Handbook on International Development and the Environment 1800883773, 9781800883772

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HANDBOOK ON INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT AND THE ENVIRONMENT

ELGAR HANDBOOKS IN DEVELOPMENT The Elgar Handbooks in Development series is a collection of works edited by leading international scholars within the field. The series provides an overview of recent research in all aspects of Development Studies, thereby forming an exhaustive guide to the field. These Handbooks aim to be prestigious, high quality works of lasting significance, discussing research areas including the politics of international development, the global economic impacts of development, and the challenges faced by those driving development, on both a national and international scale. Each Handbook will consist of original contributions by leading authors that aim both to expand current debates within the field, and to indicate how research in Development Studies may progress in the future. This series will form an essential reference point for all students of Development Studies. For a full list of Edward Elgar published titles, including the titles in this series, visit our website at www​.e​-elgar​.com

Handbook on International Development and the Environment Edited by

Benedicte Bull Professor of Political Science, Centre for Development and the Environment (SUM), University of Oslo, Norway

Mariel Aguilar-Støen Professor of Human Geography, Centre for Development and the Environment (SUM), University of Oslo, Norway

ELGAR HANDBOOKS IN DEVELOPMENT

Cheltenham, UK • Northampton, MA, USA

© The Editors and Contributors Severally 2023

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Published by Edward Elgar Publishing Limited The Lypiatts 15 Lansdown Road Cheltenham Glos GL50 2JA UK Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc. William Pratt House 9 Dewey Court Northampton Massachusetts 01060 USA A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Control Number: 2023935287

This book is available electronically in the Political Science and Public Policy subject collection http://dx.doi.org/10.4337/9781800883789

ISBN 978 1 80088 377 2 (cased) ISBN 978 1 80088 378 9 (eBook)

EEP BoX

Contents

List of figuresviii List of contributorsix Prefacexi 1

Introduction to Handbook on International Development and the Environment: from limits to growth to a transformation for the Anthropocene Benedicte Bull and Mariel Aguilar-Støen

PART I

1

RETHINKING DEVELOPMENT: CRITIQUE AND DEFENSE OF A CONTESTED IDEA

2

The sticky myth of economic growth and the critique of development Eduardo Gudynas

26

3

Leaving development behind: the case for degrowth Federico Demaria and Erik Gómez-Baggethun

41

4

Dismantling the machine: rethinking the role of technology in critical development theory Alf Hornborg

57

5

Development under scrutiny: environment, geopolitics and a reimagination of Latin America Andrés Rivarola Puntigliano and Gianfranco Selgas

71

6

A transformative post-developmental state? State institutions as change-makers in the Anthropocene Benedicte Bull

83

7

A Chinese Communist Party perspective on development and the environment: socialism through environmental development? Bjørn Leif Brauteseth

PART II 8

100

RETHINKING THE ENVIRONMENT: FROM INFINITE RESOURCE TO FRAGILE SUBJECT

The river as subject: legal innovations and their consequence for rights and development John A. McNeish v

122

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9

Oceans: the new economic frontier? Mads Barbesgaard

137

10

The Arctic: last frontier for energy and mineral exploitation? Ragnhild Freng Dale and Lena Gross

154

11

The international development of food and agriculture: global food regimes, environmental change and new configurations of power 170 Jostein Jakobsen

12

Will development kill us? Globalized livestock production in the “Pandemic Era” Mariel Aguilar-Støen and Jostein Jakobsen

185

PART III RECONSIDERING DEVELOPMENT POLICIES AND GOVERNANCE 13

Infrastructure, development and the environment in a landscape of spatial reconfigurations across the Global South: the case of the Belt and Road Initiative Fabricio Rodríguez and Julia Gurol

200

14

The new middle classes: consumption, development and sustainability 216 Arve Hansen and Ulrikke Bryn Wethal

15

New energy transitions, old problems: the challenge of achieving a just electrification with a gendered face Kirsten Campbell and Tanja Winther

16

The business of sustainability as a governance tool Jason Miklian and John E. Katsos

231 250

PART IV RECONSIDERING ENVIRONMENTAL POLICIES AND GOVERNANCE 17

The challenges of effective international climate cooperation in an unequal world Tora Skodvin

18

The sustainability governance of global supply chains: transnational approaches and the neglect of local development agendas281 Almut Schilling-Vacaflor

19

Ecosystem services in development: frontier of green colonialism or tool for social justice? Nicolena vonHedemann

267

296

Contents  vii

20

Reclaiming state capacity in the politics of energy transitions: the cautionary tale of Venezuela’s predatory transition Antulio Rosales

313

Index328

Figures

4.1

The necessary connection between the growth of “technomass” and physically unequal exchange

9.1

Overview of different maritime zones as per UNCLOS

145

15.1

Chhotkei village

235

15.2

Two solar panels

236

15.3

Smart meter box

243

viii

67

Contributors

Mariel Aguilar-Støen is Professor in the Centre for Development and the Environment at the University of Oslo, Norway. Mads Barbesgaard is Associate Senior Lecturer in the Department of Human Geography at Lund University, Sweden, and Associate Researcher at the Transnational Institute, The Netherlands. Bjørn Leif Brauteseth is Research Fellow in the Centre for Development and the Environment at the University of Oslo, Norway. Benedicte Bull is Professor in the Centre for Development and the Environment at the University of Oslo, Norway. Kirsten Campbell is Research Associate at Loughborough University, UK. Federico Demaria is Associate Professor at the University of Barcelona (UB) and Research Fellow in the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (ICTA UAB), Spain. Ragnhild Freng Dale is Senior Researcher at the Western Norway Research Institute, Norway. Erik Gómez-Baggethun is Professor in the Department of International Environment and Development Studies (Noragric) at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU), Norwegian Institute for Nature Research (NINA), Norway. Lena Gross is Researcher at NIKU – Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research and Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Sámi Studies at UiT The Arctic University of Norway. Eduardo Gudynas is Researcher at Centro Latino Americano de Ecología Social (CLAES), Montevideo, Uruguay. Julia Gurol is Postdoctoral Fellow at Chair of International Relations, Freiburg University, Germany. Arve Hansen is Researcher at the Centre for Development and the Environment, University of Oslo, Norway. Alf Hornborg is Professor Emeritus of Human Ecology, Lund University, Sweden. Jostein Jakobsen is Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Development and the Environment, University of Oslo, Norway. ix

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John E. Katsos is Associate Professor at American University of Sharjah, UAE and Research Fellow at Queen's University Belfast, UK. John A. McNeish is Professor at Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU), Norway. Jason Miklian is Researcher at the Centre for Development and the Environment, University of Oslo, Norway. Andrés Rivarola Puntigliano is Professor at Nordic Institute for Latin America Studies (NILAS), University of Stockholm, Sweden. Fabricio Rodríguez is Senior Researcher at the Arnold Bergstraesser Institute (ABI) Freiburg and Guest Lecturer at the Chair of International Relations, University of Freiburg, Germany. Antulio Rosales is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of New Brunswick, Canada. Almut Schilling-Vacaflor is Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Institute for Social Sciences at the University of Osnabrück, Germany. Gianfranco Selgas is Postdoctoral Fellow in the Centre for Multidisciplinary and Intercultural Inquiry (SELCS – CMII) at University College London, UK. Tora Skodvin is Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Oslo, Norway. Nicolena vonHedemann is the Human Dimensions Specialist at the Ecological Restoration Institute, Northern Arizona University, USA. Ulrikke Bryn Wethal is Postdoctoral Fellow in the Centre for Development and the Environment at the University of Oslo, Norway. Tanja Winther is Professor and Head of Include in the Research Centre for Socially Inclusive Energy Transition in the Centre for Development and the Environment at the University of Oslo, Norway.

Preface

It is a difficult time to put together a Handbook on International Development and the Environment. Climate change and biodiversity loss have come so far that it is impossible to avoid catastrophic consequences. Our students focus on ‘survival’ and refuse to talk about ‘development’ due to its ring of imperialism and capitalism and forces that have brought environmental havoc. To talk about ‘international development’ is equally criticized as a euphemism for a global project dominated by the West. Any author, us included, could be accused of contributing to the power asymmetry and repression involved in that project. The term ‘environment’ is no less contested, as a sharp distinction between humans and non-humans has been criticized for justifying the destruction of nature that we observe across the globe. As a result, the field of international development and the environment is currently not only divided and fragmented; the long-standing critique of the dogmatism of development, as an idea and praxis, is running the risk of becoming dogmatic itself in its rejection of development. Amid this, we have taken on the task of editing a Handbook on International Development and the Environment. We have done so with an acute awareness of the impossibility of providing an authoritative text with final responses to the many difficult issues within this field. What we have rather sought to do is to invite authors with different fields of expertise, based in different disciplines and with different geographical focus and origins, to provide their perspectives on some of the key topics of our time. Some have provided theoretical discussions; others have focused on empirical developments. What we have sought to achieve with this is dialogue: while the climate and biodiversity destruction rage, we cannot ignore that a large part of the world’s population legitimately aspire to achieve better living conditions and increased security. Neither can we ignore that the aspirations for ‘development’ come not necessarily from the rich Global North, but even more so from marginalized areas. Moreover, the criticism against the dominance of Western science and epistemology cannot result in a rejection of any scientific contributions based on geographical or epistemological origin. Thus, this book is intended to open new spaces for dialogue with the aim of reopening our field for posing the big questions: how to contribute to improvement in people’s lives while avoiding further environmental destruction and adapting to existing changes? Yet, while doing so, we have been faced with our own constraints. As academics with one foot in a northern European and another in a Latin American context, we have been able to engage authors that are connected to a Western academic tradition, based mostly in Europe or Latin America, but also two from the United States and two from Canada. While two chapters focus explicitly on Chinese ideas and practices, and several use case material from Asia and Africa, we realize xi

xii  Handbook on international development and the environment

that our common intellectual history is predominantly Latin American or European. This, however, should not stand in the way for the utility in seeking dialogue with contributions from other traditions and geographical areas. As editors of this book, we would first like to thank the contributors for their enthusiasm and engagement, not only in writing your own chapters, but also engaging with others’. All colleagues were involved in an internal peer-review process, providing critical but generous comments that helped improve each chapter. These discussions have been vital to the development of the book. We would also like to thank our home institution, the Centre for Development and the Environment (SUM), at the University of Oslo. Without its flexibility, support and facilitation of a multidisciplinary and creative work environment, this book would not have materialized. Finally, we would like to thank our two Gunnars – Ole and Stein – for their support, patience and constructive critique in this endeavor and all others.

1. Introduction to Handbook on International Development and the Environment: from limits to growth to a transformation for the Anthropocene Benedicte Bull and Mariel Aguilar-Støen

1. INTRODUCTION In June 1972, the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment became the first major attempt to link environmental issues to the international development agenda. In the years prior to the conference, several groundbreaking publications had warned against the environmental implications of population growth and the environmental impact of human activities.1 The Stockholm Conference was preceded by efforts of the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (ICN), established already in 1948, and the Man and the Biosphere program established in 1971. Yet, it was the Stockholm Conference and the publication only three months prior to the conference of the report commissioned by the Club of Rome on the Limits to Growth (Meadows et al. 1972) that really started the questioning on environmental grounds of what had been a mantra since the end of World War II: That development, understood as modernization, technological upgrading, industrialization and economic growth, was both a goal for all societies and a means to achieve most other social goals. While tracing its roots to 18th-century social thought, this idea had become the main justification for the interventions in mostly post-colonial countries by global institutions and bilateral agencies (Bull and Bøås 2010). Indeed, it is on the background of this international endeavor that the term “international development” as used in the title of this book acquired its current meaning. Over the half a century that has passed since the Stockholm Conference, there has been no shortage of attempts to integrate environmental concerns into concepts of development and adapt development strategies to lessen environmental impacts. The term “sustainable development” coined in the 1987 report by the Brundtland Commission “Our common future” is perhaps the most prominent of these, while ideas of “green growth” and “ecological modernization” follow in the same line (Jacobs 2013, Brundtland 1987). The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted by the United Nations in 2015 may also be considered a continuation of this line of thinking, as they seek simultaneously to end poverty for all and increase well-being, while also reducing the environmental impact of all human activities. 1

2  Handbook on international development and the environment

All those ideas continue to be underpinned by the imperative of economic growth as a means to promote progress and human well-being. However, half a century after the Stockholm Conference it can be concluded that such attempts have largely failed in theory as well in practice. Regarding environmental impact, climate change has been added to the issues of natural resource depletion and pollution pointed to in the Limits to Growth and the declaration of the Stockholm Conference.2 While the vast number of UN declarations, conferences and treaties on the environment have led to some important improvements and a large number of environmental initiatives and policies have been adopted (Falkner and Buzan 2019), most trends have moved in one direction: increased carbon emissions, increased deforestation, biodiversity loss, depletion of natural resources and increased pollution of various kinds. The exponential economic growth that Limits to Growth warned against not only poses a risk to future welfare, but is already affecting negatively “average well-being” of the human population.3 At the same time, while many achievements have been made regarding development, including eradication of several illnesses, a fall in child mortality and raised literacy levels, almost 700 million people live in extreme poverty, and the world is far away from meeting the 2015 SDGs.4 Thus, there is an evident discrepancy between knowledge and practice – of what we know should be done and what is being done. However, that is not the only discrepancy in this field. There is, at this point, no basic agreement about what the goal of “development” is, or whether development is desirable at all. The pursuit of development is by a large number of academics as well as activists and practitioners, not only considered a direct cause of environmental destruction, but also essentially an idea that has justified exploitation, colonization and inequality. This argument has at least four key dimensions. First, “development” is linked to the expansion of a global capitalist economy into ever broader geographical areas and societal spheres. Already in The Latin American critique of the Limits to Growth report – the so-called Bariloche report published in 1976 called Catastrophe or New Society? A Latin American World Model (Herrera et al. 1976) – a link was made between dependency relations in a global capitalist system, and the extensive resource extraction and exploitation in former colonies (Herrera et al. 2004). While Limits to Growth pointed to the physical barriers to endless consumption and use of natural resources, the Bariloche report argued that the main problem was unequal distribution as a result of an unjust socio-economic system. Neither of the reports actually saw economic growth or development as such as the problem. Yet, in different ways both reports can be considered predecessors to arguments that reject the very idea of development, and consider it an expression of a global capitalist system that is a threat to humanity, rather than a tool for improving human lives. Second, “development” is associated with a discourse rooted in Western philosophy that links it to civilization and progress, but that reserves such categories for societies and peoples similar to the European. Not only that, as argued by the Argentinean/Mexican philosopher Enrique Dussel, the very idea of development

Introduction  3

rests on its possible negation – the raw, undeveloped and the savage. Development in Europe is thus not only dependent on the colonies in terms of access to commodities and profit, but also conceptually as the “enlightened Europe” can only be understood as the opposite of the backwards Africa, Asia and Latin America (Alcoff and Mendieta 2000). Third, the origins of the idea of “development” in European history and social theory making sense of modernity present ethical as well as epistemological problems. It is an ethical problem since development is associated with a specific culture, of which dominance is justified by an unfulfilled promise of contributing to generalized improvement of human lives (Escobar 1995). The idea of development may be both patronizing and racist, and one that has justified oppression and violence in the name of human progress, while denying different peoples’ right to decide and follow their own paths. Fourth, it is also an epistemological problem, since the very the idea of development emerges out of a specific tradition not only of viewing evolution as a linear process from less advanced to more advanced, but a modern belief in the existence of knowledge with universal validity. Thus, development falsely presents a culturally and historically bounded epistemology and ontology as if it had universal validity, justifying the exclusion of alternative thinking (Quijano 1999). The result of the multiple criticism is that the field that we could name “international development and the environment” has moved from denominating a scholarly and political debate about specific goals and means, to being a fragmented field in which no basic agreements exist about legitimate goals, means or methods. One purpose of this handbook is to provide insight into four levels of critique against the very core of development discussed above: (1) the empirical (that development has not fulfilled its promise, but caused environmental destruction); (2) the political (that development has become a tool for expanding global capitalism and oppressing peoples); (3) the ethical (that development portrays some cultures and life forms as above others); and (4) epistemological and ontological (that development is based on a false belief that it means the same to different people and that knowledge about it is generalizable across time and space). These criticisms have given rise to current deeply polarized debates about “decoupling”: whether it is possible to decouple economic growth from the negative environmental consequences of the use of natural resources and whether it is possible to decouple development from its Eurocentric and colonial roots to depict a more neutral idea of human progress. However, the handbook also has the ambition of bridging some of the gaps that have emerged due to the multifaceted critique. At a point where in many Western academic circles, the goal of “development” has been replaced by “survival” due to threats of climate change and natural resources depletion, strong calls for “development” from elites in the Global South still exist and people in marginalized areas in both the Global North and the Global South continue to aspire material, social and political transformations that can improve their lives and futures in manners akin to “development” (Bennike, Rasmussen, and Nielsen 2020). Indeed, modernization, technical upgrading and industrialization is as high on the agenda as ever, especially

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in many African and Asian countries (Bull 2015). Thus to flat out reject the legitimacy of the idea of development would be as ignorant and arrogant as the insistence on it has often been. Rather, we argue, we need new narratives of what better lives might involve and how actors originating in different parts of the world can best contribute to such improvement. To produce such narratives, we must also question dogmatic tendencies in the generalized rejection of development in the multiple proposals for “decolonialization” and “post-colonialism.” In order to do so, we have divided this handbook into four parts. In the first part we discuss the criticism of development, focusing on the environmental aspects and the extent to which it is possible to think of forms of modernization, progress and growth somehow decoupled from environmental impact. The second part switches to a discussion of the role of nature. While the environment in much development thinking is thought of as a resource that is not only infinite but also essentially unchangeable, these ideas are obviously obsolete due to climate change, biodiversity loss and also the transformation of nature in what has been called “the Anthropocene” depicting an age in which human activity has transformed nature (Crutzen 2002). Should we thus think of nature rather as fragile subjects with rights? Where is actually the boundary between human beings and nature? Are we actually in the Anthropocene or should we rather speak of a “capitalocene” (cf. Moore 2016) signifying a particular way of organizing nature under capitalism, and in which a clear dichotomy between capital and nature and even humans and nature cannot be drawn. These are issues that are touched in the second part of the book. In the third part of the book we focus on policies/actions/interventions and forms of governance intended to foster development and how these must be re-thought in the light of the multifaceted critiques and challenges discussed above. The fourth section takes the same critical look at policies/actions/interventions to protect the environment. In the remainder of this Introduction we will discuss these four approaches and outline how the chapters in the Handbook are situated within broader academic and policy debates. The Introduction ends with a reflection over the use for a handbook of this kind half a century after the Stockholm Conference.

2.

RETHINKING DEVELOPMENT: CRITIQUE AND DEFENSE OF A CONTESTED IDEA

Modernization and its Critique Reading President Harry Truman’s inaugural speech from 1949, it may be difficult to understand why this has become such a pivotal event, and one that is commonly considered to mark the start of an international development project (see, i.e. the chapters of Demaria & Gómez-Baggethun, and Gudynas, in this book). In his “Point Four Program” he focuses mainly on how to ensure a way towards freedom and prosperity of all peoples, and emphasizes that this has to pass through increased

Introduction  5

production and the adoption of modern technologies by the poorer nations. Then he commits the United States to invest capital and share its technology, and invites all other nations to do the same: I believe that we should make available to peace-loving peoples the benefits of our store of technical knowledge in order to help them realize their aspirations for a better life. And, in cooperation with other nations, we should foster capital investment in areas needing development. Our aim should be to help the free peoples of the world, through their own efforts, to produce more food, more clothing, more materials for housing, and more mechanical power to lighten their burdens. We invite other countries to pool their technological resources in this undertaking. (Truman 1949)

This is a program that both reflects an optimism regarding the potential of technology and industrialization, and links political freedom, democracy and prosperity to a particular path of industrial upgrading and increased consumption. As pointed out and criticized in this book by Hornborg, it reflected a view of technology as a “privileged tool”, an intrinsically neutral instrument with which to realize goals such as economic growth, but that could also realize goals such as imperial expansion, or political control. The United Nations and the Bretton Woods Institutions (the World Bank and the IMF) had recently been established at that time, and Truman’s speech marked the start of a decade wherein much of the development effort by these institutions was directed towards the building of infrastructure and transfer of technology to set up agendas and policies for a noncommunist pathway to development at the height of the Cold War (Bull and Bøås 2012). The overall strategy and world-view underlying this discourse was synthesized by Walt Rostow into a book from 1960 The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto that is often consider the quintessential “modernization theory” (Rostow 1960). Rostow argued, based on his analysis of the experiences of the USA and the UK, that all societies need to pass through five stages of economic growth by way of which “traditional” societies went from being dominated by agriculture and low productivity to the fifth stage of mass consumption with an economy more oriented to consumer goods and services and links this pathway explicitly to the Cold War struggle between the Soviet Bloc and the West. In subsequent critique (see e.g. Sachs 1992, Escobar 1995) modernization theory has become closely associated with Western attempts at incorporating poor countries into the US dominated orbit as a means of preventing further Soviet expansion in what came to be called the “Third World”. The critique against modernization theory mounted: it is Eurocentric, it is based on an incorrect linear understanding of history, it supports Western European geopolitical ambitions and patches over global power structures and dependency relations that hinders similar developments across different countries, and not least: it is unsustainable – imagining mass consumption as the desired end-stage of history. Critiques of modernization theory have tended to identify it with Rostow’s approach, however, his approach was severely criticized from within contemporary circles of

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modernization theorists. Modernization theory from the 1960s and 1970s was not a consistent set of ideas but a field with significant variations. Many scholars sought to understand the special conditions in what was then often rather condescendingly called “backward areas,” and how economic theories should be adapted to their particular problems. As such, they created the basis for establishing “development economics” as a distinct sub-discipline of development studies; and while undoubtedly guilty of creating dichotomies between industrialized and developing countries, they were not solely based on US and Western Europe’s experiences. A surprising number of the researchers drew directly or indirectly on the experience of Eastern Europe in the recommendations formulated, and key contributors such as Paul Rosenstein-Rodan, Ragnar Nurkse and Alexander Gerschenkron all had a Russian or Eastern European background and drew heavily on this heritage in their work (Gerschenkron 1963, Nurkse 1953, Rosenstein-Rodan 1943), while others like John Friedmann drew from their experiences from Latin America and South Korea (Friedmann 1966). Another strand of modernization theory argued that cultural and social variables are at least as important as economic ones. Gino Germani is perhaps one of the most notable proponents of this strand, contributing enormously to the development of Latin American sociology while working and living in Buenos Aires (Germani 1964). As argued by Rivarola Puntigliano and Selgas in this book, there are rich geopolitical traditions emerging from outside of the United States and Europe that equally place “development” at the center of geopolitical thinking. Thus, it should be possible to reimagine development without subordinating one culture to another, and also without compromising the environment. They suggest that Latin American geopolitical thinking is a rich source in this endeavor. Dependency and Global Inequality However, this is not the Latin American thinking that first impacted the development debate. As mentioned above, the Bariloche report that criticized the Limits of Growth for its lack of focus on global inequalities, builds on a broader critique from various strands of dependency theories that argued that the entire world was encapsulated in a global capitalist system that hindered the developing countries’ possibilities of modernization. Development was either viewed as impossible within the global monopoly capitalist system (Frank 1966), or – as in the argument of the Gramsci-inspired dependency theories – partly possible in local contexts conditioned by a class compromise (Cardoso 1974, Sunkel 1969). Dependency theory also brought back the issue of colonialization, arguing that it had prevented industrialization in the colonial countries, because the profits that could have been reinvested in productive activities were transferred to the center of the colonial power (Baran 1957). This argument laid the foundation for comparing the relationship of exploitation between capitalist and worker as that of “center and periphery” (Galtung 1971, Amin 1972) or “metropoles and satellites” (Frank 1966). While highly critical of the global capitalist system, dependency theories did not criticize “development” or “economic growth” as such. Moreover, in many ways,

Introduction  7

they both criticized and reinforced the dichotomy between developed and developing countries. Yet, what they did was to theoretically link global political processes to the transfer of natural resources from the “periphery” to the “center” of the global economy, due to global structures and the unequal distribution of technologies. As such it forms the basis of the argument by Hornborg in this book: that technologies are material phenomena, dependent on specific inputs of matter, energy, labor and other biophysical resources, but also that those inputs are organized through social arrangements such as the world market. Instead of approaching economic development as a social process mobilizing neutral material instruments – which is to maintain a conceptual dualism separating society from physical phenomena – the challenge is to understand what we think of as development as a sociometabolic process of accumulation, bringing in the material from the start. This is what Alf Hornborg seeks to do in this book. The Individual Turn: Rights-Based Approaches and Neoliberalism The debate between modernization theory and dependency theory was replaced by a debate between two versions of development theory focused on individuals: neoliberalism and “rights-based” theories. While modernization theory focused on “national development” and dependency theory saw the world as an integrated system, both neoliberalism and “rights based” approaches took individual freedoms and rights as the starting point. Rights-based approaches took the uneven distribution of the benefits of development seriously and focused on the need to fulfill basic needs but also the ability to live a life in accordance with individual priorities (Sen 1991, Nussbaum 2000, UNDP 1996). The line of thinking placed responsibilities on the state, but it also sought to limit the state’s powers by emphasizing the rights of citizens, and considering law as a key tool to ensure individual needs. This line of thinking may draw its roots back to 17th-century liberal European philosophy (Cruft, Liao, and Renzo 2015), and considers economic growth and industrialization as best means to the goal (individual welfare), not the goal in itself. Thus, it also prepared the ground for a stronger protection of the environment. Drawing on a blend of Western environmental philosophy and Indigenous thinking from Latin America, in thinking and practice, nature was given rights as a subject (see below and the chapter by McNeish in this book). Yet, the more dominating trend in this “individual turn” was the replacement of “state-led modernization” as had been called for by modernization theory, with “market-led modernization” under the broad umbrella of thinking and practice called “neoliberalism.” It shared with a rights-based approach the consideration of the need to limit the power of the state, but the purpose was to allow the market to operate as a means to achieve growth. Industrialization and technological upgrading was no longer a responsibility of the state; rather it should be left to the market to decide what and where to produce. Moreover, the laws of the markets were seen to operate similarly anywhere, making a particular discipline of “development economics”

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redundant (Bhagwati 1982, Krueger 1974, Bauer 1972). Mass consumption is considered both a natural result of freeing markets, and a goal in itself. Between Sustainable Development and Degrowth It is against the neoliberal version of capitalism and modernization that most subsequent critique is launched. Broadly speaking, the current critique has taken three main roads. One seeks to maintain the argument from the Limits to Growth report that the problem is not economic growth in itself; the problem is a combination of population growth and the amount of natural resources needed for producing goods to satisfy the needs of a growing population. This has led to a broad literature and policy proposals for a form of “green growth” that defends the parts of the original ideas of development that refer to the need for technological upgrading and modernization, while seeking to transform this process towards one that pollutes less, uses less natural resources and, most importantly, reduces climate emissions (Stoknes 2021, Jacobs 2013). This builds upon the ideas of “ecological modernization” that there is no zero-sum trade-off between economic prosperity and environmental concerns. Environmental protection is no longer seen as a burden upon the economy, but rather as a potential source of future growth (Hajer 1995, Weale 1992). As such, ecological modernization goes further in the acceptance of growth than the idea of sustainable development, as proposed by the Brundtland report (Langhelle 2000, Brundtland 1987). Yet, the solution is different forms of regulation of capitalism and growth, not their rejection. Thus, all of these ideas rest on a belief that it is possible to “decouple” development from the negative environmental effects of economic growth. This idea is rejected in the line of thinking known as “degrowth.” Degrowth is a movement that started in France in the 1970s (known as décroissance) and that has gained interest across Europe in particular (D’Alisa, Demaria, and Kallis 2014). As outlined by Demaria and Gómez-Baggethun, degrowth is both a scholarly research field and a policy. Its goal is not necessarily to reduce economic growth, but to stop making this a goal of human endeavors. Gudynas – whose works have contributed strongly to the questioning of natural resource-dependent development models in Latin America and beyond – argues that the idea that economic growth leads to better lives has become a myth that is now accepted and reaffirmed by political actors across the political spectrum. This happens, according to Gudynas, in spite of mounting evidence that growth has not led to either general improvements in humans’ lives nor a sustainable management of the environment. Demaria and Gómez-Baggethun present degrowth as a social and intellectual movement that advocates reduced production and consumption in the affluent regions of the world. They argue for leaving growth and development behind altogether, and to aim for the construction of an environmentally viable and just society, based on principles of sufficiency, sharing, simplicity, conviviality, equality and care.

