“Regulatory capture” and “extractive hegemony”: the relevance of Nicos Poulantzas’ theory of the state to contemporary environmental politics in Canada
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper considers the relevance of Nicos Poulantzas’ theory of the state to debates about hydrocarbon extraction and environmental assessment in Canada. I begin with a brief summary of Poulanztas’ work, followed by an overview of the politics of hydrocarbon extraction in Canada. Next, I examine recent public policy debates about the assessment and regulation of energy extraction in Canada. These debates, which focus on the concept of “regulatory capture,” fall victim to many of the problems Poulantzas identifies with instrumentalist approaches to the state. Critical accounts of regulatory capture have helped expose the fact that oil companies exercise an incredible degree of control over the Canadian state. However, it offers limited guidance for long-term strategies to confront extractive capital. In the section on “Environmental assessment and extractive hegemony,” I draw on Poulantzas to examine recent academic debates about the role of environmental assessment in the reproduction of extractive capitalism in Canada. Scholars have shown a more nuanced understanding of the power dynamics at play in the assessment and regulation of energy projects in Canada. Nevertheless, engagement with Poulantzas’ work can help deepen and expand these critiques, especially his emphasis on the role of state-organized material concessions in producing consent to capitalism.
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.
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 | 0.000 |
| 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 it