Trade, Tarsands and Treaties: The Political Economy Context of Community Energy in Canada

Julie L. MacArthur
Additional contact information
Julie L. MacArthur: School of Social Sciences, University of Auckland, Human Sciences 541, 10 Symonds Street, Auckland 1010, New Zealand

Sustainability, 2017, vol. 9, issue 3, 1-20

Abstract: Governments today are increasingly looking to non-state and bottom up community actors to help achieve climate change mitigation targets. Canada is a resource rich state with one of the highest per capita greenhouse gas footprints in the world. It is also a state where issues of political will, geographic scale and incumbent industries contribute to a challenging context for broad community participation. Despite this, a long history of co-operative and municipal activity exists in the energy sector, exhibited in diverse ways across its provinces and territories. Provincial variation in energy sources and actors illustrates a far more nuanced picture than exists at the national level, providing a case rich with both promising and cautionary tales for the community energy sector. This article examines the emergence of community energy in the context of broader energy sector moves towards increasingly powerful trade agreements, privatization, and conflicts over Indigenous rights in Canada. It argues that significant potential exists to strengthen the role of local actors in Canadian energy governance, but that macro-level political and economic developments have also created significant challenges for widespread community energy transitions.

Keywords: community energy; energy policy; Canada; political economy; renewable electricity; public participation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/9/3/464/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/9/3/464/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:9:y:2017:i:3:p:464-:d:93551

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().