Introduction
Since the 1980s, national development policies and environmental regulation have been drastically improved in the Global North as much as in the South. Countries have been forced to integrate economic development and industrialization with sustainable development and conservation of natural systems. This essay discusses changes that occurred over the past few decades by comparing developmental strategies and environmental management in Canada (representing the Global North) and India (symbolizing the Global South). It looks into the main features of adopted ecological modernization policies, namely market-based instruments like energy taxes, trading schemes, subsidies for renewable technology, etc. In addition, the analysis illustrates contradictions existing between mainstream development ideology favouring rapid economic growth over other objectives and the traditional lifestyles that focus on sustenance and social welfare.
The underlying argument is that from the pivot point of the 1980s, there has been a serious divergence in Northern and Southern countries’ strategies of balancing national development with environmental sustainability. Canada turned aggressively towards neoliberal capitalism, resource extraction for export, and ecological modernization as a supporting policy framework. India liberalized some sectors to private investment but kept more characteristics of state-led developmentalism despite the efforts towards incorporating environmental and social objectives within the development schemes, which are, to an extent, corporatized. While both countries embody the tense trade-offs between economic growth and sustainability present in developing economies, they differ in their approaches, which depend on their sociohistorical backgrounds. The essay is structured by comparing Canada and India’s recent economic and environmental trajectories, then bringing out convergences and divergences, ultimately reflecting on tensions between dominant development ideology and more harmonious alternative pathways.
Development Paths in Canada
Shift Towards Unfettered Capitalism
Canada vigorously embraced neoliberal ideology since the 1980s by dismantling regulations, privatizing state enterprises, and opening borders to free trade and foreign investment (Carroll & Kellow 2011). The 1988 Canada-US Free Trade Agreement, later succeeded by NAFTA, marked a watershed towards globalized capitalism. External trade as a percentage of GDP surged from 45% to over 60% by the 2000s as Canada positioned itself as a resource exporter to the US (Clapp 2005). Provinces auctioned off utilities, transportation, and telecom assets while Ottawa slashed subsidies and financial regulation. The power balance tipped decisively towards private capital, especially in natural resource sectors.
Intensified Natural Resource Extraction
Canada’s economic destiny became linked to staples exploitation, turning Innis’s theory into reality (Innis 1995). Energy exports comprise around 15% of total exports, mainly to the US, dominated by oil and gas, while mining and forestry account for an additional 5-6% each (Natural Resources Canada 2020). The oil sand deposits in Alberta have gained the most prominence, labelled one of the largest hydrocarbon reserves globally. Bitumen production there swelled from just 0.8 million barrels per day (bpd) in 1990 to a peak of 3.7 million bpd in 2019, facilitated by heavy subsidies almost to the tune of $2.5-3 billion annually. Rising output enabled Canada to become America’s largest oil exporter.
Sidelining of Environmental Priorities
Despite claiming to balance resource use and conservation, governments systematically weakened environmental regulations and assessments to promote fossil fuel interests. The oil sands boom is again indicative. Mining bitumen means levelling boreal forests, emitting immense greenhouse gases, utilizing vast water resources, and creating toxic effluent tailing ponds. First Nations tribes report destroyed hunting, fishing areas, and cultural heritage sites, violating their territorial rights (Kindornay et al., 2015). Ecological modernization policies like carbon pricing have only made a marginal impact, while the dominant economic paradigm centres on maximizing returns from natural capital. Geostrategic dependency on the US reinforces this resource extractor role in the absence of industrial policies to nurture green technology innovation and sustainability.
Persistence of Nature Commodification
Canada’s brand of capitalism continues to treat nature as a cash commodity rather than a system underpinning human survival. According to critics, governments subsidize resource extraction through programs like oil sands royalty reductions and indirectly via dedicated infrastructure links like pipelines, roads, and rail wagons (Katz-Rosene, 2017). They also hinder international climate change pledges to phase out fossil fuels and call transition plans unrealistic. Policies crafted to ensure mischievous players capture the benefits persist, although studies on peak oil demand, stranded carbon assets, and renewable energy potential indicate a gradual reduction of dependency since renewable energy is a competitive option (Podhola, 2013). Canada trails its developed economy peers in the process of decarbonization and ecological sustainability.
Struggles of the First Nations for Environmental Justice
The disparities between actual environmental practices and ideal ecological modernization policies in a real developmental context are significant globally in the debate on environmental justice concerning indigenous communities. The First Nations and tribes like the Cree, the Dene, and Lubicon Cree have suffered from inappropriate oil sands expansion, and other megaprojects like pipelines traversing ancestral territories bore the biggest burden (Carter, 2011). More often, tribes are forced or coopted in practice rather than genuinely consulted and given their indigenous rights. They report destroyed habitats, lost livelihoods in hunting/fishing and sacred cultural sites, and downstream pollution amidst expanded extraction. Nevertheless, legal victories that acknowledge historical Native sovereignty in land/water use are fragmented and incapable of systematically challenging the capitalist push toward unsustainable resource extraction.
