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- Convenors:
-
Ståle Knudsen
(University of Bergen)
Dinah Rajak (University of Sussex)
Send message to Convenors
- Stream:
- Displacements of Power
- Location:
- Julian Study Centre 0.01
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 4 September, -, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel aims to discuss comparatively how trans-national companies, the state and the neoliberal economic order are linked in complex ways in energy industries.
Long Abstract:
Energy industries are considered central to the working of society and is therefore a major concern of state policies. Despite this, little ethnographic work has been conducted inside energy corporations or at the interface between states and corporations. An understanding of this is crucial as petroleum companies are to a larger degree state-owned than other companies. Investigating how different ownership models influence the way in which companies operate internationally, opens up for discussing tensions between neoliberal dynamics and various models for company-state-society interaction. Tracking the production, circulation, reformulation and outcomes of energy companies' strategies and practices as they move from sites of formal policy-making to sites of implementation in different locations worldwide, can broaden understandings of how corporations variously work with, against or through the state.
We will raise questions concerning how ownership structures and state policies influence the approaches that energy companies have to social and environmental responsibilities. How are relations between the corporate world and the state negotiated and enacted, especially when the energy corporation moves abroad but the state stays behind? What is the effect of corporations relating to the emerging global regime of performance standards and reporting mechanisms?
This panel welcomes researchers with interest in state-owned energy companies or relations between companies and the state. We invite papers that investigate issues related to, though not limited to: sustainability, human rights, labour unions, CSR, neoliberalization, international standards, and infrastructure.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 4 September, 2019, -Paper short abstract:
The paper explores the entanglement of national energy strategies, global aid economy, and patronage politics, based on research in Lebanon of a planned private-sector wind power project, highlighting the instrumental importance of capture of state institutions by a globalised entrepreneurial elite.
Paper long abstract:
In 2018, the state of Lebanon awarded three contracts to private companies to build the first wind energy power plants in Lebanon, in a bid to fulfil the country's 2010 commitment to produce 12% of its total power requirements for Lebanon through renewable sources by 2020 and aid an ailing power sector. Two of the three companies are owned by an Arab businessman who has investments across the Arab region, particularly in post conflict contexts. More importantly, he is also business partner of Lebanese prime minster in several private sector endeavours.
Based on preliminary field work in the winter of 2019 in the north of Lebanon, desk research, and sustained research on Lebanon's political anthropology, this paper seeks to explore the entanglements between state and private sector actors and concerns, where the mobilisation of politics of apportionment, clientelism and sectarian/ political identities, as well as state bureaucracy are key to private sector gain and continued capture of state resources by the ruling elite. The paper explores how the wind power projects are imagined within national energy strategies and presented to the international community for aid and investment, and negotiated locally in the field vis-a-vis members of the community, land owners, and members of the local governments.
The paper engages with a recent trope in the literature on the sate in Lebanon, that contests its depiction as a 'weak state', but rather highlights the instrumental importance of capture of state institutions by the elite in a global aid economy.
Paper short abstract:
The paper focuses on strategies and practices of Nordic companies as they move from the Nordic to the Gulf region to establish business in energy and sustainability sector. How does the Nordic leadership work in company-state-society interaction when moving abroad from the common Nordic Model?
Paper long abstract:
Leadership style can be viewed as a manifestation of central values being developed in relation to the surrounding society. Research points out that the core of the Nordic leadership is related to such ethical considerations as how democracy, responsibility, human dignity, obligations, rights and the individual's role in relation to the community and state are viewed (Andreassen, Lundquist 2019). The values that have guided leadership in the Nordic region relate specifically to openness, integrity and trust, and to the Nordic Model more broadly - the economic and social policies common to the Nordic countries.
Compromises to balance different interests in society, in corporate governance models and in labor market stand out as a significant feature in the Nordic region since early 20th century. Moreover, strong emphasis on welfare, CSR and environmental sustainability are characteristic for the Model that aims to combine economic growth with democratic stability.
The paper focuses on strategies and practices of Nordic companies as they move from the Nordic to the Gulf region to establish and expand their business in energy and sustainability sector. How does the Nordic leadership work in company-state-society interaction when moving abroad from the Model common to the Nordic countries?
The paper is based on an ongoing applied post-doctoral research on internationalization of Nordic energy and smart technology companies (both state-owned and privately owned) to the Gulf region. Understanding their challenges in establishing long-term business in energy and sustainability sector in the Gulf has been the primary goal of author's fieldwork during 2018.
Paper short abstract:
This paper investigates how the relation between state and company is enacted through infrastructure and negotiated by local politicians, after the formerly state-owned company Equinor/Statoil moved into a new region in its home country Norway.
Paper long abstract:
This paper investigates how the relation between state and company is enacted through infrastructure when a formerly state-owned company moves into a new and formerly peripheral region of its home country. The Snøhvit field operated by Equinor (formerly Statoil) was approved by the Norwegian government in 2002. It marked the opening of the Barents Sea in the Norwegian Arctic, with correspondingly high expectations - and fears - from the local population, which consists of both Norwegians and the indigenous Sámi.
The construction and operation of the field took place after Equinor's privatisation, at a time when the state was simultaneously enabling development and withdrawing some of its former involvement in governance. Though the state still owns the majority of the shares, and the company is largely seen as a state company by the population, Equinor's role as a national policy-shaper and regional influencer has changed in the last decade and a half.
Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, this paper explores how the local level has understood and negotiated their future between the state and the company. Noting how municipal politicians make demands variously to the government and to the company and attribute them overlapping, but differentiated responsibility, it asks which futures are enabled and restricted through physical infrastructure, impact assessments, and enactments of responsibility in public performance.
Paper short abstract:
The vast might of today's global oil corporations is widely assumed. This paper focuses on the narrative and performative elements of corporate power, asking how is that power sustained in the face of increasing pressure from national governments and wider publics?
Paper long abstract:
In the world of neoliberal capitalism, we are told, innovation and future-thinking reign, sweeping away locality and history as dead weight in the drive to ever-increasing efficiencies. At the same time, the discourse of market rationalism instructs that it is capital, not culture, globalism rather than localism that rules the roost. But this dominant image of corporate capitalism overlooks the ways in which transnational corporations (TNCs) - especially extractives - are territorialized, rooted in place in ways that cannot simply be transcended. The Darwinian capacity of global corporations, and the resilience of big capital to political and social challenges, is taken for granted without showing how it is achieved, or the struggles of reinvention this involves. Critically, we fail to see the resources corporations deploy (material and discursive) when negotiating new political pressures, social challenges and legislative imperatives. While the vast might of today's global oil corporations is widely acknowledged, less attention has been paid to the narrative and performative elements of corporate power on which this paper focus, asking how is that power sustained in the face of increasing pressure from national governments and wider publics? As oil corporations attempt to negotiate converging existential crises - financial, ecological and political - the pursuit of ethical valorization becomes ever harder and ever more important for millennial oil companies. Against this backdrop, sustainability emerges, not just as the latest rendition of CSR, but as a central common strategy within the discursive work of transnational oil companies.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the relationship between the Norwegian national oil company Equinor (formerly Statoil), and the governments of Tanzania and Norway, with a particular focus on trust and the aid relationship.
Paper long abstract:
Trans-national companies investing in the oil and gas sectors of poor countries have been criticized for neo-colonial exploitation of vulnerable nations and populations. Some countries, including China and Norway, simultaneously play the role of investors and development partners. Equinor, formerly Statoil, is a Norwegian national oil company which has recently rebranded itself to become a broader energy company. It has invested in more than 30 countries, including several countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. This paper explores the company - state - society interactions of Equinor, Tanzania and Norway, with a particular focus on how 50 years of 'development partnership' plays into the understanding of trust. More than six years after Equinor discovered huge gas resources in the country, the Tanzanian government is still hesitant to sign a final host government agreement with the company. The paper untangles the complex ways in which Norway is involved in Tanzania's petroleum sector: First of all as one of the major prospective investors in the oil and gas sector, but also as an (unwelcome) advisor through the Oil for Development aid program.
Paper short abstract:
Through a multisited study of a Norwegian state-owned renewable energy corporation, this paper explores how the increasing embedding of CSR in international guidelines impacts the way in which responsibility is handled when large energy corporations operate overseas.
Paper long abstract:
While CSR used to be considered voluntary acts of 'doing good', corporations now try to integrate social and environmental issues in risk management and decision-making systems, in performance standards, and in standardized reporting frameworks intended to ensure transparency and accountability. The practice and language of CSR has thus increasingly become informed by and embedded in a multitude of international guidelines. How do these changes affect the way in which responsibility is handled by corporations? And what is the role of states in the shift to standards? We pursue these questions in a study of one of the international projects of a particularly 'responsible' firm, the renewable energy corporation Statkraft, which is owned by the Norwegian state. The state enacts its ownership of the corporation through instructing it to primarily pursue profit for its owner, but also to act responsibly through signing up to or following specific international standards. Taking a multisited approach to the application of standards in Statkraft has enabled us to identify and explore the gap between field reality and corporate presentation, to observe that they act very independently of the specific state expectations, and explore the multifaceted nature of CSR within and at the fringes of the corporation. We argue that while the application of standards results in much less standardization than what is often assumed, the elusive figure of the 'stakeholder' plays an important role in holding together the heterogeneous field of corporate responsibility.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores internal and external smoothness-creating strategies and devices deployed by oil-and gas companies in the face of potential frictions arising in the interface between global energy capitalism and local realities. It draws on fieldwork on Equinor Brazil's sustainability policy.
Paper long abstract:
Anna Tsing encourages scholars to pay attention to the frictions that arise in the interfaces between particular socio-territorial localities and diverse deployments of global capitalism. Drawing on fieldwork exploring the Norwegian state energy company Equinor's sustainability policies in Brazil, this paper is an attempt to think through my fascination over all the frictions that are NOT surfacing, and the potentially contested paradoxes that are smoothed over through the art of corporate governance. Oil companies doing CSR-work in the so-called developing world constitute a condensed clash of scales of power in the sense that the companies represent the most powerful locus in the wheel of global capitalism. More often than not, they operate in countries and locations that can be characterized as sites of dense inequalities of power and privileges, as well as wayward development efforts by private and public, local and global actors alike. There are often enormous gaps between the messiness "out there" and the seemingly slick surface of modern corporate management performances.
This prompts the question of how may we think around the friction-erasing devices in the form of reporting mechanisms, sustainability policies, corporate oxymorons and corporate discourses that oil companies deploy in order to ensure and signalize control and calm waters both internally and externally? How may we understand the smooth surface of corporate governance as a particular facet of neoliberal governance? And how is Equinor; a state oil company from a rich Nordic welfare state, crafting and conceptualizing its frictionless impression management strategy?