Own, fund, and spill
Canada's ‘frontier-making state project,’ 1973–84
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 6445285 |
|---|---|
| Authors | James Wilt (0009-0005-0072-0694, University of Manitoba, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 125 |
| Pages | 103470-103470 |
| Publication date | 2025-12-03 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Political Geography (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0962-6298 • E-ISSN: 1873-5096 |
| Publisher | Elsevier BV (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103470 |
| OpenAlex | W4416969264 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 22 |
Since the Liberal Party of Canada's re-election in April 2025, Prime Minister Mark Carney has initiated a major reconfiguration of the federal government's approach to resource extraction and transportation projects, many of which implicate the country's Northern regions. Drawing on Bob Jessop's concept of “state projects,” this article offers historical context for better understanding this political and geographical shift by examining the Liberal government's “frontier-making state project” of 1973–84 that poured immense resources into accelerating oil and gas exploration in Canada's Arctic and Atlantic offshores. It identifies three fundamental characteristics of this historical state project—direct ownership/participation, financial and pricing incentives, and oil spill research—and traces their usage over time, including through the subsequent period of neoliberalization. It concludes by suggesting that the federal government's new vision for resource extraction and transportation represents the revival of a“frontier-making state project” that hybridizes an older style of government involvement with more recent aspects of neoliberalization. Building on Jessop's theoretical work and the historical example of the former state project, it also highlights the potential for conflict over and even failure of such a project in the context of intersecting pressures and contingencies.
Arctic · Context (archaeology) · Government (linguistics) · Politics · Resource (disambiguation) · State (computer science) · Arctic and Russian Policy Studies · Mining and Resource Management · Natural Resources and Economic Development
Theorizing the More-Than-Human State
The strategic-relational approach, realism and the state
Introduction to the Eastern Arctic Marine Environmental Studies Program
Accelerated extractivism in the age of tariffs
Gramsci as a Spatial Theorist
Ignorance and Environmental History
Energy
The Western Accord and Lower World Oil Prices
Applying the Strategic‐Relational Approach to Urban Political Ecology
The New Nature of Things? Canada's Conservative Government and the Design of the New Environmental Subject
Fossil capital, ‘unquantifiable risk’ and neoliberal nationalizations
Limits to “counter-neoliberal” reform
Oil in parallax
The Value of Nature to the State
Political ecology II
Political ecologies of the state
Theorizing Sociospatial Relations
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |