‘Shell games’, displacement and the reordering of boreal landscapes in Alberta, Canada

Terrestrial conservation offsets have become a leading solution to the ecological consequences of Alberta's oil sands boom. The broad-based support for terrestrial offsets in the province is representative of a larger global trend toward the rescaling of environmental governance and greater use of market-based conservation models. A well-developed critical literature now documents some of the overarching logics and material implications of these ‘neoliberal’ approaches to conservation. Much of this scholarship has drawn on Marxian notions of accumulation by dispossession to raise concern that the use of market-based approaches serves to widen dispossession through increased enclosure and privatisation of both nonhuman nature and political discourse on issues of environment. While in many instances these concerns are justified, the mechanisms through which market-based conservation channels benefits to powerful societal actors may be more complicated than often assumed. Drawing from recent empirical research on attempts to establish markets in terrestrial conservation offsets in Alberta, Canada, this paper complicates some of the dominant narratives of privatisation associated with market-based conservation initiatives. Market-based conservation may, in some instances, be employed to expand a functionally public domain as a means of lubricating private wealth generation, suggesting the need for a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between market-based conservation, dispossession and accumulation.