Presenters and Exhibitors

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

On Monday June 27, Clifford Atleo Sr., President of the Nuu-chah-nulth Tribal Council in British Columbia, and Dan Edwards, a fourth generation west coast commercial fishermen and initiator of the West Coast Sustainability Association, have been invited to give a reflective presentation on the  historical disempowerment of communities and small scale resource harvesters on Canada’s West Coast.

Clifford Atleo was born and raised in Ahousaht, BC.  He worked for the Native Brotherhood of BC from 1978-1989. During this time, he was appointed as a Commissioner to the Pacific Salmon Treaty.  He served on the Pacific Advisory Regional Council, a senior advisory group to the Minister of Fisheries and also served on the Salmon Enhancement Board.  From 1993–2005, he served as a Chief Negotiator for Ahousaht, in the modern day treaty making process.  He initiated a joint management model for fisheries, called the West Coast Aquatic Management Board, now known as West Coast Aquatic, where he served as a co-chair from 2002–2007. During the same period he also served on the International Halibut Commission. Currently, Clifford is the Nuu-chah-nulth Tribal Council President.

Dan Edwards is a fourth generation commercial fishermen whose family has lived and fished from Ucluelet for over 60 years. After being involved in numerous land use planning processes in Clayoquot Sound, he initiated the West Coast Sustainability Association, a native and non-native organization focused on establishing community-based management in the WCVI area. He served as Executive Director of the WCSA, as director of the Regional Aquatic Management Society, and as Councilor for the Village of Ucluelet. He is a director of the BC Dogfishing Association, a member of the Canadian Fisheries and Allied Workers Union, and an alternate on the Clayoquot Biosphere Trust board. Dan is presently the Executive Director of the Area A crab fleet out of Prince Rupert and an active fishermen on a longline vessel in the integrated groundfish fishery in B.C. He continues to participate on the Commercial Fishing Caucus for groundfish, which helped to develop the integrated groundfish process and until recently was the Labour Representative on the West Coast Aquatic Board, a process he was the community negotiator for during the late nineties when this board was brought into existence in order to implement the Oceans Act.

Jackie Sunde and Merle Sowman of the University of Cape Town’s Environmental Evaluation Unit will be our keynote speakers on Day 2, bringing strong community university experience, both working on the front lines of community initiatives relating to natural resources in South Africa.

Merle Sowman is the Director of the EEU and Associate Professor in the Department of Environmental and Geographical Sciences at UCT. She obtained her PhD in the field of integrated coastal management from UCT in 1994, and has been involved in research, consulting and teaching on integrated environmental and coastal management since 1985. Her key areas of interest are mainstreaming environmental sustainability issues into sector planning and decision-making processes, co-management of coastal and small-scale fisheries resources, and procedures and methods of environmental assessment (University of Cape Town).

Jackie Sunde is currently a part time researcher and PhD student at the University of Cape Town Environmental Evaluation Unit; she is also the Chair of the Coordinating Committee of the International Collective in Support of Fishworkers, ICSF. Until March 2010, she was the Policy research and advocacy coordinator at an NGO working with small scale fishing communities, the Masifundise Development Trust. In 2001, she was a Social Development Consultant, contracted to the Human Rights and Poverty Directorate, Provincial Administration of the Western Cape, which involved working with all nine Provincial departments in order to develop a framework for the Implementation of international gender equality instruments (University of Cape Town).

For Day 3, Coastal CURA Collaborators Evelyn Pinkerton of Simon Fraser University and Fikret Berkes of the University of Manitoba will present on policy options for Integrated Resource Management. Based in Canada, these final speakers will share their experiences on working with community and government collaborative initiatives for the future.

Evelyn Pinkerton is a maritime anthropologist who has integrated common property theory and cultural/political ecology in considering the role communities play in the management of adjacent renewable natural resources. She has played a key role in developing the theory and practice of power-sharing and stewardship through co-management agreements (Simon Fraser University). She has published over 40 peer-reviewed articles on fisheries and forestry co-management arrangements, and in Fisheries that Work (1995, co-authored with Martin Weinstein), began to develop a more comprehensive framework for analyzing and comparing co-management arrangements. This work has since evolved into analysis of the developmental sequence of types of co-management rights and activities (Simon Fraser University).

Fikret Berkes is Distinguished Professor of Natural Resources at the University of Manitoba, and holds the Canada Research Chair in Community-based Resource Management. He has worked with the coastal communities and resources of all three coasts of Canada. Fikret has devoted most of his professional life to investigating the relations between societies and their resources, and to examining the conditions under which the "tragedy of the commons" may be avoided. He is the author of Sacred Ecology (2008) and the editor of a number of books including Adaptive Co-management (2007) and Navigating Social-Ecological Systems (2003). 

Our invited speakers are well known for their involvement and experience with the empowerment of communities in the management of local natural resources. Their insight will be the backbone on which to build daily conference dialogues, to further the creation of innovative solutions and management strategies for natural resource dependent communities across Canada and internationally.