Gordon Hickey

• Professor (Full) at McGill University

Well-designed and supported innovation niches may facilitate transitions towards sustainable agricultural futures , which may follow different approaches and paradigms such as agroecology, local place-based food systems , vertical farming, bioeconomy, urban agriculture, and smart farming or digital farming. In this paper we consider how the existin...

Research has identified an urgent need to renew agriculture's traditional design organization and foster more open, decentralized, contextualized and participatory approaches to design and innovation. While the concepts of co-design and co-innovation used in agriculture resemble features of open innovation, they may benefit from ‘inbound open innov...

Ecosystem-based management of fisheries and other transboundary natural resources require a number of organizations across jurisdictions to exchange knowledge, coordinate policy goals and engage in collaborative activities. Trust, as part of social capital, is considered a key mechanism facilitating the coordination of such inter-organizational pol...

Inter-organizational collaboration is often considered essential to transboundary fishery governance, due, in part, to the high levels of task interdependence, the remote and often treacherous conditions, and the limited levels of information available to any policy actor on resource status. In the high seas, Regional Fisheries Management Organizat...

The impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on food and nutrition insecurity are likely to be significant for Small Island Developing States due to their high dependence on foreign tourism, reliance on imported foods and underdeveloped local food production systems. SIDS are already experiencing high rates of nutrition-related death and disability, includ...

Participatory Scenario Planning (PSP), the collaborative process of envisioning plausible futures, is a promising approach to aid environmental management and governance in the Anthropocene. Emerging scholarship on PSP emphasizes its potential for social learning to enhance knowledge, values, and competencies for more sustainable governance. Howeve...

There is a growing call in sustainability science and practice to build empathy, especially among actors involved in environmental management. We explored how participatory scenario planning (PSP), a popular collaborative environmental planning tool and an emerging transdisciplinary research approach in sustainability science, can influence empathy...

Natural resource management networks cohere due to mutual dependencies and fragment, in part, due to the perceived risks of interaction. However, research on these networks has tended to accept coherence a priori rather than problematizing dependence, and few studies exist on interorganizational risk perception. This article presents the results of...

Indigenous water knowledge recognizes water as living, and that the relationship between people and water is one of reciprocity. Yet, Indigenous Peoples continue to struggle for water justice due to centuries long and ongoing colonial legacies that have intergenerational effects on self-determination, culture, and wellbeing. Using a narrative revie...

Environmental knowledge networks (EKNs) link research collaborators in a common purpose to produce data and knowledge to better understand social-ecological phenomena and address environmental challenges. Over recent years, as scientists have grappled with how to produce data and actionable knowledge for conservation and sustainability, more EKNs h...

Landscape governance challenges, particularly in peri-urban contexts like the Bannerghatta National Park (BNP) region in South India, exemplify ‘wicked’ problems due to their inherent complexities. These challenges arise from a mix of conflicting interests, policy ambiguities, and sociocultural dynamics, which often blur the definition of problems...

Indigenous peoples in Canada are disproportionately exposed to environmental contaminants and may face elevated health risks related to their unique cultural, spiritual, and economic relationships with the land, including the use of traditional food systems. However, to date, institutionalized approaches to assess risks to human and ecological heal...

Natural resource governance challenges are often highly complex, particularly in Indigenous contexts. These challenges involve numerous landscape-level interactions, spanning jurisdictional, disciplinary, social, and ecological boundaries. In Eeyou Istchee, the James Bay Cree Territory of northern Quebec, Canada, traditional livelihoods depend on w...

The tidal wetland-dykeland ecosystems of the Bay of Fundy provide essential benefits or ecosystem services that support peoples’ well-being and those of non-human lifeforms, such as plants and animals. However, the futures of these ecosystems and their ability to provide and sustain these benefits are strongly driven by climate change impacts (e.g....

The rising prevalence of childhood overweight and obesity within the Caribbean is a major public health and policy concern because obese children are at risk of developing non-communicable diseases (NCDs) later in life. Throughout the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), children are consuming unhealthy diets, characterized by energy-dense, processed and...

Globalized food systems are a major driver of climate change, biodiversity loss, environmental degradation, and the increasing prevalence of overweight and obesity in society. Small Island Developing States (SIDS) are particularly sensitive to the negative effects of rapid environmental change, with many also exhibiting a heavy reliance on food imp...

