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- Convenors:
-
Naomi Hossain
(SOAS University of London)
Marjoke Oosterom (Institute of Development Studies)
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- Formats:
- Experimental Mixed
- Stream:
- Infrastructure and energy
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 29 June, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
Fossil fuel subsidies encourage unsustainable carbon emissions and benefit the rich, yet efforts to cut them are unpopular and resisted. The panel invites interventions exploring the contentious politics of fuel subsidies, and of citizen engagement in energy transition policymaking.
Long Abstract:
Fossil fuel subsidies are common and resilient, despite the growing global policy and political elite consensus that they are environmentally damaging, fiscally unsustainable, socially inequitable, and should be progressively eliminated. While global gatherings such as COP26 will debate these issues, the voices of others, such as citizens whose livelihoods depend on affordable fuel, are rarely heard in this context. Mass protests, particularly among low income urban groups, are a common result of energy pricing decisions made in elitist and closed policy spaces. Subsidy reforms are frequently stalled or reversed in response. This panel invites papers or other interventions - e.g. film, photography, activist testimony or campaign strategies - that help make sense of the popular political obstacles to fossil fuel subsidy reform. Contributions are particularly welcome if they shed light on the rationale for and organization of protests against subsidy cuts and/or tax rises (as seen recently in countries as varied as France, Chile, Ecuador, Iraq, Iran, and Haiti). Documentation and analysis of efforts to break the elite stranglehold on energy policymaking, to create and make spaces for citizens to have their say without or in addition to resorting to the streets, would also be welcome.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 29 June, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
This paper analyses how in Mozambique frustrations at the contrast between expectations of energy abundance and experiences of poor access and rising costs are expressed through popular culture and small-scale protests
Paper long abstract:
In Mozambique, the acquisition of full national ownership of the Cahora Bassa mega-dam and initial investments in oil and gas extraction in the northern province of Cabo Delgado have led to official pronouncements in the media declaring the country to be energy resource-rich, as well as to a rush to enact legal reforms in the energy sector with a view to attracting international capital. These government promises have generated rising expectations of a better life among the citizenry, which contrast with a lived reality of poor-quality energy access and high transport costs. Frustration at this contrast drove several protest episodes in the period after 2008, but in recent years intensified repression has made people reluctant to take to the streets in large numbers. This paper examines how new forms of everyday protest have emerged around electricity and fuel in a context marked by promises of energy resource development. Drawing on analysis of expressions found in popular culture and ethnographic research in peri-urban neighbourhoods in Maputo and Matola, we argue that in a context where there are limited platforms to publicly engage with energy policies, citizens resort to micro-protests and derision as forms of political action.
Paper short abstract:
This study investigated if fossil fuel-related popular protests in Nigeria yield accountability and empowerment outcomes, and the conditions under which that happens. We found protests to yield little for citizens; opening up the civic space for dialogue may produce better outcomes than protests.
Paper long abstract:
There is little evidence on whether and how popular protests and actions contribute to citizens’ empowerment and whether these enables citizens to hold states to account in fragile and conflict-affected settings. This study investigated if fossil fuel-related popular protests in Nigeria yield accountability and empowerment outcomes, and the conditions under which that happens. Nigeria is the largest producer of crude oil in Africa, and the sixth in the world. Yet it has been the site with many recurrent fossil fuel-related struggles. While some of these struggles led to change in government policy – a sign of accountability and empowerment --, others did not seem to have been noticed by the government at all.
The study adopted a mixed-method design, combining qualitative and secondary data. We conducted key-informant interviews with leaders of fuel protests, media personalities and government officials in the petroleum sector in Abuja and Lagos. We also conducted focus group discussions with citizens in different locations in Lagos State. We complemented these data sources with an events catalogue which reviewed newspaper reports on energy protests in Nigeria from 2007 to 2016.
Our findings suggest that accountability and empowerment outcomes of the struggles over energy access in fragile and conflict-affected settings are severely limited by the very conditions that define the state as fragile: weak institutions, elite capture, widespread corruption, and a citizenry that is protest-fatigued and disempowered. Frameworks that open up the civic space for dialogues between government and the citizens may produce better outcomes than protests.
Paper short abstract:
Protests in Nigeria hardly empower people to influence policies that determine their energy supply. Historically, protest groups have limited protest and contentious claims to demand for price fixity. How may we understand such self-limitation and failure of protests to engender empowerment?
Paper long abstract:
Struggles over energy imply voice or a level of empowerment. Do such struggles empower social groups to influence or take more control over the policies that influence their energy supply? The question requires a movement away from 'how citizens can recover their sense of capacity to act' to whether that 'sense of capacity to act' motivates critical action geared at influencing or taking more control of policy arenas that shape energy supply. Fuel subsidy struggles in Nigeria appear insufficient to empower citizens to influence policies that determine their energy supply. Protestations of subsidy removal have over and over again failed to move beyond a demand to revert to the status quo ante. Moreover, protesters' contentious claims have hardly gone beyond articulation of negative impact of price hike and reinstatement of pre-existing price. Protesters seem less interested in challenging the logic of petrocapitalism than competing for distributional advantage. How do we explain such apparently self-limiting strategy of protesters? What are the implications for efforts to promote citizens' empowerment in fragile and conflict affected countries? The paper relies on qualitative data derived from interviews and secondary sources conducted in Nigeria as part of the Demanding Power Research Project under the A4EA Programme.