Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar is not David’s first published book, but it is based on his doctoral thesis and, in this sense, his first, major scholarly work. We are led in this discussion by Prof. Maurice Bloch and Prof. Jonathan Parry—two of David’s colleagues at the LSE and engaged readers of David’s work. They carry us through the complexity of David’s arguments about history and narrative and raise important questions about whether he engages deeply enough with the socio-economic realities that Malagasy people faced at the time of his research.
These conversations first took place at the LSE Research Seminar on Anthropological Theory, and are published as a FocaalBlog feature in tribute to the life and work of David Graeber.
Alpa Shah is Professor of Anthropology at LSE, convenes a research theme at
the LSE International Inequalities Institute and is author of the
award-winning Nightmarch: Among India’s Revolutionary Guerrillas.
Jonathan Parry is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Anthropology at the LSE. He is the author of Classes of Labour: Work and Life in a Central Indian Steel Town and co-editor with Chris Hann of Industrial Labor on the Margins of Capitalism. Parry writes more broadly on the classic anthropological themes of caste, kinship, marriage, and exchange. Alongside Maurice Bloch, he has also co-edited two classic works in anthropology, Death and the Regeneration of Life and Money and the Morality of Exchange.
Maurice Bloch is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Anthropology at the LSE. He has carried out long-term ethnographic research in Madagascar, is the author of In and Out of Each Other’s Bodies: Theories of Mind, Evolution, Truth, and the Nature of the Social, and writes more broadly on power, history, kinship, ritual, and cognition.
This post is part of a feature on “The Political Power of Energy Futures,” moderated and edited by Katja Müller (MLU Halle-Wittenberg), Charlotte Bruckermann (University of Bergen), and Kirsten W. Endres (MPI Halle).
In a little restaurant in the
midst of a foggy day, Talita served me chicken, rice, salads and a glass of
local wine. She said I was the only customer, the only person around. The
mountain area in the Viseu region in northern Portugal usually attracts tourists
for its special landscape; the granite and slate of the mountain as well as the
lush flora, interlaced with moss and lichens. But with the lockdown during the
COVID-19 crisis people stopped coming. There are not many other industries
here, the only other ones are the wine and the wind businesses, the latter of
which is huge. Talita points to the turbines on display on the top of the
cliffs, surrounding us —an infrastructural crown that towers over the valley.
“You see, we have so much wind here, it is our secret resource.” Talita explains that wind is the special,
often unknown ingredient of Portuguese wine. It plays a role as a natural
antibiotic, preserving the integrity of the vineyards without the need for preservatives
and it dries out the plants after it rains. “You can feel it in the wine.” I
sip from the glass, seeking the taste of the wind. It is not just a sensorial attempt.
I am in Portugal to trace how wind has been harnessed, and how an instrument like a green bond has served as both a financial and an energy source. As part of a larger project which looks at the development and impact of green finance from an anthropological perspective, I followed the first Chinese green bond to be issued in Europe as an ethnographic object of research. This not only sheds light on the way a green bond can be traded across boundaries but also on what its impact is on the ground. Green bonds result from the recent development of green finance, which promises to tackle the current ecological crisis with debt instruments. Similarly to conventional “vanilla” bonds, green bonds are fixed-income debt instruments whose risk is bound to the issuer profile but whose proceeds are earmarked in green infrastructure/projects that the issuer pledges to invest in (Jones et al. 2020).
Green bonds bring cheaper capital
for issuers and lower risk returns for investors by offering projects that decarbonize
infrastructures and favor energy transition. Green bonds exemplify how the
financial and the material are deeply interconnected. As I will show, this is
demonstrated by the way the auditing and certification practices that create
and “provoke” the value of the bond as a financial asset (Muniesa 2014; Birch
and Muniesa 2020) intersects with specific material conjunctures and power
hierarchies in which the bond is embedded.
Thus, this analysis explores the
way finance capital valorization is increasingly interwoven in the process of
assetization of nature, and how this is deeply implicated with the political
role of energy infrastructures as both local connective and collective devices.
It shows how at the bottom of this new green financial pyramid lies the
invisible and infinite potential of wind as energy resource (Franquesa 2018).
As green bonds are proclaimed to have an increasingly important role in
harmonizing the often-antithetical duality between sustainability and finance,
an investigation of how they unpack and are deployed on the ground seems
increasingly urgent.
Image 1: Turbine in the Portuguese countryside, Viseu. (Photo by Giulia Dal Maso, May 2020).
China’s Three Gorges in Portugal
China Three Gorges (CTG) is the state-owned enterprise behind one of the largest dams in the world, the “Three Gorges Dam”; a giant hydroelectric dam celebrated as a triumph of Chinese modern technopower. As the Chinese leader in energy provision, CTG sought ways to penetrate Europe under the encouragement of the Chinese state’s “Go Out” expansion strategy. China not only started to look beyond its borders for sources of energy and natural resources (Mohan and Urban 2019, 248), it also adopted processes of green securitization as a way to boost its position to the world’s most powerful green financial system (Bruckermann 2020) and promoted its ecological civilization (shengtai wenming) outside its borders.
CTG landed in Portugal in 2011
when the country was under the scrutiny imposed by the Troika (the
International Monetary Fund, the European Commission and the European Central
Bank) for its high government deficit. Among
other reforms, Portugal was then compelled to eliminate the country’s
growing feed-in tariff debt that compromised Portugal’s path to renewable
energy transition. If a few years earlier Portugal adhered to the EU’s 2009
renewable directive, the aim of which was toachieve 60 per cent of its
electricity generation from renewable energy sources (Andreas et al. 2019), now
it was forced to repay the debt. In the void left by the convoluted austerity
measures promoted by the Troika, Chinese state capital intervened, with CTG
obtaining a stake in the Portuguese energy sector: 21.35 per cent of shares of
the main Portuguese public utility Energias de Portugal (EDP) and 49 per cent
of EDP Renewables (a subsidiary of EDP). Effectively, CTG benefited from this forced privatization, and contributed to a new path in
Portuguese renewable energy transition, a process that the EU had encouraged
but to which it then denied support.
Thus, the CTG became the first
Chinese issuer to release a green bond denominated in Euro and certified and
listed in Europe. However, despite the layers of compliance with the EU
regulations the issuance process does not provide much information about the
nature, the location and the impact of the turbines refinanced by the bond.
Formally, the documents of the bond—the necessary dispostif for the
issuer to certify the truthfulness of its projects and to thus validate the
greenness of the bond—do not specify the location of the wind plants, but name
only the destination countries of the investment. In the case of this specific
bond, the equation of estimated reduced CO2 in wind power in
megawatts is the only formula that speaks of the sustainability of the wind
farms (Sullivan and Hannis 2017). While it is necessary to quantify the
specific number of reduced emissions through wind power, the extent to which
this equation effectively abstracts the essence of the turbines is striking, as
it de-territorializes CTG’s operations in a prospectus which was consequently
validated and certified with no assessment on the location in which these were
implemented.
The green bond, however,
effectively gave consent to CTG to inherit a government permit on the land the
windfarms were built upon, while also benefitting from the previous normative
and labor regime that built them (including the EU feed-in-tariff). In other
words, it allowed CTG to extract a rent from previously funded infrastructures,
with financial capital accruing through the expropriation of a common good in a
process of enclosure of natural resources. The municipality of Viseu had its
benefits, earning central state funds in exchange for land permits, but these
were not extensive. The clausula regulating the funds discounts the price for
land rights if the scope is to build for public interest. Furthermore, the
windfarms refinanced by CTG were just repowering old infrastructure. This
refinancing does not bring much “additionality” at a local level. As many other
large wind infrastructures in marginal areas, the ones in Viseu tended to
reproduce, if not exacerbate, relations of uneven development between rural and
urban areas, as well as public and private investments (Franquesa 2018; Bigger
and Millington 2019).
Image 2: Village surrounded by windfarms, Torres Vedras. (Photo by Giulia Dal Maso, May 2020).
On the Connectivity and
Collectivity of Green Infrastructures
Infrastructures are political entities and as such “a vantage point for rethinking politics” (Opitz and
Tellmann 2015; Larkin 2013). They determine how the green bond “hits the
ground” at a local level. Taking inspiration from Opitz and Tellmann’s (2015)
reflections on the politics of connectivity and collectivity of
infrastructures, I argue that the technological connectivity of energy
infrastructures enables relates to a notion of collectivity, which explains
their impact at local and social level. If windfarms are essential in
guaranteeing connectivity (as a source of energy provision) with the world,
they are at the same time alien to local forms of collectivity. In fact, the
specific rationalities of programming infrastructures that the green bonds
convey doesn’t have anything to do with the local and political space these
infrastructures establish. Often encouraged by austerity measures, green bonds
can become “the conduit of large capitals, often originating from afar, which
lands in local contexts with little clue on their history and specificity”
(transl. Lipari 2020; Scotti 2020). As
noted above, in their making, green bonds often do not include any information
on where the infrastructures are located, and if and how these will impact
collective communities.
Talita shows me her electricity
bill. A chart on it shows that most of her energy power comes from wind power.
She is happy about this. However, she is also angry and frustrated about
struggling to pay her bills; these are way too high. She doesn’t attribute the
high cost of her energy bills to the source of energy, which is wind, but to
the management and distribution of it. Portugal, and Viseu in particular, is
one the EU regions with the highest rate of energy poverty in the EU. Some
locals I met told me that they only use wood stoves to keep warm in winter;
electricity is too expensive.
People hold contradictory
feelings about the wind farms in their area—a mix of indignation and
appreciation. The appreciation stems from the fact that now the turbines are
considered the banner of Portugal’s success in achieving nearly 80 per cent of
renewable energy. Talita tells me she quite likes them as part of the landscape
and some tourists see them as an attraction. They signify that Portuguese
people care about their land and their country’s path to sustainability. They
also reflect a renewed “energy consensus,” which finds roots in the path
dependency between democratic power and electricity provision (see Mitchell
2017; Boyer 2019) that in Portugal partially guaranteed political legitimacy
from the Carnation revolution onwards. The indignation towards the wind farms
instead emerges in the cleavage between the wind blowing on their land and the
infrastructure that harnesses it now. While wind was once a resource people had
used for generations, benefitting the vineyards and fueling local windmills that
still dot the landscapes of Portuguese countryside—and thus directly
contributing to the community’s economic benefit—people now see the externally
financed and technologically advanced wind turbines next door as something
financially distant and out of reach.
Giulia
Dal Maso is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bologna. She
currently works on the topic of impact/green finance. Her earlier research was
on financialisation in postsocialist contexts; in China and Eastern Europe. She
has published in in Journal of Cultural Economy; Historical Materialism;
Social and Cultural Geography; South Atlantic Quarterly, and has a book out
on Risky Expertise in Chinese Financialisation: Financial Labor within the
Chinese state-finance nexus. This
article is based on research contributing to the project ‘The Hau of Finance’,
funded by ERC consolidator grant number 772544.