Introduction Small island developing states (SIDS) are a diverse group of coastal and tropical island countries primarily located in the Caribbean and Pacific. SIDS share unique social, economic, and environmental vulnerabilities, high dependency on food imports, and susceptibility to inadequate, unhealthy diets, with high burdens of two or more ty...

New approach methods (NAMs) are increasingly important to help accelerate the pace of ecological risk assessment and offer more ethical, affordable, and efficient alternatives to traditional toxicity tests. In the present study, we describe the development, technical characterization and initial testing of a toxicogenomics tool, EcoToxChip (384-wel...

As a group of social scientists supporting a large, national, multi-site project dedicated to studying ecosystem services in natural resource production landscapes, we were tasked with co-hosting kick-off workshops at multiple locations. When, due to project design and the Covid-19 pandemic, we were forced to reshape our plans for these workshops a...

Participation in Impact Assessment (IA) has been an ongoing and important topic for scholars, with specific emphasis on public and, more recently, Indigenous participation. While specific barriers to Indigenous participation have been identified, little work has been done on how the different approaches to IA (neutral arbitration, multi-way exchang...

This paper reviews the architecture of collaboration that exists within inter-organizational natural resource management (NRM) networks. It presents an integrative conceptual framework designed to help operationalize the multi-level interactions that occur between different dimensions of trust, risk perception, and control as key concepts in inter-...

Impact assessment (IA) involves complex interactions among societal actors with diverse knowledge systems and worldviews (ontological pluralism) that ideally combine to both define and support societal goals, such as sustainable development. An often acknowledged but rarely explored concept in these efforts is research capacity — the ability of a g...

In policy fields where regulatory science underpins government decision making, barriers to policy learning tend to be more entrenched. Presented with new and improved scientific methods and technologies, a key question increasingly facing regulatory authorities is how best to adapt established procedures without alienating stakeholders who value s...

How is it that the New Zealand government’s process for re-establishing Indigenous fishing rights has failed to deliver thriving Māori fisheries? This paper examines why, at Te Waihora, a coastal lake, and site of one of the nation’s longest running and best-funded state-Māori co-governance agreements, Māori fishers have been unable to use their ri...

Background While the concept of ecosystem services has been widely adopted by scholars and increasingly used in policy and practice, there has been criticism of its usefulness to decision-makers. This systematic map will collect and analyse literature that frames ES as a collaboration tool, rather than as an ecosystem assessment tool, to answer the...

In remote peripheral regions like the Arctic, research networks have been identified as an important mechanism for nurturing science-informed innovation. Given that relatively little is known about the network structures that support Arctic innovation processes, we employ social network analysis techniques to examine the structural organization and...

India's forest landscapes are reeling under severe demographic and developmental pressures. These tensions are particularly pronounced in peri-urban regions that are marked by rapid land use change, weak and overlapping institutions and competing claims on land. This paper examines how rapid urbanization influences place-making and the practice of...

In ecosystem governance, due to the ecological, social, and jurisdictional complexity of these systems, pluralities of knowledge are increasingly necessary for informed decision-making. However, there are frictions between different kinds of knowledges, whether scientific, bureaucratic, or local. The bringing together of Indigenous and Western know...

Impact assessment (IA) processes rely on the ability of assessment boards and their assessors to gather, synthesize, and interpret knowledge from a variety of sources, making IA a knowledge-based activity. IA boards in northern Canada operate in a context that prioritizes pluralism, where Indigenous knowledge is a key element of decision-making and...

Mangrove forest policies are often characterized by their fragmented nature, as multiple sectors, disciplines, and institutional structures interact to affect mangrove conservation and management. This study analyzes mangrove forest policies in Panama, a country known for its rich mangrove coverage and, conversely, its high rates of mangrove loss,...

Mangrove forests fulfill essential socio-ecological roles, such as providing timber and other forest products, protecting coasts against erosion and rising sea levels, supporting healthy fisheries, and fostering biodiversity. Sustainable mangrove management (SMM) aims to address mangrove degradation and reverse trends of mangrove loss while empower...

There is a scarcity of research on building nutrition-sensitive value chains (NSVCs) to improve diets and nutrition outcomes of populations in the Caribbean. This study contributes to filling this research gap by outlining a participatory approach to evaluating a NSVC model for “farm to fork” (F2F) school feeding in the Eastern Caribbean Island of...

Recent literature and empirical research show that both trust and collaboration are of great importance for effective fishery management. The application of Machine Learning (ML) to fishery management offers exciting new opportunities for data synthesis and analysis and integrated insights across typically siloed domains. Yet, challenges remain as...

