Paper short abstract:

This paper examines recent extreme winter weather events in the US that have heightened scrutiny of deregulated electric utilities built around futures markets. Blackouts and surging fuel prices in storms have been linked to such systems’ high dependence on natural gas fuel.

Paper long abstract:

Deregulated electricity in the United States was driven by a 1990s free market lobby that joined forces with conservative politicians, proponents of deregulated natural gas and some environmental organizations. Despite promises of lower rates and sustainable power, both goals became sidetracked in reformed utilities by the rise of shale gas, which emerged as the fuel of choice for new US generation plants. Recently, reliance of large deregulated systems on gas fuel has been shown to be a major cause of two grid failures – the Texas “Freeze” of February 2021 and Winter Storm Elliot which hit the mid-Atlantic region in December 2022. I will draw on research on both storms to discuss new evidence on the ways that deregulated systems heighten both economic and social risks during high demand periods, as well as emerging evidence from investigations of these storms on gas price manipulation and other vulnerabilities of gas plants and their fuel supply systems in cold weather. I will discuss consumer advocacy and the politics of reform and oversight. The findings have serious implications for many countries given the widespread adoption of components of deregulated electricity globally and the current export juggernaut that has boosted reliance on Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) for electricity since the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Paper short abstract:

Regulation of maternal health markets in Bangladesh is enacted as political and social-relational exercises that remain disconnected from national regulatory aspirations and peripheral to the creative work required to make biomedical maternal health technologies work in practice.

Paper long abstract:

In Bangladesh, transitions towards institutional birth care have been rapid, increasing from less than 10% in 2004 to 65% less than two decades later. This shift has been driven primarily by care seeking in minimally regulated private health facilities, where over 80% of births are conducted through caesarean. Despite this, maternal mortality has stalled. These trends have caused alarm in policy and programming circles. National and global health discourses often evoke regulation of private health services as the answer to ensuring the regularisation, i.e., achieving order and regularity of the quality of maternal health services delivered through health markets and restraining private health actors’ ‘unscrupulous’ inclinations toward patient exploitation. Based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork, this paper explores regulation of maternal health markets in Bangladesh as a sociocultural field of practice, elucidating the generation of national regulation discourses and the enactments of regulatory practices in peri-urban and rural peripheries. It contends that governance discourses in policy and programming circles operate primarily to stake moral claims and constitute tenuous state/economy divides. It then turns to the localised governance practices in sub-national settings. These everyday practices reveal health service regulation as primarily political and social-relational exercises that, while sometimes necessary to continue the animation of biomedical technologies with confidence in private health facilities, remain both disconnected from national regulatory aspirations and peripheral to the creative work required to make biomedical maternal health technologies work in practice. These ultimately result in differentiation rather than regularisation of maternal health services.

Paper short abstract:

This paper details an encounter of anthropological instruction on cross-cultural perceptions of the sea which was provided to lawyers and marine scientists regulating offshore fossil fuel ventures. My task was to inspire unknowing and release their grip on epistemic certainty. But did it work?

Paper long abstract:

In 2023, I stepped into a room of lawyers, marine scientists and environmental engineers employed in the service of regulatory decision-making on offshore deep sea fossil fuel extraction. My task - to assist them in developing a cross cultural orientation towards ways of knowing, specifically, how to engage with different cultural viewpoints concerning the sea. Operating within a contentious and litigious space, regulatory decision making on the risk that deep sea fossil fuel ventures pose to Indigenous peoples’ heritage is a concern which keeps this regulatory body in a state of directive anguish. The hope was that sharing anthropological insights on ways of knowing, plurality, ethics and care, configured cross-culturally, might alleviate their concern and open pathways towards better informed decision-making.

This undertaking follows 25 years of ethnographic collaboration with Indigenous maritime groups in Australia, thus posed intellectual and ethical challenges. It took shape as an applied post-conventional anthropology, in which the post-conventional is distinguished as going above and beyond normative practice and aligning with a broader social contract. The moment in which these exchanges took place serves as the ethnographic encounter from which I draw several observational points on the role of anthropology in ‘doing unknowing’ – a project aimed at releasing the grip of epistemic certainty. This encounter allows me to confront the translational impasse that hinders communicative success for Indigenous viewpoints in dominant western knowledge scenarios; to explore commensurability in ways of knowing, and to examine confidence in uncertainty as a paradigm for holding multiple, divergent perspectives.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the transformation of Global North energy systems in natural gas and electricity at the end of the twentieth century from a structured risk environment to less regulated ways of procuring energy for commodity markets.