Bibliography
Andreas, Jan-Justus,
Charlotte Burns, and Julia Touza. 2019. ‘Portugal under Austerity: From
Financial to Renewable Crisis?’ Environmental Research Communications 1
(9): 091005. https://doi.org/10.1088/2515-7620/ab3cb0
Birch, Kean, and
Fabian Muniesa.2020. Assetization: Turning Things into Assets in
Technoscientific Capitalism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Bigger, Patrick, and Nate
Millington. 2019. “Getting soaked? Climate Crisis, Adaptation Fiance, and
Racialized Austerity.” Environment and Planning E: Nature and
Space 3, no. 3: 601-623.
Boyer, Dominic. 2019.
Energopolitics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene. Durham: Duke
University Press.
Bruckermann,
Charlotte. 2020. “Green Infrastructure as Financialized Utopia: Carbon offset
forests in China.” In: Chris Hann and Don Kalb (eds) Financialization:
Relational Approaches, pp. 86-110. New York; Oxford: Berghahn.
Franquesa, Jaume. 2018. Power struggles: dignity, value, and the renewable energy
frontier in Spain. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Larkin Brian. 2013. The Politics
and Poetics of Infrastructure. Annual Review of Anthropology 42:
327-343.
Lipari, Samadhi. 2020. “L’Impatto Territoriale
della Transizione Energetica: un’indagine sulla filiera dell’Eolico nel
Mezzogiorno.” Le Parole e le Cose.
http://www.leparoleelecose.it/?p=40083
Opitz, Sven, and
Ute Tellmann. 2015. “Europe as infrastructure: Networking the operative
community.” South Atlantic Quarterly 114, no. 1: 171-190.
Scotti, Ivano. 2020. Vento forte. Eolico e Professioni
della Green Economy. Salerno: Orthotes.
Mitchell, Timothy.
2011. Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. London: Verso
Books.
Mohan, Giles, and
Frauke Urban. 2019. “China and Global Resources.” In The Palgrave. Handbook
of Contemporary International Political Economy, 245–61. Springer.
Muniesa, Fabian.
2014. The Provoked Economy: Economic Reality and the Performative Turn.
Routledge.
Jones, Ryan, Tom
Baker, Katherine Huet, Laurence Murphy, and Nick Lewis. 2020. “Treating
Ecological Deficit with Debt: The Practical and Political Concerns with Green
Bonds.” Geoforum 114: 49-58.
Sullivan, Sian, and Mike Hannis. 2017. “Mathematics Maybe, but Not Money.” Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal. 10.1108/AAAJ-06-2017-2963.
Cite as: Dal Maso, Giulia. 2021. “The Landing of a Chinese Green Bond in Portugal.” FocaalBlog, 13 April. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/04/13/giulia-dal-maso-the-landing-of-a-chinese-green-bond-in-portugal/
This post is part of a feature on “The Political Power of Energy Futures,” moderated and edited by Katja Müller (MLU Halle-Wittenberg), Charlotte Bruckermann (University of Bergen), and Kirsten W. Endres (MPI Halle).
When you enter the House of culture in Dojkinci, a small village on Stara Mountain, you are instantly amazed by its floor. The freshly painted red, green, and blue patterns revived the previously cracked ground. These traditional geometrical shapes are landmarks of ćilim – a centuries-old weaving technique of wool from sheep herds on the Stara Mountain. Few steps inside, and you are surrounded by the large photographs of nature, people, and customs characteristic of this mountain in eastern Serbia. Only a year ago the walls covered by the photographs were molded due to the damaged roof and windows. The building was empty and in decay. It became again the center of the village’s social life after
Image 1: House of Culture Dojkinci. Meeting between the villagers, the architects and the movement Let’s defend the rivers of the Stara Mountain regarding a new revitalization project (photo by the author, 2020)
the villagers together with architecture students and their teachers and the grassroots movement Odbranimo reke Stare planine (Let’s defend the rivers of Stara Mountain) renovated this building in 2019 as an act of resistance to the threat of small hydropower plants (SHPPs). SHPPs consist of several kilometers-long pipelines, which channel water to the turbines where the electricity is produced, threatening to leave the riverbeds dry and local communities without water. The more water the pipe holds, the more electricity the turbine creates and the more profit through subsidies it brings to private investors. Thus, for the local villagers and environmental activists the pipes of SHPPs came to symbolize greed, environmental destruction, and social marginalization.
The SHPP in Dojkinci, together with almost 3000 plants in the Western Balkan countries, arose from the network of national capitalists, European banks, and the national energy sectors responding to the EU accession standards. However, Dojkinci and other villages in the Stara Mountain did not succumb to such a wide front of interests. My contribution examines how this happened. I will firstly explain how SHPPs emerged from the Serbian renewable energy (RES) market, and then describe the social responses triggered by SHPPs.
Renewables
between liberalization and water-grabbing
The
Serbian RES market emerged from the pressures for liberalizing the energy
market, the government’s resistance, and the inflows of Western European
capital. The liberalization of the energy sector in the EU candidate-countries
is part of the broad legal, economic and political compliance to EU
standards. The EU expects the Serbian energy sector to go through a double transformation.
From a state-owned system that is largely dependent on coal, the sector should
become competitive, decentralized, at least partly privatized, and promote
renewable energy. This ambitious task unifies both liberalization and energy
transition, keeping the logic of the free market as their leading principle. In
the early 2010s, the Serbian government established the foundations of the RES
market, consisting of a certification procedure for green electricity producers
and fixed-rate feed-in tariffs (FITs) guaranteeing beneficial prices for 12
years. FITs are the means of
subsidizing renewable energy production. They are paid by all citizens through
their electricity bills and transferred to the producers in a form of
subsidized electricity prices
If it had followed entirely the prescribed logic of unfettered competition, the Serbian RES market could have had severe social, political, and economic effects. The state’s monopoly could have turned into an oligopoly of European companies, with FITs pushing up the low electricity prices – repeating developments already seen in Spain (Franquesa 2018). To prevent this scenario, the government found a middle way: to establish the RES market but prevent significant changes. It limited access to FITs through technology and capacity caps. These limitations targeted large investors in wind and solar, but also local people interested in installing small numbers of solar panels on private property. Foreign investors quickly filled the quotas for wind power subsidized by FITs. Only one channel for investments remained wide open – around 800 locations for SHPPs in mountainous, often protected regions.
Investors
and authorities claimed that hydropower is identical to wind and solar sources.
The ideology of untapped hydro potentials, anchored in the socialist
technological heritage, is widespread among Serbian engineers and continuously supported
by all Serbian governments since the 2000s. The costs for planned SHPPs were
lower because expertise in the hydropower construction sector already exists
since socialism. Moreover, SHPPs technology is not as capital-intensive and
dependent on the economy of scales as larger solar and wind parks. This
combination of technological and economic factors meant that the costs were low
and that smaller investors could easily access the financial market. Alongside
the international banks and a few private investors from Western Europe, people
with close affiliation to the Serbian ruling party invested in and owned the
new SHPPs, among them, the godfather of the Serbian president. This implies
that after repaying credits for the SHPPs, the profits gained through FITs
would stay within the circles of national capitalists unlike profits from foreign-owned
wind or solar parks. The purpose of SHPPs was not
to transform the energy sector, as they only contribute to the national
electricity production with 2.5%, but rather to guarantee easy profits through
FITs.
Even though SPPSs investors were usually local capitalist, it does not mean that it has not been a lucrative opportunity also for foreign capital in the region. European financial institutions and manufacturers of hydro equipment have followed a well-established path of foreign direct investments that have transformed the political, economic, and social fabrics of the postsocialist countries. SHPPs have been a good opportunity for the Western European producers of hydro equipment to reanimate an industry drowning because of the current rush for wind and solar sources. Hydro lobbies organized conferences that connected national energy authorities, public producers of electricity, manufacturers, and financiers, to consider new fruitful investments. Foreign financial capital played a key role in supporting SHPPs in the region. Most of the credits for SHPPs in Serbia came from commercial banks such as Erste Bank, UniCredit, Banka Intesa, and Société Général. Large financial institutions like European Investment Bank, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and World Bank’s International Finance Corporation, together with Norwegian, Austrian, German, and Italian development banks, poured hundreds of millions of euros into greenfield hydro projects in the region (Bankwatch 2019).
In
this context, environmental and local community protection mechanisms were
hardly implemented and succumbed to the immense pressure of national and
international capital and power. The government lowered environmental standards,
allowing the RES market to turn into water-grabbing. Researchers from the University
of Belgrade identified on all inspected SHPPs malfunctioning or dry paths for
fish migration and pipes unlawfully built-in riverbeds. They argued that the
rule of “biological minimum”, which was supposed to guarantee the minimum level
of water in riverbeds to sustain the river, was conducted by experts close to
the investors and without systematic, often costly studies (Ristić et al 2018).
This “biological minimum” therefore could not limit the investors’ arithmetic
transformations of water into kWh and FITs, leaving behind dry riverbeds especially
in protected areas with high biodiversity, such as the Stara Mountain.
Struggles
against SHPPs
I
first visited the village Topli Do in the Stara Mountain in December 2019, while
the residents had been barricading the bridge in the village for three months
to stop an investor from trying to build two SHPPs on both rivers flowing
through their village. Most of them were retired people and small-scale
agricultural producers, fearing that SHPPs would disturb the underground water
that they use for drinking, as well as pollute and reduce the water in rivers
for livestock and gardens. Numerous springs and waterfalls attract many
visitors to the village, and the villagers were afraid that SHPPs would spoil
both natural exceptionality and their opportunity for supplementary incomes
through room rentals.
Image 2: Panorama of Topli Do (Photo by the author, 2019)
Residents of Topli Do and nearby villages recognized the state and investors as the main perpetrators and directed their anger towards them. But they also conveyed their existential anxieties through narratives of the “approaching global wars for water”, “international corporations stealing water”, and “extinction of their communities for settling migrants” from the Middle East who lived in a refugee camp in the nearby town of Pirot. These anxieties sprouted from the long-term sentiments of the vanishing of Serbian villages where mostly elderly people live. Decaying homes and infrastructure, closed schools, and ambulances are the material witnesses to rural flight. In this context of social degradation, the investors and local authorities promoted SHPPs as opportunities for development. The locals told me that the municipality fabricated the mandatory consultations with them, and portrayed SHPPs as benevolent water mills, and promised benefits for everyone – temporarily employed local workers and landowners near the rivers. “I wanted to bring improvement to this village which has had nothing, I brought my one million euros”, the investor in Topli Do SHPP said in a documentary film about the Topli Do barricade (Marinković 2020).