Toxicity testing is under transformation as it aims to harness the potential of New Approach Methods (NAMs) as alternative test methods that may be less resource-intensive (i.e., fewer animals, cheaper costs, quicker assays) than traditional approaches while also providing more data and information. While many stakeholders are of the opinion that t...

Hazardous chemicals are one of the greatest environmental challenges facing our planet, testing governments in the face of economic and social development. Chemical risks are often complex systemic risks, which require particular governance processes, stakeholder participation mechanisms, and communication procedures to manage. In this article we e...

Trust has been identified as a central characteristic of successful natural resource management (NRM), particularly in the context of implementing participatory approaches to stakeholder engagement. Trust is, however, a multi-dimensional and multi-level concept that is known to evolve recursively through time, challenging efforts to empirically mea...

This paper explores the degree to which the ecosystem services (ES) concept and related tools have been integrated and implemented within the Canadian government context at both the provincial/territorial and federal levels. The research goals of the study were to qualitatively assess the extent to which ES assessment is being integrated at differe...

This paper explores the potential for collaborative governance approaches to support Cumulative Effects Assessment (CEA) in the Cree territory of Eeyou Istchee, located in Northern Quebec, Canada, where a long history of large-scale hydroelectricity development, mining and forestry activities have negatively affected wildlife populations, imposing...

Cannabis legalization is spreading rapidly. In California, as the plant transitions from an illegal drug to agricultural product, regulations have been implemented to manage its production and associated environmental impacts. Yet, at the early stages of this process, many of the state's cannabis farmers continue to operate illicitly. This study ex...

Despite the global toxicology community discussing New Approach Methodologies (NAMs) for chemical hazard and risk assessment, such as in vitro, in silico, and ‘omics-based approaches, for some 30 years, their formal adoption by regulators remains limited. Previous research suggests that insufficient validation, complexity of interpretation, and lac...

Global social and economic changes, alongside climate change, are affecting the operating environment for agriculture, leading to efforts to increase production and yields, typically through the use of agrochemicals like pesticides and fertilizers, expanded irrigation, and changes in seed varieties. Intensification, alongside the expansion of agric...

Cities are net consumers of food from local and global hinterlands. Urban foodshed analysis is a quantitative approach for examining links between urban consumers and rural agricultural production by mapping food flow networks or estimating the potential for local food self-sufficiency (LFS). However, at present, the lack of a coherent methodologic...

Most previous studies aim to predict ecosystem sustainability from the perspective of a sole human or natural system and have frequently failed to achieve their desired outcome. Based on the coupled human and natural system (CHANS) and its interaction with other systems, we attempted to analyze the effectiveness of the Grain to Green Program and pr...

CONTEXT COVID-19 mitigation measures including border lockdowns, social distancing, de-urbanization and restricted movements have been enforced to reduce the risks of COVID-19 arriving and spreading across PICs. To reduce the negative impacts of COVID-19 mitigation measures, governments have put in place a number of interventions to sustain food an...

The influential role of international treaty secretariats in coordinating bureaucracies across jurisdictional boundaries has been highlighted in recent years. While we now better understand how their influence occurs, the field still faces a substantial difficulty in answering the basic quantitative question of "how influential?" By employing netwo...

Background: Some 20 y ago, scientific and regulatory communities identified the potential of omics sciences (genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics) to improve chemical risk assessment through development of toxicogenomics. Recognizing that regulators adopt new scientific methods cautiously given accountability to diverse stakeholders...

Nutrient loading from agriculture is a critical threat to aquatic ecosystems, affecting their ability to provide safe drinking water, and limiting the provision of ecosystem services such as water-based recreation. Efforts to manage the problem typically focus on encouraging, incentivising, or requiring use of best management practices to reduce nu...

Social capital develops through relations between people and groups within community social networks. Women in smallholder agrarian communities often draw on social capital to influence their intra-household bargaining positions, with significant implications for their resource access. However, the extent to which women use different types of socia...

Reviewing both conceptual and empirical studies on climate vulnerability and adaptation assessment, this paper offers an analytical framework to help better understand how context-specific adaptation strategies could be developed. The framework systematically assembles the Sustainable Rural Livelihoods and the Vulnerability Assessment frameworks to...