Introduction  9

The Post-Colonial Challenge and Development’s Revenge Many ideas of “degrowth” resonate with those of the third line of critique, the post-colonial or “decolonial” critique of Eurocentrism and universalism of dominant development thinking and practice. The decolonial critique is a combination of a rejection of “development” as a prescription and description of human progress, and call for a new way of acquiring knowledge, including a call for the recognition of knowledge established through a variety of processes and methods (Sachs 1992, Escobar 1992, Dussel 1993, Mbembe 1992). This call for diversity of the post-colonial critique evolved into a project of “decolonializing” thinking about development, the environment and the relations between them (Grosfoguel 2011). While this perspective has occupied much of the academic thinking on the relationship between the environment and development in the West after the turn of the millennium, ironically, a strong push for development on its traditional terms as technological upgrading, modernization and economic growth has come from China and other countries in the Global South (Bull 2015). While contradicting in part the market-based capitalism of the neoliberal West, the new push for development has brought back the strong role for the state as argued for by modernization theorists. It has also, more recently sought its own ways of incorporating environmental concerns with the desire for economic growth and development (Kim and Thurbon 2015, Zhou et al. 2018). The two last chapters of the first part of the book discusses these attempts, and whether they are compatible with both sustainability and democracy and human rights. Bull discusses whether the modern state, which is to a large extent structurally dependent on economic growth, can be transformed to become an instrument in a real green transformation, by discussing ideas ranging from that of a democratic “green state” (Eckersley 2004, Barry 2021, Eckersley 2021) to the “green developmental state” and “environmental authoritarianism” (Chen and Lees 2016). Brauteseth provides a thorough critique of the Chinese Communist Party’s proposal, coined as ecological civilization, arguing that this is an ambiguous tool that will seek to transform the ideas of environmental justice to exclude human rights and claims for democracy, not only within Chinese borders, but potentially also outside. Thus, the project of “international development” has been thoroughly taken out of the context of Truman’s call for the sharing of technology as a means to provide freedom and prosperity for all peoples, to become a tool for an emerging superpower in a new geopolitical context.

3.

RETHINKING THE ENVIRONMENT: FROM INFINITE RESOURCE TO FRAGILE SUBJECT

Nature in the Green Revolution In modernization theory referred to above, nature and ecosystems were for the most part discussed in relation to agriculture. Comprehensive land reforms were launched

10  Handbook on international development and the environment

across the world under the guidance of the United Nations during the 1950s. The USSR, China and the Eastern Bloc emphasized collective ownership, large scale operations and mechanization to achieve economic development. Land reforms in the rest of the world emphasized land redistribution, agricultural productivity, large scale operation, and new technology. From the 1970s onwards, the focus shifted to integrated rural development combining productive activities with improvements in living standards and infrastructure. Land reforms launched in the 1970s were variegated, ranging from revolutionary reforms (e.g. China, Vietnam and Ethiopia) and military induced reforms (e.g. Peru, Egypt, Chile and Iran), to decolonization reforms (e.g. Algeria, Zimbabwe and the Philippines), but they had in common that results were mixed at best (Rekha 1996). The development objective shifted from generating overall growth, to assisting “target groups” like women and small scale farmers. However, many of the land reforms of the 1970s and 1980s opened up the forest frontier for the advancement of the agricultural frontier, in many cases causing massive deforestation. A main purpose of early agricultural reforms was to increase productivity. Although most early scholars of development assumed that the impetus for development and economic growth would necessarily come from the industrial sector (Nurkse 1953, Lewis 1951) already in the 1940s with support of the Rockefeller Foundation the Mexican Agricultural Program (MAP) was launched. A variety of wheat that doubled and tripled yields in a short period of time was developed there in 1954. Based on the success of this variety, Norman Borlaug – lead scientist of MAP – brought the new seeds to India in the early 1960s, and the seeds were subsequently released for commercial use in India and other countries.5 Together with fertilizers and irrigation, improved hybrid seeds were spread to other countries by the Rockefeller and the Ford Foundations, and state support and credit were seen as crucial for the success of the application of agricultural improvements in production. In 1968 William Gaud, then administrator of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) coined the term “Green Revolution” at a meeting of the Society for International Development in Washington DC, claiming that such developments in agriculture “contain the makings of a new revolution. It is not a violent Red Revolution like that of the Soviets, nor is it a White Revolution like that of the Shah of Iran. I call it the Green Revolution” (cited in Patel 2013: 5). The development of high yielding varieties was closely associated with the establishment of internationally funded agricultural research centers (IARCs) that brought new plant breeding techniques to the problems of agriculture in low-income countries. The first two IARCs were established in the Philippines (the International Rice Research Institute in 1962) and in Mexico (the International Center for Maize and Wheat Improvement in 1967). The latter grew out of the MAP mentioned above. Additional IARCs with breeding activities in a number of other food crops were established later. The technologies of the Green Revolution soon took front stage in rural development policy and practice ushering unprecedented agricultural expansion in the “developing world.” This happened in the context of the Cold War in which many governments would seek to appease raising dissatisfaction among peasants and

Introduction  11

the landless and the threat of communism by creating the conditions for successful agricultural development. The Green Revolution changed the thinking about nature. It was not only a reservoir that could be harvested, but something that could be profoundly transformed to better serve the needs of humans. Criticisms of the Green Revolution on ecological and socio-economic grounds have abounded since the 1970s. High yields could only be obtained under certain optimum conditions, and the negative environmental effects deriving from the use of fertilizers and pesticides were soon evident. Another of the main criticisms was that it created a landless rural proletariat as income distribution shifted in favor of the wealthy. It led to a disintegration of traditional social structures and mass migration of landless poor to the cities, contributing to urban slums (Glaeser 2010, Holt-Giménez 2008). Furthermore, the Green Revolution failed to eradicate hunger. Although the number of hungry people in China had dropped by over 50 percent by 1990, hunger actually increased in the rest of the world (Holt-Giménez 2008). Capitalist Ecologies and the Planetary Factory The Green Revolution laid the foundation for the way in which food is produced in the world today, resting on a conceptualization of nature as essentially inexhaustible and malleable. In this book, Jakobsen discusses the global structuring of food and agriculture from the 1980s onwards. He argues that the current industrialized, mechanized and increasingly corporate-controlled mode of producing and consuming agricultural goods has accelerated environmental degradation. Ecological ramifications of the corporate food regime examined in Jakobsen’s chapter include the expansion of monocultures and deforestation, land degradation and soil erosion, and the dismantling of agrarian livelihoods. The rise in the frequency and impact of zoonotic diseases across the world is one consequence of this. This is examined further in the chapter by Aguilar-Støen and Jakobsen. Their chapter pertains to an expanding research area seeking to understand how capital organizes nature (cf. Moore 2016) and how it impacts on the emergence of pandemics. They focus particularly on meat production and consumption, both of which are central in defining the landscapes of the Anthropocene. Such landscapes have been shaped by a planetary factory (Arboleda 2020) producing animals, organized by vertical integration of agricultural production, the displacement of small-scale farmers, and the production of feed and fodder by expanding, once more, the agricultural frontier into forested areas. In his chapter, Barbesgaard takes a similar view on the oceans. While oceans have received surprisingly little attention in development studies, they are increasingly given a prominent role in the future provision of food as well as energy. Barbesgaard focuses on how the emergence of what is called the “blue economy” is conditioned on the role of corporations and how a capitalist organization of the oceans has evolved over time.

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From Peasant Studies to the Commodification of Nature However, the 1960s and 1970s was not only the decade of the Green Revolution; it also saw the emergence of the academic field of peasant and agrarian studies. During the 1960s and 1970s with the war in Vietnam, the Cultural Revolution in China, the anticolonial wars in Africa and the guerilla movements in various countries of Latin America there was a growing awareness of humans’ impact on a range of interrelated environmental crises. This increased the attention of scholars and policy makers towards the peasantries of Asia, Africa and Latin America (Edelman and Wolford 2017). The result was a rich body of literature that analyzed the lived experiences, structural configurations and representations of agrarian societies and the political and cultural economy of production, consumption, accumulation, distribution and governance in relation to urbanization, development policy and modernization (Edelman and Wolford 2017). During the 1980s the field of political ecology emerged and scholars started to research the political dimensions of environmental change (e.g. deforestation, desertification and soil erosion), revealing in many cases the effects of development policy and interventions (Benjaminsen and Svarstad 2021). It became evident that to make sense of the problems of environment and development an interdisciplinary approach was needed. As Piers Blaikie (Blaikie 1995: 1) comments, “environmental issues are by definition also social ones and therefore our understanding must rest on a broader interdisciplinary perspective.” The above scholarly fields were pivotal in highlighting the tight and complex links between development, the environment and poverty (Adams 2019). The growing awareness of such links within the context of a neoliberal turn in development policy (Carroll and Jarvis 2015) resulted in a series of policy initiatives and research resulting in new conceptual models and interventions towards the commodification of nature. The commodification of nature is of course not a new idea (Gunderson 2017).6 Nature continues, as in the 1950s and 1960s, to be conceptualized as resources but the logic shifts towards commodifying nature to save it through offering economic incentives for its conservation and to decomposing nature into different components, such as genes, ecosystems and ecological processes such as carbon storage, that can be traded in global markets (McAfee 1999). Indigenous Cosmovisions and the Rights to Nature While an idea of commodification of nature dominated policy making in major institutions, ideas that rejected this gained ground among social movements for environmental justice. Within this current, the struggles for granting legal rights to nature have been prominent and the most transformative cases have been led by Indigenous peoples (O’Donnell et al. 2020). These movements merged ideas about rights emerging in Western liberal philosophy as mentioned above, with ideas originating in centuries’ old Indigenous thought. They were channeled into national constitutions through the work of broad and diverse social movements. Ecuador was

Introduction  13

the first country to recognize nature as having legal rights in its constitution in 2008 followed by Bolivia in 2010 (Lalander 2014). Later, courts granted legal rights to rivers, for instance in New Zealand where the Maori people finally were able to gain legal status for the Whanganui River (Sheber 2020). However, there is often a difficult road from legal achievements to practice. John McNeish in his chapter studying the court ruling recognizing the Atrato River Basin as a legal subject reminds us of the dangers that the recognition of legal rights represent in terms of “greenwashing” deeply entrenched political asymmetries. While new cosmovisions and ideas giving nature intrinsic value have gained ground, perhaps ironically, the drive for reducing the emission of greenhouse gases through reducing the use of fossil fuels has justified new processes of commodification of nature. As discussed by Barbesgaard and Freng Dale & Gross respectively, the “green transition” portrays the ocean and the Arctic as the last “frontiers” of pristine nature. However, as the authors argue, these are better understood as frontiers of capital expansion (cf. Moore 2016, Rasmussen and Lund 2018) emerging from ideas related to green growth and sustainable development. The “green transition” not only changes the conceptualization of oceans and the Arctic; it has become a part of a global rush for land and resources changing the conceptualization of rural landscapes. After the food price crisis of 2007‒2008 commentators started to talk about an ongoing global land grab, with much of the attention centering on Africa (Cotula 2013). Research soon showed that it was far from an “African” phenomena (Borras et al. 2011). New land deals can be found in Latin America, although food production is not always the driver of such deals (Aguilar-Støen 2016). Further, Eastern Europe has also experienced a rush for land (Visser, Mamonova, and Spoor 2012, Widgren 2015) with Sweden and Danish-based companies controlling considerable sizes of land in Russia, Romania and Ukraine. While the number of land deals skyrocketed after the food price crisis, there is an ongoing debate and disagreement both within policy and scholarly circles regarding difference over the causes, character, mechanisms, meanings, trajectories and implications of contemporary land deals (Edelman, Oya, and Borras 2013). Several controversial mining and energy projects with foreign capital are planned in northern Scandinavia often in direct conflict with reindeer herding. In their chapter Freng Dale and Gross analyze oil and hydropower which in addition to mining, conflict with Indigenous herding in the Arctic, suggesting that there are good reasons to believe that the interest in resource extraction and pressure for development in Arctic regions will increase in the years to come. China’s current plans for infrastructure expansion makes the Arctic as much a geopolitical target area as other areas of the world in which China’s interests and power is shaping patterns of resource use and extraction. The emergence of the Arctic as a resource frontier (Moore 2016, and Rasmussen and Lund 2018) demonstrates that it is just as dynamic, environmentally and politically, as any other frontier of resource exploitation in the world (Benjaminsen and Robbins 2015). Perhaps much of the lessons we have learnt about environment and development in the Global South will be useful for reimagining sustainability in the Global North.

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4.

RE-CONSIDERING DEVELOPMENT AND ENVIRONMENTAL POLICIES AND GOVERNANCE

Ideas in development have tended to evolve in a circular manner. Policy making and practice have informed theory, while ideas and theory inform policy making and practice (Bøås and McNeill 2003). Research on the incorporation of environmental issues into development policy show very mixed results – results that often contradict and challenge the deep dividing lines in development theory. In the third and fourth parts of this book, we turn to chapters that discuss evolution of development and environmental policies and interventions and forms of governing such interventions. When environmental issues first entered into discussions in development institutions, they were often considered “add ons” in an increasingly heavy loaded “Christmas tree” of development projects. The core remained the same: the idea of development as modernization, economic growth and technological upgrading. Yet, the ornament progressively included concerns for environmental issues, gender issues and concern for Indigenous peoples and other vulnerable groups. Biodiversity conservation and pollution control became a part of the development agenda. The main actors were still the Western state and Western development institutions, but demands for good governance, human rights and civil society participation as well as private sector involvement sought not only to change the development policies in a desired direction, but also the institutions and forms of governance to carry them out. The already mentioned SDGs can be considered to be the uttermost expression of this approach wherein the core of the idea of development idea is retained, while a large number of additional social goals are added. The last two parts of this book point to four major trends in the incorporation of environmental and development issues into global policies and practices. The first trend is the use of market mechanisms and the “devolution” of the mandate to implement policy to business and individual consumers. This trend is criticized for being a reflection of the overall neoliberal form of capitalism dominating the world (and discussed above) deepening inequality and environmental destruction. However, in the chapters in this book discussing this trend, it is evident that this is only one side of the story. Nicolena vonHedemann discusses the widely used policy tool of Payment for Environmental Services (PES) programs. These compensate farmers and rural landowners for not logging, and thus reducing deforestation. Such ecosystem service-focused interventions have been criticized for having colonialist and neoliberal underpinnings that produce negative outcomes for participants, deepen social and spatial inequalities, and undermine Indigenous resource sovereignty. However, as vonHedemann shows, PES programs also offer possibilities for local communities, including Indigenous communities, for demanding recognition for conservation stewardship and development needs. Almut Schilling-Vacaflor focuses on another widely used governance mechanism, namely the public–private governance of global supply chains as a means of reducing deforestation and achieving other environmental goals. Supply chain governance, that is, the introduction of environmental standards as conditions for exports, links consumers in the Global North to environmental

Introduction  15

practices in the Global South and give the former a say in the latter. Yet, as shown by Schilling-Vacaflor based on her case study of development of social and environmental standards for soybean production in Brazil, although these are negotiated by NGOs and other development actors aiming to reduce the negative impact of global consumption on the environment in the South, they often fail to take local development concerns into account. As a result of the lack of participation as well as data, concerns of affected communities such as inequality, pesticide contamination and access to water have largely been overlooked in existing governance arrangements. Hansen and Wethal also focus on consumption and the possibility of the consumer as an actor of governance of development and environmental issues. More specifically, they discuss the rise of the “new middle classes” in the Global South. The emergence of these groups of consumers challenge the widely held assumption in the development literature that the Global North overconsumes while the Global South underconsumes. Hansen and Wethal characterize this assumption as partly a “myth.” However, while the shift in global consumption diminishes some forms of inequality, it creates new forms. Moreover, Hansen and Wethal question critically the idea that new groups of consumers in the Global South may be drivers of sustainable policies and practices. Miklian and Katsos take a more positive view on the possibility of private-led market based governance of development and the environment. They focus on what has come to be known as the Environment, Social and Governance agenda (ESG) as a business-led effort to contribute to sustainable development. They argue that the ESG agenda constitutes a sea change in our understandings of how the private sector engages with societies facing socio-economic challenges. By incorporating such concerns within ESG frameworks, firms are re-setting their internal priorities and agendas to align more fully with a more expansive long-term vision of business– society relations, one that understands long-term profit is contingent on positive societal relationships, aligning their diplomatic aims (at least in principle) more closely with traditional development aims. Although there are many uncertainties related to the results, the interconnection between the private sector and development actors will make for a foundational change in business–society relationships in the years to come. A second major trend is new demand for traditional development interventions, precisely from the Global South. Due to widespread criticism against the social and environmental implications of large-scale development projects, such as the building of infrastructure and dams for electrification, the Western-led development banks and institutions largely abandoned such projects during the 1990s. This led to a deficit in the construction of infrastructure in many countries, and it created a void that China sought to fill after its 2013 launch of the mega infrastructure program, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). In their chapter analyzing and scrutinizing the BRI Rodríguez and Gurol study the impact of the BRI in three different settings in the Global South and they argue that infrastructure is not only a part of the modernization of local economies, it is a set of processes and practices that enable transnational and multi-scalar transformations of nature–society configurations. Yet it also enhances

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the global flow of goods, workforce, and commodities and (re-)produce social hierarchies within and across countries and continents. The support that this initiative has achieved in many parts of the Global South stands in stark contrast to the critique raised “on behalf” of the Global South of the very idea of development and modernization discussed above. Even when the tendency to reinforce the distinction and dichotomy between the developing and developed countries has been largely abandoned in development theory it is still present in the most ambitious global initiative to address environmental issues, namely the global climate negotiations. As discussed in the chapter by Skodvin in this book, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are associated with all aspects of the economy, which implies that economic growth seems to be inextricably linked to GHG emissions. Thus, complex decisions about burden sharing and compensation schemes, particularly between developed and developing countries, are at the heart of climate negotiations. How to find an effective international response to climate change that also allows redistribution of wealth and increased development and prosperity has become one of the key problems in global climate negotiations. While the debate not only distinguishes between developed and developing countries, it has also created a tendency towards “coalition fragmentation,” providing insight into the contradictions, complexities and shortcomings of a broad de-colonial critique as discussed in the beginning of this chapter. Among the issues that create divisions is the question of keeping fossil fuels in the ground, also in the Global South in order to reduce GHG emissions. The most dramatic drop in the production of hydrocarbons seen in the world in recent history occurred in Venezuela between 2016 and 2021. In that period the country’s oil production fell to one fourth of what it had been (from 1.9 billion barrels per day (bpd) to 500,000 bpd). This was accompanied by a dramatic economic and social crisis and the worst fall in living standards seen in any country outside of a war zone (Raffalli 2020, Puente and Rodríguez 2020). The question then arises: is it possible to conceive of a reduction in the production of fossil fuel without a parallel social and economic crisis? In his chapter Antulio Rosales shows how the crisis and the management of it depend essentially on governance. Not only is a catastrophic form of governance that has repealed years of democratic modernization the root of the social crisis, but also the reason for the failure in managing it. This also leaves a partially ironic and contradictory conclusion: that to manage a movement away from the development model based on modernization and economic growth, we do not need a return to forms of governance based on family clans, networks, clientelism and corruption, but rather a modernization of governance. Such contradictions are also evident in the chapter that discuss the local implementation of policies to strengthen the green shift in poor countries. Access to clean energy one of the SDGs, and one that is key to achieve a global renewable energy transition. However, the provision of electricity was also a core goal in the more traditional development agenda. It is a signpost of modernization and a means to achieve a number of social and welfare goals. As such they are both desired and criticized for re-creating technocentric models for development. In Campbell and

Introduction  17

Winther’s chapter they discuss how the provision of clean energy as a part of the green shift re-creates a number of conflicts and contradictions of the “old” development agenda, including gender issues.

5.

A HANDBOOK ON INTERNATIONAL ENVIRONMENT AND DEVELOPMENT FOR A NEEDED TRANSFORMATION

Half a century since the environment was first placed on the international development agenda, “development” as well as “the environment” have become deeply contested concepts. In much recent literature one would rather than “development” speak of “transition discourses” (TDs) understood as narratives that call for a significant paradigmatic or civilizational transformation (Escobar 2015). This indicates both the rejection of development and the rejection of scientific knowledge as a basis for action. A broad call is made for a deep transformation of values away from those underpinning the dominating Western civilization with its focus on modernization, linear development and exponential growth. It is a call for a new narrative that places nature and the realization of human well-being, not capitalist profit or continued consumption, at the center. Against this background, a pertinent question would be: what is the use for a handbook on international development and the environment? Who is it for? What value does the different lessons collected here have beyond the sites that are referred to? Our answer to that is that we must take the critique of development very seriously, so seriously that we also need to think critically about the critique. This is one of the things this book does, through the different chapters the authors explicitly and implicitly question the critique of development. The chapters that follow will show how ideas of modernization and development are not only rooted in Western thinking. Rivarola Puntigliano and Selgas discuss visions for modernization and development in a Latin American cultural tradition, rooted in different geopolitical projects than the West. Rodríguez and Gurol as well as Brauteseth discuss the Chinese vision for progress that contains both similar and different ideas of modernization but also many flaws, like the Western visions for modernization. On the other hand, the book illustrates that the questioning of development and modernization are also to some extent rooted in Western thought. Early ideas of post-development rested on the shoulders of French social theorists, perhaps first and foremost Michel Foucault, while the liberal conception of rights have informed recent conceptualizations of the rights of nature, jointly with a number of other sources, among them Latin American Indigenous thinking (Gudynas 2011). The book also illustrates that “development” is not only a discourse justifying Western development interventions. It is also driven by the desires of new middle classes (Hansen and Wethal) as well as local communities and Indigenous groups (vonHedemann), among others. The desire for better infrastructure (Rodríguez and Gurol) and access to electricity (Campbell and Winther), and many other services

18  Handbook on international development and the environment

and goods are not associated only with a Western development project, but with the desire, and material aspirations, of people across the world that strive for better lives. The fact that the roots of, and support for, ideas of development originate in different places of the world only means that the “cultural domination critique” of development should be questioned. It does not make the environmental critique of development less relevant. Indeed, whether coal is burned in China, the United States, India or South Africa, it has the same impact on the global climate. Construction of highways and dams have negative consequences for biodiversity whether it occurs in the Global North or the Global South or is financed by Chinese or European companies and institutions. We know that the world cannot bear continued development based on the idea, or “myth” in the words of Gudynas in this volume, of economic growth. Yet, we are far from being able to provide narratives that at the same time offer promises of better lives and create the basis for legitimate joint action and governance. This book intends to give some insights into elements that could form such a narrative. One element is that the current functioning of global capitalism must be questioned. As most elaborately argued by Barbesgaard and Jakobsen as well as Aguilar-Støen and Jakobsen, the current global regimes for producing food, whether on land or in the oceans, are fundamentally unsustainable and have a number of severe consequences not only for the functioning of ecosystems but also for human and more-than human nature. However, that does not mean that all food production or all fisheries are unsustainable. There are ways of regulating as well as protecting and encouraging more sustainable forms of production. We have discussed both strong and formal regulation (e.g. in Brauteseth’s chapter) and “soft” and informal regulation (in Schilling-Vacaflor and Miklian & Katsos’s chapters). While all have their flaws and shortcomings, that does not mean they cannot be developed into more effective instruments. A second important element, one that depends fundamentally on our ability to encourage, negotiate, dialogue and deliberate as well as to implement and monitor shifts in regulations and practices, is what jointly could be called governance. This, in turn, depends fundamentally on respect for democracy and human rights. This is most explicitly underlined in the contributions of Rosales and Brauteseth in this book discussing, respectively, what could be called an authoritarian failure and an authoritarian success: one has overseen a growth collapse (Venezuela) while the other has overseen a growth success (China). Yet, in both cases there are severe environmental and human implications. While few governance failures are equally spectacular as that of Venezuela, this book is replete with examples of good ideas and initiatives that have been implemented in contexts characterized by low trust, corruption and power abuse and that thus, at best, have had little impact, as for example the otherwise interesting idea of riverine rights as discussed by McNeish in this book. Despite its relevance governance is not something that can be imposed or “fixed,” as discussed in Bull’s chapter. It grows out of struggles and conversations. In order to move closer to the development of narratives of transitions that may provide answers to aspirations and hopes for the global population, we cannot simply abandon devel-

Introduction  19

opment without offering something to replace it. In order to do so, we must continue the conversation. And we must accept and acknowledge different forms of knowledge and different voices in that conversation and contribute to assuring that they are all heard. The hope is that this book makes a small contribution to that. There is strong scientific consensus demonstrating that the world economy is unsustainable and that mainstream solutions under the umbrella of sustainable development, whether circular economy, SDGs or even Green New Deals, seem rather as techno utopian fantasies if they are underpinned by the assumption that it is possible for the economy to grow and simultaneously decrease ecological impacts (Kaul et al. 2022). The works that inspired the launch of the Stockholm Conference, calling attention to the emergence of environmental problems and the need for a new international order, addressed first the perceived need for a new international economic order, to decrease the gap between rich and poor nations by changing North–South relations and to solve the combined problem of resource depletion and environmental deterioration threatening the survival of humankind. Fifty years down the road, we argue that a third element in the narrative for transformation necessarily involves disentangling progress from growth. This time around as income inequality is on the rise not only between but also within both the Global North and the Global South, and natural resource extraction with is inherent environmental and social consequences is expanding within the margins of European and North American countries, the need for transformations is not only relevant for people in what we used to call “developing” countries but also for people in what we used to call “developed” ones. This is not an easy task for in the public imagination as well as in the ways we measure it, progress is intrinsically linked to growth. Proponents of the idea of degrowth meet a range of criticisms ranging from the vagueness of the concept, challenges related to how to measure reductions in consumption and production (van den Bergh 2011), to the emphasis on the local economy disregarding the urgency to address global environmental change from a transnational political perspective (Schwartzman 2012), to the gap in the degrowth discourse in the “how” to move towards a degrowth society to the risk of unintentionally conflating critiques of modernity with a rejection of liberal democratic institutions (Strunz and Bartkowski 2018). The degrowth movement, like post-development before it, faces the challenge to transcend resistance and critique and actually propose alternative models that are practical, realistic and at the same time appeal to the public and to policy makers. Perhaps some inspiration is also to be found in analysis that continue to insist on retaining a focus on modern technology as a global social strategy of utilizing nature to physically establish global social inequalities, something Alf Hornborg does in his chapter in this book. Keeping this in mind might invite our imagination into transformations that allow technological advances to be employed for the conscious, democratic and collective regulation of social metabolism, in the words of Martin Arboleda (2020). He also remind us that the growth imperative threatens labor standards in the cities and in rural areas both in the Global North and the Global South which might offer unforeseen venues for alliances between disparate geographies of the world. Arboleda’s optimistic suggestion is to find ways, spaces and means to

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forge alliances and dialogues between modern science and technology and the situated knowledges of those suffering the most from the seemingly unescapable links between growth and progress. We hope to contribute to that with this book.

