Open Collections

Pipe dreaming : federalism and northern environmental policy

University of British Columbia

The Canadian North poses a clear illustration of the struggle for sustainable development in a context of advanced capitalism. How do northern political institutions and electoral incentives impact the relationships between federal, territorial and aboriginal governments in the field of environmental policy and the prospects of environmental protection? This paper will argue that negotiations for the devolution of resources and environmental activities with low economic significance have borne substantially more fruit, more quickly, than the sticky issues of non-renewable resource exploitation and impact assessment. Case work of select northern environmental policy suggests that the public interest eithe favours utilization of northern resources for economic development or is insufficiently green to overcome collective action problems beyond symbolic commitments to environmental protection.

Text

2010-04-27

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/24217

Political Science

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/