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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?