Pipelines in the “Public Interest”? The Jurisdictional Work of a Concept in Canadian Pipeline Assessment
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This paper contributes to research on the means by which the Canadian state authorises, enables, and secures new major petroleum pipelines. While disruptions to pipeline construction are now increasingly common, state and industry alike have continued to finance and approve new projects, even despite serious and ongoing concerns about impacts on ecologies and Indigenous jurisdiction. The paper focuses on one under‐researched mechanism of state authorisation: federal impact assessments for new oil and gas pipeline projects, undertaken by the National Energy Board (NEB), Canada’s now former energy regulator, which operated between 1959 and 2019. The NEB’s mandate was to deem, via impact assessment, whether a new project would be in the “public interest”. I argue public interest is an effective legal‐political mechanism for securing and obscuring the state’s claim to jurisdiction, the traction of which lies partly in an underlying colonial scalar logic and imaginary.
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.
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 | 0.021 | 0.031 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.077 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.020 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".