“The investor even asked us why defending the villages of the Stara Mountain when they would anyway disappear in a few years”, one activist told me. Between 2017 and 2020, the movement Let’s defend the rivers of Stara Mountain resisted heavily SHPPs in Stara planina through protests, legal actions, and physical clashes. Through its actions, the movement connected villagers in Stara planina, academics, environmental NGOs, and international organizations with their pan-European campaigns against SHPPs in the Balkans. Finally, faced with such a broad resistance, the local municipality terminated all SHPPs in the Stara Mountain in September 2020.
Image 3: Protest banners in Topli Do: ‘A lot of money, little energy, zero fish’ and ‘For rivers to death’ (Photo by the author, 2019)
I came again to the Stara Mountain during the pandemic in October 2020, this time in Temska and Dojkinci villages. The mood was post-victorious since villages were not endangered anymore by SHPPs. The activists and locals thought about how to use the momentum and transform the symbolic capital of the river defenders into something more. They looked for financial and institutional support for infrastructure, housing, research centers, and small-scale businesses in the Stara Mountain, and the House of culture in Dojkinci was a result of these efforts. Revitalizations were both immediate reactions to the threatening devastation from SHPPs, and opportunities to demonstrate that revival of the disappearing rural communities was possible and necessary. For the locals, these renovated objects represented debt repayments to ancestors and predecessors and a promise that life in the Stara Mountain would not end, as the leader in one of the villages told me.
Unlike
in other Serbian mountains, the SHPPs paradoxically rescued the villages in the
Stara Mountain from disappearance and marginalization by reviving the local
communities and garnering the support of the Serbian civil society. Attempts to
make profits from greenwashing unexpectedly turned into a second chance for
some Serbian communities.
Whose
market, whose energy transition?
SHPPs were supposed to maintain a status quo in the energy sector – to represent a Godotian energy transition that never arrives and does not go anywhere. However, the wide social resistance turned energy transition from a techno-bureaucratic matter in to an issue decisive for society’s future. This change led to questions about who has access to the RES market, who gets benefits from it, and what role society plays in the energy transition.
These questions are becoming prominent among newly forming energy cooperatives interested in small-scale investments in solar energy. So far, they have been largely excluded from the RES market, not recognized as potential producers, and therefore unable to apply for FITs. Energy cooperatives criticize the closedness of the market to “ordinary people” and aspire to unify activism and business initiative allowing citizens to become active drivers of the energy transition and simultaneously benefit from FITs. Therefore, solar panels are trying to make their way to the roofs of urban dwellings to demonstrate sustainable and market-democratic alternatives open nominally to everyone.
While
the aspiring cooperatives are wishing for a more inclusive market, experts and
regional media specialized in energy are also calling for more and better
markets, i.e. for the usual liberalization that supposedly corrects market
distortions with improved market mechanisms. They wish for competition between big
investors with access to credit and technology, which would ensure that the
public gets measurable and less expensive electricity from renewable sources.
This belief in the market as the only vehicle of energy transition follows the
EU agenda which emphasizes decentralized, competitive, and interconnected national
markets. Public tenders and premiums will most likely be implemented in
Serbia’s new energy laws. These laws will launch a new race between large
foreign and national investors in wind and solar power.
Such
investors wish for a free, unregulated market. A free market which gives space
to big and small producers, fosters innovations and initiative. This kind of
market is seen as a more fair and sustainable solution than the one favoring SHPPs
through FITs. But whose market and energy transition will that be? And the transition
to what? The competition between large investors will hardly open substantial space
for the development of energy cooperatives. The odds for a more democratic and
just energy transition are slim if the promise of the decarbonization of the
Western Balkan countries conveys the ultimatum of oligopolies.
Dragan Djunda is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, Central European University. His doctoral research analyses the investments in renewable energy in Serbia and their social effects.
Bibliography
Franquesa,
Jaume. 2018. Power Struggles: Dignity, Value, and the Renewable Energy Frontier
in Spain. Indiana University Press.
Marinković, Zorica. dir. 2020. Topli Do – donžon Stare planine” [Topli Do – donjon of the Stara
Mountain].
Ristić, Ratko, Ivan
Malušević, Siniša Polovina, Vukašin Milčanović, Boris Radić. 2018. Male hidroelektrane
derivacionog tipa: Beznačajna energetska korist i nemerljiva ekološka šteta. VODOPRIVREDA,
Vol. 50 [Derivate
small hydropower plants: Insignificant energy contribution and
unmeasurable ecological damage].
Cite as: Djunda, Dragan. 2021. “Transition to nowhere: Small hydro, little electricity, and large profits in Serbia.” FocaalBlog, 9 April. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/04/09/dragan-djunda-transition-to-nowhere-small-hydro-little-electricity-and-large-profits-in-serbia/
This post is part of a feature on “The Political Power of Energy Futures,” moderated and edited by Katja Müller (MLU Halle-Wittenberg), Charlotte Bruckermann (University of Bergen), and Kirsten W. Endres (MPI Halle).
In the past ten years, calls for a “green revolution” on the African continent have cast optimistic and promising scenarios of “leapfrogging” to mass renewable energy generation in order to meet the continent’s targets for electrification and forecast growth for energy demand. With a population expected to increase by 800 million by 2040 with rising urbanisation, the most pressing challenge for the continent in the next 20 years will be to meet growing energy demand in a context of partially-present and unreliable infrastructure (IEA 2019). Renewables have been positioned as a technological messiah of development, enabling the continent to “leapfrog” traditional models of centralized grid-based electricity distribution and to radically green its economies (IRENA 2015). The IRENA 2030 roadmap for Africa’s renewable energy, for instance, suggests that renewables could in the next 20 years constitute half of Africa’s total energy mix (IRENA 2015) – pending an estimated USD $70 billion investment a year. Yet current solar PV installed capacity on the continent only accounts for 5GW, or one percent of the global total (around 600GW) (IEA 2019). Visions of a renewable “energy renaissance” (Olopade 2015, 15) in Africa remain blighted by the current reliance and increasing dependence of African countries on imported oil and fossil-based energy use, and of the continued (and new) opportunities for oil and gas extraction. In turn, discourses of energy transition and leapfrogging, with their unilinear trajectories and singular vision of a low-carbon future, tend to obscure the local specificities and histories of energy systems like Ghana’s, for whom renewable energy, in the form of hydropower, has long been its main source of energy generation.
Image 1: Akosombo Dam. Akosombo, Ghana. 2016. Photo by author
In this post, I look at the contested politics of renewable energy in Ghana through a focus on the rise of “corporate solar” during an energy crisis. Ten years ago, shortly after the country discovered oil in large quantities along the coast of the Western Region, it embarked on an ambitious renewable energy path by passing the Renewable Energy Act (2011) (Act 832). The Act aimed to promote and develop the country’s renewable energy resources to ensure the country’s energy security, indigenous capacity and sustainable development. Ghana’s initial target was to increase the renewable electricity generation share, currently at less than one percent, to ten percent by 2020 (Sakah et al. 2017). Ghana thus positioned itself as West Africa’s new “energy frontier”, ushering in a resurgence of fossil extractivism paired with ambitious support for renewable energy technologies (Degani, Chalfin, and Cross 2020). In the midst of oil and gas discoveries, renewables have become a strategic, moving target conveniently reformulated to fit political agenda and rhetoric (Obeng-Darko 2019). For reasons of space, I will not elaborate on the ways in which new oil production came to stymie the growth of renewables. Instead, I provide a snapshot of solar power’s new corporate contours of energy privilege in Accra. I identify the emergence of a “renewable divide” in urban Ghana through the rise of “green enclaves” mostly enjoyed by corporate bodies and wealthy individuals. Building on the recent literature in the anthropology of energy challenging the “fantasy” of solar as a promise of democratic energy access (Szeman and Barney 2021), I consider how energy disparities endure under the transition to cleaner and renewable energy sources.
Moratorium
on the Future: Renewables as Stranded Assets
In
2019, at an event on renewable energy opportunities for the private sector, a
representative from the Renewable and Alternative Energy department at the
Ministry of Energy made an unpopular announcement. Referring to the 2011
Renewable Energy Act, he declared that Ghana was not only on track to meet its
target for 10% of total energy generated by renewables, but that it had met its
target “long ago”, since the Akosombo Dam, which was built in 1966 by Kwame
Nkrumah and accounts for 27% of the country’s total capacity, was technically a
source of renewable energy.
Invoking
the country’s proud history of electrification through the Akosombo Dam – a key
project in Nkrumah’s vision for African industrialization and self-sufficiency (Miescher
2014) – and its negligible contribution to global carbon emissions, he declared
the matter closed. Rather than seeking to please international conventions that
did not adequately capture Ghana’s place in the global responsibility framework
for climate change mitigation measures, he concluded that Ghana, like other
African countries, would do well to focus instead on providing enough power for
its people and industries.
Renewable energy companies’ representatives, entrepreneurs and analysts were shocked by the Minister’s backtracking commitment. That same year, as a result of overcapacity on the national grid, the government had issued a moratorium on PPAs (power purchase agreements), banning any addition to its grid until 2027. Since then, utility-scale renewable energy projects have come to a stall, leaving many with “stranded assets” and uncertainty about the future viability of large-scale solar PV and wind farms in the country. Of course, the Minister wasn’t technically wrong to claim the Akosombo Dam as a source of substantial renewable energy in the country’s electricity generation mix. To the renewable energy industry, however, it was perceived as a betrayal of the prevailing understanding that the target referred to additional capacity-building, mostly in the form of solar PVs and wind turbines.
Image 2: Painted advertisement for solar equipment. 2016. Accra, Ghana. Photo by authorImage 3: Painted advertisement for solar equipment. 2016. Accra, Ghana. Photo by author
Corporate
Solar & The Renewable Divide
The
moratorium on renewable energy PPAs exacerbated the inequalities that solar
power has created in Ghana’s energyscape. Today, the largest clients for solar
companies in Ghana are banks, hotels and factories – corporate bodies that have
the capital for upfront costs. Following the frequent blackouts during the
energy crisis that best the country in 2014-2016 (locally known as “Dumsor”),
and the steep increase in electricity tariffs, many businesses, particularly
factories in the industrial zones, switched to distributed generation, adopting
solar as a “commercial strategy” to reduce their costs of manufacturing. “Dumsor”
is Twi for “off-on”, a shorthand for the power outages that have become
increasingly common in the country; today, the word has come to index a more
general situation of disenchantment with infrastructure delivery and political
expediency. Solar energy companies were quick to capitalise on the crisis as a
business opportunity. In 2016, when I was researching Dumsor for my PhD thesis,
I spoke to the representative of an Indian solar company with a large global
presence who told me that initial investments in solar energy in Ghana prior to
the crisis had been minimal because the power sector was “too good” and “too
stable” for profit, compared to countries like Nigeria or Egypt that had more
frequent power cuts and thus a bigger potential market.
