No abstract

Many First Nations communities lack access to safe drinking water. In this article, we examine an under‐appreciated tool for improving First Nations water security – governance – and develop a framework for guiding the design and analysis of First Nations water governance models. In particular, we argue that three key ideas from the public administration literature – financial resources, regulation, and formalization – should be integrated with Indigenous insights and philosophies that are specific to each First Nations community. We illustrate how this might work by focusing on the insights, traditions, and philosophies of an Anishinaabek community in southern Ontario.

The regulation of election campaign donation, fundraising, expenditure, and advertising is an enduring object of study and reform. Compared to the federal and provincial levels, virtually no attention has been paid to Canadian municipal campaign finance regimes. This is surprising given the urban political economy literature’s focus on business influence on local politics and policy and evidence of corruption in Canadian local government. We take stock of Canadian campaign finance rules for municipal elections in light of Canadian and American research findings, which reveals considerable interprovincial variation in their sophistication and stringency. We then propose a research agenda to investigate aspects of Canadian local campaign finance regimes.

During a community-wide crisis, practical help from others in the community can allow individuals to manage a variety of extraordinary household needs. In this article, we synthesize insights from research on disaster resilience, social support, social networks, and social exchange into a theoretical model of factors that shape individual access to help beyond the family. We suggest that community ties—local neighborhood, associational, and friend relationships—are significant avenues for accessing help and that helping behaviors in the community are structured by social exchange. We test this model in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, drawing on a survey of 4,234 Canadians and Americans. We find that all three kinds of community ties significantly increase the likelihood of receiving and giving help; that there is a strong, positive two-way correlation between giving help and receiving help; that relationships between community ties and helping behaviors are mediated by social exchange; and that individuals in extraordinary need tend to both receive and give more help than others. Our findings provide broad-based evidence for the importance of local social ties and social exchange processes in structuring access to practical help in times of extraordinary need.