Inadequate Decarbonization Efforts
Even though Canada has nationalized the climate change mitigation goals, her decarbonization appears appallingly weak for her level of economic development. Carbon pricing instruments are in place in provinces such as British Columbia, Alberta, Quebec, etc., but the prices per tonne remain below thresholds, likely to induce changes in behaviour and/or industrial transitions (World Bank Group 2022). Clean fuel standards aiming to cut carbon intensity face delays amidst industry lobbying. Over a quarter of export revenues still flow from oil/gas extraction alone, while eco-conscious leaders face vilification akin to Australia’s carbon tax repeal (Rabe & Borick 2013). Despite net zero emissions pledges for 2050, energy exports and natural capital commodification continue to dominate Canada’s economic blueprint.
Trajectories of Development and Environmental Regulation in India
In contrast to Canada’s globalized economy, which is centred on exporting natural capital, India represented more typical post-colonial development, marked by state-led industrialization behind high trade barriers. Since Independence in 1947, five-year plans steered investment into heavy industry, infrastructure, and technology to spur growth and self-reliance (Chopra, 2017). But by the 1980s, India faced slowing growth and worsening public finances. Under duress from the World Bank and IMF, New Delhi initiated gradual market liberalization aimed at fiscal stabilization, deregulation, privatization, and openness to foreign finance and goods.
The 1991 balance of payments crisis proved the trigger for shedding socialist-style controls favouring neoliberal policies. As Finance Minister, Manmohan Singh pioneered drastic reforms – slashing import tariffs, deregulating domestic industry, and encouraging private (including foreign) players across sectors like telecom, aviation, banking, etc. (Bhattacharjee, 2022). This signalled India’s embrace of globalization and thrust towards a free market economy. Successive governments continued financial and trade deregulation. Exports and foreign investment increased rapidly: merchandise trade as a percentage of GDP rose from 15% in 1990 to over 40% by 2010, while annual FDI inflows spurted from under $1 billion to over $55 billion in the same period (World Bank 2022).
Nevertheless, unlike Canada’s wholehearted neoliberal shift, India has not shed all traces of state-led development mentalism. Public sector banks and state-owned enterprises still dominate key industries as part of the official self-reliance policy (Make in India). Governments retain a Five Year Plan planning process issuing investment and production targets. They also subsidize or mandate quotas favouring renewable energy to balance dependence on imported fossil fuels. Road, port, and urban infrastructure expansion also remain state-driven through projects like the Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor spanning multiple states (Sapru, 1998). However, critics allege such high modernist schemes often circumvent social and environmental impact assessments, harming rural communities and ecosystems.
When it comes to managing environmental externalities, India’s record appears mixed. Air pollution, water contamination, and land/forest degradation remain severe issues in its urban industrial zones and mining regions. Yet New Delhi has set ambitious renewable energy installation targets of 500 GW by 2030, comprising solar, wind, and bioenergy (Singh, 2008). Spurred by UN climate change treaties and domestic civil society campaigns, India is officially committed to reducing emissions intensity per unit GDP by 33-35 per cent from 2005 levels as part of COP21 commitments. Recent governments also claim over 80 million households now have clean cooking fuel access due to large LPG connection subsidies, reducing indoor air pollution and forest use for wood fuel (Ministry of Petroleum & Natural Gas 2019).
However, critics of green policies point out that despite their proclamations, these major developments like expanding coal mining, damming rivers, or construction of mega transport corridors continue to displace indigenous Adivasi communities without their consent and compensation (Shrivastava, 2012). Health problems and occupational hazards are among contract or informal workers in the chemicals, textiles, tanneries, and heavy industries. They get squeezed by market factors and land acquisition. The continuities of environmental injustice are the contrast between the triple bottom line sustainable development and the conventional pathways to prioritize economic growth, not considering the ecological balance or social welfare.
Analysis: Convergences and Divergences
From the 1980s onwards, Canada and India made fundamental turns towards globally integrated economies, though their starting points differed. Canada eagerly embraced neoliberal capitalist policies such as deregulation, privatization, and trade liberalization as alternatives to Keynesian interventions. Conceptually speaking, while sustaining the use of ecological modernization instruments like carbon pricing, conservation is still regarded as the second option after the exportation of hydrocarbons but is a notable part of resource extraction (Escobar, 2015). Governments promote “green capitalism” discourse without fundamentally addressing externalized environmental costs and community impacts.
