This website stores cookies on your computer. These cookies are used to collect information about how you interact with our website and allow us to remember your browser. We use this information to improve and customize your browsing experience, for analytics and metrics about our visitors both on this website and other media, and for marketing purposes. By using this website, you accept and agree to be bound by UVic’s Terms of Use for web and social media privacy.  If you do not agree to the above, you can configure your browser’s setting to “do not track.”

Skip to main content
People Departments Maps Buildings Rooms A-Z
University
of Victoria
Apply Library
Sign in Online tools Sign out
Faculty of Graduate Studies

Erza Mjekiqi

  • BA (Kwantlen Polytechnic University, 2019)

Notice of the Final Oral Examination for the Degree of Master of Public Administration

Topic

Community Knowledge, Contested Credibility: An Interpretive Policy Analysis of Credibility in Canadian Air-Quality Governance

School of Public Administration

Date & location

  • Wednesday, August 12, 2026

  • 9:30 A.M.

  • Virtual Defence

Reviewers

Supervisory Committee

  • Dr. Sarah Marie Wiebe, School of Public Administration, University of Victoria (Supervisor)

  • Dr. Astrid V. Pérez Piñán, School of Public Administration, UVic (Member) 

External Examiner

  • Ms. Ryan Hilperts, School of Environmental Studies, University of Victoria 

Chair of Oral Examination

  • Dr. Julie Zhou, Department of Mathematics and Statistics, UVic

     

Abstract

This thesis examines how credibility is constructed around community knowledge of air quality within Canadian environmental governance. Drawing on environmental justice and interpretive policy analysis, the study analyzes a purposive inventory of 23 public policy, regulatory, community, advocacy, and technical documents alongside six semi-structured key informant interviews. The study asks how community knowledge is described, assessed, translated, and taken up in governance processes. The analysis indicates that community knowledge often begins through lived and sensory experience, including odours, visible emissions, symptoms, and disrupted routines. Within the selected materials, this knowledge was more often positioned as institutionally usable after it was translated into complaint records, monitoring data, affidavits, dashboards, policy submissions, or consultation summaries. These pathways can increase visibility, but they can also shift evidentiary labour onto affected communities and preserve institutional control over interpretation and response. The thesis therefore frames credibility as a governance problem: environmental justice depends on more than making community knowledge visible; it also depends on whether institutions are required to investigate, explain, act with precaution, and share authority with affected communities. 

Keywords: community knowledge; air quality governance; environmental justice; credibility; interpretive policy analysis; epistemic justice

Back to oral exams