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- Convenors:
-
Itay Noy
(UCL)
Agustin Diz (University of Edinburgh)
Send message to Convenors
- Discussant:
-
Mette High
(University of St Andrews)
- Formats:
- Papers
- Stream:
- Infrastructure and energy
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 29 June, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
Extraction of energy resources has profound effects for local communities and environments. This panel will explore local political responses to it in order to widen locally grounded understandings of the energy sector, and the degrees of resistance and entanglement that communities demonstrate.
Long Abstract:
Across the global South, energy extraction operations have been expanding to satisfy growing global demand. Such operations carry profound, uneven effects for local communities, livelihoods, and living environments – from different forms of ‘development’ to land expropriation and ecological degradation. Local responses to energy extraction, too, are variegated, ranging from vigorous opposition to ready compliance by different groups, with complex strategies, objectives, and compromises.
This panel will explore the diversity of political reactions to extraction in order to widen locally embedded understandings of the energy sector and its impacts. Such understandings are essential for addressing the challenges of environmental change. Local politics around energy and extraction can have different driving factors, characteristics, and ideological articulations – from halting extraction to preserve agrarian livelihoods, the local environment, or community control over natural resources; to demands for compensation for land loss and other damages, and/or inclusion in the potential benefits of extractive projects such as industrial employment.
What understandings and ethical perspectives on the environment, ecology, and energy do these different political responses reveal? What visions of development and ways of living a good life do they reflect? Moreover, how do different forms of extractive politics, and their ethical and ideological underpinnings, affect and help explain the ways in which communities either act to obstruct, or themselves become entangled in, extractive industrialism? What implications do these insights have for suggested transitions to non-carbon energy, and what do they tell us about the nature and capacity of political change to tackle climate change?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 29 June, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
We analyse the role of anticommons property (multiple exclusion rights with no exclusive use privilege) in shaping the power and politics surrounding resource extraction in central India. We explicate the interlinkages between institutional architecture, resource-use outcomes, and dynamics of resource conflict across policy design and implementation.
Paper long abstract:
As countries navigate the dilemmas associated with extraction of resources – ensuring, development, mitigating climate change and achieving social justice, a peculiar institutional response has been fragmentation of rights and creation of multiple institutions to mediate resource-use. Theorized as a case of anticommons property (multiple exclusion rights and no exclusive use privileges), this situation is predicted to lead to the “tragedy” of resource “under-use”. However, there is limited empirical analysis of the de-facto resource-use outcomes of such de-jure anticommons in the extant literature.
Our analysis of resource contestations in Hasdeo Aranya forests in central India, uncovers the implications of anticommons regime in shaping the nature of resource contestations surrounding extraction of energy resources (coal). We explicate the interlinkages between the institutional architecture, resource-use outcomes, and the forces impacting the creation and resolution of anticommons (both de facto and de jure). Our data comprises: (i) detailed review of government records of policy deliberations, (ii) ethnographic fieldwork, and (iii) interviews with policymakers.
We uncover the inherent power asymmetries as they manifest through the institutional regime. We find that the very existence of de-jure anticommons can serve as the legal, institutional, and discursive foundation for resistance by local communities. They can also serve as a significant constraint on the “Cunning State’s” discretionary powers to mediate conflict. Consequently, the power and politics in action could lead to an unstable equilibrium or even a clear prioritization of resource-use amongst competing stakeholders. Our findings represent a radical rethinking of the role of anticommons in contemporary societies.
Paper short abstract:
This paper discusses the struggles around the Greek "fair energy transition" by unpacking different notions of fairness. Explaining their often contradictory political/moral underpinnings implies the combine understanding of energy, value and financial extraction.
Paper long abstract:
In the 2019 UN Climate Action Summit the conservative prime minister of Greece announced the sudden suspension of all existing coal-based power-plants by 2023. Although the share of the once predominant lignite in the energy mix had been significantly reduced in the past decade, the plan for such a violent decarbonisation left the coal-mine communities in extreme agony. On the one hand, the shutdown of a labour intensive industry will substantially raise the unemployment rates in an already crises-ridden society. On the other hand, the green plans for installing mega-photovoltaic parks, seen both as an investment opportunity and as cryptocolonialism, has created contradictory responses and deep animosities around the distribution of ecological and economic benefits for the local population.
This paper will discuss the organized struggles and infrapolitics for a so-called "fair energy transition" in the main coal region of Greece (Kozani), by unpacking the power relations among different notions of fairness. I will argue that explaining the political and moral underpinnings of such struggles implies the combine understanding of different kinds of extraction: energy extraction from nature (and its environmental impact), value extraction from labor (in energy production) and financial extraction (in form of green rents, credit and taxes).
Paper short abstract:
This paper contends that any question of a future just transition away from coal is tied into the past and present just extraction of coal in regions that have been historically coal-producing.
Paper long abstract:
Despite the universal consensus about phasing out of coal-based energy sources, India continues to pursue a high-carbon pathway. India still has significant coal infrastructure and the coal industry is linked to the livelihoods of millions of people. Questions around climate justice are particularly complex in the heartlands of coal production (Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh) in India, where some of the poorest indigenous people live. Coal extraction has historically produced injustices ranging from dispossession of land and forest commons to dissatisfactory compensation. To complicate matters further, coal extraction is intertwined with the local economy producing exploitative dependencies. This paper contends that any question of a future just transition away from coal is tied into the past and present just extraction of coal in regions that have been historically coal-producing. It argues that there are nested "extractive regimes", both nationally and in these states, which have politically structured the ambit of imagination and dialogue around extraction, and will continue to play a part into the future by throwing up the spaces that can be mobilised to steer transformations.
Paper short abstract:
Informed by fifteen months of fieldwork in India's Sundarbans, the paper considers how energy developments may be extractive of care in its practical, affective, and temporal declinations.
Paper long abstract:
Over the past decade, critical perspectives have shed light on the social and environmental justice implications of a growing low-carbon energy industry. Some of these perspectives have emphasised the structural continuity between carbon and low-carbon energy developments, potentially no less extractive in nature. More nuanced perspectives have shown how extractive projects may be motivated by moral imperatives, notably the imperative to care about climate change, thereby asking the uncomfortable question of the violence that care might do. In this paper, I propose to pursue the focus on care to highlight the need for maintenance of low-carbon energy infrastructures and technologies, and the demands these make on those who care for them in practice.
Building on Tronto's (1993) classic definition of care as a life-sustaining practice that consists of four distinct phases (caring about, taking care of, caring for and being cared for), I show how care is constantly demanded by technological arrangements always vulnerable to disrepair, and at the same time how care is demanding of work, affect and time. The paper expands our understanding of what energy developments are extractive of - not simply of mineral resources or land, but of care in its practical, affective, and temporal declinations. Rather than resistance, such perspective thus emphasises persistence (Povinelli 2011) as a form of slow violence (Nixon 2011) that might be obscured by a narrow definition of extraction.