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- Convenors:
-
Charlotte Bruckermann
(University of Cologne)
Kirsten Endres (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology)
Katja Müller (Merseburg University of Applied Sciences)
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- Discussant:
-
Felix Ringel
(Durham University)
- Formats:
- Panels
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 22 July, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
Short Abstract:
The panel examines how the persistence of conventional energy systems and the rise of renewables affects the complex operations of political power and influences the pace and results of anticipated energy futures.
Long Abstract:
Debates about climate change have long entered political arenas through diplomacy, bureaucracy and regulations as part of worldwide environmental governance. Although global efforts to foster greener energy increasingly supplement resource extractivism, unfolding protests point to the insufficiencies of current measures. This panel asks what political legitimacies and forms of power become possible through renewables' development and the greening of energy systems. From top-down policymaking regarding energy access to grassroots calls for climate justice, this panel interrogates the policies and politics surrounding renewable energy, and the unintended consequences and alliances in its delivery. Ethnographic investigations in this panel will combine the intertwined complexities of greening energy with abstractions of political power at various scales.
Questions could include: How does political decision-making on energy sources unfold, including expanding resource extraction, extending the grid, or developing renewables? What brute materialities of wires, cables, and power plants come into play? How do historic injustices and exclusionary legacies of extraction, production and consumption affect future energy horizons? Do imperatives of greening energy create new role models in energy matters that shift the focus within and beyond Europe? When do debates about local environmental priorities and energy rights undermine or bolster global climate targets? What new forms of precarity and scarcity do large-scale infrastructural impositions by local or international powerholders entail? We welcome contributions that investigate the contradictions and contestations between the persistence of conventional energy systems and the rise of renewables within the complex operations of political power that affect our anticipated energy futures.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 22 July, 2020, -Paper short abstract:
This paper examines how energy and job security are the main concerns of technocratic governance in the context of structural change policies, while various civil society actors in the Rhineland insist on the positive link between participatory democracy and climate protection
Paper long abstract:
Germany's plans to phase out coal to meet the Paris Agreement's climate goals have officially inaugurated the period of structural change in the Rhineland's lignite mining region. Ideas to turn the area into a European model region for sustainable energy production rely substantially on the mining company's expertise and infrastructure and pursue the main goal of creating jobs in "innovative" sectors. The anticipated loss of well-paid regular employment in the coal industry moreover conjures up the specter of a strengthening right-wing populism, further legitimizing the rhetoric of "green" growth in the name of defending democratic freedoms. Yet, after years of feeling politically alienated by the close ties between local governments and coal industry, many citizens not employed in the fossil fuel sector had hopes that this new situation would provide an opportunity for stronger democratic inclusion as a path to protect the environment. Now with officials relying primarily on "technofixes" (Haraway) to manage the process of structural change in the region, they fear that the talk of "participation" in planning practices becomes a mere fig-leaf for legitimizing the establishment of new business ventures to secure jobs and energy supply instead of facilitating climate protection. In line with Timothy Mitchell's reflections on "carbon democracy", this conflict between job and energy security on the one hand and climate protection on the other illustrates that political institutions and mechanisms that developed in accordance with an economy based on fossil fuels seem inadequate to govern the transformation of this same system.
Paper short abstract:
As Egypt has recently become the promised land of energy success stories, these promises involve precarity for millions of working class citizens who are faced with the removal of energy subsidies. The paper is based on ethnographic research both among policy-makers and among Egyptian families.
Paper long abstract:
Egypt recently broke a world record in the energy sector: the largest gas field discovered to date, Zohr, in the Mediterranean basin was brought into production in just two years. This record has attracted many investors worldwide. At the same time, the military regime led by Marshal al-Sissi launched an ambitious investment plan in renewable energies. For gas as for solar and wind, Egypt appears to be the promised land of the energy future.
