Peter Clancy

Offshore Petroleum Politics: A Changing Frontier in a Global System

Abstract Off-shore oil and gas development is often thought of as a classic mature staple sector, where hydrocarbons are extracted from a remote and physically challenging hinterland, by highly capitalised enterprise, to realise profit from sale and consumption in distant markets. There are, however, reasons to look more closely at this political economy of the offshore domain, particularly from the perspective of Huttons post-staples hypothesis. To begin, offshore oil and gas is a relative late-arrival to the staple trade. This means that its regulatory regimes have been infused with social policy concerns that were not present in the formative eras of terrestrial petroleum. Other features arise from the “offshore” location, where a thrust toward integrated oceans policy has emerged in recent decades and threatens to erode the sectoral autonomy of the petroleum domain. Offshore oil and gas developments are one of the new “unconventional” energy sources which have emerged in Canada over the last two decades as oil prices have risen and conventional domestic sources declined.

Formulating standards for sustainable forest management in Canada

Over the past decade, but particularly in the years since Rio, many initiatives have surfaced in the name of sustainable forest management (SFM). There is now a growing literature recognizing new techniques in timber labelling and the certification of sustainable management systems. However, they have not yet been located adequately in wider political contexts, such as the new (non-governmental) approaches to regulatory compliance or the new corporate response to the western environmental movement. This article examines a leading SFM framework in Canada, known as the Z808 initiative. Co-ordinated by the Canadian Standards Association (CSA), it advances a system of standards pertaining to sustainable forest management. As a politically-driven process to translate the concepts and practices of sustainable resource management into a concrete form, the CSA experience is very revealing. The article reviews the origins and the parameters of the Z808 system. This is followed by a commentary and critique of the system, centred on four dimensions: the pivotal role of the management system approach, the treatment of sustainability as a conceptual goal, the enclosure of the public interest, and the underlying convergence of business and state interests within this third-party certification approach. In the case of Z808, the most crucial political choices have been made already, and the operational logic of the system can be clearly discerned.