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The papers in this session discuss the impacts of resource extraction and the narratives developed around it as well as people self-organising to meet their own security needs.
Long Abstract:
Faced with persistent inequality, poverty and crime rates, several processes deepen the current social and environmental challenges while strengthening the need to transit towards a low-carbon and socially just future. Climate change along with the recent pandemic and persistently high levels of inequality and violence, make a difficult combination to overcome worldwide. How do people understand and engage with these challenges? What are the old colonial and capitalist recipes deployed to tackle these issues? How do people resist, negotiate or cooperate? What new approaches have emerged and who has driven them? Some of these issues will be discussed in the panel.
Focused on the Global South in the context of primary exporting economies, the papers in this session discuss the impacts of resource extraction and the narratives developed around it. On the other hand, the panel examines how people self-organising to meet their own security needs in Nigeria.
As such, we will discuss the different power relations that persist and influence the ways in which different peoples and countries solve environmental and social challenges. In this regard, it is key to consider the ways in which capitalism and coloniality are deeply rooted in these issues and draw on them to find solutions, along with the diverse contexts where these problems are lived, understood and tackled. Finally, it is worth looking at the structural limits and potential solutions to move towards a socially and environmentally just world for both humans and non-humans.
Methodology
Panelists will upload pre-recorded presentations. Convenors will ask panelists to watch other people’s presentation in advance of the synchronous sessions. The convenors will also share in advance what they think are the key questions emerging from the recorded presentations which will be prompts for the synchronous discussion. The convenors will also start the synchronous session outlining these questions. Then, each presenter will give a 2min pitch summarising their key argument and another 2min in which they address one of the key questions form the convenors. After this, the discussion will be open to the audience with convenors’ moderation.
Drawing on recent ethnography, I aim to analyse narratives around lithium extraction and development in Chile. I explore how these narratives connect rural with urban development by imagining the desert as an empty space only useful as a commodity zone, and its impacts on indigenous communities.
Paper long abstract:
In the context of the energy transition, lithium has been framed as a key mineral due to its key role in the ion-lithium batteries of computers, mobiles, and electric cars. Drawing on a 12-month ethnography carried out in the Atacama Desert in Chile, the paper looks at the hegemonic narratives around development in the context of lithium extraction in the Atacama salt flat. I will analyse how the interconnected dynamics of rural and urban development associated with lithium extraction express the contradictions of a persistent urban-oriented neocolonial narrative and its implications.
The Atacama Desert plays a key role in highlighting neocolonial views of the rural as empty space (Bridge, 2001), a narrative that legitimizes the destruction of certain ecosystems to bring "modernity" to urban places. Equally, as capitalism expands and national development remains tied to ideas of urban progress and modernity, paid work constitutes the only option for indigenous and rural communities to access formal system education, healthcare services, and technology. In this regard, lithium extraction appeared as a possibility for Lican Antai people to work closer to their ancestral lands, revitalizing increasingly abandoned villages. Nevertheless, they also acknowledge the temporality of mining companies and raise concerns about what will happen when "they leave the hole". While struggling to find labour opportunities, indigenous people are caught up in a dilemma: if lithium extraction ends, the villages "will die" as they will go to find job opportunities elsewhere, but if it remains, their ancestral ecosystems will be forever damaged.
This paper examines how corporations in the oil and gas industry of Nigeria make sense of climate change impact related to their activities, and the perceived link to human rights violations. It evaluates how these feed into CSR practices and reporting in response to climate action.
Paper long abstract:
The world increasingly faces a global climate threat characterized by the frequency and intensity of climate events. Human activities, especially those of extractive industries greatly impact climate change. This study deciphers how multinational and indigenous oil and gas corporations in Nigeria understand climate change. Specifically, its perceived link with gas flaring, impact on local communities and environment, including how it is reflected on corporate social responsibility practices and reporting.
The study uses interpretive research method to answer the research questions through themes generated from data with insight from extant literature and theories. Corporate documents are analyzed as are interviews conducted with personnel from the corporations, regulators of the industry, NGOs, and community residents for corroborative or rebuttal evidence.