And yet, all these promises are based on one condition, set as a must by producers and funders: that the government should remove subsidies on energy from which Egyptian citizens have benefited for decades and that they have been regarding as a 'social right'.
As a matter of fact, eliminating these subsidies was the first step taken by al-Sissi's regime, entailing a 500% increase for products consumed by the poorest (Gasoline 80 and LPG).
This paper addresses the following issue raised by the panel: « What new forms of precarity and scarcity do large-scale infrastructural impositions by local or international powerholders entail? » It is based on a double ethnographic research that I have been conducting in Egypt for 2 years. On the one hand, an ethnography of the policy-making process in the energy sector, among ministerial executives, company officials and international experts. On the other hand, an ethnography of Egyptian households, and the daily practices they develop to try to resist or adapt to these changes, or the ways in which they suffer their consequences.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores how a coal-powered Danish district heating utility is responding to a national call to reduce GHG emissions by 70% by 2035 and 100% by 2050.
Paper long abstract:
As climate awareness is moving to centre stage in the political discourse of this small affluent nation, energy sector entities are scrambling to reimagine themselves as being part of a fossil-free, zero-emission smart energy future. Business as usual is off the table, thus forcing energy planners and engineers to abandon long-cherished technology staples and renegotiate the imagined futures that go along with them. This paper is a preliminary report from an ongoing ethnographic project following a large heat utility company in the early stages of transitioning to 100% renewables in a more decentralized, sector integration-ready heat grid. The paper examines how this state of sociotechnical flux affects the way academic energy engineers interact with new technologies, engineering competencies, energy policies, thought worlds, experiences, power relationships, and tensions both within as well as outside their organization.
Paper short abstract:
This paper provides historical perspective on the relationship between political legitimacy and energy futures through analyzing the development of the grid in Istanbul. I examine the legacy of coal-powered electrical energy by charting the political and economic networks from which it emerged.
Paper long abstract:
This paper provides historical perspective on the relationship between political legitimacy and energy futures through analyzing the development of the grid in Istanbul, Turkey. Istanbul's electrification involved a process in which various European and Ottoman actors participated, resulting in a decades-long negotiation between private investors and state officials. By examining this process of electrifying both public works and domestic consumption, I shed light on political decision-making practices regarding energy production by engineer-entrepreneurs, financiers, diplomats, brokers and state officials. In doing so, I analyze the legacy of coal-powered electrical infrastructures by charting the political and economic networks from which they emerged across Europe and Turkey. Furthermore, I examine the transition from gas and oil-powered lighting, and from animal-powered urban transport, to coal-powered electrical systems. By doing so, I provide historical perspective on the question of resource transition, showing the complex political and economic operations underlying such a change. These include the work of finance capital, diplomacy and international businesses on the one hand, and the management of coal mines, refugees, urban service workers, and emerging bourgeois consumers by the political sovereigns on the other hand. I show how these operations unevenly distributed the benefits and burdens of electrical modernization and deepened the urban-rural divide. Finally, by drawing on another moment in which world war, political and economic competition between global powers, and rapid technological innovation resulted in dramatic transitions, I show the changes in popular and elite imaginaries of the future as reflected in material infrastructures.
Paper short abstract:
This paper investigates how and why SHPPs became the Balkan's dominant response to the dependence on coal. It suggests that renewable energy is not homogeneously green, but that in the current global and regional divisions it has different shades of green for different places.