NOTES 1. These included Rachel Carson’s The Silent Spring (1962), Paul Erlich’s The Population Bomb (1968), Garreth Hardin’s The Tragedy of the Commons (1968), and René Dubos and Barbara Ward’s Only One Earth (1971). 2. Report on the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, Stockholm, June 5‒6, 1972, https://​documents​-dds​-ny​.un​.org/​doc/​UNDOC/​GEN/​NL7/​300/​05/​IMG/​ NL730005​.pdf​?OpenElement (last accessed 29 March 2023). 3. Jørgen Randers, Litteraturhuset, May 2022. 4. See the SDG tracker: https://​sdg​-tracker​.org/​. 5. Borlaug was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his contribution to global agriculture and food supply. 6. Indeed, Marx’s theories of how capitalism operates and the nature of the commodity form provide the conceptual building blocks for contemporary work on the commodification of nature. Marx’s analysis of the early land enclosures – the earliest movement to commodify nature on a massive scale – has contemporary applications to understand the commodification of the commons in the Global South (Gunderson 2017).

REFERENCES Adams, B. 2019. Green Development: Environment and Sustainability in a Developing World. London: Routledge. Aguilar-Støen, Mariel. 2016. “Beyond Transnational Corporations, Food and Biofuels: The Role of Extractivism and Agribusiness in Land Grabbing in Central America.” Forum for Development Studies 43 (1):155‒175. doi: 10.1080/08039410.2015.1134641. Alcoff, Linda, and Eduardo Mendieta. 2000. Thinking from the Underside of History: Enrique Dussel’s Philosophy of Liberation. Washington, DC: Rowman & Littlefield. Amin, Samir. 1972. “Underdevelopment and Dependence in Black Africa-Origins and Contemporary Forms.” The Journal of Modern African Studies 10 (4):503‒524. Arboleda, Martín. 2020. Planetary Mine: Territories of Extraction under Late Capitalism. London and New York: Verso Books. Baran, Paul. 1957. The Political Economy of Growth. New York: Monthly Review Press. Barry, John. 2021. “Green Republicanism and a ‘Just Transition’ from the Tyranny of Economic Growth.” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 24 (5):725‒742. doi: 10.1080/13698230.2019.1698134. Bauer, P. T. 1972. Dissent on Development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Benjaminsen, Tor A., and Paul Robbins. 2015. “Nordic political ecologies.” Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift – Norwegian Journal of Geography 69 (4):191‒196. doi: 10.1080/00291951.2015.1059879. Benjaminsen, Tor A., and Hanne Svarstad. 2021. Political Eology: A Critical Engagement with Global Environmental Issues. London: Springer Nature. Bennike, Rune Bolding, Mattias Borg Rasmussen, and Kenneth Bo Nielsen. 2020. “Agrarian Crossroads: Rural Aspirations and Capitalist Transformation.” Canadian Journal of

Introduction  21

Development Studies / Revue canadienne d'études du développement 41 (1):40‒56. doi: 10.1080/02255189.2020.1710116. Bhagwati, Jagdish N. 1982. “Directly Unproductive, Profit-Seeking (DUP) Activities.” Journal of Political Economy 90 (5):988‒1002. Blaikie, Piers. 1995. Understanding Environmental Issues. London: University College London Press. Borras, Saturnino M., Ruth Hall, Ian Scoones, Ben White, and Wendy Wolford. 2011. “Towards a Better Understanding of Global Land Grabbing: An Editorial Introduction.” The Journal of Peasant Studies 38 (2):209‒216. doi: 10.1080/03066150.2011.559005. Brundtland, Gro Harlem. 1987. Our Common Future – The World Commission on Environment and Development. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bull, Benedicte. 2015. “The ‘rise of the rest’ and he revenge of ‘development’: The emerging economies and shifts in development theory.” In Emerging Economies and Challenges to Sustainability: Theories, Strategies, Local Realities, edited by Arve Hansen and Ulrikke Wethal, 19‒33. London and New York: Routledge. Bull, Benedicte, and Morten Bøås, eds. 2010. International Development: Theories of Modernization and Economic Growth, 4 vols. Vol. 1, Sage Library of International Relations. London: Sage. Bull, Benedicte, and Morten Bøås. 2012. “Between Ruptures and Continuity: Modernisation, Dependency and the Evolution of Development Theory.” Forum for Development Studies 39 (3):319‒336. doi: 10.1080/08039410.2012.688860. Bøås, Morten, and Desmond McNeill. 2003. Global Institutions and Development: Framing the World? New York: Routledge. Cardoso, Fernando Enrique. 1974. “Dependency and Development in Latin America.” New Left Review 74 (1):83‒95. Carroll, Toby, and Darryl S. L. Jarvis. 2015. “The New Politics of Development: Citizens, Civil Society, and the Evolution of Neoliberal Development Policy.” Globalizations 12 (3):281‒304. doi: 10.1080/14747731.2015.1016301. Chen, Geoffrey C., and Charles Lees. 2016. “Growing China’s Renewables Sector: A Developmental State Approach.” New Political Economy 21 (6):574‒586. doi: 10.1080/13563467.2016.1183113. Cotula, A. 2013. The Great African Land Grab?: Agricultural Investments and the Global Food System. New York: Zed Books. Cruft, R., S. M. Liao, and M. Renzo. 2015. Philosophical Foundations of Human Rights, Philosophical Foundations of Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Crutzen, P. J. 2002. “The Anthropocene.” J. Phys. IV France 12 (10):1‒5. D’Alisa, Giacomo, Federico Demaria, and Georgos Kallis. 2014. Degrowth: A Vocabulary for a New Era. London: Routledge. Dussel, Enrique. 1993. “Eurocentrism and Modernity (Introduction to the Frankfurt Lectures).” Boundary 2: The Postmodernism Debate in Latin America 20 (3):65‒76. Eckersley, Robyn. 2004. The Green State: Rethinking Democracy and Sovereignty. Boston, MA: MIT Press. Eckersley, Robyn. 2021. “Greening States and Societies: From Transitions to Great Transformations.” Environmental Politics 30 (1‒2):245‒265. doi: 10.1080/09644016.2020.1810890. Edelman, Marc, Carlos Oya, and Saturnino M. Borras. 2013. “Global Land Grabs: Historical Processes, Theoretical and Methodological Implications and Current Trajectories.” Third World Quarterly 34 (9):1517‒1531. doi: 10.1080/01436597.2013.850190. Edelman, Marc, and Wendy Wolford. 2017. “Introduction: Critical Agrarian Studies in Theory and Practice.” Antipode 49 (4):959‒976. doi: https://​doi​.org/​10​.1111/​anti​.12326. Escobar, Arturo. 1992. “Imagining a Post-Development Era? Critical Thought, Development and Social Movements.” Social Text 31/32. doi: 10.2307/466217.

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Escobar, Arturo. 1995. Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Escobar, Arturo. 2015. “Degrowth, Postdevelopment, and Transitions: A Preliminary Conversation.” Sustainability Science 10 (3):451‒462. doi: 10.1007/s11625-015-0297-5. Falkner, Robert, and Barry Buzan. 2019. “The Emergence of Environmental Stewardship as a Primary Institution of Global International Society.” European Journal of International Relations 25 (1):131‒155. doi: 10.1177/1354066117741948. Frank, Andre Gunder. 1966. “The Development of Underdevelopment.” Monthly Review 18 (4):17‒31. Friedmann, J. 1966. Regional Development Policy: A Case Study of Venezuela. Boston: MIT Press. Galtung, Johan. 1971. “A Structural Theory of Imperialism.” Journal of Peace Research 8 (2):81‒117. Germani, Gino. 1964. La sociología en la América Latina: problemas y perspectivas. Buenos Aires: Eudeba. Gerschenkron, Alexander. 1963. “The Early Phases of Industrialization in Russia: Afterthoughts and Counterthoughts.” In The Economics of Take-Off into Sustained Growth, edited by W.W. Rostow, 169–191. International Economic Association Series. London: Palgrave Macmillan. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1007/​978​-1​-349​-63959​-5​_9 Glaeser, B. 2010. The Green Revolution Revisited: Critique and Alternatives, Vol. 2. London: Routledge. Grosfoguel, Rafael 2011. “Decolonizing Post-Colonial Studies and Paradigms of Political-Economy: Transmodernity, Decolonial Thinking, and Global Coloniality.” TRANSMODERNITY: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World 1 (1). Gudynas, E. 2011. “Buen Vivir: Germinando alternativas al desarrollo.” América Latina en Movimiento 462:1–20. Gunderson, Ryan. 2017. “Commodification of Nature.” In International Encyclopedia of Geography: People, the Earth, Environment and Technology, edited by D. Richardson, N. Castree, M. F. Goodchild, A. Kobayashi, W. Liu and R. A. Marston, 1‒20. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Online Library. Hajer, M. A. 1995. The Politics of Environmental Discourse: Ecological Modernization and the Policy Process. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Herrera, A. O., H. D. Scolnik, G. Chichilnisky, G. C. Gallopin, & J. E. Hardoy. 1976. Catastrophe or New Society? A Latin American World Model. Ottowa, Canada: IDRC. Herrera, Amílcar Oscar, Hugo D. Scolnick, Graciela Chichilnisky, Gilberto C. Gallopín, and Jorgelina Hardoy. 2004. “Catástrofe o nueva sociedad?: modelo mundial latinoamericano; 30 años después.” Buenos Aires: IEED Centro Internacional de Investigaciones para el Desarrollo. Holt-Giménez, Eric. 2008. “Out of AGRA: The Green Revolution returns to Africa.” Development 51 (4):464‒471. doi: 10.1057/dev.2008.49. Jacobs, Michael. 2013. “Green Growth.” In The Handbook of Global Climate and Environmental Policy, edited by Robert Falkner, 197‒211. London: John Wiley & Sons. Kaul, Shivani, Bengi Akbulut, Federico Demaria, and Julien-François Gerber. 2022. “Alternatives to Sustainable Development: What Can We Learn From the Pluriverse in Practice?” Sustainability Science 17 (4):1149‒1158. doi: 10.1007/s11625-022-01210-2. Kim, Sung-Young, and Elizabeth Thurbon. 2015. “Developmental Environmentalism:Explaining South Korea’s Ambitious Pursuit of Green Growth.” Politics & Society 43 (2):213‒240. doi: 10.1177/0032329215571287. Krueger, Anne O. 1974. “The Political Economy of the Rent-Seeking Society.” The American Economic Review 64 (3):291‒303.

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Lalander, Rickard. 2014. “Rights of Nature and the Indigenous Peoples in Bolivia and Ecuador: A Straitjacket for Progressive Development Politics?” Iberoamerican Journal of Development Studies 3 (2):148‒172. doi: http://​dx​.doi​.org/​10​.2139/​ssrn​.2554291. Langhelle, Oluf. 2000. “Why Ecological Modernization and Sustainable Development Should Not Be Conflated.” Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning 2 (4):303‒322. doi: 10.1080/714038563. Lewis, W. Arthur. 1951. Principles of Economic Planning. London: Dennis Dobson. Mbembe, Achille. 1992. “Provisional Notes on the Postcolony.” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 62 (1):3‒37. doi: 10.2307/1160062. McAfee, Kathleen. 1999. “Selling Nature to Save It? Biodiversity and Green Developmentalism.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 17 (2):133‒154. doi: 10.1068/d170133. Meadows, Donatella H., Dennis L. Meadows, Jørgen Randers, and William B. Behrens. 1972. The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind. New York: Universe Books. Moore, J. W. 2016. Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History and the Crisis of Capitalism. Oakland, CA: PM Press. Nurkse, Ragnar. 1953. Problems of Capital Formation in Underdeveloped Countries. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nussbaum, Martha. 2000. Women and Human Development. New York: Cambridge University Press. O’Donnell, Erin, Anne Poelina, Alessandro Pelizzon, and Cristy Clark. 2020. “Stop Burying the Lede: The Essential Role of Indigenous Law(s) in Creating Rights of Nature.” Transnational Environmental Law 9 (3):403‒427. doi: 10.1017/S2047102520000242. Patel, Raj. 2013. “The Long Green Revolution.” The Journal of Peasant Studies 40 (1):1‒63. doi: 10.1080/03066150.2012.719224. Puente, José Manuel, and Jesús Adrian Rodríguez. 2020. “Venezuela en etapa de colapso macroeconómico: un análisis histórico y comparativo.” Améria Latina Hoy 85:55‒72. Quijano, Aníbal. 1999. “Colonialidad del poder, cultura y conocimiento en América Latina.” Dispositio 24 (51):137‒148. Raffalli, Susana. 2020. “Perspectivas de la crisis humanitaria.” In Perspectivas 2020, Politica UKAB, Deciembre 2019, Caracas. https://​politikaucab​.net/​2019/​12/​18/​perspectivas​-2020/​ Rasmussen, Mattias B., & Lund, Christian. 2018. Reconfiguring frontier spaces: The territorialization of resource control. World Development, 101, 388‒399. https://​doi​.org/​https://​doi​ .org/​10​.1016/​j​.worlddev​.2017​.01​.018 Rekha, Bandyopadhyay. 1996. “Global Review of Land Reform: A Critical Perspective.” Economic and Political Weekly 31 (11):679‒691. Rosenstein-Rodan, Paul N. 1943. “Problems of Industrialisation of Eastern and South-Eastern Europe.” The Economic Journal, 53 (1 June):202–211. https://​doi​.org/​10​.2307/​2226317 Rostow, Walter W. 1960. The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sachs, Wolfgang. 1992. The Development Dictionary. A Guide to Knowledge as Power. London: Zed Books. Schwartzman, David. 2012. “A Critique of Degrowth and its Politics.” Capitalism Nature Socialism 23 (1):119‒125. doi: 10.1080/10455752.2011.648848. Sen, Amartya. 1991. “Welfare, Preference and Freedom.” Journal of Econometrics 50 (1):15‒29. doi: https://​doi​.org/​10​.1016/​0304​-4076(91)90087​-T. Sheber, Kaitlin. 2020. “Legal Rights for Nature: How the Idea of Recognizing Nature as a Legal Entity Can Spread and Make a Difference Globally.” Hastings Environmental Law Journal 26 (1):147‒166. Stoknes, Per Espen. 2021. Grønn vekst: En sunn økonomi for det 21. århundre. Oslo: Tiden.

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Strunz, Sebastian, and Bartosz Bartkowski. 2018. “Degrowth, the Project of Modernity, and Liberal Democracy.” Journal of Cleaner Production 196:1158‒1168. doi: https://​doi​.org/​ 10​.1016/​j​.jclepro​.2018​.06​.148. Sunkel, Osvaldo. 1969. “National Development Policy and External Dependence in Latin America.” The Journal of Development Studies 6 (1):23‒48. doi: 10.1080/00220386908421311. Truman, Harry S. 1949. Inaugural Address. Harry S. Truman Library. https://​ www​ .trumanlibrary​.gov/​library/​public​-papers/​19/​inaugural​-address UNDP. 1996. “Human Development Report 1996.” UNDP (United Nations Development Programme). van den Bergh, Jeroen C. J. M. 2011. “Environment Versus Growth: A Criticism of ‘Degrowth’ and a Plea for ‘A-Growth’.” Ecological Economics 70 (5):881‒890. doi: https://​doi​.org/​10​ .1016/​j​.ecolecon​.2010​.09​.035. Visser, Oane, Natalia Mamonova, and Max Spoor. 2012. “Oligarchs, Megafarms and Land Reserves: Understanding Land Grabbing in Russia.” The Journal of Peasant Studies 39 (3‒4):899‒931. doi: 10.1080/03066150.2012.675574. Weale, A. 1992. New Politics of Pollution. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Widgren, Mats. 2015. “Linking Nordic Landscape Geography and Political Ecology.” Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift – Norwegian Journal of Geography 69 (4):197‒206. doi: 10.1080/00291951.2015.1062797. Zhou, Lihuan, Sean Gilbert, Ye Wang, Miquel Muñoz Cabré, and Kevin Gallagher. 2018. Moving the Green Belt and Road Initiative: From Words to Actions. Working Paper. Washington, DC: World Resource Institute & Global Development Policy Center.

PART I RETHINKING DEVELOPMENT: CRITIQUE AND DEFENSE OF A CONTESTED IDEA

2. The sticky myth of economic growth and the critique of development Eduardo Gudynas

1. INTRODUCTION At the beginning of the 2020s, there is an increasing acceptance of the weaknesses of the idea of economic growth as a path towards development among institutions that have long promoted the idea. However, ironically the same institutions and intellectuals stubbornly reject its alternatives. One example is the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) that since its establishment has advocated a growth-based development. In an interview, Alicia Bárcena, then General Secretary of ECLAC, admitted that the development strategies that had been pursued were exhausted.1 Not only were industrial and innovation policies absent, and inequality increasing, growth performance had been poor, and where there had been growth it had failed to produce development. Yet, while recognizing the failure of economic growth, she insisted on continued growth-based strategies. This recognition of the failure of growth is important, because it implies the defeat of the conventional ideas of development promoted by international agencies. At the same time, the solution proposed is to reinvent development introducing a new variety. It is as if it were impossible to think beyond a development in general, and as growth in particular, confirming the intimate relationship between the two. The inability to think beyond growth is not only evident among major development institutions, but also among most current political leaders, irrespective of political background and color. Current Latin America provides a plethora of examples. In Chile, for instance, conservative president Sebastián Piñera (2010‒2014 and 2018‒2022) affirmed that: “I know that someone thinks that economic growth is not a central element, but I beg to differ.”2 He considered economic growth as indispensable in general, but also of absolute importance in order to respond to the social demands expressed during the major social uprising of 2019‒2020 (see also the chapter by Bull in this book). Almost at the same time, at the other side of the Andes mountains from a very different political perspective, leftist president Alberto Fernández affirmed that in order to resolve Argentina’s major problems, that according to him were poverty and foreign debt, it first had to grow economically.3 Looking a bit beyond Argentina, in Brazil the populist right wing president Jair Bolsonaro was disappointed to learn that the country had grown very little the past year (only 1.1 percent in 2019, meaning less than during the former president of Michel Temer’s 26

The sticky myth of economic growth and the critique of development  27

period).4 Bolsonaro demanded more growth for 2020, and sought at least to achieve 2 percent. These examples illustrate that, irrespective of ideological position and model of development, growth was at the core of the goals. Not even the Covid-19 crisis changed the obsession with growth. Policies such as lockdowns and quarantines had a number of economic effects. Yet, for a while public health measures were given first priority. However, in spite of the importance of the sanitary crisis, the debate quickly returned to be about economic growth. In this new situation, there was major concern about the “negative” growth, or the contraction of the national economy (CEPAL, 2020). This chapter takes as the starting point the recognition of the failure of growth, and analyzes some aspects of development and growth. First, it briefly reviews the historical origins of the ideas of development and economic growth in order to discuss some of their recent expressions. This is followed by comments on some of the reasons for the consolidation of a concept of development as growth, arguing that this was due to the insertion into previous ideas of defense of progress that consolidated in the 19th century, and that became dominant. This allows for the explanation that although there exist many different concepts of development, they share some basic common conceptualizations, and among those are the prerequisite of economic growth. The analysis builds on critical perspectives on development. It recognizes that there are multiple forms of development and therefore one uses the concept of varieties of development, derived from and inspired by the “varieties of capitalism” approach (in the sense applied by Gudynas 2016). Moreover, it considers that development is expressed at different basic levels, distinguishing between actions, sectoral plans and strategies, basic positions (as are the varieties of capitalist development or socialist development), but that all of these rest on a common core of basic shared ideas (as is explained in Gudynas, 2017). While different perspectives of development are based on very different economic and ideological visions, they share the idea of economic growth as indispensable for development.

2.

THE ORIGINS OF THE IDEAS OF GROWTH

The roots of the ideas of development and the role of economic growth can be traced to the end of the 19th century and start of the 20th. Among the key elements in this historical process are the discussion in the United Kingdom about “development” of their colonies, and the first “manuals” about economic development, including the one by J.A. Schumpeter, published first in German in 1912. It would thus be an error to assume that the idea of development was born in 1949 with the inauguration speech by US President Harry Truman (see also chapter by Demaria and Gómez-Baggethun in this book). To the contrary, one could argue that this concept is the continuation of the category of “progress” as it was constructed in the 18th and 19th centuries. Although that sequence cannot be summarized here, it is important to keep in mind that the pair progress and development cannot be separated from the

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colonial condition, wherein in the metropolis produce the frameworks of politics and actions in what we today would call the Global South. These ideas were quickly communicated across the continents. For example, Schumpeter’s text was published in English in 1934 as the “theory of economic development.” It was followed by other contributions that we today consider “classics” including the one by L.A. Lewis from 1955 that in English was named “The theory of economic growth” but that in Spanish was presented in 1958 as “The theory of economic development.” In an annex Lewis defends his idea of development as growth making evident the links to key elements as welfare and the control over nature. He affirms, for example, that “the advantage of economic growth is not that wealth increases happiness, but that it increases the range of human choice,” and “it gives man greater control over his environment and thereby increases his freedom” (Lewis, 1955: 420 and 421). With the publication of “The stages of economic growth” by Walt W. Rostow in 1960, one more step was taken in the process of establishing growth as an indispensable element in the broader scheme of development. Schematically, one could say that growth would be the engine of development, allowing the advance from positions labeled as backward to others that were viewed as advanced. That engine was food, in the South, with the profits obtained from extracting and exporting natural resources, while in the North, with those from industrialization of those commodities. Development was deployed as a historical linearity that explained the past and at the same time announced the future. One justified the application of the labels “underdeveloped” and “developed,” wherein the first put up the second as goals to achieve and examples to imitate. These positions were at the same time a part of a political and geopolitical perspective, clearly expressed in the discourse of President H. Truman in 1949 (see for example, Esteva, 1992), which in turn provided the basis of a style of international development aid (see Macekura, 2013). The ideological content of all this did not pass unnoticed; suffice to remember that the subtitle of the “development manual” of Rostow was a “non-communist manifesto.” From the ideas of Truman to the role played by Rostow, development as growth got disseminated in the hands of “international development aid,” with its armies of experts, financial instruments, new institutions (like the “development banks”), diplomacy and even including military interventions. For these and other reasons, the ideas of development as growth became dominant by the early 1960s (for an analysis of this process, see Arndt, 1978). As that perspective advanced, some indicators become dominant, such as the gross domestic product (GDP). National accounting was strengthened, and mathematical models were disseminated (e.g. Harrod–Domar or the Rosenstein–Rodan models). These and other elements were part of a toolbox used by economists to diagnose development and sketch plans for the future (Unceta, 2015). Moreover, they were easily inserted in other similar currents, such as those of the “modernization,” which is also derived from the faith on progress. Ideas like “social development” were separated from, but at the same time linked to, “economic development”; for example, in

The sticky myth of economic growth and the critique of development  29

1963 ECLAC launched its first “social development report” as a part of this purpose (see CEPAL, 1963; Germani, 1969). It is impossible to summarize all the discussions about development that took place as a result of this. However, for the purpose of the following analysis it is important to highlight some points. Both the conventional positions, such as those of Lewis or Rostow, as the so-called “heterodox” perspectives such as those of Raúl Prebisch of ECLAC and other “structuralists,” or those that held more critical approaches such as those of the Latin American dependency theorist or Marxists (such as F.H. Cardoso, Enzo Faletto, Celso Furtado, Theotinio dos Santos, Ruy Mauro Marini and various others), all accepted that there should be some form of development and this progressed through growth. As argued by Unceta (2015), the critique of the development orthodoxy did not question the ever stronger identification of development as growth. In the specific case of the dependency scholars, in hindsight it is clear that they ended up assuming “most of the postulates of the conventional development theory, although they sought different paths for achieving its objectives” (Munck, 2017: 20). Problems such as the difficulties in the paths to industrialization, the asymmetry in international trade and the deterioration of the terms of trade between the value of exported raw materials and imported capital goods, the distribution of income, or property ownership were discussed. Views on the “obstacles” to development were common, where policies were postulated to grow more and better, and it was even insisted that development was a “right” of the people (examples in Aguilar Monteverde, 1967; Thesing, 1979; Sheahan, 1990). It is especially interesting that the different Marxisms and dependency schools were, for the most part, framed in this perspective. Let us remember that Paul Baran, an outstanding although not always recognized inspirer of many of these currents, published in 1957 The Political Economy of Growth. In a revealing passage, Baran assumes that growth and development are interchangeable, defining it “as increase over time in per capita output of material goods” (1957: 18). Socialism, in Baran’s opinion, imposes another social order, and an “economic and cultural growth” that would be possible “based on the rational domination by man of the inexhaustible forces of nature,” although he admits that it is an enormous challenge (Baran, 1957: 297). Similar situations were repeated in the space of multilateral institutions, banking and other business sectors. For example, in 1992, the then president of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), Enrique Iglesias, presented the economic agenda for the following years, multiplying the dimensions of development that should be addressed, incorporating, for example, poverty or environment goals. However, again the need for economic growth was reaffirmed, while shifting the discussion to how to achieve it while maintaining basic macroeconomic balances and ensuring a certain social justice (Iglesias, 1992). Those debates languished as development strategies based on neoliberal positions spread. This reinforced adherence to economic growth, both as part of their macroeconomic proposals and because of their political bias to commodify social life (see, as an example of developments in those years, Foxley, 1988; for a more recent

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review see Saad Filho, 2005). In turn, even in cases where the intended growth did not occur, governments, foreign institutions and intellectuals demanded “sacrifices” to return to the path of growth, such as the reduction of governmental spending included in the Structural Adjustment programs.

3.

RECENT DIVERSIFICATION

In many parts of the world, the dominance of the neoliberal consensus was challenged in the 2000s. On the one hand, critical voices within development economics criticized the free market radicalism of “neoliberalism.” Well known authors, such as Joseph Stiglitz or Dani Rodrik, rejected conventional development pathways and proposed alternative means and institutional arrangements. They advocated increased State intervention and regulation of markets, criticized free trade globalization schemes and the increasing “financialization” of the economies. Nevertheless, while promoting the development model they considered better and more just, they all endorsed economic growth (Stiglitz, 2003; Rodrik, 2012). Also in practice, alternatives to a “neoliberal” way of organizing development proliferated, including models encompassing stronger State through ownership regulations, and public policies. These trends reached an extreme diversification in Latin America due to a number of center-left, or progressive, governments entering power in the 2000s. The best examples were the novo desenvolvimento (new development) led by President Lula da Silva and the Workers’ Party (PT) in Brazil, the popular nationalism of the administrations of Néstor Kirchner and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner in Argentina, and the new versions of development under “revolutions” advocated by Rafael Correa in Ecuador, the Movement for Socialism (MAS) under the presidency of Evo Morales in Bolivia, and the 21st-century socialism promoted by Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. Once again we were faced with different varieties of development. Some of them were expressions of moderate deviations from the past, such as the model promoted in Brazil and Uruguay, while others were more radical such as those of Venezuela or Bolivia, where Marx or Lenin were frequently cited to redesign development. However, these projects also shared key ideas. One of them was conceiving development as an essentially political process, where the State could intervene by appealing to different procedures. In this sense, they differed from the policies applied by previous neoliberal or conservative governments. However, the developmentalisms typical of progressivism shared the view of economic growth as the engine of a development that, again, was interpreted as linear. Again, Latin America offers a variety of examples of different versions of development. Different governments used different rhetoric to legitimate it, including some that were presented as socialist or revolutionary, but none broke with capitalism and the core idea of economic growth. As the progressive, new left of pink tide ended, it was supplanted by conservatism (such as in Argentina) and extreme right wing populism (such as Brazil), that also

The sticky myth of economic growth and the critique of development  31

presented development as growth as the main objective, but the justifications and policies were dramatically different. Eventually, when a conservative government in turn was replaced by a new center-left government, such as in Argentina in 2020, the growth imperative persisted. A different process took place in other continents, and for the purpose of this chapter the case of China is noteworthy. There is a controversy over whether Chinese development styles are socialists, capitalists or a hybrid, with a different mixture of State and private interventions in its markets (e.g. Carney, 2009; Boer, 2021). But beyond that discussion, Xi Jinping in 2013 made very clear that he considered the policies of “Reform and Opening-Up” a success as that resulted in “political stability, economic growth, social harmony and unity of nationalities” (cited by Boer, 2021: 260). The central role of growth in Chinese style development was further elaborated by Justin Yifu Lin, former Chief Economist at the World Bank, trained on Marxist political economy in Peking and in neoclassical economics at the University of Chicago. His strategy also support growth as an essential component of development, but is quite interesting because the roles of the market and State in this process is presented as a new marriage between Marxist and Keynesian economics (see as example, Lin, 2012). These ideas, that express a common sense among many actors in the Global South, also led to the progress between stages, in a Rostownian process, presenting the peasantry as backwards sectors that should be replaced by industries.

