Land and water governance on the shores of the Laurentian Great Lakes

Abstract

The Laurentian Great Lakes Basin is large and complex, as is its institutional setting. Given these characteristics, Great Lakes boundaries are both horizontal and fluid, and governance at the Great Lakes water/land interface implicates at least four different frontiers of planning and management. While substantial multinational and sub-national policy regimes have formed over the last century to improve Great Lakes water quantity and water quality management, parallel arrangements have not formed to manage better shoreland boundaries and frontiers.

Keywords:

• land and water governance
• coastal area management
• Laurentian Great Lakes

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge the excellent research assistance provided by Katie Wholey and the helpful comments from Stephen Buckman in preparing this article.

Notes

1. These lakes are referred to as the Laurentian Great Lakes because they comprise a connected system that drains ultimately into the Atlantic Ocean through the St. Lawrence River and Seaway Basin. This system includes connecting rivers and smaller lakes as well, most notably Lakes Nipigon and St. Clair, but the smaller lakes are not commonly referred to as among the five major Great Lakes.

2. The Province of Quebec is also located within the larger Great Lakes system, abutting the St. Lawrence River and Seaway Basin to the north, but it is not located within the watershed that drains into the Great Lakes – that is, the Great Lakes Basin – and does not touch any of the shorelines of the Great Lakes.

3. Aside from brief mention of the ministry’s efforts to work ‘with local municipalities to help them make wise land-use planning decisions about development along Lake Huron’s shorelines’ (OMNR, 2014b), no other mention is made of provincial-level efforts to manage Great Lakes shoreline development on the ministry’s website, and we have found nothing in the published literature since Lawrence’s (1995, 1997, 1998) articles on this topic.

4. These reports are available from the corresponding author upon request.