In
the turn to solar as a panacea for crisis, large corporate bodies removed their
operations from the national grid, alternating between distributed solar and
diesel-powered generator sets. This commercialization of distributed solar has
further strained the financial situation of the national utilities, heavily dependent
on industrial consumers’ revenues to subsidize residential low consumers. This
has resulted in higher electricity tariffs for urban residential consumers,
making electricity increasingly unaffordable to many. The capacity to switch to
solar during a moment of crisis revealed new forms of energy privilege that
take place outside the grid. In turn, the adoption of solar by a select elite (cf.
Günel 2021) has further exacerbated the conditions of energy inequalities and precarity
that many Accra residents live under. In the low-income neighbourhood of
Western Accra where I have been doing fieldwork since 2014, this “renewable
divide”, as we may call it, crossed two types of association. My neighbours and
interlocutors perceived rooftop solar as a luxury item unaffordable to most, or as a humanitarian good reinforcing unequal
trajectories of transition between the global North and the global South.
Here,
“corporate solar” coexists with the “developmental” deployment of small-scale
solar (in the form of solar lanterns and mini-grids) introduced by NGOs and small
social enterprises in rural areas. The parallel trajectories of corporate and
non-profit interests may appear surprising, operating as they do in divergent moral
economies. Both types of solar projects, however, are driven by the same
material, political and economic advantages of solar, as a form of cheap,
reliable and distributed generation that offers autonomy from the
inefficiencies of state infrastructure (Cross 2019, 54).
In
effect, both “developmental” and “corporate” solar contribute to what may be
called the creation of “green enclaves” in the energy landscape of Ghana,
pockets of autonomous, renewable energy that serve both corporate and
humanitarian rationales. I borrow the term “green enclave” from an engineer of
the Volta River Authority (VRA) responsible for the hydropower generation plant
at the Akosombo Dam that provides a large part of Ghana’s generation capacity. At
a convention for renewable energy in Accra in 2019, he described to me plans to
install solar panels on the roofs of Parliament, ministries, and the
residential facilities at the Akosombo dam as “the greening of our enclaves”, a
term that fittingly describes the infrastructural model of renewable energy at
large in the country. It is not surprising that the Minister who had conveniently
re-adjusted Ghana’s renewable energy target himself had solar panels installed on
his house.
In
a context of widespread energy precarity, solar in urban Ghana has exacerbated inequalities of access to reliable
and affordable electricity, creating “green”
geographies of inequality, energy security, and privilege.
Image 4: Solar panel business. 2019. Accra, Ghana. Photo by author
Conclusion:
Energy Transitions in perspective
Ghana’s case-study
has important implications for understanding energy transitions around the
world. In popular discourses of energy transitions, the replacement of fossil
fuel dependencies by renewable energy sources seems both inevitable and
imperative. Calls for a renewable energy revolution in Africa are appealing,
but they too often assume that renewables come to fill a gap, a lack, or an
evidential need – in other words, that their benefits are too self-evident to
forgo. Renewables, in this case, belong to the future – and fossil fuels to the
past. In many ways, Ghana presents an inverse scenario of this dominant model
of transition. Having powered most of its electricity needs with hydropower, it
is now switching to increased reliance on thermal power plants and an oil
economy. Further, this past of renewable energy through hydropower is today
invoked to encourage a rush for oil and gas exploitation. In discussions with
energy officials, policymakers, and the general public, I am repeatedly
reminded that “Ghana is a low emitter”, bearing no responsibility to global
greenhouse gas emissions. For a country that relied until recently entirely on
hydropower for electricity, yet currently faces issues of reliability and
affordability (Eshun and Amoako-Tuffour 2016), “sustainability” appears as a
secondary concern to more pressing issues of overcapacity and improving access
to reliable and affordable power. In turn, the adoption of renewables may not
primarily be motivated by questions of environmental ideology, but also as a convenient
(if privileged) solution to crisis. Accounting for the political potential of
renewable energy futures around the world will demand that we grapple with the
contradictory, divergent and conflicted visions and temporalities of energy
transitions, and the relations between crisis and capital, privilege and
poverty through which they come into being.
Pauline Destrée is a Research Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the University of St Andrews. She is a member of the ERC-funded research project Energy Ethics. Her research explores energy, extraction, climate change, gender and race in Ghana.
Cross,
Jamie. 2019. “The Solar Good: Energy Ethics in Poor Markets.” Journal of the
Royal Anthropological Institute 25 (S1): 47–66.
Degani,
Michael, Brenda Chalfin, and Jamie Cross. 2020. “Introduction: Fuelling
Capture: Africa’s Energy Frontiers.” The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology
38 (2): 1–18.
Eshun,
Maame Esi, and Joe Amoako-Tuffour. 2016. “A Review of the Trends in Ghana’s
Power Sector.” Energy, Sustainability and Society 6 (1): 9.
Günel,
Gökçe. 2021. “Leapfrogging to Solar.” South Atlantic Quarterly 120 (1):
163–75.
IEA.
2019. “Africa Energy Outlook 2019.” Paris: IEA.
IRENA.
2015. “Africa 2030: Roadmap for a Renewable Energy Future.” Abu Dhabi: IRENA.
Miescher,
Stephan. 2014. “‘Nkrumah’s Baby’: The Akosombo Dam and the Dream of Development
in Ghana, 1952–1966.” Water History 6 (4): 341–66.
Obeng-Darko,
Nana Asare. 2019. “Why Ghana Will Not Achieve Its Renewable Energy Target for
Electricity. Policy, Legal and Regulatory Implications.” Energy Policy
128 (May): 75–83.
Olopade,
Dayo. 2015. The Bright Continent: Breaking Rules and Making Change in Modern
Africa. Reprint edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt USA.
Sakah,
Marriette, Felix Amankwah Diawuo, Rolf Katzenbach, and Samuel Gyamfi. 2017.
“Towards a Sustainable Electrification in Ghana: A Review of Renewable Energy
Deployment Policies.” Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 79
(November): 544–57.
Szeman,
Imre, and Darin Barney. 2021. “Introduction: From Solar to Solarity.” South
Atlantic Quarterly 120 (1): 1–11.
Cite as: Destrée, Pauline. 2021. “Solar for the Few: Stranded Renewables and Green Enclaves in Ghana.” FocaalBlog, 9 April. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/04/09/pauline-destree-solar-for-the-few-stranded-renewables-and-green-enclaves-in-ghana/
This post is part of a feature on “The Political Power of Energy Futures,” moderated and edited by Katja Müller (MLU Halle-Wittenberg), Charlotte Bruckermann (University of Bergen), and Kirsten W. Endres (MPI Halle).
We are in the middle of the Rhineland’s lignite mining region, a semi-urban to rural area in the west of Germany. The landscape is considerably altered by past and present projects of large-scale resource extraction and subsequent “recultivation” measures to convert the land back to agricultural production or natural conservation. Lignite (or brown coal) is exploited in vast open-pit mines here – the Hambach mine not far from the city of Cologne is dubbed “Europe’s biggest hole” – “swallowing” everything from forests to villages in their way.
Coal mining – in contrast to the more authoritarian
and centralized organization of oil extraction – has been historically
associated with the development of the welfare state and the consolidation of
workers’ rights in western democracies. However, as Thomas H. Eriksen notes,
“contemporary coal mining has been restructured and reconfigured to resemble
oil drilling formally”, becoming “less labour-intensive and more
capital-intensive than in the past” (2016: 38). This neoliberal restructuring resulted
not only in the transformation of institutions of “Carbon Democracy” (Mitchell 2009),
as the conditions for workers to organize and wield influence over the means of
production were eroded, but also in declining economic dependency on the coal
industry in the Rhineland region.
Despite this decrease of economic significance in the
region, RWE, the energy company currently operating the mines, has still been considerably
involved in local politics over the past decades – not least because of its
mandate to secure the provision of cheap electricity for German industry and consumers.
To this day the state-approved “general public interest” serves as the legal
basis for the suspension of fundamental rights, making possible the
expropriation of land titles, the demolition of protected landmarks, or the
circumvention of guidelines for environmental protection for the extraction of
fossil fuels in Germany’s lignite mining regions.
Image 1: A new energy horizon after the end of the world? Excavators, conveyor belts and terrace landscape in the Hambach open-pit mine (Picture taken by the author)
Environmental destruction and relocation of tens of thousands of people due to numerous mine expansions in the Rhineland were thus firmly connected to narratives of national progress and regional prosperity. Mourning over losses of personal possessions and feelings of belonging were relegated to the private realm, and little room was left for critical voices in the public domain.
Recently however, this hegemonic state-industry nexus has been successfully challenged by a coalition of environmentalists, citizen initiatives, radical activists and other civil society actors (despite the continued economic profitability of the coal industry, ensured by “environmental load displacement” (Hornborg 2009) and other indirect subsidies). Their demands to save the remaining forest in front of the Hambach mine effectively stopped the encroaching extractivist operation. They were supported by a government commission installed to negotiate the conditions of Germany’s energy transition, following the decision to phase out the coal industry as a national contribution toward climate change mitigation.
The prospect of a global climate crisis has therefore led to the current reevaluation of lignite mining from guarantor of wealth and stability to driver of multi-scalar uncertainties. This enabled previously marginalized actors to voice their concerns by articulating their demands in terms of these globalized discourses. Yet, the (inter-)nationally reported success of the protests around the Hambach forest was only one instance of ongoing negotiations about the pace and scale of energy transition, from the perspective of the critical civil society actors with whom I conduct research in the Rhineland.
Since this seeming breakthrough for civic participation in shaping the region’s future, numerous setbacks and scandals have occurred. These are testament to the inability of carbon-democratic institutions to deal with a crisis that challenges its basic principles of growth as progress and wage labor as key to well-being. Controversies range from the passing of a coal exit law that many critical voices interpret as a “coal extension law”, to the federal government holding back an official report that questions the energetic necessity of the energy company’s plans for mine expansion.
Before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, I
regularly participated in meetings of a local group of critical civil society
actors who played a decisive role in saving the forest and turning it into a
national symbol of climate activism. Their political engagement served as an
opportunity to take a closer look at the uneven futures of energy transition in
the Rhineland. As we sit in a circle in the Protestant church hall of a village
close to the Hambach mine, many of the participants share impressions of
feeling alienated from their home region by the energy company’s mining activities.
