University of Alberta
IN-1: Innovation 1

Deliberation on Campus Sustainability (DoCS) was a collaborative project that engaged students, staff and faculty on sustainability issues facing the University of Alberta. The ultimate goal of DoCS was to craft recommendations to influence sustainability prioritization and planning that represented the values and concerns of the campus community, while providing an avenue for everyone involved to work collaboratively on improving campus sustainability. As a student-initiated venture, DoCS was directed by an executive committee which included staff from the University of Alberta’s Office of Sustainability, experts in the field of deliberation and public engagement, and the project’s student founders. The DoCS process, materials, and research methods were given direction and made accountable by an advisory committee comprised of an individually selected cross-section of the campus community. Extreme care was given when populating this committee to ensure that a breadth of opinions were invited to attend, a value which was present throughout all aspects of the overall project. Based on the theory and practice of deliberative democracy, the DoCS process was designed with three dialogues or phases and a campus-wide survey. Phase 1 was launched in January 2011 with a survey measuring sustainability priorities. The survey was completed by 1,742 members of the campus community. The first dialogue, supported by 34 volunteers, saw 80 student, staff, and faculty survey participants combine the survey results with their perspectives to identify six key issue areas for campus sustainability. Phase 2 began with learning opportunities for the deliberators to gain a better understanding of the complexity of the six issue areas. At the March 2011 events, key knowledge-holders presented their perspective on sustainability and answered questions emerging from the Phase 1 deliberations. These learning events saw 59 participants in attendance and the results helped frame the second deliberation and ensured that participants made informed recommendations. In the Phase 2 deliberation 37 participants explored the six priority issue areas in greater depth and generated recommendations collaboratively for how the university can progress towards a sustainable campus. The third and final phase began with a well-attended series of skill-building workshops hosted for DoCS participants and the greater campus community to grow their capacity in budget development, consensus building, grant writing, program planning and evaluation and community based social marketing. The Phase 3 dialogue in April 2011 leveraged the ideas and energy that emerged from the previous deliberations and contributed to the realization of collaborative action projects that address campus sustainability opportunities. The Campus Voices: Deliberation on Campus Sustainability’s Final Recommendations (Campus Voices) document is one of the primary outputs of DoCS. Campus Voices is intended to provide a clear summation of the innovative democratic processes DoCS undertook, and to showcase the recommendations that the participants crafted. The Office of Sustainability committed to sharing this document with UAlberta's Sustainability Advisory Committee and using it to inform the creation of UAlberta's sustainability plan. The Campus Voices will accompany the sustainability plan as it travels through levels of university governance. The Office of Sustainability has also committed to clearly communicating how the DoCS recommendations were incorporated in the institution's sustainability plan.