Offshore Petroleum Politics: Regulation and Risk in the Scotian Basin by Peter Clancy (review)

Peter Clancy’s interesting and valuable book “delineates the economic fortunes of the Scotian Basin” over a fifty-year period. He casts the analysis as a “political and economic history of an offshore petroleum formation in contemporary times.” (2) He tells the reader on page 1 that the Scotian Basin “remains a promise unfulfilled” when compared to other offshore petroleum developments such as those in the North Sea and elsewhere. Among the forces and factors that he examines are business strategies including globalized business, state authorities, the political complications of federalism, issues regarding Crown title, and various phases of administrative development. To get at this story and to answer key questions, Clancy then argues that it is necessary “to explore the complex interplay between regulation and risk.” (2).

The value of the book is that unlike many political scientists writing about complex policy and governance fields over longer time periods Clancy resists the temptation to deploy an explicit simplified analytical framework into which one attempts to shoehorn the explanatory story. This book is instead a genuinely good historical analysis and is told as such, but it certainly goes well beyond the aforementioned “regulation and risk” theme (about which more will be said below). Instead of deploying one framework the author has many analytical vignettes in the various chapters that make up the total story. Moreover the book necessarily examines fiscal and equalization politics and dependencies as well as regulation.

One of these analytical vignettes, and a crucial one not normally a part of energy policy analysis by social scientists, is Clancy’s examination in Chapter 2 of offshore basin development. He examines its discrete sequence or cycle of events, and its geological and related investment and political links in a defined basin, and indeed in defining the uncertain boundaries of a basin offshore but also partly onshore as well. This quite literally grounds the book as whole in an extremely effective and telling way. In a similar manner, the analysis of the provincial state in Chapter 5 (Nova Scotia and neighbouring provinces) is linked to notions of its “entrepreneurial impulse,” a much more tentative and interesting way to discuss and characterize the state in business itself and the state interacting with businesses, including global and local firms.

Thus, the book in many ways makes quite original and interesting contributions not only to the regional Nova Scotia and Atlantic Canada energy and resource political-economic story but also to Canadian energy policy and politics, and to comparative offshore oil and gas analysis. The book is also one of the first in Canada to examine some early aspects of the role and potential of liquefied natural gas (lng). In addition, its examination of Aboriginal issues in offshore petroleum politics and also the coastal fishery is well handled.

What then of the book’s treatment of the “regulation and risk” subtitle themes, including the interplay between the two? My main criticism here is that the book falls short of the standard set in the rest of the book, largely because it is not anchored in any reasonably broad and recent literature about regulation and risk, particularly the risk side of the relationship. What is missing is a reasonable attempt even briefly to relate the offshore and oil and gas aspects of risk to the larger challenges of risk regulation, including not only risk assessment, risk management, and risk communication features, but also risk-benefit features.

Also, somewhat surprising is the book’s lack of treatment of climate change as a factor or issue in the total story. It is possible that compared to national and western Canadian oil and gas policy and politics, climate change issues simply did not resonate in the recent Nova Scotia story as a whole. If they did not, then some explanation of why this happened would help complete the political-environmental narrative.

Finally, in this reviewer’s view, the author is remiss in the way he underplays...