Alberta's oil sands reclamation policy trajectory: the role of tense layering, policy stretching, and policy patching in long-term policy dynamics

Abstract

As the Canadian oil sands development matures, an increasingly important policy activity is reclamation. Reclamation has received limited attention compared with the broader discussion of oil sands expansion, however, and its past direction and future trajectory are unclear. Recent moves to reform the policy in Alberta have been interpreted simultaneously as a major change and a marginal adaptation to the existing framework. This article employs a historical-institutional perspective to help reconcile this debate and further understanding of changes to Alberta's oil sands reclamation policies over the past half century. It traces the factors and outlines the processes which have driven its evolution since 1963 with special attention paid to the 2011 Oil Sands Progressive Reclamation Strategy, the most recent attempt to reform oil sands reclamation policy. The article reveals a complex long-term pattern of policy development in which processes of ‘tense layering’ of new initiatives on top of old elements resulted in a constantly shifting policy landscape as existing policy instruments and settings were ‘stretched’ to cover new circumstances but failed to resolve tensions between successive policy layers. After 1993, however, a more reflective process was put into place in which policy feedback informed alterations intended to reduce or remove tensions between successive layers. Such a policy ‘patching’ process is shown to have helped resolve tensions associated with earlier stretching of the existing regime and adds to the vocabulary of more general studies of policy dynamics.

Keywords:

• oil sands
• reclamation policy
• environmental management
• layering
• policy patching

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The twin characteristics of a high level of cross-sectoral horizontality and long-term temporality, however, are shared by some other policy areas, such as health, agrifood, and pensions policy and some lessons can be derived from these analogous sectors about how to analyze policy-making in this case (Feindt and Flynn 2009; Jacobs 2008; Kay 2007). Conversely, oil sands development, and reclamation in particular, also makes a good case study against which to test propositions developed about long-term policy-making in these other areas.

2. This is a concept developed in the neo-institutional sociological literature by some of its leading figures, namely Beland (2007), Thelen (2004), and Hacker (2004). Beland and Hacker 2004) and Stead and Meijers (2004), in particular, both attempt to explain the pattern through which social and political institutions have evolved over long periods of time through the use of this concept.

3. The raw bitumen is processed at one of the province's five upgraders (Alberta Energy Regulator 2014).

4. The successful separation of bitumen from the clay and sand was first achieved in 1926 when Research Council of Alberta scientist Karl Clark developed a hot water separation process, the precursor of today's oil sands operations (Oil Sands Discovery Centre 2012). This led to a small amount of production in the mid-1930s.

5. Most controversially, the ‘asset liability’ approach to assessing security for future reclamation will, in effect, hold the mine's assets as security, requiring less cash up front when the mine still contains large deposits of accessible bitumen and progressively more as those deposits are exhausted. Less controversially, there are continuing efforts to provide training and feedback for the on the ground scientific application of the criteria and indicators, a development paralleled in other regulatory areas such as food inspection, where “poke and sniff” or professional judgment is giving way to laboratory testing.

6. This is not to say that there are not calls for the complete redesign of oil sands reclamation policy. However, there is no guarantee that an optimal policy mix will result from any (re)design effort, or even that such an effort could be mounted and brought to fruition. In this sense, some aspects of slow patterns of policy change through layering are fundamentally responses to political and policy calculations about the difficulty of the wholesale replacement of policy regimes. At the political level, there is often the difficulty of assembling a broad enough coalition of interests capable of abolishing old goals and instruments and replacing them with new ones in the face of those who have reasons to protect the status quo. The more complex the political system, the larger the number of veto points, and the more actors and interests in the relevant policy subsectors, the more difficult will be wholesale change. And on the policy level, a complete redesign of a policy regime requires significant analytical capacity that can draw the appropriate lessons from the shortcomings of the old arrangements and design a more optimal replacement. That is, replacement requires the most capacity and the expenditure of significant political capital and is therefore a more difficult (and hence less likely) outcome than repeated bouts of (partial) layering.

7. In 2001 the RWG developed the following three manuals for the Environmental Protection and Enhancement Act: Land Capability Classification for Forest Ecosystems in the Oil Sand Region, Guidelines for Reclamation to Forest Vegetation in the Athabasca Oil Sands Region, and Guidelines for Wetland, and the Establishment on Reclaimed Oil Sands Leases.