Evidence shows that corporations in this industry ride on the lax regulatory and monitoring system in place, ignorance of local host communities, and take advantage of knowledge and power differential between themselves and communities. They use meager CSR initiatives, however remote from climate action, to pacify the community stakeholders and sustain or improve their legitimacy while diverting attention from the main issues at stake to forestall disruption to business.
The implication of this finding is that corporate social and environmental responsibility practices and accompanying reporting in their current forms are unlikely to produce the desired action towards tackling climate challenges. Consequently, intentional commitment by the corporations, backed by strict and mandatory policy instruments is essential since it appears that there is no end in sight for oil and gas exploration.
The paper examines effective alternative structures that have emerged to meet unmet security needs of the people from the government, by the people, in African cities, using Nigeria, West Africa's oil-rich nation and Africa's most populous country as a case study.
Paper long abstract:
African scholars have long underlined the importance of paying more systematic attention to informal economic and political institutions in reorganizing African civilizations. This has led to a growing sense among researchers about the failure of Westphalian governance models to understand current African realities as a significant step forward, and it has encouraged indigenous scholars and security experts to look into countering Euro-centric criminological assumptions about how to solve Africa's crime problems. The project provides a narrative on the current security situation in Africa, using Nigeria, West Africa's oil-rich nation and Africa's most populous country as a case study, by looking into alternative structures, emerging to fill unmet needs by the people. The project resolved that a new approach to combating insecurity within Africa is emerging through the engagement of informal non state actors in security governance thereby forming a hybrid system. It further argues that the new actors, though equally effective in solving crime are not meant to replace the formal institutions instead their in-depth knowledge of their localities could provide benefits that could be beneficial for intelligence gathering, rapid response, and long-term observation for the whole system. The project suggests that for an effective and sustainable security system to be achieved in Africa, formal and informal security actors must work together to integrate informal crime detection and prevention mechanisms into formal policing techniques, resulting in a better approach that is more suited to African reality, particularly at the grass-roots level.
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Short Abstract:
The papers in this session discuss the impacts of resource extraction and the narratives developed around it as well as people self-organising to meet their own security needs.
Long Abstract:
Faced with persistent inequality, poverty and crime rates, several processes deepen the current social and environmental challenges while strengthening the need to transit towards a low-carbon and socially just future. Climate change along with the recent pandemic and persistently high levels of inequality and violence, make a difficult combination to overcome worldwide. How do people understand and engage with these challenges? What are the old colonial and capitalist recipes deployed to tackle these issues? How do people resist, negotiate or cooperate? What new approaches have emerged and who has driven them? Some of these issues will be discussed in the panel.
Focused on the Global South in the context of primary exporting economies, the papers in this session discuss the impacts of resource extraction and the narratives developed around it. On the other hand, the panel examines how people self-organising to meet their own security needs in Nigeria.
As such, we will discuss the different power relations that persist and influence the ways in which different peoples and countries solve environmental and social challenges. In this regard, it is key to consider the ways in which capitalism and coloniality are deeply rooted in these issues and draw on them to find solutions, along with the diverse contexts where these problems are lived, understood and tackled. Finally, it is worth looking at the structural limits and potential solutions to move towards a socially and environmentally just world for both humans and non-humans.
Methodology
Panelists will upload pre-recorded presentations. Convenors will ask panelists to watch other people’s presentation in advance of the synchronous sessions. The convenors will also share in advance what they think are the key questions emerging from the recorded presentations which will be prompts for the synchronous discussion. The convenors will also start the synchronous session outlining these questions. Then, each presenter will give a 2min pitch summarising their key argument and another 2min in which they address one of the key questions form the convenors. After this, the discussion will be open to the audience with convenors’ moderation.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 8 July, 2022, -Daniela Soto (University of Sussex)
Grace Adebanjo (University of Essex)
Khadija Nda Yakubu (SOAS, University of London)