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- Convenors:
-
Itay Noy
(UCL)
Agustin Diz (University of Edinburgh)
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- 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:
Renewable energy is presented as the modern pathway for sustainable development and green growth, but its extraction follows traditional patterns of marginalization and dispossession. What implications does green energy extraction have on resistance practices and political (re)actions?
Paper long abstract:
Renewables are presented as the modern pathway for sustainable development and unlimited growth in India, and the turnkey solution to address and mitigate the global climate crisis. But this hegemonic consensus around the need for energy transition also entails a specific land politics and structural patterns of socio-economic marginalization and dispossession associated to traditional extraction.
It is essential therefore to adopt perspectives from political geography and political ecology to understand the territorial process, the persistence of class-caste relations and the legacy of coloniality underlying renewable projects in India: green energy infrastructures are specifically targeting so-called "deserted", "empty" and "waste" lands where subaltern groups (tribal, pastoral and low-caste communities) have been historically deprived of any agency. These violent logics of colonial and destructive green extraction are in the meantime contested by a diverse range of insubordination acts, open resistance and a renewed repertoire of political (re)actions coming 'from bellow'. Resistance to renewables is specifically conducted on the ground of biodiversity and environmental protection, the defence of common lands and their attached livelihood practices. It re-energises traditional agrarian struggles and becomes a practical tool to contest class-caste domination and violent absorption into capitalist modes of production.
This paper aims to make an empirical contribution to the existing debates on green energy extraction and resistance based on the study of Kutch (Gujarat). I will highlight the extraction patterns underlying the development of 2-3 wind power projects, and the parallel resistance alliance and political (re)actions that emerged from Dalits organisations, pastorals and environmental NGOs.
Paper short abstract:
Applying Gregory Unruh’s carbon lock-in as analytical framework, this dissertation attempts to find how the different political economy environments of oil-importing Morocco and oil-exporting Algeria influence the deployment of sustainable energy strategies and vice-versa.
Paper long abstract:
The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region has one of the highest potentials for renewable energy in the world, yet this potential remains poorly exploited. Applying Unruh’s carbon lock-in as analytical framework, I attempt to answer the following questions. How do the different political economy environments of oil-importing Morocco and oil-exporting Algeria influence the deployment of sustainable energy strategies and vice-versa? To what extent does access to fossil fuels interfere with renewable energy development? To what extent does resource scarcity support a fast transition towards renewables? While fuel rich countries are held back by numerous technical and institutional barriers to decarbonisation, those who lack resources and need to import them often have stronger incentives to diversify their energy mix. The interference of Western actors in both renewable and conventional energy production might lock in the interdependence of the two. Intervening Unruh’s carbon lock-in, I show that although the transition towards renewable energies leads to environmentally sustainable outcomes, it can also induce the deployment of technologies which are as socially unsustainable as fossil fuels in the way they create path dependency in unequal structures of power.
Paper short abstract:
In Central Africa, the off-grid solar market is expanding rapidly. The process is conceptualised by existing literatures as a development panacea. The proposed paper argues that, on the contrary, it carries the potential to reproduce rather than alleviate North-South inequities and dependencies.
Paper long abstract:
The off-grid solar market in Central Africa is expanding rapidly, driven by a mix of foreign direct investment and development finance, both emanating almost exclusively from the global North. The techno-economic literature advocating its continued expansion is underpinned by a central assumption that this process will act as a development panacea, reducing poverty and catalysing transformative processes of economic development. This assumption is generally supported by the development literature exploring the relationship between expanded access to off-grid solar energy and economic development in the global South, which finds positive effects primarily through increased household income and savings.
Through the presentation of data from a firm survey conducted in August and September 2020 in Burundi, Rwanda and the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, the proposed paper first establishes the size of this sector, its dominance by Northern firms, and its aggressive plans for future growth. Next, through a theoretical reframing of the existing literature, the paper challenges its foundational premise of off-grid solar as development panacea, arguing instead that in the African context it might more appropriately be conceptualised as a trojan horse; outwardly benign, but carrying within the potential to reproduce rather than alleviate North-South inequities and dependencies. The paper concludes that the existing literature would benefit from a heightened appreciation for the possibility that the developmental effects of this rapidly growing sector will not rest on the expanded energy access it generates per se, but rather the broader institutional political economy framework within which this expansion takes place.