Stephan Schott | Carleton University (original) (raw)

Papers by Stephan Schott

ARCTIC

This paper explores how policies and programs can better support country food security and food s... more This paper explores how policies and programs can better support country food security and food sovereignty in Gjoa Haven, Nunavut. Through a series of six focus groups with a total of 74 participants, we explore the challenges that Elders, youth, hunters, food preparers, and program providers face in the access, availability, quality, and use of country food. Despite the diverse representation among focus groups, participants revealed similar challenges across demographics and highlighted how tailored policies and programs can provide complementary solutions that serve more than one purpose. We argue that policies and programs targeting financial and economic challenges; resources and infrastructure; and skills and knowledge will improve country food security and will promote food sovereignty. Ultimately, policies and programs must be community informed and tailored to their current context and community dynamics. However, the recommendations we provide could be adapted to other Ar...

McGill-Queen's University Press eBooks, Sep 15, 2022

How Ottawa Spends, 2004-2005

The paper discusses future energy links between Canada, the United States and Mexico and potentia... more The paper discusses future energy links between Canada, the United States and Mexico and potential climate change mitigation policies in North America. A comparison of national interests and economic and political situations in each of the NAFTA countries provides supporting evidence to further integrate energy markets, while developing a common cap-and-trade carbon emission market, rather than relying on individual national energy policies and domestic emission markets or carbon taxes. The paper identifies major challenges for the further development and survival of an integrated energy market and a common emission-trading scheme. First energy security must be redefined under NAFTA from a North American perspective and not from an individual country or regional perspective. Currently NAFTA Article 605 is biased in favour of the United States' and Mexico's energy security interests. Secondly it needs to be determined how to initially allocate emission permits, how permit all...

Sustainability Science, 2020

The effective and appropriate bridging of Western science with traditional or Indigenous knowledg... more The effective and appropriate bridging of Western science with traditional or Indigenous knowledge is an ongoing discussion in the literature and in practice. The discourse transitioned from separate knowledge system to knowledge integration and most recently to knowledge co-production. We argue it is the moral and ethical responsibility of Western scientists working in and with Indigenous communities to make a concerted effort to collectively create mutually advantageous new knowledge while strengthening traditional knowledge and considering the normative impacts of Western science methods. Our knowledge coevolution framework provides guidance for achieving this in a flexible manner that can be applied to an array of research programs. Project governance structure, steps for implementation, checks and balances, and challenges are presented within the context of research project execution. We then illustrate application of the model throughout a harvest study conducted in Gjoa Haven...

On the Dual Nature of Weak Property Rights In the natural-resource literature, conventional wisdo... more On the Dual Nature of Weak Property Rights In the natural-resource literature, conventional wisdom holds that weak property rights will cause a resource to be over-exploited. This is because weak property rights are typically perceived as a problem of input exclusion – or theft of un-extracted re-sources. We present evidence to the effect that weak property rights often take the form of contestable outputs – or output theft – and that this has an impact on resource use. We propose a model of resource use under generally weak property rights – or weak state presence – when resource users face the dual problem of input exclusion and output appropriation. We show that introducing the possibility that outputs be contested acts as an output tax, with the added twist that resource users effectively determine the tax level. This tax has a depressive effect on input use. Whether the resource is under- or over-exploited depends on the relative severity of output appro-priation and input excl...

Springer Polar Sciences, 2017

Our chapter examines the political and fiscal factors of collective capabilities for self-determi... more Our chapter examines the political and fiscal factors of collective capabilities for self-determination in three Inuit-dominated areas in Canada with active self-government regimes: the relatively new territory of Nunavut, the region of Nunavik (in Quebec) and the region of Nunatsiavut (in Newfoundland and Labrador). We derive and measure important political and fiscal indicators identified by the literature (institutional independence, representation, local capacity and fiscal ability) that are based on the most recent information from the three regions. Our analysis indicates that most Inuit governments are still quite financially dependent and constrained. In terms of institutional independence, and representation, Nunavik lags behind the other regions due to a fragmented governance system with three separate regional public administration bodies that receive funding through provincial parent departments. In terms of local capacity, as measured by the proportion of Aboriginal people with university degree, the three regions lie well below Canadian and provincial averages. Nunatsiavut has significantly higher education levels than other Inuit regions; however, the percentage of Aboriginal people with university degrees is also higher in Newfoundland and Labrador than in Quebec and in Canada.

The WSPC Reference on Natural Resources and Environmental Policy in the Era of Global Change, Nov 6, 2016

The paper derives noncooperative and community-based output-sharing partnership solutions to the ... more The paper derives noncooperative and community-based output-sharing partnership solutions to the fundamental problem of the commons (Dasgupta and Heal, 1979). The noncooperative solution utilizes free-riding in output-sharing partnerships to counteract excessive harvesting incentives, that prevail in limited access to common property resources (CPR). A first-best output-sharing rule is derived. The output-sharing rule without communication still requires third party assessment of individual output, but not of harvest practices (as opposed to individual quotas). It does not extract rent in the form of output taxes or the auctioning of individual quotas, is not susceptible to third party interests, and entails less adjustment costs than taxes or individual quotas, which makes this policy instrument more acceptable to resource users. Communication in CPR extraction has been shown to be effective for specific CPR environments (Ostrom et al., 1990, Ostrom et al., 1994, Hackett et al., 19...