Despite being part of the majority that does not depend on the coal industry
for income, some of the locals feel their concerns were generally ignored by communal
politics, making them rather skeptical of established political institutions’
capability to develop a sustainable and equitable future for the mining region.
Nonetheless, they see the impending process of energy
transition as a window of opportunity to reconnect with their home region by
actively participating in the development of alternative future visions, beyond
institutions of representative democracy. This desire for autonomous
participation is directly linked to the affective alienation associated by some
of my interlocutors with the large-scale landscape transformation of the mining
activities, coupled with the close connection between local politics and the energy
company.
This carbon-democratic entanglement of political
institutions and energy industry experienced in everyday life in the
Rhineland’s lignite mining region probably finds its most drastic manifestation
in the practice of “creating facts” (“Fakten schaffen”), of which my
interlocutors often accuse the mining company. This expression usually refers
to the practice of producing accomplished facts which alter conditions in a way
to favor certain outcomes. Often their undeniable materiality forces other
actors to acknowledge these facts, in turn leading to the retrospective
legitimization of the outcomes of Fakten schaffen. Thus, actors with the
power and institutional support to “create facts” narrow down an otherwise ambiguous
situation potentially open to negotiation by different actors to a specific
path of options in their interest.
In this way the energy company continues the controversial destruction of almost completely relocated villages. Under Germany’s new energy policy, the company is sticking to its operating plan and regular rhythm of extraction and redevelopment, despite radically changing socioecological and energy-political parameters. While numerous critical actors unsuccessfully appeal to democratic institutions to inhibit this pursuit of enforcing prior arrangements through material destruction, the following, more ambiguous example will serve to illustrate this modus operandi of Fakten schaffen and its relation to the feeling of alienation.
Image 2: “Path dependency” – literal and figurative: Solar panels aligning fossil fuel transportation infrastructure near the Hambach forest (Picture taken by the author)
Thomas, an outspoken and very knowledgeable member of a local citizen initiative against coal mining, and part of the larger group of civil society actors mentioned above, gives me a ride to the train station after we participated in one of the regular protest-walks through the forest at the Hambach mine. As we pass the bridge over the railway connecting the mines with the nearby power plants, I decide to ask him about the solar panels aligning the tracks beneath us. Their sheer size hardly makes them unnoticeable, but I never paid much attention to them, except for contemplating the irony that the fossil fuel infrastructure gives room to more “sustainable” forms of energy generation here. After all, the solar panels seemed somewhat out of place next to passing trains packed with lignite. The panels simultaneously signal the out-of-time-ness of the coal industry and point to a new energy future on the horizon. But Thomas’ reaction to my question made me aware of another aspect regarding their significance for the issue of affective alienation in relation to the practice of Fakten schaffen.
Knowing that most of my interlocutors are in favor of
direct solar energy generation and having the impressive photovoltaic structure
right before our eyes, I am prepared to finally hear a success story about
civic participation in local development. Yet, Thomas is not sympathetic to the
photovoltaic project at all. He tells me it was a typical outcome of
cooperation between energy company and politics in the region.
This sentiment echoes many civil society actors who
criticize that, being the biggest landowner there, RWE conducts itself “like the
lord of a manor” (“Gutsherrenart”), demonstrating the “feudal” excesses
of carbon democracy in the Rhineland, which regularly undermine popular desires
of stronger democratic involvement in matters of future-making. Thomas goes on
to inform me that a citizen initiative proposed a similar project a few years
ago in which the solar panels ought to be lining the highway that was relocated
closer to the village because of the encroaching mine. They had imagined the
photovoltaic structure as serving multiple other functions, such as protecting
villagers from noise and air pollution emitted by the mine and highway. While
the project gained some attention in the local press, it was not supported by
the communal administration and ultimately had to be relinquished.
Around the same time, the energy company came to an
agreement with the administration to make property available for the hitherto
largest photovoltaic project in the region, co-financed by a local bank. The
uncanny speed with which this project was realized confirmed not only the close
ties between politics and coal industry to critical actors like Thomas, but
also showed clearly how easily something can be achieved in the region when the
energy company is directly involved.
So instead of being perceived as a successful step
towards sustainable energy transition in the Rhineland’s lignite mining area,
the solar panels symbolize a failure of civic participation. They appear to Thomas
as a material (arte-)fact resulting from the dubiously close cooperation
between local politics and the energy company. Judged from a distance, this
instance of Fakten schaffen produced a material outcome in line with my
interlocutors’ desires for sustainable energy generation. However, the concrete
infrastructure stands as a monument that exemplifies how flows of innovation
are caught up in existing power relations and ultimately contribute to
consolidating the local incarnation of the state-industry nexus, even in the
face of impending coal exit.
While the lignite industry will disappear in the
foreseeable future, the longstanding history of capitalist extractivism – the main
reason for the affective alienation of a large group of people in the area –
will likely continue, no matter the source of energy. The deliberate promotion
of technoscientific development interventions carried out by experts in the
context of energy transition policies thus works to forestall the
socioecological transformation from below that Thomas and others envision as a
necessary step for politics in the Anthropocene.
Nowhere does this become more apparent than in the economic ministry’s newly adopted rhetoric of establishing a special economic zone in the area to speed up planning processes and pursue the double-bind of “green growth” (Eriksen 2016). Meanwhile, they were simultaneously hosting forums for civic participation that seem disconnected from this pursuit, because they operate at a different pace. This contradictory course of action leads many local actors to evaluate the efforts to integrate civil society into official planning processes as a mere façade, intensifying their skepticism towards institutions of carbon democracy in the region.
This brief insight into my fieldwork shows how inhabitants
that felt alienated by collusions between energy industry and political
institutions, sensed the diverging interest of politics and industry in the
context of energy transition as an opportunity to regain some autonomy over the
shaping of their region’s future. However, instances of Fakten schaffen enacted
by the state-industry nexus function to curtail this grassroots engagement, and
to (re-)connect extractive infrastructures of late industrialism (Fortun 2014)
to narratives of modernization and progress under the aegis of “green growth”.
A coalition of local actors more attuned to the
socioecological uncertainties of the Anthropocene criticizes this
carbon-democratic variant of “cruel optimism” (Berlant 2011), and pushes for a
joint transformation of resource use and political culture in search of a
redefined “good life” for all. Rather than a utopian vision of future
prosperity, this practical engagement might be characterized as “patchy hope” (Tsing
et al. 2019) which, despite being situated and emplaced, operates between the
particular and the universal, the local and the global; aware of its own
limitations within ambiguous entanglements of politics and energy in the
Rhineland.
Felix Lussem is a research assistant and lecturer in the field of environmental anthropology at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Cologne, Germany. His doctoral research deals with shifting spatial and temporal orders in negotiations of “global crises” with a regional focus on the Rhineland’s lignite mining area. Contact: flussem2@uni-koeln.de
Bibliography
Berlant, Lauren. 2011.
Cruel Optimism. Durham & London: Duke University Press.
Eriksen, Thomas H. 2016. Overheating. An
Anthropology of Accelerated Change. London: Pluto Press.
Fortun, Kim. 2014. From Latour to late industrialism. HAU:
Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (1): 309-329.
Hornborg,
Alf. 2009. Zero-Sum World: Challenges in
Conceptualizing Environmental Load Displacement and Ecologically Unequal
Exchange in the World-System. International Journal of Comparative Sociology
50 (3-4): 237-262.
Mitchell, Timothy. 2009. Carbon democracy. Economy
and Society 38 (3): 399-432.
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt, Andrew S. Mathews & Nils
Bubandt. 2019. Patchy Anthropocene: Landscape Structure, Multispecies History,
and the Retooling of Anthropology. Current Anthropology 60 (Supplement
20): S000.
Cite as: Lussem, Felix. 2021. “Alienating ‘facts’ and uneven futures of energy transition.” FocaalBlog, 7 April. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/04/07/felix-lussem-alienating-facts-and-uneven-futures-of-energy-transition/
This post is part of a feature on “The Political Power of Energy Futures,” moderated and edited by Katja Müller (MLU Halle-Wittenberg), Charlotte Bruckermann (University of Bergen), and Kirsten W. Endres (MPI Halle).
Debates about climate change have long entered political arenas through diplomacy, bureaucracy and regulations as part of worldwide environmental governance. Global efforts to foster greener energy increasingly supplement resource extractivism (IEA 2019). Yet, unfolding protests, from Fridays for Future to Extinction Rebellion, point to the insufficiencies of current measures. As lawsuits threaten the European mega-corporation RWE Energy with the responsibility for glacial melting in the Andes and Sioux sit-ins block the Dakota Access Pipeline in the USA, direct political action is on the rise to fight climate change by transforming energy infrastructure. Social anthropology’s analytical thrust to treat energy systems as sociotechnical constructs urgently needs to challenge the depoliticizing tendency inherent to energy decision-making (Boyer 2019, Howe 2019).
Image 1. Fridays for Future Cologne, Germany 2019. Photo by Charlotte Bruckermann
In particular, narratives of incremental improvement based on efficiency, productivity, and development discourse, must be re-examined in of the urgent need for renewable energy generation (Franquesa 2018, Gupta 2015). At the same time, political turmoil accompanies many renewable energy projects. These range from protests against involuntary displacement and the destruction of ecosystems by hydropower megaprojects like the Chinese Three Gorges dam to sovereignty struggles over Bolivian lithium reserves used in the production of solar batteries to the Spanish governments’ recent decision to hand over wind turbine development to big energy players. Beyond doom and gloom, energy’s production, distribution and consumption rise and fall with technological innovation (Winther 2013, Günel 2019). Our imagination of what makes human life easier and what improves living conditions for societies shapes the technologies we come up with and how we put them to use.
Image 2. Treehouse with solar panel on the forest edge of RWE’s Hambach coal mine in protest of surface mine expansion, Germany 2019. Photo by Charlotte Bruckermann
Over the last decades, anthropology and other academic disciplines have shown that energy systems are interdependent webs of sociotechnical and sociomaterial connections (Boyer 2014; Richardson and Weszkalnys 2014; Gupta 2015; Appel 2015). They are enmeshed in geographical conditions, spatial identities, traditions, norms and imaginaries as well as in political negotiations and financial assessments (Günel 2019; Moss 2020; Mitchell 2011; Bakke 2016). These assessments and negotiations have often privileged not only one energy technology over another, but one community’s or stakeholder’s future over another (Powell 2018). This grave inequality has led the critical social sciences to question what energy futures entail, how much adaptations are necessary or possible, what we can sacrifice for particular energy scenarios, and to ask who exploits what instruments of power to what particular ends (Smith and High 2017).
