Federalism and Natural Resource Management: A Comparative Study of Intergovernmental Conflict over Oil and Gas in Canada and Nigeria

How does federalism affect oil conflict between governments in federations? Systematic theory-driven answers to this question are scarce, both in the comparative federalism and resource curse literatures. My dissertation bridges this research gap by comparing intergovernmental conflicts over oil in Canada and Nigeria, two distinct varieties of multinational federations in which competitive and conflicting territorial claims over oil are deep-seated. Employing a historical institutionalist framework, it demonstrates how conflict over oil in these federations has been primarily shaped by federal institutional rules, specifically formal institutional-constitutional design allocating competency over oil, and the informal institutions relating to the normative ideas about federalism and federal community. The dissertation underscores how federal institutional rules interact with the configuration of economic, social, and political structures in the broader polity. The dissertation shows that, ultimately, conflicts over oil were generated by the interaction of this constellation of institutions operating within specific temporal dynamics, including federal origin and formative moment institutional choices, sequence/timing of federal rule creation vis-Ã -vis the development of the oil industry, contingency events, critical junctures, and path dependent trajectories. I examine two domains of horizontal and vertical intergovernmental conflict: oil-related intergovernmental fiscal transfers, and âownership,â jurisdictional-legislative, and revenue rights over offshore oil. A key theoretical contribution of this dissertation lies in its explanation of oil conflict as processes that evolve over time rather than the usual way conflict is viewed as single events in time. To this end, the dissertation develops the novel frame of conflict dynamics, three dimensions along which conflict processes in federations may vary, and applies this to the explanation of offshore oil conflict. These dimensions are the degree of assertiveness of claims made and the degree of concession won by the provinces/states; the degree of conflict intractability or protractedness; and the nature of intergovernmental coordination. As a corrective to conventional static notions of conflict as violent or nonviolent outcomes, this dissertationâs focus on conflict processes helps to carefully specify the evolution, ebbs and flows, and continuities/changes of conflict embedded within ostensibly self-reinforcing and self-preserving iii conflict patterns. Central to the concept of conflict processes is (de)centralization dynamics or federal dynamics: the continuities and changes in federal rule or the authoritative (re)allocation of power over oil itself. Conflict is not only produced from the initial foundational âcompromiseâ between federal and provincial/state actors allocating competence over oil; the renegotiation of these rules over time, which in essence entails the redistribution of power/resources and rule reinterpretation, also generates distinct patterns of conflict and conflict resolution. Such renegotiations are heightened during critical junctures when institutional rules are remarkably relaxed, such as the Natural Resource Transfer Agreements (1930) and 1970s-80s oil price crises in Canada, and military rule (1966-975), civil war (1967-1970), 1970s-80s oil price crises, and the transition from military to democratic rule in 1999 in Nigeria. Thus, the processes of oil conflict are intricately woven around or bound up with the continuing process of federal (re)balance, which takes place primarily but not exhaustively over federal institutional rules as reflection of federal solidarity and as arena for conflict. By focusing on how federal institutional rules shape conflict, the dissertation underscores the endogenous processes of federal institutional change, reinforcing historical institutionalistsâ emphasis of the implication of institutions in their own transformation. Conflict processes can provide a guide to an understanding of the operation of federalism and its evolution. The Canadian and Nigerian cases also demonstrate how contestations over oil over time played crucial roles in pushing the federations towards paths that deviated from the broader centralized or decentralized federal institutional designs established at federalization, with the role of oil more crucial in this regard in Nigeria than Canada, given the dependence of the whole federation on this resource. Finally, the dissertation demonstrates that when conflict is viewed as a complex iterative process, and when such a long-term understanding of conflict is applied to different policy fields or subfields of a particular policy field, such as onshore and offshore oil, counterintuitive findings may emerge. For example, though conflict over oil in Nigeria is generally considered more contested than in Canada, my findings on the divergent conflict dynamics between governments over offshore oil suggests that conflict was more intractable in Canada than in Nigeria

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