Integrated land management in Alberta: From economic to environmental integration

Alberta illustrates the obstacles to attempted policy transformation after years of deliberate policy drift. Despite being a pioneer of land use planning in western Canada, the province eventually relaxed its planning regime and failed to update plans that were perceived as an obstacle to resource-led development during a recession. When recession was succeeded by an oil-and-gas-driven boom, planning controls continued to be locally negotiated and relatively relaxed. The effect was to encourage damaging competition between resource industry and establish a pattern of clientilist politics, in which each industry looked to its departmental champion to resolve its land use problems. Whether the new provincial land use framework can change these deeply entrenched patterns or will merely layer new policies onto the old remains to be seen.