Paper long abstract:

Throughout the twentieth century, large-scale energy systems in North America/Europe were highly regulated by a national political community whose decision-making authority relied on positions of bureaucratic- and capitalist-led industry organization. After restructuring in energy markets during the 1980s, the culture of power surrounding political decision-making began to wane. The avant-garde knowledge of regulatory institutions became less prestigious when contrasted to new forms of market-driven information focusing on near-term future interactions of supply and demand. This paper explores the waning of regulatory politics surrounding large-scale energy systems in the United States at the turn of the millennium by illuminating key aspects of federal-state political decision-making processes on energy transportation infrastructure. By highlighting the activities of regulatory intellectuals whose accumulated work begins to impede Arctic pipeline proposals, I demonstrate a reliance on judgments that no longer reflect the conditions in which large-scale projects are now determined. Thus, the waning of regulatory politics reflects the diverse feelings and practices associated with a culture of power whose decaying relevance increasingly lingers as distinctions of an earlier rationalizing principle.

Paper short abstract:

This paper highlights the role of affect in the racialised logics of petrocapitalist regulation.

Paper long abstract:

This paper highlights the role of affect in the racialised logics of petrocapitalist regulation. Drawing on insights from anthropology, psychology, and critical race theory, it argues that racial capitalism shapes regulatory modalities in extractive sites. Specifically, I show how (presumed and actual) affects of corporate actors, state leaders, and ordinary citizens are differently at stake in the formulation and application of regulatory policy. National political elites, for example, may come to be blamed for improper conduct and greed, while the exaggerated hopes of citizens and communities serve as grounds for social upheaval. By positing affect as a liability (Berg and Ramos-Zayas, 2015), regulation thus deflects from the ways extractivist projects reinforce and exacerbate structural inequalities. Rather than mitigating harm, regulation becomes an instrument of power. The paper builds on critical ethnographic comparison, revisiting material from research with oil and gas regulatory bodies in two different ethnographic sites (UK, São Tomé and Príncipe).

Paper short abstract:

The paper follows the social life of sustainability regulations by focusing on experts who work to ensure compliance. How do people working to improve industries from the inside conceptualise their agency, parameters of transformation, and contribution of regulation to aide their cause?

Paper long abstract:

Metals are key building blocks for technologies of energy capture and storage amid decarbonisation and transition towards renewable energy. Yet mining, refining, and recycling have histories of damaging the environment worldwide, as well as influencing and relying on lax environmental regulations. It is in this context that metal markets herald sustainability as a principal and touted value amid the sector’s declared aims to renew social license and avoid past mistakes. The fieldwork takes place in 2023-4 as discussions about sustainability are being energised by the EU’s adoption of the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) considered a significant step-up from previous efforts. The paper is based on participant observation in metal market conferences, interviews with London-based commodity analysts and investors, and following sustainability experts who promote compliance with this and other prospective regulations of similar type through education and offering services. It focuses on how regulation is socialised by creating new social roles - people hired in-house or as companies to ensure compliance. This paper looks at how they conceptualise and strategise against one of the common sources of criticism, namely that sustainability efforts and reporting regulations represent greenwashing - a way for companies to define signifiers such as “sustainability" according to their interests - rather than a fundamental shift in values that center the environment.

Paper short abstract:

New regulations resulting from the twin forces of Indigenous reconciliation and energy transition are resulting in a regulatory thickening to surface geoscapes of NE British Columbia. This paper examines what these regulatory practices are doing and undoing to the western Canadian energy industry.

Paper long abstract:

Energy regulators in Canada purport to do the work of ensuring that activities unfold in a manner that ensures public safety and the environment while supporting Indigenous reconciliation, resource conservation, and a strong economy for the public good. As such regulators and regulatory policy constitutes resource-scapes as ethico-juridico-regulatory objects with multiple and often competing stakeholders. Given the vastness of such a project, much has overflowed the regulatory frame. Recently regulators have been confronting significant changes to federal and provincial legislation to meet global climate commitments, mitigate cumulative effects (see the case Yahey vs BC), and include deeper attention to biodiversity. As such, recent changes to regulations have expanded their scope in ways that appear to materially expand that which counts as a regulatory object. This paper therefore explores the regulatory thickening to surface geospaces of NE British Columbia to examine how and what these practices are (un)doing to the western Canadian energy industry. The paper draws from ethnographic fieldwork among energy producers that work the Montney formation in Western Canada.

