Government human service organizations regularly attempt to recruit ethnically and culturally diverse professionals to improve services to diverse communities. The assumption here is that organizational culture and structure support this organizational practice. This study considers the unique challenge for Aboriginal professionals who work in a government child welfare system responsible for the oppression of Aboriginal children, families, and communities. As a non-Aboriginal organizational insider and researcher, I use a combined Indigenous/ethnographic approach to explore these issues with Aboriginal professionals within the British Columbia Ministry of Children and Family Development (MCFD). This study involves a dual focus that examines the history, identity, values, motivations, and practice approaches of Aboriginal professionals as well as how organizational structural and environment variables support or impede their representation of community needs and interests. Analysis of these two areas results in significant findings for the organization, the social work profession, and various practice and organizational diversity literatures. Aboriginal participant descriptions of values, beliefs, and practices contribute to literature exploring contemporary Indigenous practice approaches that integrate traditional knowledge with professional practice. Consistent with some representative bureaucracy studies, participant descriptions of personal history, experience, practice, and motivation to work in MCFD indicate values, beliefs, and motivations strongly shared with their representative group: to reduce the number of Aboriginal children in government care and reconnect them to community. Aboriginal participant role tensions and dual accountabilities, resulting from their unique community/Ministry insider/outsider position, provide context to studies that explore tensions and contradictions that exist for diverse professionals working in their communities through mainstream organizations. Findings also contribute to studies in representative bureaucracy and other organizational diversity approaches concerned with the ability of diverse professionals to actively represent community interests. Organizational variables, such as low Aboriginal practice support, racism, cultural incompetence, hierarchical structure and decision making, risk-averse practice norms, poorly implemented rhetorical change initiatives, and institutional physical environments, among others, impede the ability of Aboriginal participants to actively represent community interests. Mitigating factors were found where some Aboriginal participants describe significant organizational support at the worksite level through dedicated culturally competent Aboriginal management and practice teams. / Graduate / 0452 / 0617 / 0631 / janerousseau@shaw.ca

Government human service organizations regularly attempt to recruit ethnically and culturally diverse professionals to improve services to diverse communities. The assumption here is that organizational culture and structure support this organizational practice. This study considers the unique challenge for Aboriginal professionals who work in a government child welfare system responsible for the oppression of Aboriginal children, families, and communities. As a non-Aboriginal organizational insider and researcher, I use a combined Indigenous/ethnographic approach to explore these issues with Aboriginal professionals within the British Columbia Ministry of Children and Family Development (MCFD). This study involves a dual focus that examines the history, identity, values, motivations, and practice approaches of Aboriginal professionals as well as how organizational structural and environment variables support or impede their representation of community needs and interests. Analysis of these two areas results in significant findings for the organization, the social work profession, and various practice and organizational diversity literatures. Aboriginal participant descriptions of values, beliefs, and practices contribute to literature exploring contemporary Indigenous practice approaches that integrate traditional knowledge with professional practice. Consistent with some representative bureaucracy studies, participant descriptions of personal history, experience, practice, and motivation to work in MCFD indicate values, beliefs, and motivations strongly shared with their representative group: to reduce the number of Aboriginal children in government care and reconnect them to community. Aboriginal participant role tensions and dual accountabilities, resulting from their unique community/Ministry insider/outsider position, provide context to studies that explore tensions and contradictions that exist for diverse professionals working in their communities through mainstream organizations. Findings also contribute to studies in representative bureaucracy and other organizational diversity approaches concerned with the ability of diverse professionals to actively represent community interests. Organizational variables, such as low Aboriginal practice support, racism, cultural incompetence, hierarchical structure and decision making, risk-averse practice norms, poorly implemented rhetorical change initiatives, and institutional physical environments, among others, impede the ability of Aboriginal participants to actively represent community interests. Mitigating factors were found where some Aboriginal participants describe significant organizational support at the worksite level through dedicated culturally competent Aboriginal management and practice teams. / Graduate / 0452 / 0617 / 0631 / janerousseau@shaw.ca

Cette thèse s'intéresse à la réconciliation entre le défi mondial du changement climatique et les solutions locales et sectorielles qu'il convient de bien articuler pour contribuer, efficacement, équitablement et de la manière la plus acceptable, à la réduction des émissions de CO2. Plus précisément, nous étudions les conditions pour une mise en place réussie de la politique climatique à l'échelle de la mobilité urbaine des personnes. / This PhD thesis deals with the reconciliation of the global challenge that is climate change and the local and sectoral solutions that need to be accurately designed to remedy to it the most efficiently, equitably and acceptably possible. More specifically, we investigate the conditions for a successful implementation of climate policy at the scale of the urban mobility of passengers.

Cities are growing at unprecedented speed, with all the challenges this global trend poses, from macro environmental and social level to individual level. Today the vast majority of women worldwide living in urban areas do not have the same access as men to public spaces and to services that the urban area offers. Furthermore, women often feel more unsafe in public spaces than men, and gendered violence and harassment in public spaces is a problem that is pervasive and widespread globally.  Women have historically been omitted in the urban planning process, with the consequence that cities do not respond to their needs, lives, activities, experiences, and in the worst cases discriminate and segregate them. Consequently, the access to cities’ public services is limited for women and young girls, and so are also their economic and political powers- an important democratic issue. My research explores how systematically including the gender mainstreaming perspective at an early stage in urban planning and adopting participatory bottom-up communication processes that give voice and empowerment to the marginalized, could be a decisive factor in developing inclusive and accessible cities for all, against discrimination and segregation.  Putting the gender equality perspective at the centre of the communication of designing/redesigning/transforming urban areas is therefore strategic to the implementation and success of an inclusive social development for all, both in the Global South and in the Global North.   Keywords: urban planning, public spaces, gender, gender mainstreaming, gender equality, inclusivity, accessibility, social equity, urban justice, participation, democracy.