"Internation-Alization" and the Conservation of Canada's Boreal Ecosystems*
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Over the past decade, students of domestic public policy have increasingly turned their attention outwards, incorporating analysis of various facets of globalization and internationalization into their accounts of the factors shaping policy processes and outcomes. Scholarship at the junction between comparative public policy and international relations has expanded rapidly, with early generalizations about the importance of attending to extra-territorial influences now beginning to spawn debate over how, and under what conditions, these influences make a difference. This paper explores one important contribution of these debates. It uses Bernstein and Cashore's delineation of pathways of non-domestic influence as a framework for examining the forces influencing the policies and practices that are shaping the fate of Canada's vast boreal forest region. Exploring what they call internationalization (the increased activities and influence of actors, ideas and institutions from beyond state borders (1)), Bernstein and Cashore seek to demonstrate the utility of distinguishing four pathways of external influence on domestic policy: of the global market; international rules and regulations; changes in international normative discourse; and infiltration of the domestic policy-making process. (2) We will use the boreal case to test the potential of the Bernstein and Cashore framework. Our reflections focus on two primary questions. First, are the framework's core distinctions clearcut and useful? Second, is the framework comprehensive enough to capture the range of ways in which non-domestic forces operate, or should additional pathways be delineated? These reflections on the validity and comprehensiveness of the Bernstein and Cashore model will, we hope, contribute to refinement of theory on the impacts of international factors on domestic policy processes and outcomes. In addition, our examination of the fit between the framework and the case should enhance our understanding of the conditions under which transnational forces influence Canadian environmental policy processes. More specifically, this analysis will help us assess whether, in the years ahead, Canada's federal and provincial governments are likely to address threats to boreal ecosystems. Our account, we should emphasize, represents only a preliminary sketch of a story in its early stages. It will be some time before we will be in a position to gauge the impacts of the various forces shaping the fate of the boreal environment. I. THE THREATENED BOREAL Canada's boreal region covers about two million square miles, (3) accounting for over 50 per cent of Canada's land mass. The Canadian boreal represents about one-third of the global boreal zone, about one-half of which is in Russia with the remainder in Alaska and the Scandinavian nations. (4) Canada's portion of the boreal contains one-quarter of the world's remaining large intact forests, (5) with most of these frontier forests in the northern sections of the boreal. (6) Wetlands, including an estimated 1.5 million lakes and some of Canada's largest river systems, cover about one-third of the area. (7) The Canadian boreal is threatened by industrial development, agricultural expansion, and climate change. Organizations working to conserve boreal ecosystems frequently remind their audiences that significant knowledge gaps continue to hinder attempts to develop a complete picture of the scope and ecological impacts of these threats. Some facts concerning the boreal continue to be in dispute. A clear picture of stressed ecosystems does, nonetheless, emerge from the work of a diverse array of credible scientific authorities. Andrew Nikiforuk offers this assessment, citing the warnings of freshwater ecologist David Schindler, one of Canada's most honored scientists: An industrial assault on the boreal, combined with a cascade of stressors from acid rain to climate change, is now degrading the forest so quickly that only a few northerly parts may survive intact as isolated parks. …
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".