The contributions to this FocaalBlog feature discuss the political legitimacies and forms of power that become
possible through renewables’ development and the greening of energy systems. Indeed,
the development of renewable energy sources begs questions with high stakes: How does political decision-making on energy sources unfold, including
expanding resource extraction, extending the grid, or developing renewables?
How do historic injustices and exclusionary legacies of extraction, production
and consumption affect future energy horizons? Do imperatives for greening
energy create new role models in energy matters that shift the focus within and
beyond the dichotomy of “the West and the Rest”? When do debates about local
environmental priorities and energy rights undermine or bolster global climate
targets? Which new forms of precarity and scarcity do large-scale
infrastructural impositions by local or international powerholders entail?
Based on a panel at the 16th EASA Biennial Conference virtually
held in Lisbon in July 2020, this collection of papers investigates 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. From top-down policymaking regarding energy access
to grassroots calls for climate justice, the contributions interrogate the
policies and politics surrounding renewable energy, and the unintended
consequences and alliances in its delivery.
Rethinking
energy futures
After decades of constant growth in energy production
and demand, climate change is no longer an abstract threat. We are therefore forced
to scrutinize established foundations of energy systems. While energy research
has already expanded the view from the misperception of localised, insulated
extractivism to that industry’s real-world global conditions, climate change
forces us to rethink our energy future on all levels.
Formerly the elephant in the room, all too often
ignored in energy action, climate change increasingly factors into decisions on
changing energy systems large and small. At least, this is reflected in the
figures: In 2019, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), global
energy-related CO2 emissions flattened (slightly) at around 33 gigatons,
resulting mainly from a sharp decline in CO2 emissions from the
power sector in advanced economies (IEA 2020). This flattening is the result of
the expanding role of renewable sources (mainly wind and solar photovoltaic), of
fuel switching from coal to gas, and results from higher nuclear power output.
We need to expand our understanding of energy systems
beyond sociotechnical systems to socio-ecological horizons. In his Capitalism and the Web of Life, Jason
Moore (2015) proposes that the separation of humans and nature resulted in the
exploitation of “Cheap Nature”, exacerbating resource use in excess of
sustainability several fold. This extensive extractivism then fuelled the rise
of capitalism, supporting financial systems that rest on exploitation of both
minority societies and the interrelated human-nature-complex. Many energy
systems, regardless of their sustainability status, threaten global living
conditions and operate by privatizing profits and socializing risks and losses.
Critical understanding of conventional energy systems and creative approaches
to potential energy futures therefore require both intellectual and political
engagement.
Image 3. A squirrel scurries across entangled electricity cables in Hanoi, Vietnam. Photo by Kirsten W. Endres, 2019
Bridging different scales of inequality and extraction, the blog contributors challenge the undemocratic and unequal ways of owning and producing energy. They question the financial assessments of energy production that ignore or miscalculate environmental and climate effects. However, as anthropologists, they also direct our attention to the human experiences and personal pathways forged through engagement with energy futures. Their case studies affirm that obligations rather than incentives are needed to make green technologies work for all and to reduce energy consumption. Cash cows of energy production within established political and market systems too often fail to provide just and sustainable energy systems.
Thinking of our energy future, CO2 emission
developments indicate that socioecological considerations are gaining weight in
energy debates and practice, as they flattened after reaching a historical
height (IEA 2020). However, these shifts are not yet substantial enough to outpace
political powers that focus on the economic or technological dimensions of energy
production systems only. Time and again, official statements from politicians
and others claim that faster or more consequential shifts to renewable energy are
not feasible, thus revealing a reticence to realize sustainable energy futures.
Arguments abound that energy networks and electrification need (fossil fuel
based) development, or that they require at least bridging technologies to
guarantee cheap and reliable supply of sufficient energy. In parallel, quarrels
that a technology is not mature or marketable enough break out alongside complaints
that solar energy was too expensive to survive on the market. Fears of economic
losses, of declining voter favour or of structural change prevent energy
transitions that are socioecological in nature and backed by sociopolitics
(Sovacool 2016).
Image 4. Joint launch of Green Bond Index between the Luxembourg und Shenzhen Stock Exchange in Beijing, People’s Republic of China 2017. Photo by Charlotte Bruckermann
To accomplish energy transitions, voluntary
obligations of private companies are not sufficient. Such obligations have hardly
ever led to improvements of community goods, especially not if cutting profits
was a necessity. The voiced by non-corporate stakeholders need to be heard and implemented
through legally binding rules. Climate, nature and the planet cannot speak for themselves,
but require a socioecological understanding of energy systems to be the basis
for energy decision making. This does not imply that we can solve the climate
dialectic (Goodman 2016). A socioecological energy system concept will not allow
for a sudden political regulation of the climate crisis through regulating
energy production. Yet, understanding the political powers at play in energy
systems is essential so as to not become paralyzed and to retain instead agency
in times of severe crisis: energy futures need to be envisioned, power mechanisms
understood and analysed. The papers of this special issues contribute to this endeavour.
Image 5. Power lines shaping current and future energy systems, Germany 2021, photo by C. Schulze
Ethnographic
inquiries into energy futures
Our blog contributions take the reader to a variety of geographical settings and socio-political environments. Felix Lussem’s contribution explores the contemporary entanglement of political institutions and the energy industry in Germany’s lignite mining Rhineland, a region with a long history of large-scale resource extraction. As Lussem shows, this entanglement finds its most obvious expression in the practice of “creating facts” in order to (continue) providing cheap energy from the fossil fuel, while activists and other civil society actors try to prevent further damage to their environment and demand greater public participation in designing pathways towards a sustainable energy transition in the region.
Calls for an accelerated transition to climate-friendlier and cleaner energy sources have also gained momentum on the African continent. Some of the pitfalls and challenges of implementing green energy policies at the national/local level become apparent in Pauline Destree’s contribution. Rather than belonging to the future, renewables (such as hydropower) have dominated Ghana’s power sector in the past, while recent oil discoveries have spurred an increased rush for fossil fuel exploitation. Concomitantly, corporate solar investments gained salience during an energy crisis that hit the country in 2015. As Destree demonstrates, this led to a “renewable divide” in urban areas. While a few “green enclaves” benefit from their installed renewables, the financial situation of national utilities has worsened, resulting in higher tariffs for urban residents who continue to depend on the national grid.
Dragan Djunda’s contribution takes us to the Western Balkans, where small hydropower plants (SHPPs) have recently emerged as a dominant strategy for reducing fossil fuel dependency. This double transformation path to renewable energy and liberalisation of the energy sector as an adaptation to EU standards attracted large flows of foreign investment. But the damming of the last remaining free-flowing rivers in Europe has sparked its own protests, as the selling of SHPPs licences implies the ‘sell-off’ of locally used water and of pristine environs. In the Stara Mountain region in south-eastern Serbia environmental activists and local residents successfully defended rivers and villages against the impending damage from hydropower development in the region. As an unexpected outcome of the conflicts and contestations, the formerly decaying villages suddenly attracted increased touristic attention as well as financial support for community-relevant infrastructure projects.
In northern Portugal, structural reforms and austerity measures imposed by EU institutions to battle the country’s financial crisis have contributed to another path in renewable energy transition, a path that forges links into the global green bond market. Giulia Dal Maso’s contribution traces the history and location of wind farms in the wine-producing Viseu region that had been refinanced by the first Chinese green bond issued in Europe. Whereas the bond-issuing Chinese enterprise has since been able to extract rent from a previously public infrastructure, this refinancing did not produce any “extra good” for local people in the Viseu region, who keep struggling to pay their electricity bills.
From industrialized regions facing their own coal
dependency and growing holes in landscapes of extraction in the German
Rheinland to a Ghanaian balancing act between weathered dams for hydropower, new
oil and gas discoveries, and the mushrooming of privileged green enclaves, from
regional resistance to damming up the rivers of the Balkan mountains to
residents in rural Portugal finding themselves poised between local pride in
their wind and the pressure of paying for its energy delivery by a Chinese
investor: What the contributions to this blog feature show is that pathways
towards a renewable energy future are not straight-forward or unilineal, and global
players in renewables finance usurp local infrastructures and drive their
agendas forward, albeit being consistently challenged and scrutinised by more
local imaginations of a sustainable future.
Beyond a focus on energy experts and policy pragmatists balancing public utilities and personal consumption as a calculative endeavour, anthropological investigations show how every energy provision relies on common resources and reshapes shared landscapes. Big players in energy production wield finance and power in ways that may undermine or further political and personal futures, and lead to surprising twists and turns in energy narratives. Yet suturing scales of energy engagement between corporate hierarchies, different state levels, and local energy producers and consumers, reveal that decisions on the form and type of energy used reach into deep historical experiences of developmentalist projects. Tracing the entangled relationships between people forging their energy horizons and reflecting on their demands and obligations to each other, brings to light their commitment to a collective future.
Katja Müllerworks as a social anthropologist at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Regional Studies, Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg and at the University of Technology Sydney. She conducts research on energy transitions, mining and climate change, as well as on digital cultural heritage.
Charlotte Bruckermann explores carbon as a frontline of value in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen. Her current research focuses on carbon management in the creation of Chinese ecological civilization, with a focus on carbon offset forests, digital carbon accounting, and the decarbonization of everyday life in a coal region. Her book Claiming Homeswas published in 2019.
Kirsten W. Endres is Head of Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle/Saale, Germany. Her current project focuses on the interrelationship between the development of energy systems and the complex operation of modern states and state power in the Greater Mekong Subregion.
References
Appel, Hannah. 2015. Subterranean Estates: Life worlds of coal
and gas. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Bakke, Gretchen. 2016. The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between
Americans and our Energy Future. New York: Bloomsbury.
Boyer, Dominic. 2019. Energopolitics:
Wind and Power in the Anthropocene. Durham: Duke University Press.
Franquesa, Jaume. 2018. Power
struggles: dignity, value, and the renewable energy frontier in Spain.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Goodman, James. 2016. “The climate dialectic in energy policy: Germany and India compared.” In
Energy Policy 99: 184-193.
Günel, Gökçe. 2019. Spaceship in
the Desert: Energy, Climate Change, and Urban Design in Abu Dhabi. Durham,
N.C.: Duke University Press.
Gupta,
Akhil. 2015. “An Anthropology of Electricity from the Global South.” In Cultural
Anthropology 30(4): 555-568.
Howe, Cymene, Ecologics: Wind and
Power in the Anthropocene. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019. 241 pp.
IEA – International Energy Agency (2020), Global CO2
emissions in 2019, IEA, Paris
https://www.iea.org/articles/global-co2-emissions-in-2019
Mitchell, Timothy. 2011. Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. London: Verso.
Moore, Jason. 2015.
Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital.
London: Verso. Moss, Timothy. 2020. Remaking Berlin. A History of the City through Infrastructure,
1920-2020. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Powell, Dana E. 2017. Landscapes of Power: Politics of Energy in the
Navajo Nation. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.
