Envisioning Equity: Coalition and Partnership Strategies of Ottawa's Equity and Inclusion Lens

This thesis examines the development process of the Equity and Inclusion Lens, a guidebook on inclusive practices designed for City of Ottawa employees, created by a coalition of eleven local community-based social movements in partnership with the City. It analyzes the political strategies pursued by these actors at three interrelated but distinct scales: the City-community partnership, the intersectional coalition of movements, and the individual movements themselves. While the shared strategies adopted by both the coalition and the partnership were generally effective in achieving their common goals, as well as those specific to each movement, this study argues that the multiple priorities they had to address sometimes contradicted one another. The strategies adopted at the higher scales also played out differently at the scale of the individual movements, as some movement-specific strategies aligned more readily with the shared strategies of the coalition and the partnership, while others ran counter to them.