Market-based environmental governance and public resources in Alberta, Canada

Both proponents and critics of market-based conservation instruments (MBIs) have shared a tendency to characterize these new governance tools as a shift from former state centred management to a greater reliance on markets and market actors as a means of achieving conservation goals. A growing literature on the use of MBIs has outlined a series of characteristics and typologies thought to define these new environmental governance approaches. Chief among these has been the tendency to view such tools as either a displacement of state intervention in favour of private actors and free markets, or active state engagement in re-regulation in support of such ends. This paper draws on a case study of conservation offsets in response to resource development in the Canadian province of Alberta to complicate some of these pervasive narratives. Rather than representing a shift from state to market, or state intervention in support of market instruments, the provincial government has actively engaged in both limiting the development of a market-based system and shaping the parameters of existing industry-NGO offset projects in ways that avoid risks and conflict and support existing power dynamics around resource allocation and use in the province.