Frontiers in Climate, 2021

There is a growing body of literature that examines the role of affect and emotions in climate ch... more There is a growing body of literature that examines the role of affect and emotions in climate change risk perception and risk communication. Conceptions of affect and emotions have differed according to theoretical perspectives and disciplinary orientations (e.g., sociology of risk, psychology of risk, climate science communication), but little has been done to map these differences. This perspective article provides an in-depth analysis of the study of affect and emotions in climate change risk research through a literature review of studies published in the last 20 years. In this perspective, we examined how affect is conceived, what emotions have been considered, and their role in climate change risk perception and risk communication. Early studies in climate risk perception and risk communication included vaguely defined emotions (e.g., negative and positive) in climate risk perception and risk communication studies, more recently turning attention to how different affective di...

The Extractive Industries and Society, 2018

Abstract Because of their close relationships to the land, water, and resources therein, and thei... more Abstract Because of their close relationships to the land, water, and resources therein, and their marginalized social and economic positions, Indigenous peoples living in current or former settler colonies are particularly vulnerable to mining’s impacts, yet have the potential to benefit from its opportunities as well. This paper reviews the literature on large-scale mining projects’ relationships to Indigenous peoples in post/colonial contexts, focusing on Australia, Canada, Finland, Greenland, New Caledonia, Norway, and Sweden, in the aim of generating insights from comparative perspectives. First, we discuss differences in legal regimes governing Indigenous peoples’ rights and implications of those rights for negotiations over mining projects. Next, we examine, in turn, mining activities’ various impacts − environmental, economic, social − and how they specifically affect Indigenous communities. Finally, we explore ways that Indigenous communities living in a post/colonial context have addressed large-scale mining projects’ impacts by engaging with them, through both negotiation and resistance. We conclude by summarizing our findings on the relationships of Indigenous peoples to large-scale mining projects in the focus countries and identifying what gaps remain in the literature, and we provide thoughts as to how future research could address those gaps.

The common property problem, first analyzed in the context of overfishing (Gordon, 1954), is ubiq... more The common property problem, first analyzed in the context of overfishing (Gordon, 1954), is ubiquitous: independent tax authorities will overtax the same base (Berkowitz and Li, 2000), and independent researchers will exert excessive effort to make the same breakthrough (Wright, 1983). We propose a "Partnership Solution" to this common property problem. Each of n players maximizes his payoff by joining a partnership in the first stage and by choosing his effort at the second stage. Under the rules of a partnership, each member must pay his own cost of effort but receives an equal share of the partnership's revenue. The incentive to free ride created by such partnerships can be beneficial since it naturally offsets the incentive to exert excessive effort inherent in common property problems. In our two-stage game, this institutional arrangement can, under specified circumstances, induce socially optimal effort in a subgame-perfect equilibrium: no one has a unilateral incentive (1) to switch partnerships (or create a new partnership) in the first stage or (2) to deviate from socially optimal effort in the second stage. Not all consequences of partnerships are so benign. Cartel members can use partnerships to solve their "problem" of excessive output so as to achieve monopoly profits; infinitely-repeated interactions are unnecessary. Service professionals frequently organize themselves into such partnerships as do plywood producers and crews on fishing vessels. In Japan, crews of different fishing vessels sometimes form partnerships to share their revenues (Platteau and Seki, 2000), reportedly for the reasons we analyze.

Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, 2009

Schott et al. (2007) have shown that the “tragedy of the commons ” can be overcome when individua... more Schott et al. (2007) have shown that the “tragedy of the commons ” can be overcome when individuals share their output equally in groups of optimal size and there is no communication. In this paper we investigate the impact of introducing communication groups that may or may not be linked to output sharing groups. Communication reduces shirking, increases aggregate effort and reduces aggregate rents, but only when communication groups and output-sharing groups are linked. The effect is stronger for fixed groups (partners treatment) than for randomly reassigned groups (strangers treatment). Performance is not distinguishable from the no-communication treatments when communication is permitted but subjects share output within groups different from the groups within which they communicate. Communication also tends to enhance the negative effect of the partnered group assignment on the equality of individual payoffs. We use detailed content analysis to evaluate the impact of communicati...

This paper provides an experimental testing ground for an equal output-sharing partnership approa... more This paper provides an experimental testing ground for an equal output-sharing partnership approach as a common pool resource (CPR) management instrument. It examines the behaviour of resource users in output-sharing partnerships of different sizes, and evaluates the impact of partnership size and the way partners are assigned on effort (extraction) levels. Experimental results are very close to Nash predictions, and confirm that group size significantly affects resource user’s effort supply. The first best solution is achieved when resource users are privately extracting from the CPR and equally sharing their output with the socially optimal number of partners. The way partners are allocated (randomly or with the same partners over 15 periods) does not significantly affect aggregate effort contributions. Income distribution, however, is more equitable with random allocation of partners than with fixed partners. This paper is work in progress and should not be quoted without consult...