Welcome
About the Project
This site contains all the final documents that were and continue to be generated from the project Making it Happen -- The Transition to a Sustainable Society.
The project was carried out at the University of Ottawa’s Telfer School of Management under the direction of Dr. André Potworowski, who was assisted by an Advisory Board and a team of MBA students.
The project was originally funded by the Walter and Duncan Gordon foundation, Natural Resources Canada, the Canadian Gas Association, and the National Research Council of Canada.
Our basic premise was to look back at some 30 years work on environmental visions and sustainable societies, starting with Canada's own "Conserver Society".
The Making it Happen Project started with some basic questions:
• Why is progress in going green so slow in Canada?
• How might it be accelerated? and
• Why are other countries able to make headway so much faster than we can?
Despite widespread awareness of environmental issues and despite the availability of numerous mitigating technologies, progress toward sustainability remains slow in this country. In part, this is attributable to institutional barriers that impede the application of available solutions. Members of the Telfer School of Management at the University of Ottawa decided that a useful contribution to the environmental debate would be made by studying these barriers:why do they exist? how do they function? and how can they be reduced or removed?
Please follow the project and feel free to post comments on our Blog:
http://transitiontosustainability.blogspot.com/
To contact the Webmaster, please email: K Chyla