Understanding a regional municipality and it’s collection of communities: Cape Breton Regional Municipality
I want to make a disclaimer: my travel to Cape Breton to visit regional social innovators was based on my Director of Strategic Initiatives and Partnerships with Inspiring Communities role. The words and reactions within this piece are my own, and I don’t represent the opinions of Inspiring Communities. However, we seek to empower and amplify the voices of systemically marginalized individuals and their communities at Inspiring Communities.
If you want to understand the opinions of systems change within rural communities from an Inspiring Communities standpoint, please visit Inspiringcommunities.ca
-Kjeld Mizpah (KJ) Conyers-Steede
In my last piece, I explored my coastal roots through the lens of community and economic development. Which meant my next journey had to be on another island. So, my next visit had to be Cape Breton. I have always considered Cape Breton a region with a unique approach to innovation. As a son of an island, I have always seen island jurisdictions approach a quest for sustainability and resilience. Centring their innovation with these traits is as much part of their DNA as water is to the ocean. Like other islands, as I drove through rural Cape Breton, I couldn't help but feel the deep connection between sustainability, innovation, and the sense of community ingrained into the infrastructure connecting the communities within the island. This invisible connectivity stems from the sense of isolation the region has experienced for generations.
This is why collaboration and a sense of "united we stand, divide we fall" have strong roots within some communities. The normalization of co-creating community resilience is a strength the island craves. This form of social innovation directly results from island life. Island life (as well as coastal communities) encourages innovation. To test the idea, I sought to understand the emerging work of Inspiring Communities within Cape Breton. As I meandered through diverse landscapes, sharing meals and conversations with locals, social innovators, and policymakers, I saw how Cape Breton's approach to social innovation adaption looks at untangling the generational traumas of the island's colonial bugs. To understand this, I planned to seek an understanding of the diverse communities of Unamaꞌki.
Blame it on Colonialization, Atlantic Canada Inc.
Like in most Atlantic Canadian communities, I can't talk about the generational trauma (socially or economically) without tracing it back to the region's colonial past. The story of the Outsourcing Empire can be difficult to outline in a blog post. Still, it serves as my north star in understanding the commercialization of this region. or as I call it, Atlantic Canada Inc. Like most colonial creations, economic prosperity has changed commonwealth communities for generations. While travelling to different communities in Atlantic Canada, the revenant of this can be seen through the growth of different communities. This journey has brought to light several key observations that resonate across the region. For the most part, Atlantic Canadian regional municipalities' origin story started as economic colonial trading posts, defence colonial trading posts, or a combination of these artificial origins, causing top-down governance culture to thrive. This governance culture was the backbone of historical economic policy that emphasized commercialization (Nerbas, 2018), or the protection of commercial interests, over the needs of the individual and, largely, the island's communities.
The island's history of rentier capitalism has seen the extraction of community wealth, which has left its mark for generations. We need to consider what happens when community and economic systems bore the brunt of extractive policies. Driving through communities, the scars of economic exploitation are evident, which always makes me raise questions about Canada's formation, colonial past, and concentration of economic development. If exploitation of Cape Breton's natural resources built generational wealth for other communities, what does righting the wrongs look like in a quest for the future of economic development within the island? The island's history is etched into its cliffs, serving as a reminder of the consequences of prioritizing big business over community well-being.
As our industrialized economies shifted their operations away from former colonial economic trading communities, the shift hindered communities' innovation ability because commonwealth countries centralized their innovation capabilities. Focusing on rural and emerging urban centers across Atlantic Canada, they share a common historical economic reality, shaping its reality. This reality echoes in communities like those on the Avalon Peninsula (Newfoundland), impacted by the cod fish Memorandum, or South West Nova (Nova Scotia), never truly bouncing back with disconnection due to the decline of the Dominion Atlantic Railway. With these shared challenges, Rentier Capitalism has shaped most of the region's communities, leaving a wave of complex barriers in its wake.
Reflection: Rural Economies and Regional Realities
These collective challenges have become a call to action for potential improvement and innovation. Rural development's future starts by supporting regional clustering and the creation of impact networks that express a noticeable desire to adopt, test, and implement social innovation. These collaborative ecosystems act as phase zero for creativity and progress, fostering joint solutions to local challenges.
I see this in how social innovators within rural communities see the symbiotic relationship between business development, social good, and connecting networks of micro-economic growth as a significant aspect that unfolds. Through my studies at the Sobeys School of Business, I have realized that when sectors try to connect to a National Innovation System, it improves and empowers regional clustering. I want to explore how we can merge this practice that has proven successful within the economic setting and connect it to social innovation. Through my studies, we have started understanding the system dynamics within regional innovation clusters. By connecting to an article written by Archibugi & Michie, they state that examining systems (especially innovation systems) starts by exploring education, knowledge diversity, and the desire to capitalize on diverse systems.
Observing how the growth of small enterprises influences broader macroeconomic shifts emphasizes the importance of creating economic ecosystems that build with communities in mind. While my initial exploration aimed to capture the essence of the entire island, the journey led to the rural Cape Breton Regional Municipality (CBRM). In this unique location, the observed patterns in Nova Scotia manifest uniquely, offering an in-depth exploration of the interplay between challenges and opportunities specific to this region.
Where many may see despair, I see a perfect place to explore, ideate, and test ways to combat complex social, environmental, and economic issues centre in rural context. I believe through a regional innovation clustering model, the ability to scale and adapt when ideas are proven successful can be an interesting experiment.
I have started to wonder what type of social innovations can thrive in this model and what is needed for community champions to "play in the sandbox" and share different perspectives surrounding analyzing the problems they see. However, from the local level, there must be a conversation surrounding human and capital infrastructure and, most importantly, research and community building. These resources will allow for the complexity to be understood to build a governance culture that supports the ideation of solving our big, hairy problems.
Ground Zero Check Point: Rural Futures
When I started this journey over two years ago, my exploration of coastal roots and the economic and social dynamics of rural communities resulted in wanting to understand how much we are connected when shaping our approach to community economic development. As Cape Breton Regional Municipality is now my fourth learning journey, it has unveiled a complex tapestry of historical challenges that hinder the imagination of opportunities. This shared struggle of isolated, rural, and emerging urban centers underscores the need to support social innovators trying to build systems that look upstream.
To do this, the potential has to be exploring the development of a regional social innovation system that encourages innovation for rural communities. This would involve examining regional dynamics and exploring what is needed to develop a governance culture that explores who has power, who exercises control, and who needs to build trust, especially in Rural Futures. To combat this, we need to invest in eliminating innovation deserts that are prevalent outside urban centres. Engaging in conversations and sharing perspectives can create policies and structures that encourage systemic solutions and address the big, hairy problems coastal communities face and beyond. But in order to get this right, there needs to be demand for social innovation, which, through my visits to communities, Cape Breton could be an interesting testing ground.
As we navigate the rural and coastal landscapes, I see firsthand the call for an approach that allows us to thrive despite historical challenges.
Once again, thank you to the team at Inspiring Communities for aiding the development of this learning journey.
References
Archibugi, D., & Michie, J. (1995). The globalization of technology: a new taxonomy. Cambridge Journal of Economics, 19(1), 121–140.
Nerbas, D. (2018). Empire, Colonial Enterprise, and Speculation: Cape Breton's Coal Boom of the 1860s. The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 46(6), 1067–1095.
