ABSTRACT
Why have so many democratic governments during the current expansion of commercial gambling participated so wholeheartedly in liberalizing gambling regulations and thereby neglected to protect their publics from the impacts? A straightforward answer to this question is that they do so because of the money. There is simply too much potential revenue for governments to collect with minimal effort for them not to proceed down this path. A more complex response to this question recognizes that “governments” are not single entities. They are made up of complex aggregations of agencies, communication systems, informal networks, and of course individual people working in their confined contexts and subject to their own aspirations and vulnerabilities. Ascribing motivation and intent to the system as a whole is problematic because systems are not volitional entities; it is the people operating within them that experience the motivations. When the whole mechanism of government systems moves in one direction, it makes more sense to consider that there are a range of processes coinciding at varying levels that enable this movement to occur and that individuals positioned at these various levels find themselves drawn in and subject to the momentum that surrounds them. In this chapter I aim to explore how governments as complex systems, despite resistance by some individuals within, end up as active players in gambling expansion. This description parallels the roles governments play in the frontier of other newly discovered extractive industries, such as mining, logging, or petroleum exploration, where the interests of the site of production and the people around are often secondary to the interests of development.
