SOE and SOC reports are relatively new methodological developments in North American planning practice. The first municipal SOE reports appeared in Canada in the late 1980s, and by the mid 1990s had been adopted by about 20 of Canada's largest municipalities. They were seen as an important tool for responding to increasing community and government concerns about local environmental quality.

The first urban sustainability report was published in Seattle in 1993. Since that time, interest in such reports has become widespread in communities across North America. To date, there has been little research into the question of whether alternative reporting formats and report preparation processes "make a difference" at the local level, in terms of community efforts to become more environmentally, economically, and socially sustainable, or whether these reports are just costly and ineffectual exercises whose future may be as limited as the ill fated social indicator movement of the 1970s.

The purpose of this project is to investigate both the direct and indirect influence of such reporting activities on local decision making for sustainable development.

Objectives:

• To assess the contribution of a rapidly evolving planning tool, "State of the Community" (SOC) reporting to sustainable development decision making at the local level in Canada.
• To compare the contribution of SOC reports to that of a narrower, but more widely utilized form of reporting in Canada known as State of the Environment (SOE) reporting.
• To determine whether the more narrow focus of SOE reporting is beneficial or detrimental to their future as planning tools in comparison to more holistic and increasingly popular SOC reports.

Methodology:

• A telephone survey of 157 of Canada's largest municipalities was conducted in 1998, to determine who was doing SOE or SOC reports, and to collect those reports that had been completed.
• A content analysis of the reports was done from 1998-2001; to provide information on the purpose and target audience of the reports, the nature of the process used to prepare the reports, the reporting frameworks adopted, the number and types of indicators employed, indicator targets, selection criteria for indicators, and policy recommendations.
• Interviews were conducted in 1999 for SOE reports, and in 2000 for SOC reports to gain more detail on the above items, and to fill in any related information not presented in the report itself. Interviews were also used to determine the opinions of the respondents regarding why they feel that their report influenced or did not influence decision-making, whether they thought that the process of creating the reports contributed to social or organizational learning, as well as the respondents views on the future for SOE/SOC reporting in their community.

Results:

• The SOE/SOC website and database containing content analyses of the 70 reports collected, categorized indicator lists of the 925 indicators used in the reports, and graphical representation of trends in reporting frameworks and processes used across Canada.
• Papers will be published in Planning and Geography journals in 2001. Copies of these papers will be available by contacting Dr. Virginia Maclaren.