The Innovation Fix and the Politics of Petrodependence in Alberta

My dissertation examined technological innovation in the Alberta oil sands, including the state agencies, regulatory frameworks, and industry actors through which digital and other efficiency-oriented technologies are developed, adopted, and legitimized as solutions to environmental crisis. It questioned the historical, economic, and governance conditions that have enabled public resources to be channelled into private technological development that promises to reconcile extraction with environmental responsibility. Using a mixed-methods qualitative research design, including archival research, semi-structured interviews, and policy analysis, my dissertation demonstrated how those conditions have enabled the Alberta oil sands innovation network to redefine climate change as a technical problem solved by technology.

Across four empirical chapters, my dissertation constructed a comprehensive account of innovation in the Alberta oil sands, from historical origins in state entrepreneurship to regulatory encoding in carbon pricing and emissions reduction policy, contemporary institutional expression in Alberta’s provincial investment architecture, and the legitimizing parallel governance order assembled by non-state actors.

Together, these chapters’ historical and political analyses revealed that innovation in the Alberta oil sands operates primarily as a mechanism through which to manage the political contradictions of fossil capital rather than to resolve them, and to reproduce the conditions of continued extraction while claiming the authority of climate action. The dissertation termed this the “innovation fix”: the governance disposition wherein the environmental questions of whether to extract, and at what scale and in whose interests, are displaced by technological questions of how to extract more efficiently.

My dissertation research was supervised by Dr. Darin Barney, and was generously supported by both SSHRC and FRQSC.