4. CRITICISM AND PERMANENCE Almost at the same time that the essentiality of growth in development was consolidated, questions and criticism arose. There is a large number of critical evaluations of growth, in academia, social movements and among political actors. It is not necessary to repeat it in its details here, but it is important to point out some of them for the present analysis. As anticipated above, the most visible questions surrounding growth did not question it as a goal in itself, but debated different ways to achieve it. Following this perspective, there was a distinction between on the one hand, a negative, regressive or ineffective growth, and on the other hand, a positive, effective and virtuous form of growth. This debate thus prevented a discussion of the centrality of growth; it was rather limited to a discussion of different ways of growing. Lewis himself (1955: 469) recognized a flip side or costs of economic growth, and understood that for this reason attitudes towards development were ambivalent. Even more acute were Galbraith’s early questions about luxury-oriented consumer development where the goal should not be to maximize growth but to ensure access to goods such as food, clothing, housing, and so on (Galbraith, 1964). Other approaches denied the direct association of growth with development. There have been redefinitions of development, expanding it to dimensions beyond economics to incorporate others such as social or environmental ones. In this way, growth would lose its determining role, and development was defended as a multifaceted

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process. This is a very common position among United Nations agencies, and its clearest expressions are the proposals for human development or sustainable development (see the chapter by Bull and Aguilar-Støen in this book). Strong criticism was also leveled at growth itself for its social (for example Hirsch, 1976) and environmental consequences, as the report to the Club of Rome in 1972 clearly showed (Meadows et al., 1972). Indeed, there is an ecological impossibility of perpetual growth of economies since resources such as oil or minerals are finite, and in the same way, the capacity of ecosystems to deal with impacts is also limited. In a finite world, infinite growth is impossible. The evidence that has accumulated in the last fifty years reinforces these warnings, where climate change is the most evident, and makes it clear that there would be no viable future if the obsession with economic growth and material consumerism persists (Victor, 2010). A new wave of criticism was organized above all in Western Europe and from the academic field under the umbrella of “degrowth” (see D’Alisa et al., 2015; Unceta, 2015; and Demaria and Gómez-Baggethun in this book). The progressive Latin American government mentioned above received harsh criticism for its continued dependence on resource extractivism. The dependence on mining, oil, agricultural and other sectors, structured for the export of raw materials, is prevalent among many countries, most of them in the Global South (like in Latin America and Africa) but also in the North (as in Australia, Canada or Russia). The progressive governments in Latin America were harshly criticized for continuing this practice with devastating environmental consequences in spite of calling themselves “progressive” (see Gudynas, 2011). However, although they organized extractivism differently with direct participation of the State (for example through State companies), greater capture of economic surpluses in some sectors (especially oil), and they legitimized extraction as necessary to finance actions against poverty (see, for example, reviews offered by different countries by Cypher, 2010; Ban, 2013; Nem Singh, 2014; Ramírez, 2014), the extraction of raw materials continued. The discursive legitimation of growth can change, and it can even be presented as inevitable to attack poverty, but it is nonetheless present as a key ingredient in development varieties that ultimately remains capitalist. Progressive governments are noteworthy because they offer a legitimation of extractivism to achieve growth, so as to promote social justice, usually expanding monetized aid along with the promotion of increased consumption. Yet, inequalities persisted along several dimensions, such as in access to drinking water, sanitation or health. Moreover, human rights violations persisted or aggravated both in the cities and in the countryside, and the violence did not stop (see Shapiro and McNeish, 2021). This caused a tension as even new developmentalist styles that sought growth to achieve social inclusion also caused the deterioration in other components of social justice. This was evident, for example, under the coalition led by the Workers’ Party (PT) in the Lula da Silva government, which, as Lavinas (2017) warns, resulted in articulating mass consumption with extractivist and financialized developmentalism. By its very nature, maintaining consumption and assistance programs for the poorest required economic growth, and this was only possible through extractivism. Even in more extreme cases, such

The sticky myth of economic growth and the critique of development  33

as those of the Citizens’ Revolution of Rafael Correa in Ecuador, it was proposed to increase extractivism in order to get out of it in the future (Ecuador, 2009). The logic that was once again Rostownian, insofar as they proposed accumulating capital from the export of raw materials to later try a productive diversification and a “leap” in the stages of development. As southern countries were under subordinated roles in current globalization they all sought to attract investment and increase exports, mostly of raw materials, as necessary components to achieve economic growth. There have been ample discussions of what type of growth is desirable. So called “heterodox” policies, like the Brazilian “new developmentalism,” seek for example, not only to engender growth, but “economic transformation.” Yet its desired result is the “growth” of living conditions in a necessary, autonomous and automatic way (Bresser-Pereira, 2003: 32; see also Gaitán and Boschi, 2015). In the end, the main discussions were about what kind of growth was necessary, “best” or “true,” not whether growth itself is desirable. All these recent experiences show that both in varieties of capitalist development and those that used discourses against capitalism, they maintained the objective of economic growth. None of the warnings, criticisms or denunciations had substantive effects on the centrality of economic growth or on the imaginary of development among governments and international agencies. From European Union blueprints to OECD strategies, from multilateral development banks to most development economics departments in universities, economics growth maintained its centrality even today. It was discussed whether there was a “good” or “bad” growth; if the rate was sufficient or insufficient, what the correct participation of the State or private actors should be, or the ways of distributing its supposed benefits, among various elements, but the necessity of growth was never questioned.

5.

LEVELS, VARIETIES AND ROOTS OF DEVELOPMENT

The analysis of the previous sections shows that the adherence to economic growth is very strongly entrenched. The aspiration and defense of growth is repeated across very different ideological positions and by actors along the entire political spectrum. This occurs in spite of the many warnings against the impossibility of perpetual growth. Thus the belief in growth becomes irrational and more similar to an act of faith. Thus we cannot assume that a rational discussion based on accumulated evidence of the impossibility of perpetual growth will convince those who uncritically defend that idea. In order to understand how fundamental this belief has become, it is useful to distinguish between different levels of conceptualization of development. Level 1 corresponds to the basic conceptual perspectives that describe and organize development, usually described as a model, ideology or culture. This is where the conceptual bases that describe varieties could be divided in different trends by economic considerations (e.g. capitalist and socialist), political (neoliberal, conservative, progressive,

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socialist, etc.), or in other ways, are located. They could be described as the major “families” in development (the categorization into levels follows Gudynas, 2017). Level 2 refers to sectorial programs, such as poverty alleviation or attracting foreign investment. Level 3 deals with specific actions linked to development, such as the approval of a mining project or the construction of housing. Many of the classic analyses of economic and social policies focus on these two dimensions, including evaluations of their effects in promoting economic growth or improving social conditions. The Latin American experience is very relevant because in a short period of time, governments pursued a number of different development models. They ranged from conservative and neoliberal approaches, to varieties of progressive approaches including so-called “21st century socialisms.” In no other region was there a similar diversity in the last decades. The consideration of that experience shows that there are some previous components, even deeper, that are shared by all those varieties of development described as level 1 and its derivations. Economic growth is present in all of them. At the same time, Yusting Yifu Llin and others that promote “hybrid” strategies also express those shared ideas, allowing them to put together Marx and Keynes. That basic shared feature corresponds to level zero, which contains ideas and feelings that are the roots for all contemporary development ideas (Gudynas, 2017). Along with economic growth, at level zero there are other conceptions such as the claim to understand development as a linear, universal and progressive process, the separation of society and nature, or the belief in scientific-technological solutions as truths. These are the “basement” of the modern idea of progress, holding the contemporary building of development and growth with all its different tenants. There are many conflicts, including strong arguments between major families at level 1. Yet, they hardly recognize that they are sharing the same modern roots. It is important to note that this level does not rest on an objective rationality but rather is embedded in affectivities and beliefs, which are precisely those that shield its components against all criticism and evidence. This explains why growth has become a “sticky myth.” It is so insofar as it remains adhered time and time again to the idea of development despite more than 50 years of questioning. It is also a myth in the sense that it represents universally accepted fanciful narratives, where growth would be almost a hero with divine powers, coated in admiration. Myths are not defined precisely; rather, they appear through rites (such as the celebratory acts of ministers who applaud increases in GDP). They are realities created for those who defend and replicate them (they have performative capacities pretending that every country was represented in the GDP graphs). This is not surprising because development, in its basic conceptions, operates through processes that remember a religion, as Rist (2002) warned. It is an act of faith, which makes it immune to its failures and is constantly reproduced from the practice of its parishioners. In this way, at this zero level a political theology operates that constructs narratives of development that shield it as sacred, and operate through

The sticky myth of economic growth and the critique of development  35

action plans, instruments and evaluations that are close to liturgies (following, in part, Hammill and Lupton, 2012).

6.

PROGRESS AND DEVELOPMENT IN A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

The conceptual and affective roots of that zero level of development are historically shaped. It would not be serious or rigorous to postulate that elements such as economic growth arose automatically after the publication of manuals such as those of Lewis or Rostow, as if those ideas were so powerful and attractive that those publications were enough to convince almost everyone and become a central idea in the following decades. The formation of this zero level is not built in a few years, but implies a long process in shaping culture, ideologies and even sensitivities. Although the defense of growth was consolidated in the middle of the 20th century, this was possible because the ideas of development were supported and merged, in turn, in the conceptions of progress, which had a much longer history. It is more appropriate to consider that we are facing a slow and complex historical process, which can be summarized, very schematically, as a sequence between the conceptions of progress, development and then economic growth. This sequence occurred at least since the 18th century, and that is why it was able to unify the political and economic elites, and even received broad citizen support, in so many countries. Starting in the 18th century, the idea of progress gradually became dominant, incorporating and organizing itself with other key concepts such as those of freedom or sovereignty, and in turn, relying on scientific knowledge (Nisbet, 1980). This resulted from different changes in Europe regarding how to conceive of knowledge, reason, life in society and links with nature (a “culture” of growth in the sense of Mokyr, 2017, was on the way). In those conceptions of progress there were already many overlaps with trade and the market, which in many aspects correspond to what we conceive today as economic growth, as evidenced for example in the writings of Adam Smith, A.-R. Turgot or Thomas Malthus. In the 19th century, all this was reinforced much more, linking ideas such as the evolution of plant and animal species with the reforms of the positivists such as Auguste Comte, or even with the criticism of K. Marx (see Nisbet, 1980). They and others, each in their own way, claimed the need to progress from a situation that was considered inferior, more negative or morally questionable, to give way to another typified as superior, better and morally desirable. The idea of growth fits perfectly into this scheme, since it was interpreted as if it were the growth of an organism from infantile stages to other mature ones. In turn, the path from this scheme to models such as Rostow’s is understandable. All of those ideas spread under colonial regimes in what is now the Global South. This happened through the direct reading of books, or the exchange mediated by Europeans who came to the continent to advise or guide governments and busi-

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nessmen, or by those in the South who traveled or studied in Europe. In the Latin American case, when the new republics were formed in the 19th century, the call for progress had much support. A good example is that the positivist message of the French philosopher A. Comte was consolidated in the Brazilian flag as “order and progress.” The preaching of progress was embraced by the Latin American elites regardless of how it was tried to be applied and its real consequences (see Burns, 1983). In the 20th century, the ideas of progress overlapped with those of development and growth, since in their essence they were referring to the same issue. This is very clear in the work of Lewis, but also in previous authors (such as Colin Clark and his “conditions for economic progress”; 1940). In the 1950s began the publication of textbooks and guidelines on how to achieve development and growth, written in the North but reaching all corners of the planet. An example is the 1957 Principles and Problems of Modern Economy, by William Koivisto (1964), sponsored by the Agency for International Development of the United States. Along its pages the ideas of progress, development and growth are constantly used interchangeably. These and other texts were produced and distributed because it was understood that development was universal and therefore what was designed in the academic and political centers of the industrialized North should be used for all the countries of the Global South. Books and guides were translated and disseminated throughout all regions, for use by teachers, students, government officials and businesses. Powerful mechanisms were configured that consolidated these conceptions. The mathematical economic approach and numerical indicators, such as the GDP, gained enormous prominence, generating an aura of infallible expert knowledge and scientific certainty. Similar processes happened in other areas, from social issues to the arts. What was considered to be real progress was in reality just imitative modernization. Such a process was portrayed in Octavio Ianni’s diagnosis for “Modern Brazil” when he points out that it is an idea that has something of a caricature: “First, a caricature that results from the hasty imitation of other realities or historical configurations, frequently involved in ideas, concepts, explanations, theories,” and second, because this is superimposed on national situations that are multiple, generating an “absurd kaleidoscope of realities and imitations” (Ianni, 1996: 46). The idea of development and other associated ideas, although they were built as an effort of secularization and supposed scientific objectivity, actually ended up becoming a new religiosity in the sense of being defended as acts of faith. In this way the components are built at level zero of the development. The amalgam between rationalities and affectivities makes them almost immune to criticism and evidence to the contrary.

The sticky myth of economic growth and the critique of development  37

7.

EXHAUSTION AND ALTERNATIVES

In 2020, on top of the exhaustion of previously tested development strategies, came the Covid-19 pandemic. The coronavirus hits countries that in many of them were dealing with previous challenges, from social unrest, increased unemployment or authoritarian turns. Economic growth expectations were low, unemployment was rising, the international value of various raw materials had fallen and poverty was on the rise again. The health crisis due to the coronavirus was inserted into an already complicated situation, with multiple economic, social and political consequences. Despite such an extreme situation, once again the government’s responses have been to bet on more economic growth to alleviate the problems. Latin America offers many examples, as if no one had heard ECLAC’s confession, all governments activated policies to promote economic growth. These range from further flexibility for oil and mining in Andean countries to a more intense expansion of the agribusiness in Brazil. In fact, the pandemic was effective in reinforcing measures of control and discipline on the population, strengthening a variety of capitalism that repeats its dependence on natural resources although increasing the use of digital networking and communication. There were a number of debates about alternatives as even conventional actors acknowledge social, economic and ecological challenges, but most of them remained committed to capitalist growth (Gudynas, 2020). It seems that a strategy that does not depend on the growth of the economy is unthinkable, and even unimaginable. The only acceptable debate refers to how to achieve and organize this growth. Discussions are only allowed from levels 1 to 3 to development, but not about the fundamental ideas found in level zero. In other words, the myth is so strong that only debates about different varieties of development are tolerated, and no options beyond development are contemplated. It would seem that only small groups or the “deluded” are able to think of alternatives beyond growth. Nor is it seriously considered whether this obsession with growth might be one of the causes of the social and environmental crisis. The irrational shield that covers development explains why it is imperative to address that basic level that serves as its foundation. Any attempt to propose substantive alternatives must focus on the elements that nest in that zero level, not only the attachment to economic growth, but also on components such as the society– nature duality or the universalist claim of development. It is urgent to imagine the unimaginable: abandon the obsession with growth, with progress, with universality. Therefore, the possibility of alternatives requires a previous step, which is to be able to think about them, to dare to discuss the indisputable. It is not possible to present substantive alternatives or discuss them with social movements if the attitude to accept, and even claim, options beyond development is not first generated. What is missing are attitudes that may bring back such currents. Raúl Prebisch, who played a key role in promoting a southern critical perspective, was a developmentalist of this time but at the same time he dared to question the ideas given as valid in his time. It is precisely this mood of criticism, this willingness to seek alternatives beyond the simple, which is also needed today. Prebisch said in 1963:

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“The propensity to import ideologies is still very strong in Latin America, as strong as the propensity of the centers to export them,” and to be clearer he added: “This is a leftover from the times of outward growth.” He does not reject the contribution from other areas and regions, but insisted that “nothing exempts us from the intellectual obligation to analyze our own phenomena and find our own image in the effort to transform the existing order of things” (Prebisch, 1963: 20). In many places, critical stances, heterodox and daring proposals were abandoned to be replaced by moderation and correctness. What is lacking are large institutions and groups that may produce shared visions, aspirations and even dreams of a great narrative of change, dedicated to transform the current order. Attitudes of disobedience by experts are needed, at times also of intransigence to be able to pierce the foundations of the current truisms, and in this way, as Prebisch said, “find our own way.” If development is at the end a belief that must be understood as a political theology, the search for alternatives will require heretics that can disobey those dogmas. The term heretic in its original Latin and Greek meanings implied choice. It referred to the dissident of the ideas defended by a community of believers, questioning its foundations to seek other options. This is how we open alternatives to development.

NOTES 1.

América Latina ha perdido el tren de la política industrial y la innovación, I. Fariza entrevista a A. Bárcena, El País, Madrid, February 7, 2020, https://​elpais​.com/​economia/​2020/​ 02/​05/​actualidad/​1580921046​_527634​.htm. 2. La Tercera, Santiago, February 25, 2020, https://​ www​ .latercera​ .com/​ pulso/​ noticia/​ pinera​-reitera​-la​-necesidad​-del​-crecimiento​-economico​-financiar​-mayor​-gasto​-publico/​ 1020501​-6/​. 3. Presidente Fernández afirma que Argentina primero debe crecer para luego pagar deuda externa, Xinhua, desde B. Aires, February 29, 2020, http://​spanish​.xinhuanet​.com/​2020​ -03/​01/​c​_138831586​.htm. 4. Bolsonaro cobra Guedes a entregar crescimento mínimo de 2% neste ano, Folha S. Paulo, February 21, 2020, https://​www1​.folha​.uol​.com​.br/​mercado/​2020/​02/​bolsonaro​-cobra​ -guedes​-a​-entregar​-crescimento​-minimo​-de​-2​-neste​-ano​.shtml.

REFERENCES Aguilar Monteverde, Alonso. 1967. Teoría y política del desarrollo latinoamericano. México, Instituto de Investigaciones Económicas, UNAM. Arndt, H.W. 1978. The rise and fall of economic growth. A study in contemporary thought. Melbourne, Longman Cheshire. Ban, Cornel. 2013. Brazil’s liberal neo-developmentalism: New paradigm or edited orthodoxy. Review International Political Economy 20(2): 298‒331. Baran, Paul. 1957. The political economy of growth. New York, Monthly Review Press. Boer, Roland. 2021. Socialism with Chinese characteristics. A guide for foreigners. Singapore, Springer.

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Bresser-Pereira, Luiz C. 2003. Desenvolvimento e crise no Brasil. História, economía e política de Getúlio Vargas a Lula. 3rd ed. São Paulo, Editora 34. Burns, E.B. 1983. The poverty of progress. Oakland, University of California Press. Carney, Richard W. 2009. Chinese capitalism in the OECD mirror. New Political Economy 14(1): 71‒99. CEPAL. 1963. El desarrollo social de América Latina en la postguerra. Buenos Aires, Solar Hachette. CEPAL. 2020. Informe sobre el impacto económico en América Latina y el Caribe de la enfermedad por coronavirus (Covid-19). Santiago, CEPAL. Clark, Colin. 1940. The conditions of economic progress. London, MacMillan. Cypher, J.M. 2010. South America’s commodities boom: Developmental opportunity or path dependent reversion? Canadian Journal Development Studies 30(3–4): 635‒662. D’Alisa, Giacomo, F. Demaria and G. Kallis (eds). 2015. Degrowth. A vocabulary for a new era. London, Routledge. Ecuador. 2009. Plan Nacional para el Buen Vivir 2009-2013. Construyendo un Estado plurinacional e intercultural. Quito, SENPLADES. Esteva, Gustavo. 1992. Development, pp.  6‒25, in The development dictionary (W. Sachs, ed.). London, Zed. Foxley, Alejandro. 1988. Experimentos neoliberales en América Latina. México, Fondo de Cultura Económica. Gaitán, Flavio and Renato Boschi, 2015. State–business–labour relations and patterns of development in Latin America, pp 172‒188, in: New directions in comparative capitalisms research: Critical and global perspectives (M. Ebenau, I. Bruff and C. May, eds). New York, Palgrave. Galbraith, John K. 1964. Economic development. Boston, Houghton Mifflin. Germani, Gino. 1969. Sociología de la modernización. Buenos Aires, Paidós. Gudynas, Eduardo. 2011. Buen Vivir: Germinando alternativas al desarrollo. América Latina en Movimiento, 462: 1–20. Gudynas, Eduardo. 2016. Beyond varieties of development: disputes and alternatives. Third World Quarterly 37(4): 721‒732. Gudynas, Eduardo. 2017. Post-development and other critiques of the roots of development, pp 84‒93, in The essential guide to critical development studies (H. Veltmeyer and P. Bowles, eds). Abingdon, Routledge. Gudynas, Eduardo. 2020. Tan cerca y tan lejos de las alternativas al desarrollo. Planes, programas y pactos en tiempos de pandemia. Lima, RedGE and Cooperacción. Hammill, G. and J. Reinhard Lupton. 2012. Introduction, pp 1‒20, in Political theology & early modernity (G. Hammill and J. Reinhard Lupton, eds). Chicago, University of Chicago Press. Hirsch, Fred. 1976. Social limits to growth. Cambridge, Harvard University Press. Ianni, Octávio. 1996. A idéia de Brasil Moderno. São Paulo, Brasiliense. Iglesias, Enrique V. 1992. Reflexiones sobre el desarrollo económico. Hacia un nuevo consenso latinoamericano. Washington, Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo. Koivisto, William A. 1964. Principios y problemas de economía moderna. México, Centro Regional de Ayuda Técnica, Agencia para el Desarrollo Internacional (AID) y Limusa Wiley. Lavinas, Lena. 2017. The takeover of social policy by financialization. The Brazilian paradox. New York, Palgrave Macmillan. Lewis, W. Arthur. 1955. The theory of economic growth. Unwin University Books, London. Lin, Justin Yifu. 2012. The quest for prosperity. How developing economies can take off. Princeton, Princeton University Press. Macekura, Stephen. 2013. The point four program and the U.S. international development policy. Political Science Quarterly 128(1): 127‒160.

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Meadows, Donella H., D.L. Meadows, J. Randers and W.W. Behrens III. 1972. The limits to growth. Washington, DC: Potomac Associates. Mokyr, Joel. 2017. A culture of growth. The origins of the modern economy. Princeton, Princeton University Press. Munck, Ronaldo. 2017. Desafíos y alternativas en América Latina. Dublin, Glasnevin y Desde La Gente. Nem Singh, J.T. 2014. Towards post-neoliberal resource politics? The international political economy (IPE) of oil and copper in Brazil and Chile. New Political Economy 19(3): 329‒358. Nisbet, Robert. 1980. History of the idea of progress. New York, Basic Books. Prebisch, Raúl. 1963. Hacia una dinámica del desarrollo latinoamericano. Con un apéndice sobre el falso dilema entre desarrollo económico y estabilidad monetaria. México, Fondo Cultura Económica. Ramírez, C., J.M. 2014. Has Bolivia’s 2006–12 gas policy been useful to combat the resource curse? Resource Policy 41: 113‒123. Rist, Gilbert. 2002. The history of development. From western origins to global faith. London, Zed Books. Rodrik, Dani. 2012. The globalization paradox. Democracy and the future of the world economy. New York, W.W. Norton. Rostow, W.W. 1960. The stages of economic growth. A non-Communist Manifesto. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Saad Filho, Alfredo. 2005. The political economy of neoliberalism in Latin America, pp 222‒229, in Neoliberalism: A critical reader (A. Saad Filho and D. Johnston, eds). London, Pluto. Schumpeter, Joseph A. 1912. Theorie der wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung. Duncker & Humboldt, Berlin. Schumpeter, Joseph A. 1934. The theory of economic development. Harvard, Harvard University Press. Shapiro, Judith and John-Andrew McNeish (eds). 2021. Our extractive age. Expressions of violence and resistance. New York, Routledge and Earthscan. Sheahan, John. 1990. Modelos de desarrollo en América Latina. México, Alianza Editorial Mexicana. Stiglitz, Joseph E. 2003. Globalization and its discontents. New York, W.W. Norton. Thesing, Josef (ed.). 1979. Política y desarrollo en América Latina. Buenos Aires, ISI and Los Andes. Unceta, Koldo. 2015. Más allá del crecimiento. Debates sobre desarrollo y postdesarrollo. Buenos Aires, Mardulce. Victor, Peter. 2010. Questioning economic growth. Nature 468(7322): 370‒371.

3. Leaving development behind: the case for degrowth Federico Demaria and Erik Gómez-Baggethun

1.

INTRODUCTION: LEAVING DEVELOPMENT BEHIND

Western industrial civilization rests on widespread beliefs regarding the virtues of development and growth as pathways to improved human welfare, prosperity, and happiness. Within this logic, continued expansion of production and technology are presumed to make the future self-evidently better. These presumptions, however, are being destabilized from fields like ecological economics, post-development, and degrowth, which point to the unrecognized costs of growth and to the accelerating destruction of biocultural diversity justified in the name of development and progress (Castoriadis, 1985; Escobar, 1995; Daly, 1996; Victor, 2013). Many attempts have been made to make growth and development greener and more humane. Post-development and degrowth mistrust such attempts as mostly rhetorical exercises that sustain status quo. Rather than just adding different adjectives (green, inclusive, sustainable) that keep the expansive core of development and growth unchecked, they call for changing the system’s structure and functions, and to envision and put into practice political alternatives where development and growth are not seen as ends in themselves (Rahnema and Bawtree, 1997; D’Alisa et al., 2015). According to Gudynas and Acosta (2011: 75), post-development thinking strives ‘to search for alternatives in a deeper sense, that is, aiming to break away from the cultural and ideological bases of development, bringing forth other imaginaries, goals, and practices’. Hence, this chapter does not argue for making development greener or more inclusive, but for leaving development behind, undertaking a rupture with its ideological and ontological underpinnings to search for post-development alternatives. Degrowth, we will argue, is one among those alternatives. It represents a means of breaking apart from the imaginary of development and to open a passage to other forms of imagining and organizing society (Castoriadis, 1985). In so doing, this chapter makes a case for abandoning development and growth as organizing principles of social and economic life. Following this introduction, the chapter is organized in six main parts. First, we examine the emergence of the development doctrine, scrutinizing its origins and philosophical underpinnings. Second, we undertake a critical analysis of the ideas of 41

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progress, development, and growth from a post-development perspective. Third, we examine attempts to harmonize development and environment through the notion of sustainable development. We argue that this concept and its associated policy agenda has contributed to mask rather than overcome the conflict between growth and the environment, detracting attention to more effective sustainability strategies. We then present degrowth as a social and intellectual movement that advocates reduced production and consumption in the affluent regions of the world, and that makes a case to place justice, sustainability, and well-being at the centre of political agendas. After summarizing the core theoretical tenets of degrowth, the chapter closes with a reflection on the politics of degrowth and a set of open questions for the degrowth movement.