Richardson, Tanya and Gisa Weszkalnys. 2014. Introduction: Resource
Materialities, Anthropological Quarterly
87 (1): 5-30.
Smith, Jessica and Mette High. 2017. “Exploring the anthropology of
energy: ethnography, energy, and ethics.” Energy Research and Social Science
30: 1-6.
Sovacool, Benjamin.
2016. How long will it take? Conceptualizing the temporal dynamics of energy
transitions, Energy Research & Social Sciences 13: 202-215.
Winther,
Tanja. 2013. The impact of electricity: Development, desires and dilemmas. Berghahn.
Cite as: Müller, Katja, Charlotte Bruckermann, Kirsten W. Endres. 2021. “Introduction: The political power of energy futures.” FocaalBlog, 7 April. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/04/07/katja-muller-charlotte-bruckermann-kirsten-endres-introduction-the-political-power-of-energy-futures/
Contemporary anthropological praxis sits at the intersection of two ethical traditions. Many anthropologists are equipped with both a sophisticated understanding of the ethics and politics of representation and a practical knowledge of the bureaucratic norms and standards of institutional research ethics (informed consent, confidentiality, anonymisation etc.). And yet, if the PrecAnthro/EASA report (Fotta et al 2020) and the recent scandal at the HAU journal tell us anything (Kalb 2018, Murphy 2018, Neveling 2018, Singal 2020), it is that our disciplinary ethics does little to ensure the ethical conduct of our discipline. As other contributors to this debate have noted, the situation described in the report demands a political and an anthropological response. It requires us to unionise and work ethnographically to understand “the structures of feeling and the conditions of possibility for collective mobilization” (Narotzky 2021). In my opinion, the report should also provoke us to re-evaluate the ethics of anthropological knowledge production.
I welcome the PrecAnthro report for helping to illustrate the scale of anthropological casualisation in Europe, but it is true that my feelings likely reflect how closely the report describes my own experiences of academic precarity: I was educated in the UK and since completing my PhD in 2015, have worked on fixed-term research contracts. As Susana Narotzky (2021) and Natalia Buier (2021) note, the report privileges the perspectives of researchers like me, whilst excluding the experiences of some of the most marginalised precarious workers in anthropology such as low-paid teaching staff for whom EASA membership is neither professionally advantageous nor affordable. I write here from my located perspective as a post-doc who has worked in the field of research ethics for a number of years.
I found little to disagree with in the FocaalBlog commentaries on the PrecAnthro report and would only contend that I do not believe that anthropologists feel uncomfortable talking about precarity within our discipline. On the contrary, in fact, I think that anthropologists are more than happy to discuss academic precarity because they see it as a largely externally driven phenomenon – part of the same great process of neoliberal bureaucratisation that has devolved power from academics to university managers and driven a culture of performance review and job insecurity across the piece (so called publish-or-perish). Rather, I would think, what makes anthropologists feel uncomfortable is talking about how the precarity of junior colleagues leaves them vulnerable to exploitation by senior colleagues and reluctant to report abuse and bullying due to a fear of reputational damage (Kalb 2021, Drążkiewicz 2021, Rajaram 2021). The kind of exploitation that allegedly took place at HAU may be extreme, but as Neveling (2018) argues, it sits within “a spectrum of social, economic, and political processes that have always driven academia and continue to do so” and that reflect the general conditions of capitalism. Yet, whilst we should of course foreground the political economy of academic casualisation in order to understand the grounds for collective resistance, we must also question what it means to produce anthropology is a way that is sensitive to the risks of exploitation inherent to the contemporary academic process. Such a project would necessarily be as much about the ethics of anthropological knowledge production as the political economy of precarity.
One of the difficulties that anthropology faces here is a lack of familiarity. Our existing professional ethics and standards are attuned to the practices of conducing fieldwork and writing ethnography. We are not used to thinking about how we interact with each other as a problem of anthropological ethics. Neither do we tend to think of “the anthropologist” as someone who is particularly vulnerable. Indeed, it was not so long ago that the anthropologist was seen as quite the opposite of a precariously employed, exploited worker. Typified by the image of Stephen Tyler on the cover of Clifford and Marcus’s Writing Culture (1986), the figure of the anthropologist-as-writer marked a dawning disciplinary confrontation with the idea that ethnography was not neutral scientific description, as had apparently previously been assumed, but a genre of “persuasive fiction” largely produced by elite, white men, working under conditions of colonial and post-colonial privilege. Anthropologists, who understandably tend to privilege the ethics of their own discipline to those imposed from the outside (i.e., institutional research ethics), have become keen observers of the politics and ethics of representation. Anthropologists are skilled at unpacking assumptions and revealing the structures of inequality that determine whose experience counts and who gets to speak for whom – as demonstrated in this debate by the various incisive critiques of the limits of the PrecAnthro survey. And yet it is unclear how effective our existing disciplinary ethics alone can be when the subject of exploitation is neither a subject of investigation, nor ultimately representation, but rather a fellow anthropologist.
The PrecAnthro report evokes a strikingly different image of “the anthropologist” to that of the elite, white man of crisis of representation. The typical respondent in the report is described instead as “a woman aged around 40… educated in either the UK or Germany… possibly in a relationship but has no children… and probably dissatisfied with her current employment and her work–life balance due to the fact that she works on a fixed-term contract” (Fotta et al 2020: 1). The report further illustrates what many already knew: contemporary anthropological knowledge production relies on a precariat of low-paid anthropological workers (postgrads, postdocs, teaching assistants etc.), many of whom will never obtain a permanent contract in the discipline nor academia more generally. What does the growing visibility of this version of “the anthropologist” mean for anthropological praxis? Are we to continue to imagine that the rights and wrongs of anthropological knowledge production can be discussed independently of the labour relations that structure our discipline? If not, then we may need consider whether our existing professional ethics are equipped to deal with the moral and political realities of anthropological research in the 21st century. Indeed, if it is our ambition to build the kind of class consciousness required for collective mobilisation, then we may need to start by acting in solidarity with precariously employed anthropologists and try to envisage ways that our working practices can be used to help mitigate, rather than exploit, the forms of vulnerability that academia creates.
Adam
Brisley is a post-doctoral
researcher at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. He has a PhD from the
University of Manchester and has previously held post-doctoral positions in the
universities of Manchester and Bristol. His research interests focus on the
relationship between care and political economy in the context of health
systems crisis.
Clifford, J. and
Marcus, G. 1986. Writing culture: The poetics and politics of ethnography.
University of California Press: Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
Fotta, M., Ivancheva, M. and Pernes, R. 2020. The Anthropological Career in Europe: A complete report on the EASA membership survey. European Association of Social Anthropologists: https://doi.org/10.22582/easaprecanthro
Cite as: Brisley, Adam. 2021. “Ethics and the Anthropological Worker.” FocaalBlog, 9 February. http://www.focaalblog.com/2021/03/24/adam-brisley-ethics-and-the-anthropological-worker/
The authors of The Anthropological Career in Europe(Fotta, Ivancheva and Pernes 2020) have made
visible the inequality and hierarchy that has become increasingly normalized in
higher education in Europe. The impact of the report lies far beyond
anthropology, and my reflections here build on the report’s key findings and
consider the impact of precaritization on the university and academia as a
whole.
I was reluctant to contribute to
this blog series. The recently published EASA report
(Fotta, Ivancheva and Pernes 2020) draws attention to precarious labour in
anthropology. However, in the last decade we seem to have been talking about
precarity in academia non-stop. There is even a nickname for the genre: “quit
lit”. So, what, I wondered, would my story change?
Indeed, I
have been telling my story to many colleagues, including to those in positions of
power. A few colleagues proved to be wonderful allies, offering kindness,
compassion, and practical support. However, quite a few showed little empathy
or solidarity, and displayed a strong appetite for power. While academic
credentials are key to building a career in academia, personal reputation
also matters tremendously. You depend upon your colleagues for recommendation
letters. This is even more true when you become an ‘internal candidate’ (the
sort of candidate that you, as an international migrant, hated until you
finally became one yourself). So you learn to please everybody, to be a “good
girl”: not to question your Line Manager in meetings, and surely never, ever,
in front of others; do not criticise your institution in public; never make
demands; say yes to everything; never complain; do not admit you struggle; and
most importantly, show endless gratitude.
When, after almost seven years of
working at my last institution (where I arrived from Cambridge with my own
Marie Curie grant) my third temporary contract was coming to an end, a group of
undergraduates (without my knowledge) decided to collect signatures in support
of me. However, at the last minute, they hesitated to go public. They revealed
their plans to me and asked, “What if it causes more harm than good?” Even
though they were new to academia, they already sensed that critique and
bottom-up citizen action might be a great topic for an academic paper, but is
not necessarily appreciated at the university offices. For me, the students’
support was moving, not least because it was evidence that I am good at my job
– despite the stream of job rejections suggesting otherwise. My students
appreciated my research insights and my pedagogical skills, and were willing to
take a risk. Yet I feared that it would indeed be seen as an affront and a
betrayal. I felt deeply insecure and was afraid of being accused of actually
initiating the protest myself. I could be branded as a troublemaker. And who would
ever want to hire a troublemaker?
I was also reluctant to contribute
to this important discussion on precarity because I do not wish to be viewed
through the lens of the precariat. I want to be known for my craft, not my
struggle. After all, we are professional academics, not humans. But, most
importantly, I am still struck by the feeling that there is a stigma attached
to being a precarious worker.The myth of meritocracy promotes a
certain narrative: academic success is based on talent, skill, and accomplishment.
Moreover, this is not a mere job, but a vocation, requiring sacrifice. Failure
therefore suggests that you are just not good enough, or lazy, an old maid in
the academic family. If you struggle, perhaps it’s because you just don’t have
what it takes? Maybe you have chosen the wrong job?
Academic labour relations are the
perfect field for gaslighting and undermining the abilities and achievements of
scholars who are not in a position of power. They also lead to segregation and
isolation. In the highly competitive academic market, people are easily reduced
to the amounts of identifiable social capital they can offer. If you represent
the elite, why would you associate with the academic proletariat?
Furthermore,
I did not want to write this blog post because it is embarrassing. How could I
be so naïve as to find myself part of a Ponzi scheme? Universities
and full professors profit from the accelerated recruitment of people in lower
ranks. The more junior scholars you recruit, the less teaching you have to do;
they will do it for you. You have more time for research, publishing,
networking, gaining ever more valuable ‘academic currency’ in an exponential
fashion. The more PhDs you recruit, the more prestige comes to you and your
institution. You can build your clan, your estate, your power. The more
post-docs you recruit, the better your publication record (the most important
academic currency). The goal is therefore the constant expansion of the pool of
dependent early-career scholars. The problem is, how to lure them in? In
academia, this is done by the promise of permanent, stable, respectable jobs,
and the myth of meritocracy: if you work hard, with talent, if you do
everything by the book, you will obtain success. But, as the EASA report clearly
points out, this is often a false promise.
