This volume offers a provocative strategic critique of an entire phase of direct-action campaigning in North America: the much-debated actions to block fossil-fuel pipeline projects and to affirm Indigenous sovereignty. The book's theme is the climate-change movement's strategic engagement with place-based movements, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, to weaken and to force change on the fossil-fuel sector.
Hoberg's book joins a range of comparative case studies that assess this wave of protest and land defence (for example, Haluza-Delay and Carter, Reference Haluza-Delay, Carter and E2006; Black et al., Reference Black, D'Arcy, Weis and Russell2014; Shaw, Reference Shaw and K2021). Examining four key pipeline campaigns, Hoberg finds that these joint actions have been strikingly successful. The strategic balance has shifted against the sector's growth, and the two movements’ collaborations have been crucial in mobilizing adequate resistance.
However, the book's main significance lies in two final twists, spelled out in the last 75 pages or so. First, Hoberg presents evidence that the climate movement's alliance with place-based ones has enhanced the latter's “repertoires of contention” in important and unanticipated ways. The reasons for building this alliance were impeccable: the successes against the fossil-fuel industry would have come no other way. But now the urgently needed second stage of the climate-change movement's grand strategy—rapid construction of industrial-scale renewable energy—faces similar obstacles. This stage entails major local impacts, and place-based movements have no more reason to welcome them than they welcomed new fossil-fuel infrastructure. Hoberg provides both case studies and argument—including a review of politics surrounding British Columbia's controversial Site C dam—to argue that anti-renewables resistance is a real concern. Second, and tantalizingly, Hoberg thinks that something can be done and provides a road map in chapter 11, which is essentially a tour of crucial literature on informed, deeply participatory planning.
The Resistance Dilemma bears the marks of Hoberg's decades of scholarship, most notably strategic and institutionalist interventions on the politics of resource policy subsystems. Hoberg belongs to a remarkable cohort of British Columbia–based policy researchers in the 1990s, who brought the fruits of historical institutionalism and policy studies to bear on BC's struggles over forest policy reform (for example, Cashore et al., Reference Cashore, Hoberg, Howlett, Rayner and Wilson.2001). The prudent and balanced tone of Hoberg's work in this period shaped its reformist message and, among other things, brought Hoberg to pioneering leadership at UBC's Faculty of Forestry. His was and is a manifestly synthetic mind in the field of policy subsystems, and the enduring analytical value of the framework he developed with his forest policy colleagues is central to the investigative architecture of The Resistance Dilemma.
As Hoberg notes (xvii-xviii), however, The Resistance Dilemma also bears the marks of his recent departures from “value-free social science,” in the name of open climate advocacy. More clearly than with his forest policy work, this book contains explicit policy advice to political actors. Like any strategic advice, it must avoid the special risks of research for a cause: one must give no prior guarantee that friends will expect or welcome the advice provided, and one can give no quarter to self-deception.
Some such friends will ask Hoberg whether his overall realist tone strays too closely to the ecological colonial dangers that Indigenous scholars and land-defenders decry. Will the urgency of a green transition simply override—again—North America's foundational place-based collectivities, Indigenous Nations, and will the climate cause and the dilemma Hoberg names provide the justification? Others may ask—also problematically—whether the climate movement would have been better to avoid giving place-based causes the lead in confronting fossil capital. Still others might ask whether industrial energy is the real problem and suggest that some kind of eco-primitivism is therefore the only way out.
The key to the volume, strategically and ethically, is that Hoberg refuses these paths. But his route out of the dilemma rests heavily on the viability and legitimacy of deep consultations. Can they work in this policy subsystem? Does human society have the time? Can this be done in a way that avoids the deliberative impasses that developed over British Columbia forest policy? This reader awaits a companion volume that addresses the potential of this deliberative exit from the Resistance Dilemma.
