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- Convenors:
-
Pauline Destree
(Durham University)
Mette High (University of St Andrews)
Sean Field (University of St Andrews)
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- Stream:
- Who Speaks and for Whom?
- Sessions:
- Friday 2 April, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
Who speaks for energy? This panel explores how responsibility and authority frame the social worlds of energy production, consumption, distribution and disposal; and, the role of anthropologists in researching and representing the people, communities, and non-humans connected by energy.
Long Abstract:
Energy is a necessity of life. How energy is harvested from the environment, however, and the repercussions of energy consumption, are of growing public concern and a central contributor to anthropogenic climate change. In a global yet highly unequal energy economy, questions of responsibility and authority are crucial to understanding the entangled social and material complexities of our energy present(s) and futures. This panel explores the ethical tensions and power dynamics vested in the social worlds of energy production, consumption, distribution and disposal. We ask: How are responsibility and authority crafted, accepted and challenged by those who speak for energy? And, in turn, by the people, communities, and non-humans that are dependent on and adversely affected by human energy practices? How do non-humans figure in energy dilemmas? Can, and should they be represented in the anthropology of energy, and by whom? How do we reconcile analysis of the energy sector’s provision of global energy needs and contribution to climate change with the voices, stories, beliefs, ethical sensibilities, lives and livelihoods of people who work in the fossil fuel, nuclear and renewable energy industries? Do anthropologists have a responsibility to avoid favouring or opposing some energy sources and voices over others? How do we, as anthropologists, navigate the ethical tensions of working with conflicting voices and demands for representation in a highly contentious field? This panel welcomes papers that reflect on the ethical challenges, tensions, and opportunities associated with ethnographically researching energy from field sites around the world.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 2 April, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
In this paper, I examine energy elites via an exploration of their own energy and climate considerations. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork based in the energy industry in Oslo, Norway, I trace how energy elites navigate between hope and hopelessness in the face of climate change.
Paper long abstract:
With vastly growing climate change concerns, the experts, managers, executives, and investors in leading positions within the hydrocarbon industry have been placed under increased scrutiny. Despite often being at the centre of – or rather being the debate – these ‘industry leaders’ or ‘energy elites’ are a surprisingly under-researched group. With this paper, I wish to examine energy elites via an exploration of their own energy and climate considerations. Drawing on 18-months of ethnographic fieldwork in various energy companies in Oslo, Norway (including fossil fuel and renewable firms), I trace how energy elites navigate between hope and hopelessness in the face of climate change. In particular, I will discuss what I refer to as “optimistic fatalism”; the continued effort to change something that is deemed unavoidable, i.e. ‘doing something rather than nothing’ in light of expected bad outcomes. More concretely, I analyse how and why many Norwegian energy elites follow an action and solution-based approach towards energy and climate dilemmas despite believing that climate change cannot be halted, and its detrimental consequences cannot be avoided.
Paper short abstract:
Climate change highlights the relation between energy production and increasing environmental uncertainty. I follow a legal claim against a German energy company over its contribution to climate hazard in Peru which broadens public discussions about responsibility in times of climate change.
Paper long abstract:
Climate change highlights the relation between energy production and increasing environmental uncertainty around the world. In a precedent-setting legal claim, the Peruvian farmer and mountain guide Saúl Luciano Lliuya sued the German energy company RWE over its contribution to climate hazard in the Andes. The company has produced coal-fired energy for over a century and is one of Europe’s largest historical emitters. The lawsuit draws on climate science to trace a causal link of legal accountability between RWE’s operations in Europe and climate change impacts in Peru. This opens a broader discussion about energy production and responsibility in times of climate change. The legal claim conceptualises climate change in terms of translocal socio-material entanglements across the planet. This concretises the relation between energy production in Europe and socio-environmental vulnerability elsewhere. This paper draws on ethnographic research following the claim in the Peruvian Andes, at German courts and UN climate summits. Bringing a Peruvian farmer onto the global stage of climate politics, the claim brings other knowledges and ways of being to bear on international discussions about climate change.
Paper short abstract:
In my talk I aim to unsettle the consumption-provision binary conventionally informing energy research, since this dichotomisation of actors tends to reproduce hierarchies along colonial and class power structures present in discourses about energy inequalities, poverty and (state) responsibilities.
Paper long abstract:
In April 2019, a larger series of service delivery protests took place across urban areas in South Africa, starting in Alexandra, a Johannesburg township (Nyathi 2019), insisting energy supply be understood as a necessity of life.
While some scholars criticised the media coverage of the protests for encouraging “politically” motivated narratives supposedly incited by political parties as opposed to “genuine” grievances (Friedman 2019), others predicted the recurring protests to soon develop into an organised movement (Ndebele 2013).
Inspired by Ingold (2014) and Abu-Lughod (1991), I argue that from an anthropological perspective both approaches cannot do justice to the complexities of energy supply and its discursive multi-vocality in a South-African post-colonial context. Reading Ingold and Abu-Lughod with and against each other regarding their understanding of the anthropologist’s responsibility, I claim that as ethnographers we have a ‘responsibility to care’. Where agency seemingly appears as absent or rather appropriated by more powerful players in the energy sector (e.g. state actors, energy providers, energy activists, civil society actors or international development initiatives), it is a collaborative, caring ethnographic perspective that can shed light on the protests and non-payment of services as political acts of resistance against inequalities in energy supply.
I thereby aim to unsettle the consumer-provision-binary conventionally informing energy research (e.g. Von Schnitzler 2013, 2008; Ferguson 2007; Ajam 2001; Johnson 1999), since it tends to reproduce hierarchies along colonial and class power structures present in South African discourses about energy inequalities, poverty, and (state) responsibility to provide access to energy for all.
Paper short abstract:
This paper analyses discourses and performances of oil-for-development in Ghana as pedagogical projects that turn a key natural resource into an object of civil responsibility and merit.
Paper long abstract:
This paper looks at the ethics of oil wealth distribution at the Ghanaian national oil company’s CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) Foundation. Through interactions between communities earmarked as beneficiaries of oil revenues and the Foundation’s staff, it analyses how understandings of care, responsibility, investment and distribution are enacted between the state and some of its ‘poorest of the poor’ citizens. It looks at the ways that oil translates into a developmental and ethical apparatus that frames poverty and destitution as infrastructural and moral conditions that can be transcended through inspirational narratives and educational practices. In the various manifestations of oil revenues (boreholes, classrooms, dormitories, and other community facilities), CSR projects enact a vision of futurity and development that is not so much a financial or social endeavour as a pedagogical project, dependent upon successfully imparting ‘good behaviour’ onto citizens. Through these ‘investments in people’, oil works as a pedagogy that turns a national resource, and its redistribution, into an object of civil responsibility and merit.