And here
is the final reason for my initial hesitation to write: I am exhausted. I
finally obtained the holy grail of academia: a permanent job! I now have the
chance to rid myself of the stigma, move on, forget. So why would I go back now
and get myself involved in this discussion, associate myself with rebellion,
with a fight that is no longer mine? Why would I throw myself back into this
mud? I worked so hard to get out of it!
Yet, I
decided to write. Because I don’t want to be part of an academia run as
a rat race. Because I know intimately about the suffering of the precariat. For
those of you, who have never been in that position, think of your pandemic
experience: remember March 2020, overwhelmed with teaching because of the
unexpected new rules of the game, having to adjust your teaching overnight.
This is how many precarious workers feel every September. Scholars who move
between institutions have to learn the new rules of the game all the time,
prepare new courses, adjust to new environments. Remember, the frustration when
senior (often male) colleagues were excited that they would finally have time
to publish, while you were drowning in teaching and caring duties? Did you
start to stress about your job security, funding cuts, redundancy? These are
the daily stresses and frustrations of those in the early career stages. Was it
fun to have Christmas or Easter over Zoom, to not see your parents,
grandparents? This is how many international precarious workers have been
spending Christmas for years. You might also now be familiar with the pressure
of caring for your children non-stop. This is the recurrent reality of many of
those in the international precariat who have children, but no family networks
at hand to help, and who cannot afford a sitter or day care. Did you feel
lonely in the pandemic? Are you fed up talking to friends on WhatsApp and would
like to see them in person? This is the constant reality of so many
international scholars lured by the myths of the Ponzi scheme that academia is,
trapped in a precarious limbo.
Many young precarious workers are international
migrants, and as such they make good workers. Uprooted from their personal
networks, with no relatives to visit on Sunday, they are available to work
extra hours. They also have a lot to lose: they have already made so many heavy
financial and personal sacrifices for their academic careers that it is very
hard for them to change course, which means they are ready to do anything and
everything, especially if they are given the hope of another contract. They are
also easily replaceable and disposable as often they are excluded from academic
patronage networks. Often, they have little or no connection with an Alma Mater
of their own. For their new institutions, they are just foreigners who have
arrived for their own gain. There is an unspoken assumption that they will
leave. Consequently, few feel a moral responsibility for them. They are also
highly vulnerable to discrimination based on nationality or race, both within
and beyond the workplace. It is shameful that this exploitation happens in
academia, particularly in anthropology, where so many careers were built on
researching exploitation, migration, and indeed, precarious lives.
Ela Drążkiewicz is a researcher at the
Institute for Sociology at the Slovak Academy of Sciences. She is the author of Institutional Dreams: The
Art of Managing Foreign Aid. She specialises in
political, economic and organisational anthropology.
Bibliography
Fotta, Martin, Mariya Ivancheva and Raluca
Pernes. 2020. The anthropological career in Europe: A complete report on the
EASA membership survey. European Association of Social Anthropologists. https://easaonline.org/publications/precarityrep
Cite as: Drążkiewicz, Ela. 2021. “Blinded by the Light: International Precariat in Academia.” FocaalBlog, 5 February. http://www.focaalblog.com/2021/02/05/ela-drazkiewicz-blinded-by-the-light-international-precariat-in-academia/
The EASA
report on The Anthropological Career in Europe (Fotta, Ivancheva and Pernes 2020) is an important initiative that offers
quantitative evidence about a situation which all of those who work in academia
are aware of, many experience daily, and which has repeatedly been denounced
since the onslaught of the neoliberal policies starting in the 1980s. I will
comment on this document from my situated viewpoint as a Spanish
anthropologist, a full time tenured anthropologist, and a PI of large
collaborative projects.
As a
report produced by anthropologists for anthropologists, my first surprise was
to find it not very anthropological. Although the report acknowledges that
situations are very different among countries, we do not get a picture of what
those differences are. The ‘methodology’ cannot deliver that picture. First,
the assumption that EASA membership represents anthropologists working in
Europe, and in particular the most precarious anthropologists, is probably inaccurate.
In Spain, many of the part-time non-tenured teaching positions have extremely
low salaries and their holders juggle a plurality of jobs that make research
difficult. As a result, membership in EASA –which is fundamentally tied to
participation in the biennial conference—is rarely sought. Therefore, a large
contingent of (probably) the most precarious voices, many of which are not
proficient in English, is not represented in the survey. This may also explain
why a large majority of respondents work in Northern institutions which have
more resources than those in other countries.
Second,
what does the fact of choosing to produce a ‘survey’ rather than an
‘ethnography’ of “The anthropological career in Europe” say about the
discipline of social anthropology, about its trust in the ‘evidence’ produced
by our main methodological tool? Why does EASA as an association of social
anthropologists thinks that it needs quantitative evidence in order to make its
point about precarious anthropologists’ situation in the academy? We have
countless ethnographies about labor precarity in Europe, but we have scant
detailed ethnographies about precarious anthropologists teaching and doing research
in concrete university environments. This has not been an obstacle to
insightful and important articles being written from two perspectives: on the
one hand, contributions based on personal experience; on the other hand,
contributions based on statistical secondary sources enabling theorizations
about the neoliberal transformations of the university in general or in a
particular country (often in the Global North). As Pérez and Montoya (2018: A5)
propose, personal experience should “reveal research paths for future
ethnographies of academic precarity”, but it cannot substitute for them. I
suggest that producing ethnographies is an urgent task if we want (1) to
understand concrete ongoing processes of exploitation, domination and
dispossession, and (2) to organize in a collective manner to overturn them.
Third, context
and history. The survey does not provide any tools for historical and political
context. Rather, it generalizes the neoliberal process as if it developed in
the same way everywhere. We know from anthropological investigations into other
domains of life, however, that the rolling back and rolling out of the neoliberal
state is modulated by concrete historical circumstances.
In the
mid-1970s, as a result of an increase in the number of university students,
Spanish universities resorted to hiring a large number of non-permanent faculty.
The figures vary slightly according to each university but, on average, 80 per
cent of the faculty in Spanish universities were non-permanent in the mid-1970s
(Profesor No Numerario) (Moreno 2019,
Castillo 1982). According to statistical records of the Ministry of Universities, the figure of non-permanent faculty
has stabilized at around 45 per cent in the past four years. Precarity, then,
was part of an undemocratic university system where hierarchies of patronage
dominated the scarce avenues towards stable tenure. Precarity, now, is part of
an austerity regime that has reduced public education resources, forcing
universities to seek funding from other sources (e.g., research grant overheads)
or public-private partnerships. This has important implications for our
understanding of the neoliberalisation of Spanish academia; as much as it sheds
light on the long history of academic precarity and the struggle against this.
In the
1970s, as part of the general struggles for democratization of the university,
a nationwide movement of the No Numerario’s developed. Based on assembly
meetings in faculties and universities, it was not attached to parties or
unions and was coordinated at the national scale by a committee of
representatives. They demanded the same treatment as the permanent faculty,
together with access to decision making committees in the university and other
democratic requests. They organized long strikes and threatened the continuity
of teaching and exams. Yet, their demand of stability and equal treatment sought
to obtain a well-paid labor contract and
to abolish the life-long tenure of the Profesor
Numerario, subjecting all
professors to periodic evaluation of their teaching and research and,
implicitly, to the possibility of ending their contract. In the end, this
radical position –the generalization of “non-tenured” academic labor contracts–
was disabled by a law of university reform issued by the first socialist
government in 1983, which promoted a process of rapid stabilization of most PhD-holding
No Numerario’s through access to lifelong tenure (Carreras 2004).
Today, the
privatization of the public university system is based on the elimination of that
life-tenure system and its substitution by tenured labor contracts in a context
where the existing labor regulations have deregulated most rights and
protections. Precarious faculty today in Spain are represented only partially and
by various unions demanding stability, but there is no equivalent movement,
organization and coordination to that of the No Numerario’s in the
seventies. Why is that?
Local
patronage networks are still very much in place, and one of the major assets to
access a permanent job is to remain close to one’s Alma Mater, rather than to
publish or get an international post-doc position abroad. In public
universities 87% of teaching faculty (tenured and non-tenured) have a PhD from
the same Autonomous Community, and 73% from the same university where they
defended their PhD. Simultaneously, an increasing contingent of young academics
who have been competitively selected to post-doc positions in research projects,
have generally been able to publish in ‘impact’ journals and have expanded
their international networks.
As a
result, two very different kinds of precarious academic exist nowadays. They
are often pitted against each other in competitions for tenured positions. When
committees have to decide the value of teaching or research experience, the
value of the local or foreign (i.e. from outside the university) candidate,
they often tend to favor the local candidate with teaching experience. Rather
than moralizing this as being ‘bad’ or ‘good’ for the university, my point here
is to underline the diverse positionalities of precarious academics in Spain
and the difficulties that this fragmentation entails in terms of collective
organization and mobilization. In a context with more precarity and minimal
research opportunities, within an ongoing struggle for democracy, the No
Numerario’s movement collectively organized and achieved stability. Why not
now? What needs to be done?
As anthropologists we need ethnographies of academic precarities, we need to historically situate the various forms of precarity and to compare them. To act effectively, we need to understand the structures of feeling and the conditions of possibility for collective mobilization. We know the numbers, now we need to know the souls.
Susana Narotzky is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Barcelona, Spain.
Bibliography
Carreras, J. 2004.
Evaluación de la calidad docente y promoción del profesorado (IV). Legislación
universitaria española (b): de la Ley de Reforma Universitaria (1983) a la Ley
Orgánica de universidades (2002). (1ª parte.) Educación Médica 7(1): 9-23
Castillo, J.J. 1982.
Universidad: O todos o ninguno, El País,
12 de abril 1982
Fotta, Martin, Mariya Ivancheva and Raluca
Pernes. 2020. The
anthropological career in Europe: A complete report on the EASA membership
survey. European Association of Social
Anthropologists. https://easaonline.org/publications/precarityrep
Pérez, M. & Montoya, A. 2018. The Unsustainability of the Neoliberal Public University: Towards an Ethnography of Precarity in Academia. Revista de Dialectología y Tradiciones Populares, LXXIII(1): A1-A16
Cite as: Narotzky, Susana. 2021. “A History of Precariousness in Spain.” FocaalBlog, 29 January. http://www.focaalblog.com/2021/01/29/susana-narotzky:-a-history-of-precariousness-in-spain/
