Strategic Investigation of the Jackpine Mine Expansion Dispute in the Alberta Oil Sands

Abstract

The Graph Model for Conflict Resolution (GMCR) methodology is employed to ascertain strategic insights into a serious conflict over environmental concerns connected to the expanded exploitation of oil sands at the Jackpine Mine Expansion project located in Alberta, Canada. In fact, the expansion of extracting bitumen from large tracts of oil sands in Alberta and its associated potential negative environmental impacts have received increasing attention at the global level. Accordingly, environmentally responsible extended mining of bitumen at the Jackpine site is urgently needed. Hence, the GMCR methodology and its associated decision support system GMCR II are utilized to systematically investigate the conflict of the Jackpine Mine Expansion project. The results imply that the Federal Government of Canada is more concerned about the economic benefits generated by the oil sands projects rather than environmental impacts. It is suggested that more effort should be devoted to the environment conservation by the government.

Managing conflict in aquaculture

“…As mentioned in the previous section, GMCR has been successfully applied to aquaculture disputes. Other fields in which GMCR has been utilized include brownfields (Hu et al, 2009;Bernath Walker et al, 2010;Hipel, Hegazy and Yousefi, 2010;Yousefi et al, 2010cYousefi et al, , 2011Hipel and Bernath Walker, 2012;Philpot et al, 2017), construction management (Kassab et al, 2006(Kassab et al, , 2010(Kassab et al, , 2011Yousefi et al, 2010a, b), energy (Armin et al, 2012;Matbouli et al, 2015;Xiao et al, 2015;Garcia et al, 2016;O'Brien and Hipel, 2016), indigenous people relations (Ma et al, 2005;Obeidi et al, 2006), military science (Fraser et al, 1990;Kilgour et al, 1998;Hipel, 2011;Hipel et al, 2014), trade (Hipel et al, 1990(Hipel et al, , 2001) and sustainable development (Levy et al, 1995;Hipel and Obeidi, 2005;Ghanbarpour and Hipel, 2009). The GMCR methodology is purposefully designed to investigate real-world conflicts in order to obtain meaningful insights to satisfactorily resolve a given dispute by meeting each stakeholder's interests as much as possible within the social constraints of a given problem and possibly even reaching a win/win resolution.…”