Petro-Power and Progressive Permutations: Conservation Offsets, Oil Sands, and the Politics of Neoliberal Conservation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recent years have witnessed a growing international discourse and related rise of conservation paradigms that suggest the only way to make conservation work is to fully incorporate it into economic circuits. The development of a suite of market friendly conservation techniques have been at the forefront of this neoliberal turn in conservation practice, leading to the need for a deeper theorization and understanding of the role that non-extractive uses of nature are playing in relation to contemporary capitalism, and the political implications of these new approaches to conservation. The dissertation explores this global phenomenon through a case study of terrestrial conservation offsets in response to the ecological consequences of oil sands development in Alberta, Canada. The chapters that follow query the social, political and economic processes leading to the development of this particular conservation tool, and the political implications of project implementation in the province, particularly in regard to shifting accesses to land and resources. The findings complicate a number of dominant narratives to be found in the existing literature on market-based conservation practices, particularly in regard to the privatization of governance and their ability to facilitate recursive rounds of enclosure and accumulation. The case study draws attention to a series of contradictions and hybridizations that suggest that market-oriented conservation tools are associated with a more fractured and partial political project than often presented in the critical literature. The implications of the study suggest a need to shift focus from concerns about the use of market-friendly instruments in and of themselves, to the broader social and political context in which any given market is embedded. Doing so may serve to strip the neoliberal project of its assumed power, and open opportunities for novel and unanticipated re-imaginings of human-environment relations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.070 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".