Saving the Canadian Fur Industry’s Hide: Government’s strategic use of private authority to constrain radical activism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We examine the relationship between private and public regulatory authority in contexts characterized by radical transnational activist contestation against industry practices. Employing a comparative case design, we study government responses to similar activist campaigns calling for a trade ban on Canada’s sealing and fur industries. Relying on conventional public authority, the Canadian government was unable to prevent a European ban on seal skin products, leading to the collapse of its sealing industry. In contrast, its response to anti-fur trapping activists successfully employed private authority in the form of a standard-setting multi-stakeholder initiative (MSI). Doing so not only averted a ban but effectively shut down international debate over restrictions concerning the sale of products using trapped fur. Drawing from social movement theory on activist heterogeneity and political opportunity structure, we introduce a novel conceptualization of standard-setting MSIs as strategic instruments employed by governments to constrain the political opportunities for radical transnational activists. Our findings contribute to the literatures examining interactions between private and public regulatory authority, instruments of government repression and the political dynamics surrounding MSIs.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".