Market-based environmental governance and public resources in Alberta, Canada
Introduction
Over the past decade there has been increasing interest in the use of terrestrial conservation offsets as a policy tool to address the growing ecological impacts of Alberta’s oil sands industry. Offsets have garnered the support of industry, environmental and conservation groups, the provincial government and some First Nations. Despite this broad support, and a decade of pilot projects and studies, a market in terrestrial offsets has failed to take hold in Alberta. A number of factors have been responsible for the constrained development of markets in offsets in the province, but perhaps none as important as a lack of state leadership and intervention in support of such strategies. This paper explores how the lack of a diversified provincial economy, state reliance on the revenues derived from extractive resource development, and a context of public land and resource ownership have led to a lack of state intervention and the hindering of attempts to implement conservation offsets as a market-led mitigation tool in the province. Such an analysis complicates some of the dominant narratives surrounding the growing global trend toward market-based environmental governance tools.
Market-based instruments for environmental governance (MBIs) have become increasingly popular on a global scale. Support for the use of MBIs is often premised on the assumption that these new techniques offer greater flexibility and efficiency than state centred command & control, and often espouse the ability to reconcile economic development and growth with environmental protection (see inter alia Anderson and Leal, 2001, Daily and Ellison, 2002, Shogren, 2005, Turner and Daily, 2008). Over the last several decades there has been a growing interest in a variety of market based instruments from markets in atmospheric carbon to the banking of significant ecological habitat. Payment for ecosystem services, tradable credits in pollution and biological resources, and biodiversity offsets are but a few examples of these new market based instruments. The concept of conservation (or biodiversity) offsets has global antecedents in earlier regulated compensation or mitigation measures, but have more recently evolved to include a stronger focus on the use of market initiated systems whereby development disturbance is mitigated via the purchase, storage, and exchange of terrestrial habitat credits. The concept of mitigating ecosystem disturbance via the conservation of equivalent units of habitat elsewhere can occur through a variety of mechanisms, including voluntary initiatives on the part of industry, or government regulation requiring mitigation via offsets, which in many instances have been facilitated via market-based systems where third party bankers develop offset credits for sale to buyers requiring them under government regulation. Ecosystem Marketplace documents the existence of approximately 65 conservation (or biodiversity) offset programs in various stages of development across the globe (Masden et al., 2010).
A number of researchers in geography and cognate social sciences have provided rich typologies for understanding the various forms these market-based governance tools might take (Bakker, 2007, Castree, 2008, Lemos and Agrawal, 2006, Heritier and Rhodes, 2011). In his exploration of nature’s neoliberalizations Castree (2008) outlines a series of core characteristics or “ideal types” found in much of the literature on neoliberal environmental governance and the shift to market-based approaches. While recognizing the limitations of such ideal types, Castree’s (2008) overview includes: privatization, marketization, deregulation, reregulation in support of privatization and marketization, the development of “market-proxies in the residual public sector”, and the “construction of flanking mechanisms in civil society” p. 142. Bakker’s (2007) study of water governance provides a series of similar typologies of possible neoliberal governance reforms that may be employed either singularly, or in combination, by a number of governance actors and institutions.
Much scholarship on the use of MBIs as governance tools have wisely recognized the ongoing role of the state, albeit this recognition most often focuses on the role of the state as facilitator via re-regulation in support of privatization and markets. Despite this recognition there has been a strong tendency in much of the critical literature to focus on a co-occurring deregulation, or retreat, of the state. This is most clearly seen amongst critics who view the use of market-based instruments as a shift from state centred command and control to governance via private interests and markets. Much critical scholarship has raised concerns about the level of democratic deficit that results from these shifts, a concern that is largely premised on the apparent shrinking of the public sphere (Katz, 1998, Smith, 2007, Walter, 2003, Swyngedouw, 2005, O’Neill, 2007, Prudham, 2004).
Other scholars of neoliberal environmental governance have complicated these understandings and have drawn our attention to the need to evaluate the complexities and contradictory logics of actually existing attempts at market-based governance (Roth and Dressler, 2012, Dressler and Roth, 2011). There is now a growing body of literature that suggests that market-based tools (or attempts at neoliberal governance, as it is often termed) may hybridize with, or be complicated by geopolitical context and existing systems of governance, such that these new market tools (or neoliberalizations) no longer fit the neat categorizations and typologies to which they are said to cohere (see inter alia Milne and Adams, 2012, McElwee, 2012, Shapiro Garza, 2013).
The sections that follow explore the development and use of an apparent MBI, terrestrial conservation offsets, in response to oil development in the Canadian province of Alberta. The paper queries the extent to which governments actively shape and manage what are often presented as market-based instruments. Such analysis complicates some of the dominant narratives to be found in the existing literature which would characterize offsets as part of a growing global trend away from state centered governance toward a greater reliance on markets in the provision of environmental goods and services. The following case study demonstrates that rather than representing a clear shift from state centred management to markets, attempts at offset programs have been complicated by existing geopolitical context, including the lack of a diversified provincial economy, a relatively rigid policy realm and provincial property regimes. These factors have hindered the development of a true market based system in conservation offsets, resulting in governance mechanisms that don’t neatly fit standard interpretations or ideal types. Despite language that would suggest an adherence to market principles, what have emerged in their place are perhaps best thought of as a form of industry-NGO corporate social responsibility program that has been highly constrained by the provincial government.
