Resource Curse in the Global North: The role of oil revenues in the formation of the Albertan conservative assemblage

Anthropological study of oil extraction has hitherto placed particular focus on the developing and indigenous worlds. Douglas Rogers notes that the relationship between oil and indigenous peoples has been particularly well studied (Rogers 2015: 366). More specifically, many developing world-centred analyses have focused on the resource curse idea. For instance, Behrends (2008) has examined how even when oil extraction is but a future possibility, conflict can still ensue on the border between Sudan and Chad. Meanwhile, Terry Lynn Karl (1997) establishes an analytical separation between those political regimes where modern institutions had emerged prior to the entry of oil revenues onto the scene, and those where oil "overwhelmed" emerging institutions, creating a resource curse. This assumption has led to critiques of this notion using ethnographic data from the third world. Weszkalnys (2011) explores how first world acceptance of the resource curse idea results in neoliberal attempts to intervene in São Tomé e Principe in the name of pre-empting and preventing new resource curses.

Existing anthropology of oil has thus documented a widespread neoliberal assumption that resource curses are not a disease of the first world, and that strong institutions are a key preventative factor. For this reason, I would like to conduct research into Alberta, Canada a first world petrostate where some of the effects of a resource curse have appeared under the auspices of neoliberal governance: the monopolization of political power in the hands of conservative parties, widening wealth inequality, corruption, environmental degradation, unsustainable fiscal largesse, as well as Dutch disease, which according to Behrends et. al. (2011) is "an amplification of the resource curse". Though not a fully-fledged resource curse, I still think it important to warn that the assumption of first world immunity to resource curses may be both ethnocentric and misguided, particularly given Alberta's long history and recent resurgence of right-wing, economically liberal populism, and that just south of the border, many of the USA's most important oil producing regions are also Donald Trump's electoral heartlands. The implications of oil revenues for conservative-led democratic backsliding in first world contexts are therefore an urgent research focus, not least because of the denialist position of Albertan and US conservatives on climate change. I aim therefore to study the electoral implications of oil revenues, and the association between oil extraction and conservative political formations, with analytical consequences for our understanding of oil dependency and the resultant conservative resistance to climate policy.