Reviewing both conceptual and empirical studies on climate vulnerability and adaptation assessment, this paper offers an analytical framework to help better understand how context-specific adaptation strategies could be developed. The framework systematically assembles the Sustainable Rural Livelihoods and the Vulnerability Assessment frameworks to...

We synthesize key concepts in ecosystem services governance in the context of enhancing participatory governance of Canadian working landscapes. The ultimate aim is to identify and apply pressure on deep leverage points for transformation.

The designation of dark sky areas (DSAs) is an increasingly popular regulatory tool for mitigating light pollution in rural communities with tourism-based economies. However, there is a lack of empirical evidence available on how the DSA model functions in practice, including the opportunities, challenges and controversies that can arise. Focusing...

Many Small Island Developing States of the Caribbean experience a triple burden of malnutrition with high rates of obesity, undernutrition in children, and iron deficiency anemia in women of reproductive age, driven by an inadequate, unhealthy diet. This study aimed to map the complex dynamic systems driving unhealthy eating and to identify potenti...

Background: Given current legislative mandates to assess the safety of thousands of chemicals and the slow pace at which conventional testing proceeds, there is a need to accelerate chemical risk assessment. Governments and businesses are increasingly interested in New Approach Methodologies (NAMs) that promise to reduce costs and delays. Aim: W...

Within agricultural innovation systems (AIS), various stakeholder groups inevitably interpret ‘innovation’ from their own vantage point of privilege and power. In rural developing areas where small-scale and subsistence farming systems support livelihoods, dominant policy actors often focus heavily on participatory modernization and commercializati...

Smallholder farmers are key actors in addressing the food and nutrition insecurity challenges facing the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), while also minimizing the ecological footprint of food production systems. However, fostering innovation in the region’s smallholder farming systems will require more decentralized, adaptive and heterogeneous insti...

The need for domestic smallholder farming systems to better support food and nutrition security in the Caribbean is a pressing challenge. The Caribbean Community (CARICOM) faces complex socioecological challenges related to historical legacies of plantation agriculture, small population sizes, geographic isolation, jurisdictional diversity and pron...

Small Island Developing States (SIDS) are widely recognized as a special case for sustainable development due to the unique set of challenges and vulnerabilities they face. While SIDS are a diverse group of nations, most share such characteristics as limited land availability, insularity, susceptibility to natural disasters and deep integration int...

This analysis traces how different forms of social capital embedded within community-based social networks may affect smallholder farming system innovation in support of food security in the Caribbean. In two rural communities in Saint Lucia, the strong presence of interpersonal agricultural knowledge networks operates to facilitate farmer-to-farme...

Predatory sharks contribute to healthy coral reef ecosystems; however their populations are declining. This paper explores some of the important social factors affecting shark conservation outcomes in Belize through a qualitative analysis of the shark-related activities, attitudes and perceptions among local stakeholders and their perceived relativ...

Sustainable fishery management is a complex multi-sectoral challenge requiring substantial interagency coordination, collaboration, and knowledge sharing. While scholars of public management network theory and natural resource management have identified trust as one of the key ideational network properties that facilitates such interaction, relativ...

In 2018, we surveyed cannabis growers about their experiences with California's commercial cultivation legalization system. Our results suggest high rates of noncompliance with the new regulations. Of the respondents, 31% reported income from cannabis and had not applied for cultivation licenses, indicating a violation of state regulations. These f...

This study expands the Inter-Institutional Gaps (IIGs) framework to conceptualize the legitimacy associated with different types of ecological knowledge (e.g., scientific, traditional and local) used in natural resource governance. We draw on primary qualitative data, and document analysis to examine a case of inland fisheries management in the nor...

In 2018, we surveyed cannabis growers about their experiences with California’s commercial cultivation legalization system. Our results suggest high rates of noncompliance with the new regulations. Of the respondents, 31% reported income from cannabis and had not applied for cultivation licenses, indicating a violation of state regulations. These f...

This article traces the history of Bannerghatta National Park (BNP), a deciduous forest south of Bengaluru city, India that is undergoing rapid socio-ecological transformations. Using remotely sensed data combined with interviews, oral histories and archival material we map the changing landscape to discern continuity and change in BNP across pre-c...

Community-based forestry (CBF) policies have been widely adopted as potentially-effective sustainable natural resource management strategies. Since communities can have local knowledge and a stake in the long-term sustainability of the resource base, CBF is thought to produce better social and environmental outcomes. In practice, though, successful...