2.

THE DEVELOPMENT DOCTRINE AND ITS CRITICS

Since the end of World War II, the idea of development became the frame of reference guiding the goals and aspirations of nations across the world. In its most widely accepted understanding, development depicts the process whereby low-income national economies are transformed into modern industrial economies (see e.g., entry in Encyclopaedia Britannica). This process is presumed to entail changes such as economic growth, poverty alleviation, technical advances, an increase in formal educational skills, and the decline of agriculture relative to industry and services in the share of economic output (Nafziger, 2012). Critics however claim that development is more than the technical and socio-economic endeavour the common definition suggests, drawing attention to how it shapes social imaginaries and expectations, and to its unrecognized social and environmental costs. According to Sachs (1997: 1), development ‘is a perception that models reality, a myth which comforts societies, and a fantasy that unleashes passions’. Building on these critical stances, this chapter takes distance from the dominant self-assertive definition of development, weighting its widely recognized virtues against its costs, such as accelerating environmental degradation, the disappearance of local cultures and knowledge systems, and the dissolution of communitarian ties (Illich, 1973). Taking note of such unrecognized costs and side-effects, Rist (2014: 13) proposes a definition we deem more operational for the purposes of this chapter: Development consists of a set of practices, sometimes appearing to conflict with one another, which require – for the reproduction of society – the general transformation and destruction of the natural environment and of social relations. Its aim is to increase the production of commodities (goods and services) geared, by way of exchange, to effective demand.

The launch of the development doctrine is often situated on 20 January 1949, when United States President Harry S. Truman presented ‘The Point Four Program’, a technical assistance programme that portrayed the Southern hemisphere as

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underdeveloped. For the first time in history, countries became formally classified as either developed or underdeveloped. The North was presented as ‘advanced’ and ‘progressive’, while the South was presented as ‘backward’ and ‘primitive’. Underdevelopment, it was assumed, could be tackled through capital investment and increased production, and the ‘developed world’ was portrayed as being responsible for transferring technology and knowledge from richer to poorer countries. This discursive turn, critics argue, replaced the old European colonialism by a new US-led imperialism, where colonizers became developed, and the colonized became underdeveloped. According to Sachs (1997: 2), it also provided ‘the cognitive base for both arrogant interventionism in the North and pathetic self-pity in the South’. Through the ‘The Point Four Program’ two-thirds of the world were seen and made to see themselves as having fallen into the undignified condition of ‘underdevelopment’ (Latouche, 2004). Development changed people’s perceptions of themselves, and frugal but previously proud ways of life became dissatisfying. According to Rist (2014), this historical turn had four main implications. First, it redesigned the new international relations around anti-colonial imperialism. Second, inequality was justified: if development is a synonym of economic growth, wealth can be generalized to everyone on Earth; therefore, injustice is a temporary condition, and redistribution is no longer seen to be required. Third, development transcended the ideological divide between communism and capitalism, as both political options adopted the development credo. Fourth, a common standard was set, the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), where appraisal of social progress was reduced into a single unit of measure: money. In this way, critics argue, development becomes a euphemism of Western hegemony, now portrayed as the only possible one, based on a single technological and knowledge regime. With this imaginary, growth, development, and progress should continue indefinitely. The underlying assumption is that constant growth will make the future self-evidently better. In effect, to most scholars, politicians, and the public at large, the idea of development has come to signify a sum of virtuous human aspirations such as well-being, progress, and social justice. Such self-assertive understanding, however, also involves that the term does not mean much more than what the individual speaker wishes it to mean. As argued by Gudynas in this book, development has become a new religion. While an ideology can be questioned, a religion cannot because it is by definition the set of beliefs of a given social group in certain indisputable truths. One example of such beliefs is the presumption that technological progress will allow humanity’s most pressing challenges, such as poverty alleviation and climate change, to be solved. There is a widespread consensus around the virtues of development that makes the concept utterly difficult to challenge. Internal criticism of development has generally revolved around variations or elaborations of the term. Through ideas such as Human development, Local development, Sustainable development, and Green development, efforts are made to overcome its detrimental social and environmental side-effects. In theory, the underlying presumption is that development can be re-signified. Genuine critics of growth like Herman Daly (1996) have made a case for salvaging the idea of development, claiming that sustainable development should

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be understood as qualitative improvement without material expansion. Sympathetic as we are to such a proposal, we note that, in practice, growth and development have remained the two sides of the same coin, the first becoming the mantra in the Global North, the latter in the Global South. As we shall see in Section 4, the centrality of development as a practice of continued economic expansion has remained within framings like sustainable development, leading to a changing discourse rather that to a changing reality, as the persistence of rampant inequality, environmental destruction, and erosion of cultural diversity illustrates. Post-development builds on the idea that there is something intrinsically problematic with the concept of development (Castoriadis, 1985), thereby advocating a rupture with the idea itself (Latouche, 2004). Such rupture, we argue, involves a critical revision of the ideas of progress, development, and growth as major ideological pillars of industrial and technological societies.

3. POST-DEVELOPMENT: RETHINKING PROGRESS, DEVELOPMENT, AND GROWTH Development critics often adopt a post-structuralist perspective, whereby categories that tend to be assumed as universal truths are scrutinized as contingent ideas, constructed within a particular history and culture. Through this lens, concepts like progress, development, and growth, whose nature and virtues tend to be taken for granted, are critically examined. From this perspective central questions include who has the power to define what the problem is (diagnosis), and how it can be solved (prognosis). For instance, if the problem of poverty is framed as a lack of material consumption, then the solution is technological development and economic growth. This kind of framing becomes self-evident, necessary, and a universal truth. Post-development theory sets out to critically scrutinize development and growth as the ideological underpinnings of the expansionary vision of industrial societies. The emergence of this ideology can be traced back to early modernity, in close connection to the idea of progress. With the advent of the Enlightenment, the new faith in reason erected scientific and technological advancements as the substitute of the old religions and rites, extending the belief that harnessed through reason, science and technology would direct humanity towards constant improvement (Naredo, 2010). Preceding the launch of the development doctrine in the mid-twentieth century, the ‘Frankfurt School’ examined the notions of modernity and progress under a new and critical light. Horkheimer and Adorno (1944/2002) deemed reason as a double-edge sword. On the one hand, reason has served emancipatory processes and technical developments that brought about unprecedented achievements on health and material affluence. On the other hand, some of the major atrocities of modern times (i.e., world wars, ethnocide, and rampant environmental destruction) have been justified in the name of reason and progress (Hohendahl, 2013). According to Horkheimer and Adorno (1944/2002), genocide and other forms of large-scale violence result from domination of nature by humans and from the domination of some human

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beings by others. In a culture that pursues ‘progress’ as supreme value no matter what, destroying any obstacle to this mission is legitimate. The engine driving this domination, they claim, is the ever-growing capitalist economy, fed by science and industrial technology. Walter Benjamin (1942/1969) criticized the accepted vision of progress as a mechanical and gradual process. To Benjamin, historical time is non-linear, made of sudden catastrophic moments. The dogma of progress, he argued, recognizes advancements in the mastery of nature, but ignores the retrogression of society that sometimes comes with it. Benjamin thought of revolutions not as the locomotive of history (as theorized by Marx), but as ‘the human race grabbing for the emergency brake’, that is, an emergency brake to the locomotive of destructive forces triggered by progress. In the 1970s, intellectuals associated with post-structuralist thinking, such as Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, and Baudrillard, developed a radical critique of modern philosophy with roots discernible in Nietzsche and Heidegger. Foucault (1971) led an intellectual tradition critical of reason and progress, examining how modern forms of power and knowledge served to create new forms of domination (Best and Kellner, 1991). Also in the 1970s, forerunners of ecological economics and degrowth thinking attacked established notions of development and growth, unveiling their unrecognized social and environmental costs. Ecological economics precursors like Mishan (1967), Georgescu-Roegen (1971), Odum (1971), Commoner (1971), Kapp (1978), Martínez-Alier and Schlüpmann (1987), and Daly (1996) pointed to the ecological destruction that accompanies economic expansion, identifying growth as a driver of accelerated habitat destruction, pollution, and resource depletion. Forerunners of degrowth thinking, such as Illich (1973), Gorz (1980), and Castoriadis (2005) further attacked ‘development’ and ‘progress’ as the underpinnings of growth ideology, and of the expansionary vision of modern industrial civilizations. Post-development theory emerged in the 1980s and 1990s through the work of scholars like Wolfgang Sachs, James Ferguson, Arturo Escobar, Gustavo Esteva, Majid Rahnema, Serge Latouche, and Gilbert Rist. This body of literature makes the case that development is rooted in the earlier colonial discourse, where developed nations are portrayed as superior to the underdeveloped nations, which are conceived as backward, as being in need of help from the developed nations, and as desiring to become like them. Development is thus seen as an ethnocentric expression of Western and Northern hegemony over the rest of the world. Development is further seen as a set of worldviews, discourses, and interventions that act also as powers to intervene, to transform, and to rule (Sachs, 1997). Post-development raises questions about who voices development concerns, what power relations are displayed, which are the vested interests of experts and organizations that rule development priorities, and which voices are excluded as a result. Post-development attempts to counter and overcome the inequalities of this discourse, defending and promoting grassroots movements, and expressing distrust of the development establishment (Escobar, 1995, 2015). Post-development chal-

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lenges the notion of a single path to development, acknowledging a diversity of valid pathways and cultural perspectives (Demaria and Kothari, 2017). Advocates of post-development challenge dominant economic science as a form of mental colonization. For this, Serge Latouche (2004) calls for a ‘decolonization of the imaginary’, that is a challenge to the social representations that shape our belief systems, and for taking inspiration from cultures outside or at the fringes the industrial civilization. Hence, whereas development discourses tend to portray traditional resource systems in the ‘underdeveloped’ world as archaic, inefficient, and unproductive, to be modernized and rationalized in the name of development and growth (see e.g., Robinson and Acemoglu, 2012), post-development shows interest in indigenous cultures, local knowledge, and traditional resource systems, and adopts a critical stance towards globalizing techno-scientific discourses (Gómez-Baggethun, 2021). Consequently, within post-development thinking, there is also an emerging literature on relational ontologies and epistemologies of the South (de Sousa Santos, 2009, 2015; Escobar, 2016). These literatures have undertaken a cultural critique of modern relationships to ‘nature’ through a cross-cultural philosophical engagement with indigenous philosophies (Reddekop, 2014). In doing so, ecological economists and post-development thinkers strive to transcend Eurocentric visions and engage in philosophical and ontological dialogues across regions and cultures (Delgado et al., 2012), taking inspiration from environmental and indigenous philosophies to counter the utilitarianism, anthropocentrism, and dualism that characterize our truncated relationship with non-human nature (Muradian and Gómez-Baggethun, 2021). A central tenet of post-development thought is that the ideal of a Western middle-class lifestyle revolving around the nuclear family, mass consumption, and extensive private space is neither a realistic nor a desirable goal for the majority of the world’s population. Development promotes models of industrialization that are ignorant of the local cultures and historical contexts of the peoples to which they are applied, and that are ecologically unsustainable (Latouche, 2009). Already 25 years ago, Sachs (1997) noted that if all countries followed this example, five or six planets would be required to serve as mines and waste dumps.

4.

SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT AS A FALSE RECONCILIATION BETWEEN GROWTH AND THE ENVIRONMENT

Various ideas have been promoted to turn development green (Adams, 2020). The most popular of these ideas is sustainable development, defined in the report Our common future (also known as the Brundtland report) as ‘development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’ (WCED, 1987: 16). Since the late 1980s, the idea of sustainable development has become the guiding principle in national and international policies aiming to harmonize goals of economic development, poverty alleviation, and environmental protection. Moreover,

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in the last decade, the term has gained renewed momentum through the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), 17 interlinked global goals set up in 2015 by the United Nations General Assembly and designed as a blueprint to achieve a more sustainable future by 2030. Despite its popularity in policy circles, environmentalists have criticized sustainable development as a green washing device for conventional development policies. In this section, we review the precedents, origin, and evolution of the idea of sustainable development, suggesting it represents a false reconciliation between development and environment that has contributed to perpetuate rather than overcome the ecological–economic contradictions of the industrial civilization. The publication of the Club of Rome report Limits to Growth fifty years ago (Meadows et al., 1972) established environmental limits as an important issue in political and economic policy debates. The report portrayed economic growth as a key driver of environmental degradation, convincing many political leaders about the impossibility to growth perpetually in a finite planet. For example, Sicco Mansholt, incoming President of the European Commission, declared that Europe should not aim at maximizing GDP growth, stating that ‘the central question is how we can reach a zero-growth economy’ (quoted in Martínez-Alier, 2014). Sustainability discourses of the 1970s predominantly recognized industrialized countries of the Global North as the main contributors to environmental degradation, via disproportionate appropriation of the Earth’s natural resources and ecological sinks. Given limits to growth, redistribution of wealth was favoured over economic expansion as a strategy to tackle poverty. In 1974, UNEP and UNCTAD convened an international symposium at Cocoyoc, publicizing the idea of ‘ecodevelopment’ as a compromise to accommodate the right to development in poor countries within the Earth’s biocapacity. The declaration, an attempt to reconcile human rights and environmental limits, stated that ‘the hope that rapid economic growth benefiting the few will “trickle down” to the mass of the people has proved to be illusory’ and rejected the idea of ‘growth first, justice in the distribution of benefits later’ (Ward, 1975). The notion of ecodevelopment was however short-lived, as it soon met opposition from powerful actors. Only a few days after the release of the declaration, Henry Kissinger, as chief of US diplomacy, rejected the text entirely in a cable sent to UNEP and UNCTAD directors, de facto vetoing the term ecodevelopment in international forums (Galtung, 2010). Sustainable development followed as the new guiding principle, flipping upside down prevalent framings of environmental problems and solutions (Gómez-Baggethun, 2019). Growth was no longer framed as the driver of environmental problems but as the solution. In contrast to previous sustainability discourses that recognized a conflict between growth and the environment, the Brundtland report advocated ‘more rapid economic growth in both industrial and developing countries’ (WCED, 1987: paragraph 72) concluding that ‘the international economy must speed up world growth’ (ibid: paragraph 74). Anticipating current ideas about green growth and decoupling of environmental impact from GDP growth, the report claimed that more rapid growth could be sustainable if nations shift the content of their growth towards less material and energy intensive activities and develop more

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resource-efficient technologies (ibid: paragraph 32). This expectation of a dematerialized and decarbonized economy was formalized through the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC), used since the 1990s to claim that growth and free trade are positive for the environment (Gómez-Baggethun, 2020). In this way, sustainable development reshaped sustainability discourses to fit growth imperatives. In addition, the Brundtland report shifted responsibilities of environmental degradation from the rich to the poor, referring to a ‘downward spiral of poverty and environmental degradation’ and claiming that ‘poverty place unprecedented pressures on the planet’s lands, waters, forests, and other natural resources’ (WCED, 1987: 7). Last but not least, the report’s support of ‘expansionary policies of growth, trade, and investment’ (article 24) secured a harmonious relationship with the neoliberal agenda of economic deregulation and free trade. Since the Brundtland report, all sustainable development declarations have endorsed economic growth and trade liberalization in the name of sustainability (Gómez-Baggethun and Naredo, 2015). Sustainability policy, earlier watchdog and counterbalance of dominant economic ideology, had been turned by sustainable development into a docile servant. Over recent decades, mounting empirical evidence shows economic growth to be a driver of major environmental impacts including carbon emissions (Jackson and Victor, 2019), resource depletion (Wiedmann et al., 2015), and biodiversity loss (Otero et al., 2020). The EKC hypothesis has come true only in developed countries that have outsourced their industry to developing countries with cheaper labour force and softer environmental regulations (Jackson, 2017). Empirical data also suggest that pointing at poverty (rather than affluence) as a major cause of environmental degradation is equally problematic, as evidence shows that per-capita carbon and material footprints of rich nations is, on average, far larger than the footprints of poor nations (Martínez-Alier, 2003; Hickel, 2020; Wiedmann et al., 2020). Yet, still today, international sustainability policy keeps promoting economic growth through the SDGs, most explicitly in SDG 8, which pursues ‘Decent work and economic growth’. Whereas a comprehensive analysis of the SGDs is beyond the scope of this chapter, three major concerns are worth mentioning from a post-development perspective. First, SDG 8 presents economic growth as a goal in itself rather than as a means to achieve the other goals, such as decent work, health, and education in low-income countries. This illustrates a perpetuation of the economy ideology that seeks growth for the sake of growth. Second, the ways in which the SDGs are articulated into targets and indicators presupposes a one-world perspective, that is, a singular understanding of what a good life means, which corresponds to the imaginary of Western civilization. This does not only represent a cultural imposition, but also – and paradoxically – the promotion of a socio-economic system and lifestyle that has proven to be ecological unsustainable. Third, the 2030 Agenda declaration fails to adopt a historically situated perspective that accounts for the reasons behind the problems it pretends to tackle, such as poverty, inequalities, and climate change. We argue that without a proper recognition and understanding of the structural roots, drivers, and responsibilities of environmental degradation and social inequalities it will be difficult, if not entirely impossible, to arrive at effective

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solutions. Once again, the problematic relationship between economic growth and ecological sustainability is a fitting example of this. In summary, along with previous appraisals by ecological economists and post-development thinkers, we claim that sustainable development is an oxymoron that represents yet another effort to preserve the ideology of growth. Its aim was to try to save the religion of growth in face of the ecological crisis, while keeping intact the basic tenets of the capitalist economy.

5.

LEAVING DEVELOPMENT BEHIND: THE CASE FOR DEGROWTH

The term degrowth was first proposed by political ecologist André Gorz in 1972 and was used in 1979 to entitle a book with a French translation of essays by Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, intellectual father of ecological economics and the degrowth movement. Degrowth was then launched by French environmental activists at the turn of the millennium as a provocative slogan to re-politicize debates on development and the environment, and to denounce the doublespeak of sustainable development. Thus, degrowth is not originally launched as a concept (at least not symmetrically to economic growth) but rather as a defiant political slogan. Contrary to what is often assumed, the word degrowth should therefore not be interpreted as a mere opposite of growth as conventionally understood (i.e., as increases in GDP); degrowth is not meant to mean recession nor negative growth (i.e., a decrease in GDP). Rather, degrowth is a ‘missile word’ that aims to articulate social and environmental critiques of how the growth-based capitalist economy leads to environmental destruction and wealth concentration. Degrowth challenges the hegemony of economic growth thinking and calls for a democratically led redistributive downscaling of production and consumption in industrialized countries as a pathway to environmental sustainability, social justice, and well-being (Demaria et al., 2013; Kallis, 2018). Degrowth is associated with the idea that smaller can be beautiful. However, the emphasis is not only on less, but also on different: different economic activities, forms and uses of energy, social relations, gender roles, allocations of time between paid and non-paid work, and relations with the non-human world (D’Alisa et al., 2015). Degrowth envisions a radical transformation of the economy but is not primarily an economic project. Although tightly connected to ecological economics, degrowth implies escaping the language and practice of ‘economism’, both as a reality and as an imperialist discourse. Hence, the vision of degrowth transcends the economic domain. On the one hand, degrowth implies reducing the physical scale of social metabolism (the energy and material throughput of the economy), to fit the environmental limits defined by the Earth’s regenerative and assimilative capacities. On the other hand, degrowth challenges the existing prominence of market relations in societal organization, countering the colonizing expansion of market values and language into novel social and ecological domains, and demanding the de-commodifi-

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cation of both social relations and of human relationships with non-human nature (Gómez-Baggethun, 2015). Degrowth also calls for deepening democracy, expanding popular control to political domains that liberal market democracies tend to leave and the hands of technocrats or corporate power, such as the way we should run the economy and the content and direction of technological developments. Finally, degrowth implies an equitable redistribution of wealth within and across the Global North and South, as well as between present and future generations. Degrowth emerges as a project to counter capitalism and the globalized market and to replace them with an alternative civilizational project. The rupture with ‘developmentalism’, a form of productivism mainly tailored to so-called developing countries, is a foundation of this project. A degrowth transition is not a sustained trajectory of descent, but a transition to convivial societies who live simply, in common, and with less. There are several ideas about the practices and institutions that can facilitate such a transition and the processes that can bring them together and allow them to flourish. The attractiveness of degrowth emerges from its power to draw from and articulate different sources and streams of thought (including justice, democracy and ecology) and to formulate strategies at different levels (including oppositional activism, grassroots alternatives, and institutional politics). It brings together a heterogeneous group of actors who focus on different social and environmental causes, from agroecology to climate justice. Degrowth aspires to complement and reinforce these topic areas, functioning as a connecting thread (i.e., a platform for a network of networks) beyond one-issue politics. Degrowth does not aspire to be ‘the’ alternative to global market capitalism, but rather to promote a space of creativity that reopens our capacity to envision alternatives to capitalism, growthism, and economic determinism. This means exiting the paradigm of homo œconomicus and Marcuse’s one-dimensional man, as sources of planetary homogenization with associated destruction of biocultural diversity. Consequently, the degrowth society will not be established the same way across regions and cultures. Each region should find its own alternatives to development, tailored to its own cultural and ecological characteristics. Degrowth in affluent regions can be done in alliance with other alternatives to development all over world, such as buen vivir in Latin America or the Ghandian Economy of permanence in India (Kothari et al., 2019). Degrowth shall not aim at providing a fixed political blueprint, but rather at outlining the fundamentals of a non-productivist society that can live in harmony with nature and to offer concrete examples for transitional programmes that include grassroot action and concrete policy proposals. The design can take the form of a ‘virtuous circle’ of sobriety in the form of the so-called 8 ‘R’s: re-evaluate, reconceptualize, restructure, relocate, redistribute, reduce, reuse, and recycle (Latouche, 2009). These interdependent objectives constitute a revolutionary rupture, which can trigger a dynamic towards a more autonomous, sustainable, and convivial society. Can degrowth scale up from representing a marginal idea to one with ample currency in societal and political debates? While no breakthrough is to be expected

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in the near term, some signs invite to optimism: within only a decade, degrowth has evolved from a peripheral idea of environmentalist movements to an established intellectual movement and academic field. In 2008 there were only a couple of published papers in English on degrowth. Today there are probably over 500 published papers, 15 special issues and 20 books (for a review see Weiss and Cattaneo, 2017). We might be witnessing the emergence of a new scientific paradigm, in the sense of ‘universally recognised scientific achievements that, for a time, provide model problems and solutions for a community of researchers’ (Kuhn, 1962: x). The question remains whether this intellectual momentum will translate into transformative political action.

6.

TOWARDS A DEGROWTH POLITICS

The politics of degrowth – the actors, alliances, institutions, and social processes creating degrowth transitions – remains the subject of a lively debate in Europe and beyond. For instance, in September 2018 over 200 scientists wrote an open letter to major European institutions entitled ‘Europe, it is time to end the growth dependency’ that was signed by almost 100,000 citizens. Currently, the degrowth network includes over 100 organizations with 3,000 active members, mostly located in Europe. Growth remains the credo of all governments and major international organizations such as the OECD, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. Economic growth (increasingly labelled as inclusive and sustainable) is presented as the main recipe to solve any of the world’s problems such as poverty, inequality, and sustainability. Left-wing and right-wing policies only differ on how to achieve it, for example, discussing the relative weight that states should have in steering economic growth. As discussed above, there is however an uncomfortable truth that seems increasingly difficult to obviate: mounting empirical evidence suggest that economic growth is environmentally unsustainable and is likely to remain so in the future. Moreover, much research indicates that beyond a certain threshold of material consumption already surpassed by so-called developed countries, economic growth is likely to bring more social costs and benefits, thereby becoming ‘uneconomic’ (Daly, 1996). Yet, within the existing institutional set-up, economic stability seems to be structurally dependent on retaining economic growth. The central question then becomes: how can we manage an economy without growth? Concrete policy proposals in the degrowth and post-growth literatures include alternative indicators of economic progress (Hickel, 2020), green and just tax and subsidy reforms (Sandbrook et al., 2022), work sharing and work time reduction (Schor, 2015; Gómez-Baggethun, 2022), re-regulating trade (Daly, 2013), establishing maximum–minimum income ratios (Alexander, 2015), and securing universal basics (see also Latouche, 2009; D’Alisa et al., 2015; Kallis et al., 2020). In what follows we briefly summarize some of these proposals.

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GDP must be replaced by alternative indicators of social and economic improvement. GDP growth is a deficient indicator of progress; it fails to value social and environmental costs, economic inequalities, and domestic work, resulting in poor measures of human well-being. Indicators such as the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), the Indicator of Sustainable Economic Welfare (ISEW), the Sustainable Development Index (SDI), and Inclusive Wealth address some of these problems, yet are still poorly incorporated in national accounts. Activities involving large environmental costs should be taxed, especially those involving luxurious (as opposed to subsistence) consumption. Degrowth makes a case for taxing advertisement, minimizing waste, and confronting planned obsolescence. This means that repairing products should be a more affordable option than buying new ones, which can be promoted through, for example, tax releases on repairs and longer statutory guarantees on products. Green taxation should be combined with redistributive taxation, through, for example, taxes on income, wealth, and capital. Moreover, revenue from green taxes should be earmarked for further investment in a just ecological transition and the creation of decent work for those affected by it. A green subsidy reform shifts subsidies away from activities that degrade the environment and towards activities that regenerate the environment. Examples include reallocating subsidies from fossil fuels towards renewable energies, and from agroindustry to agroecology. In a degrowth society working time would be reduced and redistributed and rules of reward should be redesigned to better reflect the hardship as well as the social and environmental value of different jobs (Gómez-Baggethun, 2022). Working time drives consumption, which is the strongest determinant of global environmental impacts (Wiedmann et al., 2020). Work time reductions can be used as a key measure for reducing environmental footprints, countering unemployment from automation, and increasing quality of life in the face of growing dissatisfaction with work-centred lifestyles. This can be achieved by using productivity gains from technological development for expanding leisure time instead of expanding economic output (Schor, 2015). Will any government implement these policy proposals? In all likelihood, not in the near future. Yet, there are signs that degrowth proposals are entering into the parliaments.1 Some political parties have started to adopt degrowth oriented or degrowth compatible proposals in their political programmes. At the House of Commons in London there is an ‘All-Party Parliamentary Group on limits to growth’. In 2018, a seminar was hosted at the European Commission titled ‘Well-being beyond GDP growth?’, and a post-growth conference with participation of influential EU policy makers at the European Parliament challenged the economic thinking of EU institutions. Many political parties and trade unions do now advocate work time reductions, and experiments with reduced working hours are taking place across the public and private sectors. The emerging field of ecological macroeconomics is shedding light on challenges and practical proposals to run economics that can bring prosperity without growth (Jackson, 2017). Many questions remain: Can degrowth more decisively enter the Parliaments? How large would its constituency be? Are

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parliaments anyway a favoured venue to promote degrowth ideas or should rather action by grassroot movements be prioritized? How could a synergy be built between grassroots movements and institutional politics? How far will the mainstream be able to support growth’s mirage? And how – and who – is going to challenge the discontent emerging out of slow growth in growth’s societies? Can we give this frustration a new meaning and direction, other than that of closure and phobia? How will opposition from the powerful be met? Which means of struggle are legitimate for degrowth? Should organized disobedience, sabotage, and other revolutionary tactics feature in its repertoire of action? Welcome to the new era of post-growth politics.