India exhibited a typical post-colonial import substitution industrialization pattern up to the economic crises, which necessitated economic opening to external finance and trade. Market liberalization has coexisted uncomfortably with the public sector banks, planning bureaucracy, and welfare programs (Forward). By pursuing foreign investments, the regimes, through eminent domain acquisitions, are adopting special economic zones, dams, and transportation corridors. This high modernist development vision promotes technical solutions yet neglects the socioenvironmental costs.
In both countries, there is evidence of the predominance of Western economic ideologies in which GDP growth, industrialization, and consumer lifestyles take precedence over moderation in resource use. However, India’s residual developmental state presents some pushback in the form of renewable energy policy innovations. The country’s intended nationally determined contribution to emissions reduction by 2030 also looks quite ambitious compared to other countries.
Environmental Justice Issues
The gap between economic developmental priorities and ecological equilibrium is evident in struggles for environmental justice. Indigenous communities and land/water protector movements bear reprisals for opposing unsustainable megaprojects fuelling the growth system. Boreal regions in Canada have experienced intensive bitumen, shale gas, and mineral extraction, operated under authorities’ discretion utilizing the disputable terra nullius legal doctrine. The construction of the Site C Dam in British Columbia endangers the Peace Valley’s diversity and the indigenous settlements (Podhola, 2013). What goes unsurprisingly is that governments shall side lobby groups for enterprises rather than ecological thresholds or pleas from frontline communities.
Comparably, in India, there has been a strong popular resistance against land acquisition or pollution from mining, factories, and big dams by adivasi groups advocating community forest rights or farmers regaining control over productive resources rather than contracted large-scale agriculture (Shrivastava, 2012). Police raids against green activists protesting illegal sand mining and river diversion and/or dangerous nuclear/thermal power plants also indicate institutional antagonism to environmentalism that challenges existing development models.
The discrimination reflects how economic modernization ideology considers customary lifestyles and livelihood practices threatening capital accumulation as backward. This developmental fundamentalism denies engagement with the pluralist ways inclusive of both human diversity and ecological integrity (Sapru, 1998). If these structurally embedded inequities between powerful and subordinate groups are not addressed, the Global North/South rift around environmental justice will not be bridged.
Reimagining Development Pathways
Realizing fairness and ecology in development remains an obscure journey path while the assumptions, power structures, and progress are not reimagined. The capital-intensive resource extraction of Canada and India’s globalized industrialization embodies the instrumentalist view of nature as limitless input. They prefer the sectors earning centralized revenues over strengthening the local self-reliance or reciprocity between human beings and the lifeworld (Podhola, 2013). The convergence of statistical bureaucratic elites and corporate lobbyists, focusing on investment-driven high output to the detriment of social objectives and ecological barriers, necessitates immediate unravelling and replacement with more convivial economies.
The shackles of gross domestic product fixation need to be broken. Post-development insights are that there is a need to move beyond the solely human-centric anthropocentric ethic towards an ecocentric one where the intrinsic value of all beings is recognized (Escobar 2015). Indicators intended to measure “progress” should go beyond GDP, industrialization, and consumerism in the direction of holistic well-being encompassing individuals, communities, and ecological habitats. The pandemic and climate change crisis now make it essential to rethink the accumulation-dependent structures, socially divisive and unsustainable, which sustain both the North and South. To reach a new path, we must re-anchor economies within social relations and planet boundaries that frame them concerning sufficiency, care, stewardship, and solidarity rather than profits and exploitation.
Conclusion
The comparison shows a notable divergence in how countries in the Northern and Southern hemispheres struck a balance between development strategies and environmental control since the 1980s-’90s. Canada is a model Northern economy now almost totally geared to export-led growth based on intensely neoliberal resource extraction. Its governments actively subsidized and protected the carbon-intensive sectors like the Alberta oil sands from socioenvironmental taxes or strict regulations. Although a few ecological modernization measures, e.g., carbon pricing, have recently been adopted, the main economic paradigm is maximizing returns from natural capital endowments such as fossil fuels. US lobbies among corporate lobbies and geostrategic pressures exerted by countries like the USA reinforce the moral suasion aimed at staple commodity exploitation. It required historic Indigenous peoples’ resistance movements to partly undo the economics-all-over extractivism.
Southern development of India reflects a more complex trajectory combining market liberalization with residual state capitalism and central planning. With several industrial and infrastructural sectors opening to private capital in the 1990s, the government is very much involved in infrastructural expansion and industrial shaping investments. Under public pressure, it has also funded renewable energy and (nominally) pollution abatement initiatives. Although the goals for economic growth are directed, the accompanying sustainable policies remain contradictory, and these communities are vulnerable victims of displacement and relocation due to the development of megaprojects. Instead of subscribing to Western neoliberal models, India’s case seems to favour the Global South to develop alternative frameworks where economic objectives do not come at the cost of environmental protection and social well-being. The sustainability quest remains a hard nut to crack, rocked with the conflicting priorities and headache of implementation.
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