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Practical Governance: The Victoria Declaration and a Relational Approach to Housing and Support Services
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- Author / Creator
- McBeth, Renee Erica
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This study encompassed the Home in the City (HITC) project, a community-engaged research project that sought to create equitable housing governance in Victoria, BC. I worked with community members, service providers, advocates, and university researchers to identify principles and processes that can build collaboration within housing services and networks. HITC participants collectively articulated our shared ideas in The Victoria Declaration–A Statement on Housing and Support Services, which was formally endorsed by local organizations, including the federally designated regional homelessness network (2019) and the City of Victoria (2022). Drawing on this relational fieldwork, my dissertation introduces and analyzes a practical governance method in which a researcher works with a community to co-create a governance resource. Practical governance is a community governance strategy and an approach to community-engaged scholarship that is grounded in a theory of political relations.
As Métis-Cree researcher and lived expert Jesse Thistle (2017) asserts in Definition of Indigenous Homelessness in Canada, “networks of emplaced significance” are essential to healthy communities. If we want governance that supports healthy communities, it must stem from “emplaced” networks grounded in the specific places or communities that people depend on to meet their everyday needs—relationships that give their lives meaning. Rather than merely criticizing current governance practices, this project’s working assumption was that we need new governance strategies that entail practical ways of making decisions together that centre relational knowledges and lived experience. Unfortunately, current contexts of governance replicate systemic inequities. In response to these challenging contexts, my practical governance method brings emplaced knowledges into a process of collective meaning-making, helps groups navigate serious disagreements, and co-creates new governance processes. -
- Graduation date
- Fall 2024
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- Type of Item
- Thesis
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- Degree
- Doctor of Philosophy
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- License
- This thesis is made available by the University of Alberta Library with permission of the copyright owner solely for non-commercial purposes. This thesis, or any portion thereof, may not otherwise be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the copyright owner, except to the extent permitted by Canadian copyright law.