“Regulatory capture” and “extractive hegemony”: the relevance of Nicos Poulantzas’ theory of the state to contemporary environmental politics in Canada
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.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.060 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".