The case study of Alberta demonstrates the absolutely crucial role of state involvement in apparently market-driven governance. However, what this paper aims to demonstrate goes further than the pervasive narratives around a retreat of the state, or common recognition of the role the state plays in re-regulation in support of market-based instruments, and rather, focuses on the ways in which active and ongoing intervention of the state shapes the discursive and material contours of the projects in ways that benefit particular actors.
Section snippets
Methods
The analysis presented in the following sections is based on an in depth case study of the development and implementation of terrestrial conservation offsets in response to resource development in Alberta, Canada. The Boreal Habitat Conservation Initiative (BHCI) was selected as the primary point of investigation due to its role as the original, and to date, most highly developed offset program in the province. The focus on the BHCI was not exclusive and the study also included investigation of
Context of Alberta
The province of Alberta in Western Canada is a resource driven economy. The province does not support a highly diversified economy and has historically relied on the benefits of a few extractive resource industries to fuel much of its economic development and growth. Forestry and the extraction of petroleum resources have been primary players in this regard, although the contribution of the petroleum industry to the provincial economy greatly outweighs the benefits derived from forestry
Terrestrial offsets in response to resource development
Despite the lack of supporting regulatory frameworks, attempts at innovation via conservation offsets had been in development by industry and NGO partners for nearly a decade prior to the provincial government’s introduction of broadly sympathetic legislation. The general concept of terrestrial conservation offsets have global antecedents dating back several decades (see Boisvert et al. this issue), and the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans has a history of using disturbance
Risky business and state intervention in offset programming
A number of factors have contributed to rigid institutional structures and policy regimes in the province and may, in part, explain the reluctance on the part of the provincial government to facilitate the reforms needed to incentivize a market in conservation offsets. The provincial government has a justifiable need to shape these programs as a means of navigating and avoiding a series of potential conflicts amongst provincial stakeholders and political constituencies that could emerge from a
Impacts and implications
The direct involvement of the state in creating the contours of offset projects has generated as series of benefits and sought to ameliorate or avoid conflicts. Importantly, both the state and industry are able to benefit from the public relations benefits of offset programming while not impeding further resource development. It is for both a low cost solution to the difficult public relations and marketing challenges faced by the state and industry. The CEO of the ACA has been quoted as saying
Discussion and conclusion
In contrast to the pervasive discussion in the literature that characterizes MBIs, such as offsets, as a reduction of state involvement in environmental governance the case study presented here demonstrates that rather than a hollowing out of state authority or re-regulation in support of markets, that the state remains at the forefront of efforts to actively shape the discursive and material contours of these new governance tools. The need to maintain strong state guidance results from the
Acknowledgements
Thank you to Sara Jackson and Katherine McDonald for insightful conversations that assisted in the preparation of this manuscript, and to Robin Roth for her remarkable patience. I would also like to thank anonymous Ecosystem Services reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript. All errors or oversights remain my own.
References (60)
- et al.
The good, the bad and the contradictory. Neoliberal conservation governance in rural Southeast Asia
World Dev.
(2011) Payments for environmental services as neoliberal market-based forest conservation in Vietnam: Panacea or problem?
Geoforum
(2012)Poisoning the well: Neoliberalism and the contamination of municipal water in Walkerton, Ontario
Geoforum
(2004)- et al.
Market-oriented conservation governance: the particularities of place
Geoforum
(2012) - ACA/Shell Canada, 2008. AOSP Supports Boreal Habitat Conservation. Press Release. Retrieved from...
- ACFN, 2013. Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation letter to Stewardship Minister Diana McQueen Re: Request for Review of...
- Alberta Enterprise and Advanced Education, 2012. Highlights of the Alberta Economy 2012. Retrieved from...
- et al.
Free Market Environmentalism: Revised Edition
(2001) The “commons” vs. the “commodity”: alter-globalization, anti-privatization and the human right to water in the global south
Antipode
(2007)- et al.
Canadian federal forest policy: present initiatives and historical constraints
Neoliberalising nature: the logics of deregulation and reregulation
Environ. Plann. A
The New Economy of Nature: The Quest to Make Conservation Profitable
All dressed up and nowhere to go: the discourse of ecological modernization in Alberta, Canada
Can. Rev.Sociol. Anthropol.
Practitioners Guide to Habitat Compensation
Managing the ‘Hollow State’: Procedural Policy Instruments and Modern Governance
Canadian Public Administration
Cited by (4)
Effects of corporate social responsibility considering emission restrictions
2019, Energy Strategy ReviewsCitation Excerpt :Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has recently attracts more and more attention in economics and management, so a large body of research on CSR practices exists, recently [1–15].
A game theoretical model for the stimulation of public cooperation in environmental collaborative governance
2022, Royal Society Open ScienceThe politics of biodiversity offsetting across time and institutional scales
2021, Nature SustainabilityFrom conservation to offsetting and neoliberalization: Institutional change, risks and opportunities in the French context
2019, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
- 1
Tel.: +1 416 515 1757.