This study explores the associations between childhood growth measures and maternal participation in agricultural decision-making in chronically food-insecure semiarid Kenya. We collected anthropometric measures from 221 mother and child pairs. Maternal participation in agricultural decision-making was measured in a follow-up study. Using Kruskal–W...

Bangladesh encounters diverse climate change impacts at different scales, which can severely affect rural communities and livelihoods. In response, the government of Bangladesh has initiated a number of institutional interventions through development plans to better support sustainable adaptation. There have, however, been relatively few assessment...

Climate vulnerability represents a highly complex public policy challenge for government due to its interaction with diverse social, political, economic, and ecological factors across scale. The policy challenge is further exacerbated when rural livelihood opportunities depend on multiple land use practices within shared social-ecological systems a...

Lake Superior is the largest and northernmost of the Great Lakes of North America. It supports a diversity of wildlife and fish species, along with commercial, recreational, and Indigenous fisheries that make vital contributions to nutrition, livelihoods, cultures, and food systems. However, this diversity of social and cultural values is not fully...

Deforestation is a primary contributor to global climate change. When the forest is felled and the vegetation is burnt or decomposes, carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, is released into the atmosphere. An approach designed to stem climate change is Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+), a global financial mechanism tha...

Northern ‘capacity’ has long been identified as a priority area for public policy in Canada and recognized as a major constraint to regional social and economic development. The concepts of capacity and sustainability often meet in impact assessment (IA) processes in Canada, which include environmental, social and economic aspects of development an...

How is community forestry (CF) research changing as CF policies mature around the world? In this research note we use bibliometrics and topic modelling to display trends in the geographic foci and research topics mentioned in the abstracts of CF-related research papers published between 1990 and 2017. We find that studies of CF in South Asia make u...

https://arcticyearbook.com/arctic-yearbook/2018/2018-briefing-notes/295-the-need-to-better-unpack-the-transaction-costs-associated-with-northern-research-in-canada

Food and Public Health is an easy to read text that helps students understand the history of modern issues in public health nutrition and health promotion. The book’s chapters include practical real-world applications and cases, which serve as examples for extension activities. For instructors, the text offers discussion and writing prompts for eac...

Designing and managing sustainable agro-ecosystems remains a significant challenge for society. This is largely because their expected functions and values are multiple, and diverse networks of actors and institutions control common pool resources at different scales. Networks are expected to play an important role in facilitating collective innova...

In this paper, we seek to better understand the temporal and spatial aspects of climatic stress on local resource production systems and resource-use behaviors by including the perspectives of resource-dependent communities. Field research was conducted over a nine-month period in the remote north-eastern floodplain communities of Bangladesh, consi...

Land is a critical resource in smallholder farming systems, access to which is guided by complex interpretations of local norms, customary values, and statutory laws. This study explores how smallholder women access land resources under local institutions in semi-arid Kenya following a major constitutional reform on land succession passed in 2010....

The Inter-Institutional Gap (IIG) is a newly developed analytical framework used to understand interactions in natural resource governance between formal and informal institutions. This gap is one of the persisting yet often-overlooked challenges facing sustainable natural resource governance, which results in rule incoherence, resource base degrad...

Research has identified an urgent need to renew agriculture's traditional design organization and foster more open, decentralized, contextualized and participatory approaches to design and innovation. While the concepts of co-design and co-innovation used in agriculture resemble features of open innovation, they may benefit from ‘inbound open innov...

In this paper, we present the results of a systematic literature review of climate change vulnerability-related research conducted in Bangladesh between 1994 and 2017 in order to identify trends and knowledge gaps. Our results identify interesting evolutions in the temporal and spatial scales of study and the nature of spatial and thematic associat...

Seed security is complementary and relational to food security; having access to seed that produces meaningful and resilient yields of culturally appropriate food is an integral aspect of food security for smallholder farmers. However, essential components of smallholder seed security continue to be underemphasized in food and seed policy. In this...

This paper offers a novel methodological approach for better understanding how different capital assets can be organized, transformed, and used in different combinations to reduce livelihood sensitivity to climatic stresses – an area that requires greater research attention in the context of adaptation policy. Research was conducted in the northeas...

This paper presents the development and validation of a psychometric scale for assessing public sector inter-agency trust. The instrument is grounded in contemporary trust theory and methodologically adapted from a measure developed for private sector alliances. Tested using four discrete studies of governance networks, each addressing transboundar...