Anna Zalik

York University · Faculty of Environmental Studies

Recent years have seen a sharp uptick in efforts to expedite resource extraction in, and expand biodiversity conservation to, Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction (ABNJ), the ~70% of oceans outside state space. In this symposium piece, we explore the co‐constitution of the parallel acceleration of biodiversity conservation and economic exploitation t...

Knowledge, as well as knowledge gaps about the oceans, shape the ways that humans govern these spaces, which are often beyond direct human observation. Like other frontiers in Western historiography, the ocean is susceptible to imperialism, anthropocentrism, and resource-driven global capitalism. However, it is also a site of possible alternatives...

Canada's Extractive Sector Transparency Measures Act (ESTMA) is the culmination of a series of proposals and consultations with government, industry and civil society organizations to address conflict over Canadian extractive industry. Created in the context of a global call for extractive industry accountability, as well as increasing scrutiny of...

This special section Beyond Transparency: Rethinking the Government of Extraction examines the relationship between international transparency discourse in the extractive sector, and the persistent association of unaccountable government, socioeconomic injustice and ongoing environmental hazards associated with extractive firms and their operations...

Our recent research reveals enormous discrepancies in oil spill data disclosed by regulatory institutions and corporate sources in Nigeria. Federal agencies as well as major international oil corporations publish inconsistent and sometimes contradictory figures, often employing different spatial or regional categorizations. Uncertainties pertaining...

This multi-authored collection of papers examines the complex realities of research on natural resource industries, including the messy entanglements of extraction, materiality, and everyday social life this research entails. Of central importance to the contributors is how scholars confront fieldwork challenges ethically, methodologically, and cor...

The dynamic and unfolding relationship between the oceans and humans underwrites a general narrative of oceans in ‘crisis’ and the need for new governance and regulatory frameworks to attend to it. As concerns surrounding marine space have proliferated, sovereignty, territory and property in the oceans remain imprecise and subject to controversy, p...

Over the past 15 years the International Seabed Authority (ISA), the United Nations agency charged with regulating extraction from the ocean floor and seabed in areas beyond national jurisdiction (a zone referred to as the “Area”), has assigned exploration contracts for deep sea mineral exploration for specific zones under its purview. Pressures ha...

Over the past five years the Canadian public has become increasingly aware of deficiencies in the regulation of the Canadian oil and gas sector. The provincial/federal responses and settlement that followed in the aftermath of the Lac-Mégantic tragedy in Quebec, and rising public concerns regarding pipeline safety across the country entailed regula...

This article identifies notable trends in environmental policy surrounding oil and gas development in Canada's leading producing provinces (Alberta, British Columbia, Newfoundland and Labrador, and Saskatchewan) in the period from 2009 to 2014: environmental policy streamlining in particular via the consolidation of environmental policymaking in de...

. Pivoting on the process of reserve replacement undertaken by key oil transnationals in Canada as a spatial fix for capital, the article considers how individual firms employ formal review processes to project their strategic interests. The proponent firm shapes, through its own participation, the regulatory terrain on which competitors will subse...

In this introduction to a special section on environmental displacement, we introduce the concept and ground it in seemingly distinct processes of climate change, extraction, and conservation. We understand environmental displacement as a process by which communities find the land they occupy irrevocably altered in ways that foreclose or otherwise...

Recent oil and gas sector reforms in Mexico transform protections on petroleum resources and labour that were implemented as a result of the 1938 nationalisation of the country's oil industry. This paper examines the Etileno XXI project, a private petrochemical plant led by a Brazilian firm and supported by Mexican and transnational capital, which...

Property relations in oceans have a complex history, shaped in part by the deep seas’ distance from processes of territorialization on land. While the national marking of some coastal space through the largely accepted, if not universally ratified, premises of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) sets specific territorial ex...

At a 2008 conference on violence in the Nigerian oilfields a colleague referenced the final passage of Chinua Achebe's novel Things Fall Apart to highlight the problematic use of the term pacification as a strategy for "resolving" the Niger Deltan crisis. In that passage a colonial official reflects on the suicide of the novel's hero, Okonkwo. The...

This article explores the relationship between the oil industry’s representation of operating conditions in key sites of extraction and the constitution of oil futures markets. An analysis of Shell Oil’s recent Scenarios publications, the ‘Trilemma Scenarios to 2025’ and subsequent ‘Scramble and Blueprints Scenarios to 2050’, provides insight into...

This article examines the emergence and campaigns of Oilwatch Africa and their implications for North-South tensions among global advocacy networks. The paper explores how the actions of civil society networks in the global South also express internal tensions shaped by local and national power relations. These relations are affected by political,...

  This article examines two aid interventions that manifest the merging of community development/relief and industrial security policy in the petroleum offshore of the Nigerian Niger Delta and the Mexican Gulf. In the Nigerian case, the article considers the crisis in the Warri region of Delta State in 2003, the subsequent evacuation of local resid...

The contemporary ecological crisis places a new spin on the notion of the "resource curse," evoking widespread concerns regarding hydrocarbon dependency. Whether environmental, in the form of global warming, or socio-political, through wars over oil, "fossil capitalism" is now understood as a global problem. The development of a global market in na...

At a conference held at Stony Brook University in December 2007, "Dangerous Trade: Histories of Industrial Hazard across a Globalizing World," participants endorsed a Code of Sustainable Practice in Occupational and Environmental Health and Safety for Corporations. The Code outlines practices that would ensure corporations enact the highest health...

This article examines the globalisation of corporate strategic philanthropy as played out in the Niger Delta of Nigeria -- a region that has been marked by a history of state and petroleum industry collusion both in social repression and environmental destruction. Social control of the Delta has rested largely on what Watts (2001) conceptualises as...

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Cornell University, Jan., 2006. Includes bibliographical references.

University Microfilms order no. 31-95825. Thesis (Ph.D.)--Cornell University, 2006. Includes bibliographical references.