| Summary: | ii Climate change will pose a challenge to governance structures in areas like the Canadian North (Berkes et al. 2005:225). Climate research has often been divorced from its social context (Cohen et al. 1998:341) and its normative aspects have long been ignored (Swart et al. 2003:S20). Using the city of Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, as an example, this thesis explores how social context can influence the approaches of governance institutions to environmental policy. This study examines the environmental beliefs of members of the City of Whitehorse and Yukon Territorial Government (YTG) to establish if there are institutional cultural norms promoting a particular environmental orientation among employees. Institutions have been shown to exert pressures on their employees to conform to institutional cultural norms (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983), and there is a broad literature establishing connections between environmental beliefs and values and environmental actions (e.g. Van Liere and
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