7. CONCLUSIONS Degrowth is slowly but steadily making its way out from the fringes of politics: Over recent years it has made its way through academia, the reports of UN-led science– policy interfaces like IPCC and IPBES, and the programmes of various political parties. Yet its potential as a force for political transformation is still in its infancy. Degrowth proponents need to think of objectives, strategies, and priorities. There is a need to expand its alliances, strengthening relationships with research and activist communities like environmental justice, political ecology, ecological economics, post-extractivism, commons, feminism, decoloniality, and post-development. The ‘how’ needs to be thought through – for example, a joint visioning process – but the ‘why’ is clear. The alliances among these networks are fundamental to weave the alternatives and foster a deeply radical socio-ecological transformation. We could imagine it as a rhizome of resistance and regeneration. Degrowth aspires to provide a way to escape a system that is absorbed by the fetishism of growth. Such rupture concerns both the symbolic domain and material practices. It implies the decolonization of the growth imaginary and the enactment of other possible worlds. The degrowth project does not aim for another form of growth (green, inclusive, smart), nor for another kind of development (sustainable, social, human), but for leaving growth and development behind, and to aim for the construction of an environmentally viable and just society, based on principles of sufficiency, sharing, simplicity, conviviality, equality, and care.

NOTE 1. See The Ecologist, 16 January 2017. https://​theecologist​.org/​2017/​jan/​16/​when​-degrowth​ -enters​-parliament

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REFERENCES Adams, W.M. (2020). Green Development: Environment and Sustainability in a Developing World, 4th edition. London: Routledge. Alexander, S. (2015). Basic and maximum income. In G. D’Alisa, F. Demaria, and G. Kallis (Eds.), Degrowth: A Vocabulary for a New Era. New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis, pp. 174‒176. Benjamin, W. (1942/1969). Illuminations (Vol. 241, No. 2). New York: Random House Digital. Best, S., and D. Kellner (1991). Foucault and the critique of modernity. In S. Best and D. Kellner (Eds.), Postmodern Theory. London: Palgrave, pp. 34–75. Castoriadis, C. (1985). Reflections on ‘rationality’ and ‘development’. Thesis Eleven 10(1): 18–36. Castoriadis, C. (2005). Escritos políticos. Madrid, MD: Catarata. Commoner, B. (1971). The Closing Circle: Nature, Man, and Technology. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. D’Alisa, G., F. Demaria, and G. Kallis (Eds.) (2015). Degrowth: A Vocabulary for a New Era. New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis. Daly, H.E. (1996). Beyond Growth: The Economics of Sustainable Development. Boston: Beacon Press. Daly, H. (2013). Top 10 policies for a steady-state economy. Daily News, October 403 28. https://​steadystate​.org/​top​-10​-policies​-for​-a​-steady​-state​-economy/​ Accessed 22 June 2020. Delgado, F., C. Escobar, S. Rist, and D. Ricaldi (2012). Knowledge dialogues for sustainable endogenous development: Reforming higher education and research in Bolivia. In B. Haverkort, F. Delgado, D. Shankar, and D. Millar (Eds.), Towards Co-Creation of Sciences: Building on the Plurality of Worldviews, Values and Methods in Different Knowledge Communities. Bangalore: Nimby Books, India, pp. 186–233. Demaria, F., and A. Kothari (2017). The post-development dictionary agenda: Paths to the pluriverse. Third World Quarterly 38(12): 2588–2599. Demaria, F., F. Schneider, F. Sekulova, and J. Martinez-Alier (2013). What is degrowth? From an activist slogan to a social movement. Environmental Values 22(2): 191‒215. de Sousa Santos, B. (2009). A non-occidentalist West? Learned ignorance and ecology of knowledge. Theory, Culture and Society 26(7‒8): 103‒125. de Sousa Santos, B. (2015). Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide. New York: Routledge. Escobar, A. (1995). Encountering Development. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Escobar, A. (2015). Degrowth, postdevelopment, and transitions: A preliminary conversation. Sustainability Science 10(3): 451–462. Escobar, A. (2016). Thinking-feeling with the earth: territorial struggles and the ontological dimension of the epistemologies of the south. AIBR. Revista de Antropología iberoamericana 11(1): 11–32. Foucault, M. (1971). The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Pantheon Books. Galtung, J. (2010). The Cocoyoc Declaration. TRANSCEND Media Service. Published on 29 March 2010. https://​www​.transcend​.org/​tms/​?p​=​3902 Georgescu-Roegen, N. (1971). The Entropy Law and the Economic Process. London: Harvard University Press. Gómez-Baggethun, E. (2015). Commodification. In G. D’Alisa, F. Demaria, and G. Kallis (Eds.), Degrowth: A Vocabulary for a New Era. New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis, pp. 67‒70.

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Gómez-Baggethun, E. (2019). Sustainable development. In A. Khotari, A. Salleh, A. Escobar, F. Demaria, and A. Acosta (Eds.), Pluriverse: A Post-development Dictionary. New Delhi: Tulika Books, pp. 71‒74. Gómez-Baggethun, E. (2020). More is more: Scaling political ecology within limits to growth. Political Geography, 76: 102095. Gómez-Baggethun, E. (2021). Is there a future for indigenous and local knowledge? The Journal of Peasant Studies, 49(6): 1139‒1157. Gómez-Baggethun, E. (2022). Rethinking work for a just and sustainable future. Ecological Economics 200: 107506 Gómez-Baggethun, E., and J.M. Naredo (2015). In search of lost time: The rise and fall of limits to growth in international sustainability policy. Sustainability Science 10: 385–395. Gorz, A. (1980). Ecology as Politics. Montreal: Black Rose Books. Gudynas, E., and A. Acosta (2011). La renovación de la crítica al desarrollo y el buen vivir como alternativa. Utopia y Praxis Latinoamerica 16(53): 71‒83. Hickel, J. (2020). The sustainable development index: Measuring the ecological efficiency of human development in the Anthropocene. Ecological Economics 167: 106331. Hohendahl, P.U. (2013). Progress revisited: Adorno’s dialogue with Augustine, Kant, and Benjamin. Critical Inquiry 40(1): 242–260. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1086/​673234. Horkheimer, M., and T.W. Adorno (1944/2002). Dialectic of the Enlightenment. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Illich, I. (1973). Tools for Conviviality. R. Nanda Anshen (Ed.). New York: Harper & Row. Jackson, P. (2017). Prosperity without Growth. London: Earthscan. Jackson, T., and P.A. Victor (2019). Unraveling the claims for (and against) green growth. Science 366(6468): 950‒951. Kallis, G. (2018). Degrowth. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Agenda Publishing. Kallis, G., S. Paulson, G. D’Alisa, and F. Demaria (2020). The Case for Degrowth. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Kapp, W. (1978). The Social Costs of Business Enterprise. Nottingham: Spokesman Books. Kothari, A., A. Salleh, A. Escobar, F. Demaria, and A. Acosta (Eds.) (2019). Pluriverse: A Post-Development Dictionary. New Delhi: Tulika Books / Columbia University Press. Kuhn, T. (1962). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Latouche, S. (2004). Survivre au développement: De la décolonisation de l’imaginaire économique à la construction d’une société alternative. Paris: Fayard/Mille et une nuits. Latouche, S. (2009). Farewell to Growth. Cambridge: Polity Press. Martínez-Alier. J. (2003). The Environmentalism of the Poor. Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing. Martínez-Alier, J. (2014). Growth below zero: In memory of Sicco Mansholt. http://​www​.ejolt​ .org/​2014/​03/​growth​-below​-zero​-inmemory​-of​-sicco​-mansholt/​ Martínez-Alier, J., and K. Schlüpmann (1987). Ecological Economics: Energy, Environment and Society. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Meadows, D.H., D.L. Meadows, J. Randers, and W.W. Behrens (1972). The Limits to Growth. New York: Potomac Associates – Universe Books. Mishan, E.J. (1967). The Costs of Economic Growth. London: Staples Press. Muradian, R., and E. Gómez-Baggethun (2021). Beyond ecosystem services and nature’s contributions: Is it time to leave utilitarian environmentalism behind? Ecological Economics, 185: 107038. Nafziger, E.W. (2012). Economic Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Naredo, J.M. (2010). Raíces económicas del deterioro ecológico y social. Madrid: Siglo XXI. Odum, H.T. (1971). Environment, Power and Society. New York: Wiley. Otero, I., K.N. Farrell, S. Pueyo, G. Kallis, L. Kehoe, H. Haberl, … and G. Pe’Er (2020). Biodiversity policy beyond economic growth. Conservation Letters 13(4): e12713.

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Rahnema, M., and V. Bawtree (1997). The Post-Development Reader. London: Zed Books. Reddekop, J. (2014). Thinking across worlds: Indigenous thought, relational ontology, and the politics of nature; or, If only Nietzsche could meet a Yachaj. Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository. 2082. https://​ir​.lib​.uwo​.ca/​etd/​2082. Rist, G. (2014). The History of Development: From Western Origins to Global Faith. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Robinson, J.A., and D. Acemoglu (2012). Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty. London: Profile. Sachs, W. (Ed.) (1997). The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power. London and New Jersey: Zed Books. Sandbrook, C., E. Gómez-Baggethun, and W.M. Adams (2022). Biodiversity conservation in a post-COVID-19 economy. Oryx: The International Journal of Conservation 56(2): 277–283. Schor, J.B. (2015). Work sharing. In G. D’Alisa, F. Demaria, and G. Kallis (Eds.), Degrowth: A Vocabulary for a New Era. New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis, pp. 223‒226. Victor, P.A. (2013). The Costs of Economic Growth. Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing. Ward, B. (1975). The Cocoyoc Declaration. International Organisation, 29(3): 893‒901. WCED (World Commission on Environment and Development) (1987). Our Common Future. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Weiss, M., and C. Cattaneo (2017). Degrowth – taking stock and reviewing an emerging academic paradigm. Ecological Economics, 137: 220‒230. Wiedmann, T., M. Lenzen, L.T. Keyßer, and J.K. Steinberger (2020). Scientists’ warning on affluence. Nature Communications, 11(1): 1‒10. Wiedmann, T.O., H. Schandl, M. Lenzen, D. Moran, S. Suh, J. West, and K. Kanemoto (2015). The material footprint of nations. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(20), 6271‒6276.

4. Dismantling the machine: rethinking the role of technology in critical development theory Alf Hornborg

1. INTRODUCTION “Development” was once imagined as the path by which former colonies could become as affluent as the nations that colonized them. It was conceived as an economic and sociopolitical process that would in principle be unconstrained by material, biophysical factors. The Anthropocene, however, is telling us that economic and technological development has not simply been a societal process, but that it has relied on the appropriation of finite biophysical resources and generated material disorder in the form of ecological degradation and climate change. Development, we are discovering, has a sociometabolic dimension that prompts us to consider how social relations and material forces are intertwined. To understand development as a process that implicates both nature and society helps to explain why it is so difficult for us to theorize, and why it continues to escape critical inquiries into its tendency to remain the privilege of a global minority. The sequestration of economic from biophysical phenomena has been as conducive to the expansion of core areas of the world-system as it has been instrumental in keeping their peripheries peripheral. “Technological progress” is widely perceived as the essence of development, but in being categorized as pertaining to the physical harnessing of natural forces, the phenomenon of technology is relegated to an extra-social realm with little inherent relevance for social theory. When referred to by economic historians and development theorists, technology is generally dealt with merely as a privileged tool, an intrinsically neutral instrument with which to realize goals such as economic growth, imperial expansion, or political control. In this chapter I will argue that this taking of technology for granted, as an external accessory immune to social theory, has made it the elephant in the room in modern economic history and development theory. To be sure, there are voluminous discussions on the social conditions for – and implications of – technological innovation, and of the ways in which social relations contribute to the design of technological systems, but these discussions do not consider technologies as socionatural phenomena. In other words, they deliberate on the societal contexts of technologies without examining their sociometabolic substance. To do so, we must acknowledge not only that technologies are material phenomena, dependent 57

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on specific inputs of matter, energy, labor, and other biophysical resources, but also that those inputs are organized through social arrangements such as the world market. Instead of approaching economic development as a social process mobilizing neutral material instruments – which is to maintain a conceptual dualism separating society from physical phenomena – the challenge is to understand what we think of as development as a sociometabolic process of accumulation. This becomes clearer when we consider the extent to which the growth of technological infrastructure in some parts of the world is contingent on the net transfers of material resources from other areas. The uneven global distribution of technological infrastructure is visible in satellite images of nighttime lights (Hornborg 2019: 60). Although closely correlated with the global distribution of money, it is thus clearly a material phenomenon. We might say that the satellite images show capital accumulation as viewed from space. The concern with inequalities and injustices that is so central to Marxist theory could be expected to generate incisive analyses of these global, distributive aspects of modern technology. Yet, as I hope to show in this chapter, Marxist analyses tend to be as constrained as mainstream economics from transcending the conceptual divide between nature and society: that is, between a realm of inexorable material causality and a sphere of constructed and negotiable relationality. The mainstream distinction between technology and society is reproduced in the Marxist distinction between productive forces and relations of production. This distinction is an obstacle to grasping the logic of global inequalities of development, as evident in the classical Marxian celebration of the technological enhancement of productivity under capitalism. Given that such technological progress may be contingent on the appropriation of embodied labor and other biophysical resources from other parts of the world-system, we must conclude that Marx inadvertently praised the asymmetric resource flows of British colonialism. In a nutshell, this paradox illuminates the contradictory understanding of technology in historical materialism. In order to grasp the sociometabolic logic of technology, we face two challenges: one is to theorize modern technology as a phenomenon that straddles the conventional divide between nature and society, the other is to revise our understanding of technology as a local relation between human expertise and nature. I shall argue (a) that modern technology is fundamentally socionatural, because (b) it is a manifestation of asymmetric global relations of exchange that are socially organized but material in substance. As technological progress is an essential component of visions of development, these deliberations should be centrally relevant to development theory.

2.

THE ROLE OF TECHNOLOGY IN CRITICAL NARRATIVES OF CAPITALISM

In what follows I will review some influential Marxian narratives of the history of capitalism to indicate how they tend to relegate technology to an unnegotiable, politically neutral sphere that is extraneous to social deconstruction. This is not to say, of course, that Marxists do not see the use of technology as highly political;

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what is at issue is whether the constitution of the technological objects themselves can be understood as intrinsically political, in the sense that they are embodiments of asymmetric sociometabolic flows. It is evident throughout his voluminous deliberations on machinery that Marx himself did not apply his own insights on commodity fetishism – the inclination of humans to perceive social relations as relations between things (Marx [1867] 1976: 165) – to the machine. While generally insistent that commodities mystify the asymmetric social exchange relations from which they are detached, he expressed praise for that category of commodified artifacts which enhances a worker’s productivity (that is, technological artifacts). For instance, the fact that the iron in an early British steam engine around 1790 was likely to embody substantial volumes of Baltic labor and land (cf. Evans, Jackson and Rydén 2002; Warlenius 2016) did not seem to perturb his account of capital accumulation as arising exclusively from the relation between capitalists and local British factory workers. However, regardless of whether the machine accomplished a global net saving of labor time, it could be expected of a Marxian approach to hesitate about celebrating arrangements which increase the productivity of some workers at the expense of labor time expended by others. Given that technologies are not established once and for all but must continuously be reproduced, the past inputs of labor (Marx’s “dead labor”) invested in extraction and the manufacturing of machinery should not be approached as a fait accompli – a product of history devoid of the kinds of moral or political implications evoked by current exchange relations. Such an approach is indefensibly impervious to the continuing asymmetries required to reproduce a modern technology over time. While Huber (2013: 14) reminds us that Marx recognized that “the dead labor of capital can only reproduce itself [‘vampire-like’] through living labor,” this living labor exploited by capital appears to include only the local operators of machinery, not the remote plantation workers and miners with whom the industrial factories must maintain an enduring relation. Technological fetishism is pervasive in fields concerned with the prerequisites of capitalism, such as economic history and development theory. An overarching issue in these fields is the extent to which the expansion of industrial capitalism in Europe can be accounted for as a result of processes internal to Europe versus global processes that made European industrialization possible. In his crusade against Eurocentric historiography, James Blaut (2000) identifies such geographical myopia in both explicitly Eurocentric historians like David Landes (1969) and in what he calls the Euro-Marxism of Robert Brenner (cf. Ashton and Philpin 1985). Common to Landes and Brenner, Blaut finds, is the conviction that colonialism and world trade were unimportant for explanations of the origins of industrial capitalism. In reiterating the classical Marxist emphasis on local class struggle, Brenner’s account ends up agreeing with modernization theorists and historians like Landes, who attributes the early industrialization of Europe to its uniquely rational and innovative mentality. Blaut objects that Brenner paradoxically traces the kind of technological rationality that Marx identified as characteristic of capitalist competition back to medieval Europe, centuries before the rise of capitalism. Brenner’s narrative is aligned with that of Landes in accounting for European expansion by referring to endogenous

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factors, rather than to processes occurring at the level of the emergent global system following the integration of the two hemispheres in the sixteenth century. Blaut’s critique of such Eurocentric narratives is entirely valid, but it is constrained by the mainstream view of technologies as products of ideas rather than material metabolism. He traces several important technological innovations to non-European inventions, objecting that Landes’ account “makes medieval Europe seem more modern than it was and medieval non-Europe seem more backward” (2000: 183). But the crucial issue, in approaching modern technology as a global phenomenon, is not the direction of the diffusion of ideas but the sociometabolic conditions, deriving from the world economy, for establishing new technologies. Blaut’s intervention illustrates that a global perspective on technological intensification does not necessarily lead to a rethinking of technology as a phenomenon that spans the conceptual divide between the material causality of nature and the negotiable contingency of society. Overcoming Eurocentrism does not necessarily have implications for our ability to overcome that divide. This is also very evident in Marxist theories of imperialism. In his survey of such theories, first published in 1980, when the so-called “Brenner debate” preoccupied many Marxian historians and development theorists, Anthony Brewer (1990: 5) observes that the Industrial Revolution in Britain made it: “possible to conceive of the abolition of poverty and drudgery through mechanized production. Marx’s vision of socialism was based squarely on the potential created by industrialization.” Although investments in new technology were largely derived from the “profits of empire” (p. 6) and the “influx of plunder” (p. 41), capitalism in the classical Marxist view “creates the material preconditions for a better (socialist) society” (p. 16): In the classical Marxist account, grossly oversimplified, capitalism emerged first in a few centres, generating capital accumulation and development there, and opening up a lead over the rest of the world without necessarily taking anything from it … . Different parts of the world are runners in the same race, in which some started before others. Any advantage gained by one at the expense of others is incidental. (p. 17)

The alternative view within the Marxist framework, exemplified by the perspectives of Andre Gunder Frank, Arghiri Emmanuel, and Immanuel Wallerstein, is that “underdevelopment” is not a state of backwardness but the result of exploitation and unequal exchange following a country’s incorporation into the capitalist world-system. In revisiting these theories of economic underdevelopment presented in the 1960s and 1970s, we must concede, with Brewer (1990: 168–169), that their references to the international exploitation and unequal exchange of “surplus” are ambiguous. It is unclear if the surplus that is unequally transferred should be conceptualized as a quantity of physical goods or as economic values. The Marxist theorists of global exploitation are finally unable to define what is being appropriated by the cores from their peripheries – that is, whether the “surplus” is material or monetary. This conundrum is reflected in the failure to problematize the phenomenon of technology in the voluminous discourse on development. Brenner (1977) reiterates

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the classical Marxist conviction that capitalism, through its own inner logic, promotes technological increases in the productivity of labor, and Brewer (1990: 182) ingenuously concludes that, “if increasing productivity is the essence of capitalist development, the prosperity of the ‘core’, or the ‘metropolis’, does not have to be at the expense of anybody else … .” The implication is that technological intensification is by definition politically neutral. Brewer’s dismissive account of dependency and world-system theories is symptomatic of the ubiquitous failure to understand modern technological development as inherently asymmetric and political. But the accumulation of capital in the sense of purchasing power (money) is difficult to distinguish from the accumulation of physical capital – through appropriation of material resources (including embodied labor) – that it enables. Emmanuel (1972: 264–265) explains his analysis of unequal exchange as an attempt to unravel “the mechanism whereby one nation exploits another (what has been called ‘exploitation at a distance’), the task that Marx set aside for the end of his work but did not have time to complete.” Although Emmanuel’s observations on the trade asymmetries resulting from international differences in the price of labor are highly significant, the argument would have been clearer – and more genuinely materialist – if it had referred to global transfers of embodied labor in a concrete, biophysical sense, rather than the abstract notion of labor “value.” In focusing on the unequal exchange of energy between central and peripheral economic sectors, Stephen Bunker (1985) pioneered the application of such a biophysical perspective, but he phrases the asymmetric transfers that result in uneven development in terms of the ambiguous notion of “energy values.” As in the case of Emmanuel, this illustrates how difficult it is to extricate development theory from the hegemonic conceptual framework of mainstream economics. Whether embodied labor or embodied energy, asymmetric resource transfers tend to be conceptualized not as biophysical quantities but as economic values. Wallerstein, whose Marxian account of the emergence of global capitalism has been of great use to many development theorists and economic historians, has published a general introduction to world-systems analysis (Wallerstein 2004) that could be expected to provide clear definitions of pivotal concepts such as “unequal exchange” and to illuminate processes of industrialization from a global and materialist perspective. However, his references to unequal exchange are not very enlightening. He defines it as “a constant flow of surplus-value from the producers of peripheral products to the producers of core-like products” (2004: 28; emphasis added). Drawing on the categories of Raúl Prebisch, Wallerstein (2004: 17) asserts that unequal exchange characterizes the relation between those involved in core-like versus peripheral production processes, favoring the former. In his Glossary, he refers to Emmanuel’s definition, which distinguishes “core-like” from “peripheral” products on the basis of differences in labor costs. In neither of these three brief mentions of unequal exchange is there an indication that the phenomenon has a material dimension. References to “surplus-value” and “costs” make it clear that whatever is being unequally exchanged should rather be quantified in money. When Wallerstein’s

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narrative in volume III of The Modern World-System (1989) arrives at the emergence of industry in eighteenth-century Britain, he nowhere suggests that the accumulation of industrial infrastructure is connected to the asymmetric material flows of world trade, such as embodied labor, land, energy, and materials. Although, true to his global perspective, he rejects explanations of the Industrial Revolution that refer to features specific to Britain, he does not reconceptualize the phenomenon of industrial technology as a category of artifacts that are contingent on global metabolism. He thus illustrates that it is perfectly feasible to provide a narrative of world history that focuses on the dynamics of the global system – rather than on the achievements of particular nations – without drawing technology itself into social theory. Wallerstein’s world-system perspective was largely inspired by Fernand Braudel and the Annales school of historiography. Braudel’s emphasis is on combining the study of material culture and global processes over the long term, yet he does not theorize the interpenetration of technological artifacts and world trade in the sense that the very existence of the former may be contingent on the latter. Braudel’s unparalleled grasp of world history notwithstanding, he does not provide a clear definition of unequal exchange: he observes that the exchange between town and country is a “good example … of unequal exchange” ([1979] 1992: 39), but does not elaborate this assessment in terms of the material asymmetries of such resource flows. The materiality of exchange appears finally not to be accorded causal relevance: Unequal exchange, the origin of the inequality in the world, and, by the same token, the inequality of the world, the invariable generator of trade, are longstanding realities. … Power is accumulated like money … . The inequality of the world is the result of structural realities at once slow to take shape and slow to fade away. ([1979] 1992: 49‒50)

In identifying colonialism and imperialism as far back as fifteenth-century Venice and seventeenth-century Amsterdam, Braudel does not seem to view the Industrial Revolution in Britain as a decisive discontinuity in the sense that processes of capital accumulation are now manifested in a productive infrastructure that is contingent on the material substance of global commodity flows. He thus traces the development of technology along a continuous sequence from Venice through Holland, Britain, and the United States, without suggesting that the industrialization of Britain should prompt us to develop new theoretical tools with which to understand the global, social aspects of mechanization. This is not to say, of course, that he does not recognize the “tremendous significance” of the “machine revolution” as “a weapon of domination and destruction of foreign competition” ([1979] 1992: 535), but that he sees no reason to problematize, from a postdualist perspective, the very phenomenon of the machine. Braudel distinguishes a “commercial revolution” in the eighteenth century, alongside the Industrial Revolution: As for the links between the Commercial and Industrial Revolutions, these are close and reciprocal: the two revolutions powerfully reinforced one another. England’s fortunes abroad lay in the constitution of a mighty trading empire giving the British economy access

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to the largest trading area in the world, from the Caribbean to India, China and Africa. ([1979] 1992: 575)

Another way of phrasing this is to observe that monetary profits in the eighteenth century translated Britain’s burgeoning exports into expanding imports of commodities representing productive potential – labor embodied in extraction as well as embodied land, energy, and materials – from its colonial periphery. The frequently asserted inequality of exchange between cores and peripheries is now inherent in its biophysical substance: the exchange of fresh resources for products representing resources already dissipated. This sociometabolic asymmetry, which can be logically inferred from the Second Law of Thermodynamics, is obscured by the pervasive preoccupation with market prices in both economic history and development theory. Although laborious, the requantification of trade in material measures would result in very different statistics. A ton of Swedish bar iron imported to Britain in 1770, for instance, represented the annual yield of more than 19 hectares of Swedish forest and almost two person-year-equivalents of embodied Swedish labor (Warlenius 2016). The implication of such figures is that economic cores are able to draw on the embodied land, labor, materials, and energy resources of their peripheries. Against this background, the Industrial Revolution suggests a point at which the accumulation of resources in Britain was converted into a productive infrastructure, the efficacy of which was as contingent on asymmetric resource flows as on engineering. The work done by the machine is thus a transmutation of the asymmetric social structure of resource flows that it requires and embodies. Although the subsequent development of industrial technology may give the impression of autonomous productivity, liberated from exploitative global relations, this autonomy is illusory. It reflects what I have called machine fetishism (Hornborg 2019). The productivity of the machine remains contingent on capital accumulation and the monetary flows through which its exploitative essence is mystified. Yet even the most critical of narratives tend to be constrained from identifying industrial production with exploitation, because the inequality of exchange is not defined in material terms: [In capitalism] the rate of profit was no longer determined solely by regional discrepancies in price (which allowed merchants to buy cheap and sell dear), but by the process of production itself. (Wolf 1982: 352–353)

Eric Wolf’s (1982) account illustrates how the Marxist writing of world history has remained constrained by the monetary framing of exchange, production, and technology. In the idiom of capital accumulation, phenomena such as unequal exchange, profits, and processes of production are conceptualized as ultimately pivoting on monetary balance sheets. It would require a fundamental rethinking of world-system history to recognize, underlying these categories, the material flows and transformations orchestrated by the flows of money. This would provide not only a rigorous definition of unequal exchange but also a radical shift of perspective on the sociometabolic essence of the machine. There is a logical connection in Marxist

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historiography and development theory between its paradoxically non-materialist concept of unequal exchange, on the one hand, and its Promethean celebration of technology, on the other.

3.