Paper short abstract:

In Johannesburg, the state’s inheritance system promises post-apartheid access to fair and protective regulation. A network of state, civic and for-profit services brings the system ‘to the people’. Yet, as understandings of public commitment diverge, formalisation and its legal protections founder.

Paper long abstract:

Under apartheid in South Africa, the state regulation of property inheritance was one among many aspects of governance that excluded the black majority. As administration was deracialised, the legal-administrative system expanded rapidly to serve a new public. Rules and processes specify how property should be passed on, who should benefit, and how parties can seek redress. Today, in Johannesburg, formal inheritance is understood by a range of practitioners as a public infrastructure offering post-apartheid access to protective regulation. A distributed network of institutions extends beyond state officialdom to civic and for-profit services, with the aim of bringing the system ‘to the people’. Its public character implies not only shared rules and processes, but shared values, access and benefit, and a shared public experience of encounter and collective engagement. Yet, while these features capture the aspirations of officials and many providers of non-state assistance, their realisation is far from straightforward. Access, benefit, a shared public experience, a shared professional ethic, and the predictability to orient future plans: all of these are called into question. Increased public access occurs at normative interfaces. In a complicated regulatory system whose navigation requires expertise, one interface is between the law and popular norms. Another is between civic and for-profit notions of service. A shared project of post-apartheid access coexists with different institutional agendas, and variable understandings and degrees of public commitment. The expanding frontier of a public regulatory infrastructure reveals the labour of brokering and bridging, and ultimately how formalisation and its legal protections founder.

Paper short abstract:

Based on the examples of France and Guinea, I show how making countries into attractive investment destinations recalibrates political authority through a scalar imaginary where domestic political configurations need to correspond to imagined desires of mobile capital.

Paper long abstract:

One of the main consequences of the 1990s state reform was to reconceptualize states as attractive vessels for foreign capital. Capital controls were loosened in the 1980s, investment protection was expanded in the 1990s and at the turn of millennium, most countries opened investment attraction agencies. More than the rise of regulatory capitalism (Braithwaite 2008), the millennial logic where economic development (for periphery) or growth (for core) were to be achieved primarily by attracting more foreign investment worked also as a regulatory force recalibrating state policy. Based on the examples of France and Guinea, I show how making countries into attractive investment destinations recalibrates political authority through a scalar imaginary where domestic political configurations need to correspond to imagined desires of mobile capital.

Guinea’s postcolonial leader Sékou Touré lambasted imperialism but at the same time invited foreign capital to Guinea already in the 1960s. After structural adjustment programs, new specialized investment attraction agencies advertised Guinea in 2002 as “a virgin territory awaiting your investments.” Although France had been a major capital exporter during high imperialism, its position to foreign capital was far more modest in the second half of the twentieth century. From criticizing the “American Challenge” in 1960s, French bureaucrats became some of the key agents pushing for international capital account liberalization in the 1990s. At the turn of century, campaigns like “Choose France” and startup nation sought to recalibrate France as an attractive destination criticized by some as “a cargo cult” obsession with foreign capital.

Paper short abstract:

Through a digital ethnography of an East African government agency’s online work, this paper examines how online practices socialise ‘offline’ regulatory responsibilities.

Paper long abstract:

This paper engages with the digital social life of regulation. Government agencies have increasing responsibilities toward meeting regulatory requirements through online presences. Focusing on digital engagements in the public sphere, this paper considers how a government agency enacts regulations on social media platforms including YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram. This paper considers the new types of civic engagement and political participation made possible through ‘digital citizenship’ in Africa, as regulators and ordinary citizens interact online. While African innovation in the form of ‘digital authoritarianism’ may be a more familiar narrative in the Global North, this paper places everyday digital governance and its ramifications in the larger landscape of African social and political life. Through a digital ethnography of an East African government agency’s online work, this paper examines how online practices relate to offline regulatory responsibilities. It considers the modalities, processes, and relationship management strategies of government officials’ online regulatory work. This work largely focuses on communicating scientific knowledge and agency activities, through a range of social media platforms. When communicating scientific knowledge is a regulatory requirement, what kinds of political participation are potentially afforded, created, and/or mediated through online work? When this online work aims to build trust in science and build trust in government regulatory capacity, what kinds of affect emerge?