Tony Dorcey

Tony came to UBC in 1971 as a founding member of the Westwater Research Centre. In 1982 he became a faculty member in the School of Community and Regional Planning (SCARP) and later in the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability (IRES). From 1999 to 2006 he was the Director of SCARP. In 2007 he was elected a Fellow of the Canadian Institute of Planners (FCIP). Tony's research and teaching have had three foci: (i) policies and institutional arrangements for natural resources planning and management with particular emphasis on water; (ii) negotiation and mediation in sustainability governance; and (iii) the planner for tomorrow – what should be her/his knowledge, skills and attitudes so as to be more successful in turning economic, environmental and social sustainability ideas into action?During more than three decades, he has undertaken research on the design of policies and institutional arrangements for waterfront development; pollution control; watershed, estuary and coastal zone management; development of fishery-mariculture industries; conflicts between the forest industry, fisheries, and recreation; dam building and operations; and offshore oil and gas development. Case studies have focused on Canada's West Coast, Fraser River Basin, Greater Vancouver and, internationally, Australia and Europe. Developing the use of negotiation and mediation and design of sustainability governance have been continuing interests in this research. He was a member of the B.C. Round Table on Environment and Economy (1990-94) and the inaugural Chair of the Fraser Basin Management Board (1992-94). During the late 1990s he was a facilitator/mediator for global multistakeholder dialogues for the World Commission on Dams and the World Bank’s forestry policy. For a brief statement of his evolving perspective on sustainability planning, please see Challenges of Sustainability Planning: Living Dangerously in Worlds of Theory and Practice.