TOWARD A GLOBAL AND SOCIOMETABOLIC RECONCEPTUALIZATION OF TECHNOLOGY

Among all the critical world historians and development theorists we have mentioned so far, the perspective that comes closest to a global, sociometabolic understanding of technology is that of Andre Gunder Frank. While at times resorting to the same kind of anti-Eurocentric but fundamentally idealist argument as Blaut, referring to “the very substantial diffusion of technology back and forth” (Frank 1998: 204), Frank observes that technological development [in early industrial Europe] was a world economic process, which took place in and because of the structure of the world economy/system itself. (1998: 204; emphasis in original)

Kenneth Pomeranz (2000) similarly addresses the global, sociometabolic dimension of the Industrial Revolution by showing how it emerged from European colonial systems that “enabled Europe to exchange an ever-growing volume of manufactured exports for an ever-growing volume of land-intensive products” (p. 20). After having calculated the vast “ghost acreages” of overseas ecological relief appropriated by nineteenth-century Britain, Pomeranz concludes that the exploitation of American land and African labor was a crucial condition for the Industrial Revolution through which Europe established its dominance in the modern world economy. Such net appropriation of resources, in other words, was a sociometabolic requisite of industrial technology. We can infer that local British productivity was enhanced at the expense of populations in the periphery and that the technology in part embodied – that is, was constituted by – such asymmetric global flows. As we have seen, however, the application of a global perspective does not suffice to reconceptualize the phenomenon of modern technology in sociometabolic terms. Drawing on Pomeranz, Robert Marks (2015) concisely and convincingly identifies the asymmetric global context of the Industrial Revolution, yet reiterates a conventional definition of technology as “the means by which humans gain mastery over natural processes for their own productive or reproductive ends” (p. 117). A definition more consistent with his global narrative would have emphasized that those means of gaining mastery over natural processes were contingent on gaining social mastery, through trade, over the colonies. The progress of industrial technology was simultaneously an index of accumulation. Given the central role accorded to superior European technology in most accounts of what Pomeranz calls The Great Divergence, there is every reason to unpack these references to an ostensibly neutral category of artifacts that explain the course of world history. Our inclination not to

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do so suggests that the phenomenon and concept of technology has become insulated and immunized as second nature to modern civilization – in leaving it intact and external to social theory, we naturalize a central mechanism of exploitation and accumulation. The pervasive circumambulation of technology’s sociometabolic essence – even among historians intent on demonstrating its relevance for social processes – is evident in Daniel Headrick’s (1981) explicit aim to trace the connections between the progress of industrial technology and the European domination of Africa and Asia. He asserts that “the connections between technology and imperialism must be approached from both sides: from the history of technology as well as from that of imperialism” (p. 4). In two books richly documenting his narrative, Headrick (1981, 2010) shows how European empires used superior technologies as tools of conquest with which to subdue the populations of their colonies. But it is precisely in this approach to technologies – as tools – that his accounts remain confined to the conventional tenets of European historiography: [B]y technology I mean all the ways in which humans use the materials and energy in the environment for their own ends, beyond what they can do with their bodies. … The history of technology is the story of humans’ increasing ability to manipulate nature, from Stone Age hand axes to nuclear bombs, from dugout canoes to supertankers, from gardening to genetic engineering. (Headrick 2010: 3)

In Headrick’s definition, there is an unbroken continuity between the ingenuity underlying Stone Age axes and that underlying nuclear bombs. The common denominator of “all technologies” is that they are “the results of human ingenuity” (2010: 3). In this view, technology is a question of knowledge: It is the disparities in knowledge of nature … that have fueled the disparities of power associated with technological change. (2010: 4)

This definition contains no reference to the role of social processes of exchange and accumulation – such as international differences in the market prices of land and labor – in making a given technology feasible. In accounts such as these, the role of superior ingenuity and knowledge tends to eclipse the fact that technologies, in order to exist in a particular place and time, must be affordable. As we have seen, even Karl Marx, who was supremely aware of the close connection between capital accumulation and investments in new technology, conceptually sequestered the “relations of production” from the “productive forces” – the social from the physical. When the physical components of a technology are translated into abstract exchange values, the calculation of what is economically feasible becomes cognitively detached from considerations of what is technically feasible, even though the two kinds of criteria must ultimately coincide. What is technically feasible is finally a question of purchasing power, yet the two considerations are kept ontologically distinct, as if access to technology and access to money were separate issues. To say that technologies cost certain amounts of money is not an exhaustive account, as they are ultimately

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contingent on the asymmetric flows of embodied labor and other resources that the monetary expenditures represent. There is, of course, an awareness that a given technology may be too expensive to be generally accessible to particular populations, but this tends not to taint the conventional understanding of technology so as to suggest that it is in itself an intrinsically distributive phenomenon. Technologies that are known to work where they can be afforded are said to be “available,” and the question of uneven purchasing power is conceptualized as separate from the question of what is technologically feasible. But an alternative conclusion from the uneven distribution of modern technology is that it only “works” within a restricted social space, and that this geography of technology is determined by the nature of the exchange of resources between different social spaces. When Headrick (1988) in great detail traces the failures of technology transfer from imperial cores to their peripheries between 1850 and 1940, he seems to underestimate the role of such asymmetric structures of exchange. He emphasizes the absence in the colonies of educational systems that would promote what he calls the “culture of technology.” Again it is clear that the existence of advanced technology is understood to reflect the occurrence of some requisite cognitive skills, rather than the geography of resource flows. This idealist interpretation of technological progress is highly problematic, not least for development theory, as it suggests that underdevelopment is a reflection not of global asymmetries and power structures, but of deficits in technical knowledge. It has been well established that technological proficiency is, as the anthropologist Bryan Pfaffenberger (1988: 237) put it, “at the very centre of what Westerners (and Westernised people) tend to celebrate about themselves.” Histories of the role of technology in European imperialism tend to emphasize its foundation in “cultures of technological expertise” (Marsden and Smith 2005). The conviction that the technology with which Europeans established and maintained their colonial empires was an index of superior expertise remains as central to modern historiography as it was to the imperialists themselves. Michael Adas (1989) begins his compelling account of the role of technology in imperial ideology by recalling how, as a graduate student, he had been struck by the similarities between contemporary modernization theorists and nineteenth-century advocates of European colonization. He thus directs our attention to the ideological continuities linking colonialism and modern development theory. However, he never challenges the essential validity – or rather exhaustiveness – of this approach. He adheres to a conventional definition of technology as efforts to control the natural environment (Adas 1989: 5), without qualifying this definition with the observation that such technological means of controlling the environment tend to rely, for their very existence, on social processes of accumulation. This social or economic aspect of technological superiority is acknowledged only to the point where it does not intrude on the neutralizing definition of technology. It recognizes that access to advanced technology requires capital, but it does not consider the extent to which technology actually is capital. The equation of modern technology with capital, as founded on unequal exchange, can be solidly anchored in natural science. By inference from the Second Law of

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Thermodynamics, groups controlling a modern technological infrastructure (technomass) must import more high-order matter-energy than they export. As indicated in Figure 4.1, in a market economy the requisite ratio of high-order imports to lower-order exports is a function of market prices.

Figure 4.1

The necessary connection between the growth of “technomass” and physically unequal exchange

If, as Corey Ross (2017: 421–423) suggests, the obsession with technology which characterizes our civilization is linked to enduring structural inequalities in trade, these inequalities should reflect the basic sociometabolic requirements of industrial civilization. Although methodologically difficult to measure in terms of entropy, they can be quantified in terms of the net transfers of resources that have been embodied in the traded commodities, particularly the flows of embodied labor, land, energy, and materials from the peripheries of the world-system (Dorninger and Hornborg 2015; Dorninger et al. 2021). The faith of our civilization in technological complexity is inextricably bound up with global structures of unequal exchange. In order to retain the classical Marxian interpretation of technological progress as generated in the local class struggle between capitalists and their workers, however, Marxist analyses tend to neglect global perspectives on the technologies developed since the Industrial Revolution. They can be expected, for instance, to dismiss Pomeranz’s (2000) argument that colonialism was an important factor in distinguishing late eighteenth-century Britain’s “great divergence” from comparable economic cores in Asia. The standard Marxist conception of “relations of production” is confined to the local British context. It does not ask for which global markets the steam-propelled factories produced their cotton wares, or draw the ultimate implications of the fact that they were financed by profits based on the appropria-

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tion of human time and natural space in the peripheries of the empire. It does not problematize the fact that the enhanced productivity of British labor – the progress of the “productive forces” so emphatically celebrated by Marx – was achieved at the expense of less expensive labor overseas. Steam technology may locally have been perceived as a substitute for labor, but it was founded on the labor of vast armies of slaves beyond the horizon. In obscuring this global context, machine fetishism is but a variant of what Marx identified as commodity fetishism. Ultimately, the steam engines did not simply run on coal. Viewed from a global perspective, they were propelled by the asymmetric structures of world trade. Without the profits from this trade, British capitalists would not have been able to keep them in operation. In focusing attention exclusively on the physical processes of coal combustion and the designs of steam engines, nineteenth-century commentators and modern historians alike have succumbed to machine fetishism.

4. CONCLUSIONS Development theory tends to view modern technology as an accessory, available to whoever can afford it, but not as an intrinsically sociometabolic strategy for redistributing labor time and other resources in world society. It is conceptually excised from the structure of the world economy of which it is an expression. This is technological fetishism, and it continues to pose a conundrum and a challenge for critical approaches to development, including Marxist theory. Whether conceptualized as a privileged investment, as a tool, or as an amendable ecological inconvenience, technology tends to be understood as a physical phenomenon external to social theory. This habit of thought is so ingrained in the modern worldview that it distorts our understanding of what is technologically feasible. The observation that a country’s technological options are constrained by its access to expensive research facilities and its general finances tends to suggest that such constraints are politically remediable circumstances, rather than structurally determined by its position in the world-system. It does not trace the feasibility of technological progress to the global, sociometabolic processes in which a country is embroiled. It makes us prone to think that technological advance is a matter of temporal progression rather than global distribution, independent of global structures of political economy, reflecting disparities in historical time rather than in social space. In this sense, our understanding of technology shares the insidious ideological implications of the concepts of “modernization” and “development” of which it serves as an index. This conclusion applies in equal measure to industrial technologies that obviously require continuous inputs of matter and energy, on the one hand, and to the seemingly “dematerialized” micro-technologies that rely on massive research infrastructures accessible only to the countries that can afford them, on the other. If development theory would transcend the conventional divide between nature and society – the physical and the relational – the phenomenon of modern technology would be revealed to be as socially distributed through global economic structures

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as development itself. To a hitherto unacknowledged extent, the enhancement of productivity in one country would be understood as being achieved at the expense of another. Such a move toward a more holistic theory of technology would also have serious implications for deliberations on the prospects of a Green New Deal, offering new perspectives on whether it is an option that is open to more than the wealthiest countries of the world. Most importantly, it would provide proponents of “decolonization” with a critical distance to the hegemonic narrative of technological development that ultimately derives from European colonialism.

REFERENCES Adas, Michael. 1989. Machines as the measure of men: Science, technology, and ideologies of Western dominance. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Ashton, Trevor and Charles H.E. Philpin, eds. 1985. The Brenner debate: Agrarian class structure and economic development in pre-industrial Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blaut, James M. 2000. Eight Eurocentric historians. New York: Guilford Press. Braudel, Fernand. [1979] 1992. The perspective of the world. Civilization and capitalism, 15th–18th centuries, vol. 3. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Brenner, Robert. 1977. The origins of capitalist development: A critique of neo-Smithian Marxism. New Left Review 104: 25–92. Brewer, Anthony. 1990. Marxist theories of imperialism: A critical survey. Second edition. London: Routledge. Bunker, Stephen G. 1985. Underdeveloping the Amazon: Extraction, unequal exchange, and the failure of the modern state. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Dorninger, Christian and Alf Hornborg. 2015. Can EEMRIO analyses establish the occurrence of ecologically unequal exchange? Ecological Economics 119: 414–418. Dorninger, Christian, Alf Hornborg, David J. Abson, Henrik von Wehrden, Anke Schaffartzik, Stefan Giljum, John-Oliver Engler, Robert L. Feller, Klaus Hubacek, and Hanspeter Wieland. 2021. Global patterns of ecologically unequal exchange: Implications for sustainability in the 21st century. Ecological Economics. Online publication before print, accessed January 1, 2022. www​.sciencedirect​.com/​science/​article/​pii/​S0921800920300938 Emmanuel, Arghiri. 1972. Unequal exchange: A study of the imperialism of trade. New York: Monthly Review Press. Evans, Chris, Owen Jackson, and Göran Rydén. 2002. Baltic iron and the British iron industry in the eighteenth century. Economic History Review 55(4): 642–665. Frank, Andre G. 1998. ReOrient: Global economy in the Asian age. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Headrick, Daniel R. 1981. The tools of empire: Technology and European imperialism in the nineteenth century. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Headrick, Daniel R. 1988. The tentacles of progress: Technology transfer in the age of imperialism, 1850–1940. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Headrick, Daniel R. 2010. Power over peoples: Technology, environments, and Western imperialism, 1400 to the present. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hornborg, Alf. 2019. Nature, society, and justice in the Anthropocene: Unraveling the money– energy–technology complex. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Huber, Matthew T. 2013. Lifeblood: Oil, freedom, and the forces of capital. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

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Landes, David S. 1969. The unbound Prometheus: Technological change and industrial development in Western Europe from 1750 to the present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marks, Robert B. 2015. The origins of the modern world: A global and environmental narrative from the fifteenth to the twenty-first century. Third edition. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Marsden, Ben and Crosbie Smith. 2005. Engineering empires: A cultural history of technology in nineteenth-century Britain. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Marx, Karl. [1867] 1976. Capital, vol. 1. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Pfaffenberger, Bryan. 1988. Fetishised objects and humanised nature: Towards an anthropology of technology. Man (New Series) 23(2): 236–252. Pomeranz, Kenneth. 2000. The great divergence: China, Europe, and the making of the modern world economy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ross, Corey. 2017. Ecology and power in the age of empire: Europe and the transformation of the tropical world. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1989. The modern world-system III. The second era of great expansion of the capitalist world-economy, 1730–1840s. New York: Academic Press. Wallerstein, Immanuel. 2004. World-systems analysis: An introduction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Warlenius, Rikard. 2016. Core and periphery in the early modern world system: A time–space appropriation assessment. In A. Jerrick, J. Myrdal, and M. Wallenberg Bondesson, eds., Methods in world history: A critical approach, pp. 185–225. Lund: Nordic Academic Press. Wolf, Eric R. 1982. Europe and the people without history. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

5. Development under scrutiny: environment, geopolitics and a reimagination of Latin America1 Andrés Rivarola Puntigliano and Gianfranco Selgas

1. INTRODUCTION After World War II, the concept of ‘development’ became pervasive in debates and ideas related to geopolitics, national ideologies, and social visions across the world. However, since the 1990s, ‘development’ has become increasingly associated with ‘colonialist modernity’ and predatory ‘neoliberalism.’ According to ‘critical’ perspectives, ‘development’ is generally aligned with patriarchal and hierarchical economic global structures absorbed by states, lacking consideration for environmental and social dimensions (Svampa 2017). From this point of view, a belief in the ‘state’ and ‘markets’ is often regarded as part of a neoliberal discourse leading to environmental and human degradation. Such views are critical towards global economic systems, often framed in terms of indigenous cosmovision, anti-systemic practices, degrowth movements, and anti-capitalist positions. Many of these ‘critical’ positions regarding capitalism are reminiscent of earlier conceptualizations elaborated within the frame of ‘dependency theories,’ but have been reshaped under the influence of postcolonial and Amerindian thought, emphasizing socio-ecological perspectives (see Gudynas 2012; De La Cadena 2015; Grosfoguel 2016; Gómez-Barris 2017). While not rejecting this line of thought, we argue in this chapter for the importance of considering other sources of critical thinking in regard to the complex interrelation between geopolitics, global capitalism, societies, and the environment. That is, for example, the case of ‘environmental geopolitics’ and ‘world-ecology’ as two ways of understanding human–nature relations as tools to identify complexities in power relations connected to structures of dominance and subordination (O’Lear 2018; Dalby 1996). Environmental geopolitics is largely inspired by ‘critical geopolitics,’ going beyond states by focusing on ‘representational spaces’ and ‘imagined geographies’ (Agnew & Corbridge 1995, 7), while ‘world-ecology’ attempts to understand relations of power, economic production, and environment-making without dissociating nature and society (Moore 2017, 607). Our aim is to link these perspectives with a long and rich tradition of Latin American thinking related to ‘development’ and ‘cultural studies.’

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Latin American thinking varies across different historical stages, philosophical topics, and cultural and social situations. The different lines of thinking are highly related to the construction of ontological and epistemic Latin American and Caribbean identities, in search of a place in the world as part of universal cultures (Beorlegui 2010, 25; Dussel et al. 2011, 5–10). Our aim is to promote analytical venues to search for a ‘reimagination’ of development through new forms of ‘geoculture’ (Wallerstein [1991] 1997). A main point is that there is much in Latin American thinking that deserves to be brought up to light, to be intertwined with contributions that consider contemporary challenges of the global system and new demands from Latin American societies. We argue that early ideas regarding ‘development,’ ‘autonomy,’ ‘geopolitics,’ and ‘regionalism’ still matter to imagine strategies out of poverty and periphery. Yet, these need to be updated in relation to perspectives regarding entangled socio-ecological conditions, together with a ‘cultural framework’ that contributes to reimagine new kind of identities and environmental implications. In the next section, ‘Geopolitics of integration, environment, and autonomy,’ we make an inroad into the origins of geopolitical and developmental Latin American perspectives. In the following section, ‘Geoculture, environment, and development entangled,’ the focus shifts towards the realm of cultural studies. This section is an invitation to consider the historical perspective of culture as a starting point to revisit the past, to understand the experiences of the present, and to reimagine the future. We share current critical views regarding the shortcomings of earlier views concerning development and geopolitics, as well as the epistemic and practical needs for the inclusion of environmental and eco-systemic considerations regarding the present and future organization of Latin American and Caribbean societies.

2.

GEOPOLITICS OF INTEGRATION, ENVIRONMENT, AND AUTONOMY

The link between geopolitics and the environment can be traced back to Thomas Malthus’ work. He advocated that an unchecked population increases geometrically, with a continuous tendency for demand to outstrip the supply due to population rise, resulting in a permanent likelihood of poverty (Stephens 2016, 62). The relationship between environment and civilization continued to be discussed by other scholars, such as John Stuart Mill. What is more interesting in relation to our chapter is the connection to geopolitics through Fredrich Ratzel, who raised the caveat that humans would fill the Earth in such a way as to leave no space for more people. Hence, the human struggle for life would largely have to be a struggle for space (Ratzel [1901] 2018, 72). The state played a central role in the spatial environment where civilizations exist, as the ultimate entity responsible for securing ‘room and food’ (Bashford 2014, 12). Here is where geopolitics steps in. Defined originally as the ‘geographic consciousness’ of the state (Kjellén 1916, 32, 39), geopolitics was concerned with the search for an optimal space for the survival of a state. The aim was both to avoid Malthusian

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challenges as well as a subordinate position to other states (powers). There is, in contemporary times, a ‘Malthusian pessimism’ about relations between humans and environments expressed through the fear of a ‘coming anarchy’ (Dalby 1996). While some perceived this as a ‘security’ threat, there are those who go beyond material dimensions. That is the case of what is referred to as ‘environmental geopolitics,’ with a focus on the nonhuman environment, ‘understood, represented, and portrayed in terms of spatial aspects of risk or security’ (O’Lear 2018, 3). Some scholars see an existential threat for the whole of civilization due to the environmental degradation caused by the capitalist system, also referred to as the ‘Capitalocene’ (Moore 2017). This concern is particularly strong in relation to the poorest parts of the global system, peripheral regions such as Latin America. In this region, the so-called ‘critical post-development’ perspective advocates that the advance of capitalism, associated with modern patterns of consumption and extractivist-oriented economies, leads to a form of ‘(wrong) development’ (Svampa 2017, 68–69). Some see the roots of the problem as structurally related to the notions of ‘development’ or ‘progress’ as something linear. That is, in turn, linked to rent-seeking capitalism without consideration of human or ecologic degradation (Gudynas 2013a, 2013b, 2019). For the case of Latin America, it is pointed out that such economic and ideological structures are deeply rooted in colonial foundations. These were transformed later on into venues of modernity that subalternized other knowledges and sensibilities. Reminding on ‘environmental geopolitics,’ this view leads away from territorial and material dimensions to a ‘geopolitics of knowledge,’ more related to discursive (global) structures of power (Mignolo 2005, 4–5). Some Latin American scholars propose a ‘radical’ alternative to environmental-capitalist systemic threats, going beyond the search of ‘alternative development’ sought by original Latin American developmental perspectives. It is argued that the pledge for ‘development’ is aligned (in the case of Latin America, since colonial times) with an extractivist and rent-sinking capitalist pro-growth ideology, which is blind to environmental and human costs (Gudynas 2019, 33, and Chapter 10 in this volume). According to this view, the path to follow should go through ‘alternatives to development,’ based on ‘biocentric radical environmentalism’ and ‘feminism.’ That implies a shift to an ‘inter-cultural’ position, based on what are pointed out as ‘indigenous visions’ aiming to break with ‘anthropocentrism’ and ‘eurocentrism.’ For example, the Andean philosophy of ‘buen vivir’ (Gudynas 2012, 73–77). Our caveat here is that, in the case of Latin America, one should draw a more apparent distinction between economistic perspectives without regard to social and environmental consequences and the critical views that appeared during the mid-twentieth century. Some of the most influential were linked to ‘development’-oriented ideas, which gained force and diffusion around the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA, CEPAL in Spanish), created in 1948. A significant contribution was seeing the existing economic asymmetries in global terms, pointing out the territorial dichotomy of core and periphery (Prebisch 1981). Social inclusion, state intervention, industrialization, and regional integration

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were key elements of the Cepalian, so-called ‘structuralist’ proposals (Rodriguez 2006). During the 1950s, this became highly intertwined with positions from governments, fostering popular and democratizing forms of inclusion. That was accompanied by the advance in the search for broader identities that could form the base of existing national states and broader regional (state) platform(s). Along this line, developmentalism became the ideological base through which different intellectual and political movements explored new forms of governance and inclusion into the global system. Common to all was the search for industrialization through regional integration, strengthening the state’s role, and improving the global position vis-à-vis great international powers. That would provide a position of ‘autonomy’ for geopolitical units aiming to overcome a subordinated (peripheral) position. There were also substantial differences among them, for example, in relation to democracy and popular inclusion. Albeit some developmentalists choose an authoritarian path, others seek new inclusive forms of culture and national identity. Yet, it is true that there was often a disconnection between a ‘technical approach’ (Sikkink 1991, 87) with broader cultural, philosophical, and geopolitical perspectives. Latin American geopolitical studies were another source of critical thinking regarding the dominating global and national economic and political systems. Geopolitics emerged in the region as a way to address the relevance of the spatial dimension to consolidating the national states. A central issue here was to give the state a central role in the strategic promotion of social and economic progress. That was strategically connected to a global perspective, where the region’s countries needed to reach a ‘secessionist autonomy’ in order to cut the umbilical cord that united it to a foreign metropolis in a dependent position (Puig 1980). A way to do so was through what became known as the ‘geopolitics of integration.’ There was a close link to developmentalism and its promotion of industrialization and adding technological value to local production. This demanded new forms of national imagination regarding peoples, states, and their ‘optimal habitat.’ That habitat was ‘the region,’ in the form of Patria Grande (great fatherland) as the home of a continental pueblo, or the South American continental geopolitical framework (Rivarola Puntigliano 2011), to promote what Stephan Haggard (1990) referred to as the pathways from the periphery. However, the initiatives to forge broader geopolitical units have also generally lacked commitment to more inclusive multi-cultural perspectives. Further elaboration needs to be made on what was known as the ‘cosmic race,’ incorporating visions and claims of indigenous communities, women, and other discriminated social sectors into what could be called a ‘cosmic people.’ The eco-systemic/environmental consideration of the habitat was not inexistent. It can be found, for example, in the work of José Felipe Marini (1980, 278), one of the most important scholars behind the ‘geopolitics of integration.’ He highlighted the issue of ecological limits and the need for states to cooperate to avoid ecological destruction, while contemplating the developmental needs of poorer countries. Moreover, acknowledging the habitat, or the ‘environment,’ can also be found in the ‘imagination’ of ‘Latin American civili-

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zation’ as a kind of ‘fifth frontier’ (Ianni 1988). It was part of a territorial acknowledgment of nature and human societies in their different forms. An example was the work of the Brazilian anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro, with a deep understanding of indigenous communities within the framework of a broader Latin American Patria Grande (Ribeiro 1983). Although Ribeiro did not use the concept ‘geopolitics,’ his contribution could be regarded as a part of the ‘geopolitics of integration.’ A Malthusian geopolitical reconnection, regarding Latin America, needs to be concerned with eco-systemic issues and the peoples’ urgent needs to overcome poverty. As argued by Juan Carlos Puig (1980, 153), this is related to overcoming the peripheral position, demanding a difficult balance with development goals, and marcher sur le fil du rasoir (‘on the razor’s edge’) regarding conditions from great powers. Similarly, those promoting critical postcolonial and decolonial positions hold that there is a centrality in questions of ‘autonomy in Latin America.’ Yet, their emphasis is on the reinvention of ‘local communities’ (Escobar 2015, 460), without acknowledging Latin American geopolitical and geocultural contributions regarding the need for larger dimensions. According to these, national and regional unity would improve the region’s bargaining positions; big ships sail better than small ones in troubled waters. But this demands a reimagination of the optimal habitat, creating bonds of solidarity across peoples to sustain a ‘common home.’ Culture plays, in this sense, a pivotal role.