Paper long abstract:
Types of renewable energy are unequally distributed across the world, and one of the reasons lies in the general tendency of technology to reproduce the wider structural relations of the contexts in which it is implemented. At the moment, thousands of small hydropower plants (SHPPs) are planned/built on the "intact rivers" of the Western Balkans, which sparked numerous mobilizations. Through multi-scalar lenses, this ethnographic paper investigates how and why SHPPs became the region's dominant response to the dependence on coal. The EU accession process, through its requirements for investment in renewable energy, opened-up lucrative opportunities for both political and economic national elites, EU banks and foreign producers of hydro equipment. With the focus on the European periphery, the paper suggests that renewable energy is not homogeneously green, but that in the current global and regional divisions it has different shades of green for different places. The turbines and pipes enclosing water demonstrate "poetics of anti-infrastructure", revealing the competing definitions of what 'renewable', 'sustainable' and 'resource' mean for local activists as well as for national politicians. These are not merely discoursive battles, but rather conflicting visions of, on the one hand, technocratic and dispossessive development of the energy sector, and on the other, grounded modernization project that tries to harmonize sustainability, aspects of locally bounded radical democracy and cooperative economy. Therefore, what rural-urban-transnational activist networks forged against SHPPs managed to articulate is not only a request for more sustainable energy, but an integral vision that challenges the neoliberalization of socio-ecological spheres of life and the uneven distribution of environmental rights.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the political temporality of energy forecasts. Through the case of Ghana, it looks at how politically-contracted dependencies on oil prevented the realisation of a renewable energy future, challenging conventional views of 'energy transitions' as a linear and generic process.
Paper long abstract:
In popular discourses of energy transitions, the replacement of fossil fuel dependencies by renewable energy sources seems both inevitable and imperative. In practice, however, hydrocarbons and renewables weave complex patterns of complementarity and contradiction that cannot be neatly folded into mutually-exclusive alternatives. In this paper, I describe how a promising future for renewable energy projects in Ghana was prevented from coming into being even as the country ranked amongst the top growing renewable energy markets globally. In the past 5 years, Ghana has undergone a curious energy 'transition': not from fossil fuel dependency to renewables, but from energy shortages to energy excess amounting to almost twice its peak demand, wasting an average US$ 24 million a month for unused power generated by IPPs contracted during an election year. As a result, renewable energy projects have come to a stall, as the government has banned any addition to its grid. As redundant thermal plants lie idle in Ghana's overcharged electricity network, renewables constitute fallow presents and prevented futures, 'stranded assets' of unrealised potential that point to the political temporalities of energy transitions and forecasts. Based on ongoing ethnographic research conducted in Ghana since 2014 with energy providers, policymakers, politicians, oil companies and electricity workers, I reflect on the political challenges of energy futures in an unequal world. Rather than accepting the linear narrative of an 'energy transition' away from fossil fuels, I argue that an ethnographic attention is needed to explain the contradictory and conflicted landscapes of energy production today.
Paper short abstract:
The paper examines the issuance of a Chinese green bonds in Europe by asking how its 'life cycle' is negotiated across differential processes of policy making. It places the growing green finance nexus at the intersection of multiple forms of political powers and forms of capital valorisation.
Paper long abstract:
Xi Jinping's call for a new ecological civilisation (shengtai wenming) and the development of Chinese green financial products along the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), display China's attempt to gain a global sustainability leadership. Chinese State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) are pushed to issue green bonds as a strategy to penetrate Europe while gaining political legitimacy. This strategy converges with the EU efforts to harness foreign investments to bridge the 'climate-finance gap' and accelerate progress towards the 2030 targets approved in the Paris agreement (COP21). Such developments, however, raise challenges on the commensurability of green financial instruments out of China's borders.
By analysing the issuance of a Chinese green bond in Portugal by the Chinese SOE 'China Three Gorges (CTG),' the paper investigates how processes of policy making in the form of standardisation and certification define the life cycle of the first Chinese green bond issued in Europe, and how these are negotiated. As the EU is releasing a new taxonomy aimed at regulating the green financial sector at a global level, Chinese financial players have long aligned to their green financial standards and regulations under the state's umbrella. The paper conceives the CTG green bond as an ethnographic object of research to grasp asymmetries between diverse 'green' epistemological traditions, as well as discrepancies in the way green and sustainable assets are deployed at a local level. In this process, heterogeneous modes of capital valorisation define the green-finance nexus as a field of tensions and frictions.