3. GEOCULTURE, ENVIRONMENT, AND DEVELOPMENT ENTANGLED A core issue in the reimagination of ‘development’ is what we understand as the entanglement between geopolitics, environment, and development, from the perspective of culture and literary representation. In this section, we take as a point of departure the premise that Latin America’s cultural, economic, and political present and futures are enmeshed in a wide array of historical conjectures—from the European conquest of the Americas to contemporary transnational and regional relations—that call for a relational reading of geopolitics, development, and the environment. These historical conjectures are also framed in a variegated cultural and geographic context that puts into question fixed constructions such as that of the nation. As we will discuss later in this section, the transcultural and geocultural processes that have transformed the cultural identity of Latin America and the Caribbean are valid points of departure to understanding the pluriverses and plurinationalities that converge in this region, and that can be productive to think otherwise globally. As Arturo Escobar explains, the idea of a pluriverse corresponds to ‘a way of looking at reality that contrasts with the OWW [One-World world] assumption that there is a single reality to which there correspond multiple cultures or subjective representations; it amounts to “a world where many worlds fit”’ (2015, 460; quotation marks in the original). Our point is that cultural and literary representation, understood here as aesthetic and

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political tools,2 should be taken seriously to attain this plurality and deconstruct and reimagine the intricate relations established between these abstract categories. Narrative and cultural products have had lasting effects on the historical and geopolitical configuration of the world (Rama [1982] 2008; Beckman 2013; Smith-Madan 2017). Twentieth-century literary regionalism is a paradigmatic example of the latter, both in its Spanish-American and Brazilian variants, imbuing geography with literary texts that describe, denounce, or reinforce the entanglements and juxtapositions of nature, politics, and culture. It envisioned an organic blend of customs and regional vocabulary, with geographical and topographical details, to procure a ‘truly’ national literature.3 Regionalismo was particularly important during the first half of the twentieth century, fostering subgenres known as the novela de la selva or the novela telúrica—literally, the jungle novel and the telluric novel. There is a close connection between these narratives and national visions since many were written by future statesmen, lawyers, and laureate poets. Authors such as a Colombian José Eustasio Rivera (La vorágine, 1924), Argentinean Ricardo Güiraldes (Don Segundo Sombra 1926), Venezuelan Rómulo Gallegos (Doña Bárbara 1929), and Chilean Gabriela Mistral (Contadores de patrias 1941), just to name a few examples, wrote novels, poems, and essays that played a central and canonical role in the articulation of a national sensibility sustained by the political and cultural tensions between the conservative regional elites and the liberal, cosmopolitan citizens (French & Heffes 2020, 11). Their literary and essayistic texts played a substantial role in representing and reflecting on local and regional realities in contrast with European life and their literary themes (French 2005, 8). However, regionalista fictions also highlighted the human as a reflection of their environment and an unmistakable geographical space, where the ethnocentric conflict of the modernizing subject with the ‘uncivilized’ natural environment entangles romantic, telluric, and Americanist traditions. This world-ecology of capitalism, humans, nonhumans, and environments mainly dealt with the development of the nation and its transcultural identities (Selgas 2022). It represented national and regional identities through metaphors drawn from nature and labor-mediated social and natural metabolism (Marx 1981, 949), showing the historical roots of this entangled relationship. For example, rubber extraction and indigenous exploitation in the Colombian Amazon represented by Rivera in La vorágine; the confrontation between civilization and the barbaric aspects of the rural environment of the Venezuelan plains in Gallegos’ Doña Bárbara; the history of the Argentinian gaucho depicted by Güiraldes in Don Segundo Sombra; or the relevance of la tierra—the land—for human identity in Mistral’s prologue to Benjamín Subercaseaux’s Chile o una loca geografía, would result, according to Carlos J. Alonso (1990, 18–20), in the construction of an autochthonous discourse where the conjunction between geography and language would give way to the allegorical configuration of the nation. The notion of autochthony, and the eagerness for autonomy it conveys, also carry an expression of Spanish-American identity to confront the European discourse of modernity, threatening to disqualify their cultural discourse. Similarly, cultural expressions such as the late 1950s’ and 1960s’ ‘New Latin American Cinema’

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also engaged with the intricate relation between geoculture and development as a response to the deepening underdevelopment, economic, and cultural dependency of the continent. As scholars have pointed out, cinema also ‘inscribed itself in Latin Americans’ struggles for national and continental autonomy’ (Martin 1997, 16), searching for modes of regional integration in the face of external economic, political, and cultural threats. In that regard, culture, literature, and cinema became unintentional documentary sources for world-making in Latin America, intervening in the political-economic dynamics of social and political change. From a Latin Americanist and regional perspective, the Uruguayan cultural critic Angel Rama approached the issue and termed it transculturación narrativa, or narrative transculturation, borrowing Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz’s concept. According to Ortiz ([1940] 1995), transculturation is a concept that accounts for the merging and converging of cultures in the context of colonialism and imperialism in Cuban and Caribbean history. For Rama, transculturation is also an operative notion to understand the continental dimension of Latin American culture. Rama reframes transculturation to discuss the fragmentation of regional cultures in opposition to the modernizing impulse represented by mid-twentieth-century literary texts. Rama’s central argument is that transculturated literatures are the product of a conflictive modern-traditional cultural exchange. In this exchange, regionalist literatures ‘surpassed’ cosmopolitan literatures by proposing a novel relationship between language, worldview, and narrative techniques without yielding to the dynamics of cultural modernization. But at the same time, as Rama ([1982] 2008, 110–111) explains, transculturated literature managed to combine nature and history by associating them within an artistic structure that seeks to integrate and balance them. It created a transculturated pluriverse, where cultures, identities, and nonhumans converged in the socio-ecological entanglements that make up the web of life. Through these procedures, the meaning of history becomes accessible via specific cultural forces from transculturated communities. The latter resonates with the premises of autonomy and the ‘geopolitics of integration’ we expound upon here. In a similar way, it fosters a way of thinking formulated earlier by Argentine philosopher Rodolfo Kusch. Geoculture speaks of the configuration of Latin American thinking in a ‘context firmly structured by the intersection of geography and culture’ (Kusch 2007, 253). According to Kusch, geography and culture form a geocultural unit. While geography points to the habitat in which the being is installed, culture acts as the symbolic container in which a life is situated. From this perspective, geoculture operates as a form of identity location, it is a support in the encounter with otherness. This position does not only highlight the relevance of local geographies and cultures in the constitution of an autonomous identity, but it also opens itself up to blur the boundaries between the local and the global, insofar as Latin American thought and identities are entangled ‘on the one hand, by the practical decisions of the group facing the geographical environment and, on the other hand, by the traditional knowledge accumulated by previous generations’ (Kusch 2007, 254). Following Rama and Kusch enriches our possibilities to deconstruct and reimagine abstract categorizations such as the ones discussed in this chapter.

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By historicizing regionalist, transculturated literature as entangled with the transformative process of modernization, the environment, and politics, we look closer at the relational dynamics between humanity and nature, dismantling binary thought, hence opening venues up to deconstruct conceptualizations in order to reimagine them. Cultural products have historically brought us closer to transcultural and geocultural processes. They highlight the clash and merging between the regional and the modern, the local and the global, tradition and modernity, Amerindian and Western thought as deeply entangled categories. With that in mind, the question we want to raise is how can we take this as a starting point to revisit our past, experience our present, and imagine our future by rethinking development from a sustainable, geopolitical, and environmental lens? Put differently, how can we recognize, as French shows by analyzing the literary work of Uruguayan regionalista author Horacio Quiroga and Chilean writer Luis Sepulveda, ‘the mutual implication of human and natural history. As human activity, and economic activity in particular shapes environmental conditions, it also conditions a group or individual’s ability to perceive environments in particular ways’ (2012, 160).

4. CONCLUSION The current challenges of the climate and socio-ecological crises are dramatic. Yet, human societies have always needed to consider the challenges and limitations of the natural environment in which they were embedded. Sometimes successfully; others, leading to ‘Malthusian pessimism’ of disruption. Latin American societies are today facing a twofold challenge. On one side, to confront the devastating impact of climate change and the negative forms in which capitalism has organized the relations between humans and nature. On the other, to do so overcoming the historical burden of poverty, income inequality, and subordinated position in the global system. Even though people claim better living conditions, their states exist in a global hierarchical system, where some societies can afford to give their people a better standard than others. Most of the time, this inequality is the result of colonial violence, force, and an unjust system of distribution of resources. We share the view of those researchers who advocate for the inclusion of environmental and eco-systemic considerations regarding the present and future organization of Latin American societies. We also agree with the position that societies need to be inclusive, basing their national visions and identities on comprehensive cultural norms. Particular consideration should be held towards groups that have been overshadowed and oppressed. It is possible to strengthen these critical and timely approaches by revisiting and incorporating to our epistemological, discursive, and social practices the contributions from earlier Latin American ideas. An example of the latter stands out in the reimagination of economic, political, and social policies for the achievement of a more sustainable development; one that denounces global and national asymmetries while proposing national and regional unification strategies. Another example stems from geopolitical thinking, where it was argued that the

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optimal habitat to improve Latin America’s position in the world system was to be achieved through ‘regional integration.’ It was not directed to break with the global system(s), but to reach a position of autonomy. To face the challenges of the twenty-first century, we need to look back at our past and reimagine our future. We must embody Walter Benjamin’s angel of history: as he flies towards the future, he turns and fixes his look to the past. We want to stress the need to actualize useful elements of early perspectives, both to contemporary contributions that consider new challenges of the global system, as well as to contemporary demands from Latin American societies. What is needed, in our view, is a reinvention that takes a stand in the outlooks of Latin American peoples and the environment, and that can be useful to think of another world as well. Development and autonomy still matter not only as a path away from the periphery, but as constructs that for better or for worse have historically shaped our relations as a society with other humans and the rest of nature. However, in order to truly achieve a sustainable development project that considers our entangled socio-ecological condition, we need to conceive a ‘cultural framework’ that continually reimagines its meanings, reaches, and environmental implications. Cultural examples such as regionalist literature, and cultural conceptualizations like transculturation and the configuration of Latin American thinking in the intersection of geography and culture, can function as a starting point to imagine the entanglements between social, natural, political, and economic forms and structures. Like ‘development,’ the ‘geopolitics of integration’ still matter but they need to be connected to a ‘geopolitics of culture.’4

NOTES 1. We would like to thank Dr. Ariel Sribman, lecturer at the Nordic Institute of Latin American Studies, for his feedback on an early version of this chapter. His comments and suggestions helped improve the quality of the manuscript. 2. Foundational works by scholars such as Angel Rama, Antonio Cornejo Polar, Antonio Candido, Jean Franco, Francine Masiello, Nelly Richard, and Beatriz Sarlo, among others, have highlighted the aesthetic-political potency of cultural products and cultural studies through their conceptualization as a ‘historically overdetermined field of struggle for the symbolic and performative production, reproduction, and contestation of social reality and political hegemony, through which collective identities evolve’ (Trigo 2004, 4). For a comprehensive approach to the discipline of Cultural Studies with a Latin American perspective as well as an understanding of the aesthetic and political qualities of Latin American cultural products, see Abril Trigo (2004, 1–14) and Alicia Ríos (2004, 15–34). 3. This chapter will not go into detail regarding the history of Latin American literature and its complexities in terms of the attainability of a truly national literature. Regionalist literature derives from a longer tradition of European naturalism, modernism, and criollismo, with a focus on natural and local features of the Latin American Republics. See Carlos J. Alonso (1990) and Jennifer L. French (2005) for a historical approach to literary regionalism in Spanish-American writers. For an approach to Brazilian literary and cultural regionalism, see Durval Muniz de Albuquerque Jr. (2014). 4. About the relevance attributed to culture, in classical geopolitics, see Björk (2021, 93).

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Agnew, John & Stuart Corbridge (1995). Mastering Space: Hegemony, Territory, and International Political Economy. London: Routledge. Alonso, Carlos J. (1990). The Spanish-American Regional Novel: Modernity and Autochthony. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bashford, Alison (2014). Global Population: History, Geopolitics, and Life on Earth. New York: Columbia University Press. Beckman, Ericka (2013). Capital Fictions: The Literature of Latin America’s Export Age. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Beorlegui, Carlos (2010). Historia del pensamiento filosófico latinoamericano: una búsqueda incesante de la identidad. Bilbao: Universidad de Deusto. Björk, Ragnar (2021). “Rudolf Kjellén’s Great Power Studies: The Editions”. In Ragnar Björk & Thomas Lundé (eds), Territory, State and Nation: The Geopolitics of Rudolf Kjellén. New York: Berghahn Books, pp. 63‒133. Dalby, Simon (1996). “The Environment as Geopolitical Threat: Reading Robert Kaplan’s ‘Coming Anarchy’”. Ecumene, 3(4), 473–496. De La Cadena, Marisol (2015). Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice across Andean Worlds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Dussel, Enrique, Eduardo Mendieta & Carmen Bohórquez (2011). “Introducción”. In Enrique Dussel, Eduardo Mendieta & Carmen Bohórquez (eds), El pensamiento filosófico latinoamericano, del Caribe y “latino” (1300–2000): historia, corrientes, temas, filósofos. Mexico: Siglo XXI Editores, pp. 5–10. Escobar, Arturo (2015). “Degrowth, Postdevelopment, and Transitions: A Preliminary Conversation”. Sustainability Science, 10, 451–462. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1007/​s11625​-015​ -0297​-5 French, Jennifer L. (2012). “Voices in the Wilderness: Environment, Colonialism, and Coloniality in Latin American Literature”. Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, 45(2), 157–166. DOI: 10.1080/08905762.2012.719766. French, Jennifer L. (2005). Nature, Neo-colonialism, and the Spanish-American Regional Writers. New Haven, CT: Dartmouth College Press. French, Jennifer L. & Gisela Heffes (2020). “Introduction: Genealogies of Latin American Environmental Culture”. In Jennifer French & Gisela Heffes (eds), The Latin American Ecocultural Reader. Chicago: Northwestern University Press, pp. 3–14. Gómez-Barris, Macarena (2017). The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Grosfoguel, Ramón (2016). “Del ‘extractivismo económico’ al ‘extractivismo epistémico’ y ‘extractivismo ontológico’: una forma destructiva de conocer, ser y estar en el mundo”. Tabula Rasa, 24, 123–143. Gudynas, Eduardo (2019). “Excedente en el desarrollo: revisión y nueva conceptualización desde los extractivismos”. Estudios Críticos del Desarrollo, 9(17), 25–56. Gudynas, Eduardo (2013a). “Extracciones, extractivismos y extrahecciones: un marco conceptual sobre la apropiación de los recursos naturales”. Observatorio del desarrollo, 18, 1–8. https://​ambiental​.net/​2013/​03/​definiciones​-extracciones​-extractivismos​-extrahecciones/​. Gudynas, Eduardo (2013b). “Debates sobre el desarrollo y sus alternativas en América Latina: Una breve guía heterodoxa”. Foro, 79, 94–111. Gudynas, Eduardo (2012). “Buen Vivir y Críticas al Desarrollo: saliendo de la modernidad por la izquierda”. In Francisco Hidalgo Flor and Alvaro Márquez Fernández (eds), Contrahegemonía y Buen Vivir. Quito: Universidad Central del Ecuador and Universidad de Zulia, pp. 71‒91. Haggard, Stephan (1990). Pathways from the Periphery: The Politics of Growth in the Newly Industrializing Countries. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

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Ianni, Octavio (1988). “A Questão Nacional na América Latina”. Estudos Avançados, 2(1), 17–18. Kjellén, Rudolf (1916). Staten som lifsform. Stockholm: Hugo Gebers Förlag. Kusch, Rodolfo (2007). Obras Completas. Tomo III. Rosario: Editorial Fundación Ross. Kusch, Rodolfo (1976). Geocultura del Hombre Americano. Buenos Aires: Fernando Garcia Cambeiro. Marini, José Felipe (1980). El Conocimiento Geopolitico. San Miguel de Tucuman: Universidad Nacional de Tucuman. Martin, Michael T. (1997). “The Unfinished Social Practice of the New Latin American Cinema: Introductory Notes”. In Michael T. Martin (ed.), New Latin American Cinema: Volume 1, Theory, Practices, and Transcontinental Articulations. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, pp. 15–29. Marx, Karl (1981). Capital. Vol. III. London: Penguin Books. Mignolo, Walter D. (2005). The Idea of Latin America. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Mistral, Gabriela ([1941] 2005). “Prólogo: Contadores de patria”. In Benjamín Subercaseaux, Chile o una loca geografía. Santiago de Chile: Editorial Universitaria, pp. 15–24. Moore, Jason W. (2017). “The Capitalocene, Part 1: On the Nature and Origins of Our Ecological Crisis”. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 44(3), 594–630. Muniz de Albuquerque Jr., Durval (2014). The Invention of the Brazilian Northeast. Chicago: Northwestern University Press. O’Lear, Shannon (2018). Environmental Geopolitics. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Ortiz, Fernando ([1940] 1995). Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Prebisch, Raúl (1981). Capitalismo Periférico: Crisis y Transformación. México City: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Puig, Juan Carlos (1980). Doctrinas Internacionales y Autonomía Latinoamericana. Caracas: Universidad Simon Bolivar. Rama, Angel ([1982] 2008). Transculturación narrativa en América Latina. Buenos Aires: Ediciones El Andariego. Ratzel, Fredrich ([1901] 2018). “Lebensraum: A Biogeographical Study”. Journal of Historical Geography, 61, 59–80. Ribeiro, Darcy (1983). As Américas e a Civilizacao, fourth edition. Petropolis: Editora Vozes Ltda. Ríos, Alicia (2004). “Traditions and Fractures in Latin American Cultural Studies”. In Ana Del Sarto, Alicia Ríos & Abril Trigo (eds), The Latin American Cultural Studies Reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 15–34. Rivarola Puntigliano, Andrés (2011). “‘Geopolitics of Integration’ and the Imagination of South America”. Geopolitics, 16(4), 846–864. Rodriguez, Octavio (2006). El Estructuralismo Latinoamericano. Mexico, DF: Editorial Siglo XXI. Selgas, Gianfranco (2022). Regionalismo ensamblado: Medioambiente, modernidad y reacción político-cultural en Latinoamérica (1930–1940). PhD dissertation, Stockholm University. Sikkink, Kathryn (1991). Ideas and Institutions: Developmentalism in Brazil and Argentina. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press. Smith-Madan, Aarti (2017). Lines of Geography in Latin American Narrative: National Territory, National Literature. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Stephens, Piers (2016). “Environmental Political Theory and the Liberal Tradition”. In M. Meyer, Teena Gabrielson, Cheryl Hall & David Schlosberg (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Environmental Political Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 57–71. Svampa, Maristella (2017). Del Cambio de Època al Fin de Ciclo: Gobiernos Progresistas, Extractivismo, Movimientos Sociales en América Latina. Buenos Aires: Edhasa.

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Trigo, Abril (2004). “General Introduction”. In Ana Del Sarto, Alicia Ríos & Abril Trigo (eds), The Latin American Cultural Studies Reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 1–14. Wallerstein, Immanuel ([1991] 1997). Geopolitics and Geoculture: Essays on the Changing World-system. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

6. A transformative post-developmental state? State institutions as change-makers in the Anthropocene Benedicte Bull

1. INTRODUCTION From its very beginning in the early 1970s, the environmental critique of “development” understood as modernization, industrialization and economic growth was accompanied by a critique of the state as a modernizing actor (Eckersley 2004). The main driver of protection of natural resources and sustainable livelihoods was rather expected to be social movements that could conduct social action “from below” (Holifield, Chackraborty, and Walker 2018), while transnational advocacy networks, rather than modern states were trusted with scaling up action. In studies of how to coordinate environmental actions, the state was replaced by “governance” as the central analytical category, including a focus on non-state actors, networks, and loose alliances (Duit, Feindt, and Meadowcroft 2016, de Castro, Hogenboom, and Baud 2015). However, it is increasingly evident that large scale collective action is needed to meet the challenges of simultaneously mitigating climate change and protect natural resources while also providing adequate livelihoods for the world’s population. An urgent question is thus: What actors and institutions should be responsible for a transformation capable of responding to this triple crisis? Can we envisage a new form of state capable of doing that? This chapter explores the question of what role the modern state can play in a transition towards sustainability. It first briefly outlines what is meant by the “modern state” based on Weberian and Marxist (including Gramscian) state theory. The second section discusses the approach that brought state theory most explicitly into dialogue with development theory, namely the theory of the “developmental state.” The following section discusses different contributions that have taken on the challenge of making state’s instruments of sustainable transitions, including perspectives on “green developmental states” and “democratic green states.” I argue that these are both based on a questionable idea of “decoupling” of the development model from its environmental and climate impact. Moreover, they fail to take into account the special challenges of post-colonial states. In the last section I ask whether it is possible to imagine post-development transformative state for the Anthropocene that 83

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is relevant for the Global South. This section draws on recent literature that seek to theorize the role of the state in a process of degrowth, but argue that it fails to account for urgent issues of legitimacy and security. To account for that, I argue that such a state could emerge as the protector of the population against the most devastating consequences of climate change and the nature crisis, while seeking to combine strategies of degrowth and exploiting potential for growth in sectors that may contribute to a sustainable transformation. This requires new forms of alliance building and construction of both domestic and international legitimacy. This last part draws on recent developments in Chile – a deeply divided middle-income country, that is profoundly affected by climate change and the loss of biodiversity, and is faced with the possibility of a deep transformation of the state.

2.

THE “MODERN STATE”

The most influential definition of the state is probably Max Weber’s notion of it as the organization with a monopoly of legitimate violence (Weber 1978). This was notably his view of a modern state – not applying to any state form in history. Weber’s argument places emphasis on territorial control through centralization of power, and has given rise to what is often called the “bellicist theory of state building” proposing that the modern state is a product of war. Warfare required the mobilization of forces, technological upgrading and the establishment of extractive capacity (Tilly 1990, Mann 1993). While originally state founding groups held many similarities with any violent organization (Tilly 1985), over time states enhanced their legitimacy as extraction of resources was paralleled not only by the ability to protect its citizens, but also by the expansion of capacity for service provision. Through this reciprocal relationship, states emerged as the permanent institutional core of political authority, upon which specific regimes were built. While states differed broadly in terms of division of power and degree of state capacity, Weber argued that the development of a meritocratic bureaucracy was a superior way in which to both enhance efficiency and create a platform of robust legitimacy (Weber 1971). Marxist state theory links the development of modern states to the evolution of capitalism, rather than legitimate territorial control. It holds that modern states have emerged to support capitalism by preparing and disciplining labor, extracting resources for building necessary infrastructure, and regulating capitalist transactions. Although there could be a functional separation between the capitalist classes and state elites, there is a mutual dependence, since the capitalist classes need the state to perform a set of functions, while the state elites depend on the maintenance of a level of economic activity, to be able to provide protection and services that ensure their legitimacy (Block 1977). Variation in states’ function and capacity has thus often been explained not only by its territorial control and success in centralizing power, but also the kind of economic activity it is presiding over (Kurtz and Schrank 2012, Saylor 2012, Soifer 2013). Recent changes in the state are for example explained by the fact that capital partly has become “denationalized” and “deterritorialized,” and

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the state has thus shifted in form but not purpose (Moncayo C 2012, Robinson 2010, Bull 2019). What Marxist and Weberian state theory have in common is a consideration of states as essentially relational (Jessop 1990, 2008). Although states depend on the extraction of resources from its citizens to different extents depending on the availability of other resources (natural resource rents, foreign loans, aid, etc.), they all rest on a degree of a reciprocal relationship to its citizens. This relationship depends on economic growth: to enable the state to provide protection from outside and internal threats; to enable it to provide services; and to pay for the administrative apparatus needed for these functions. Both democratic and authoritarian states face this growth predicament, but they will experience different consequences if the states do not fulfill their functions: In democratic states, the government in turn will lose power, but the legitimacy of the very state is only affected over time, depending on how the economic crisis is managed. In authoritarian states, consequences of lack of economic growth depend on how it affects various state-supporting elites, as the relationship to the masses may be managed through violence and repression (Bueno de Mezquita and Smiths 2012). Gramscian state theory differs from the two above particularly as it rejects the sharp distinction between the state and civil society. In a Gramscian version, states consist not only on materiality but also ideas. Different ideas are linked to different social classes, and the hegemony of the state is based on the acceptance of a specific set of ideas held by groups of civil society. An important implication of Gramscian state theory is that change is envisaged partly as a result of changing ideas (war of position), not only through physical action. The necessity to procure economic growth can be considered the first state predicament. The second is that of security, which is particularly emphasized by Weberian state theory. In many ways, this is a mirror image of realist international relations theory arguing that the world is an anarchy. Any state that does not defend itself or consciously build alliances to enhance its security risks being overtaken by larger powers. This accentuates the need for growth in order to finance defense. The upshot of this double predicament is that the state is required to coordinate and foster growth as a means of both internal and external survival. This may lie the ground for increased legitimacy and state capacity, in turn facilitating the coordination of further growth. In the following, I will discuss how state legitimacy and capacity have been related to growth-based development models, before looking beyond growth-based models.

3.

THE DEVELOPMENT STATE AND THE LAST INDUSTRIAL CHALLENGERS OF THE 20TH CENTURY

At a point when the belief in market solutions and the rejection of state-led development was at its peak in the late 1980s, students of the so-called East Asian Miracle

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economies launched a controversial argument: Against the neo-liberal argument that the role of the state should be reduced to “getting the prices right,” the developmental state literature argued that the success rested on the emergence of a state configuration wherein a capable and autonomous bureaucracy was able to steer industrial elites towards investment in high-growth, high-productivity sectors. A broad literature emerged on the economic policies pursued by the states (Amsden 2001, Wade 1990, Stubbs 2009), the type of states behind those policies, and their relationship to societal groups, particularly industrial elites (Johnson 1982, Evans 1995, 1998, Weiss and Hobson 1995, Weiss 1998), as well as on the historical and international background for the emergence of states with the ability and desire to pursue developmental policies (Kohli 1999, Woo-Cumings 1998, Cumings 1984). The “developmental state” concept was subsequently detached from the East Asian experience and defined in general terms as a state that: “establishes as its principle of legitimacy its ability to promote and sustain development, understanding by development the combination of steady high rates of economic growth and structural change in the production system, both domestically and in its relationship to the international economy” (Castells 1992: 56). It combines a Weberian state or its equivalent, with relations of collaboration and reciprocity between public and private sectors based on a political consensus of the pursuit of economic welfare and development (Schneider 2015). The role of an elite bureaucracy or specialized agencies were particularly emphasized. After the turn of the millennium, developmental state policies became increasingly popular among developing countries. However, as institutional means to confront current challenges, they have major weaknesses. First, they are not easily replicable. The emergence of the professional, meritocratic and autonomous states presupposes that resistance from competing centers of authority to the state has been overcome. In most countries, competing elites continue to challenge central authority, whether it was clan leaders or local strongmen (Migdal 1998, Boone 2012), drug lords or competing business elites influencing the state, not to enforce laws and implement policy (Amengual and Dargent 2020, O’Donnell 1993, Bull 2014). Moreover, the geopolitical backdrop of the successful East Asian developmental states was the US’ attempts to strengthen stability and establish hegemony in Asia. The US did so through supporting prosperity and even particular domestic state agencies in the different countries (Fine 1999, Johnson 1995, Pempel 1999, Nordhaug 1998, Nordhaug 2005). This helped the states in overcoming the security predicament described above, and it allowed them to focus inwards.

4.

THE “GREEN DEVELOPMENTAL STATE” OR ENVIRONMENTAL AUTHORITARIANISM

Proponents of the “green developmental state” consider the challenge of sustainability as two-fold. First, “green development” requires the creation and mass commodification of new green technologies. Second, it must be capable of destruction of

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powerful fossil-fuel incumbencies (Thurbon et al. 2021). Developmental states with their institutional capacity and autonomy from particular social forces appear as particularly capable of taking on this challenge. And indeed, Asian developmental states have used the same tools to push for the greening of their economies and implement environmental policies as they used to do to pursue rapid growth (Han 2017). Some have labeled this a “developmental environmentalism” (Thurbon et al. 2021), referring to an idea that economic and environmental goals are essentially complementary. The primary purpose is the building and strengthening of the nation. The state’s primary economic goals are increasing manufacturing capacity, technological autonomy and export competitiveness, and the appropriate role of the state in advancing those goals is strategic interventionism (Kim and Thurbon 2015). Examples of such developmental environmentalism abound. In South Korea, the state has built on its ability to direct networks of large companies to make them invest in renewable technologies, and is now actively promoting fossil-fuel phase-out under their net-zero emissions pledges (Kim and Thurbon 2015; Kalinowski 2021). In Taiwan, the institutions associated with the developmental states have not only been instrumental in investing in the “green transition”; developmentalist instruments applied in the high growth period have been brought back in order to facilitate a rapid “green transition” (Chien 2020). As argued by Bowles: the societal developmental state was needed to confront the political power of landed interests and the nascent power of labour to lead an industrial transition; now the developmental state is needed to confront the political power of carbon interests. That is, a developmental state is needed which is capable of disciplining some elements of capital and promoting others while forging the societal coalitions necessary to change the foundation of the economy. (Bowles 2020: 1430)

However, the “green developmental state” has two features that complicate its role in a green transition. The first is that it is based on a rational, scientific and managerial approach and a vision of nature as an object to be controlled and managed by technocrats under centralized bureaucracies. In the same way that the “developmental state” never questioned the basic structures of the capitalist mode of production or industrialism more generally, the green developmental state seeks to ensure the survival of capitalism based on mass consumption, through dealing with environmental risks. It may allow for a transition to a less carbonized economy, but not one that simultaneously handles the crises of nature loss, biodiversity, pollution and resource depletion. The second feature is an affinity with authoritarianism. The East Asian developmental states were mostly authoritarian and many notoriously repressed civil society (Leftwich 1995, Deyo 1987). The discussion about whether authoritarianism was a condition for the success of developmental states, or simply an additional feature, has been revived in the discussion of green developmental states. This has of course been most vehemently emphasized relating to China and its form of ecological modernization, resting on an authoritarian state (Chen and Lees 2016). However, as argued by Gilley and others, “green developmental states” show features of “environmental authoritarianism”:

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a public policy model that concentrates authority in a few executive agencies manned by capable and uncorrupt elites seeking to improve environmental outcomes (Gilley 2012). It combines a “decrease in individual liberty” that prevents individuals from engaging in unsustainable behavior and compels them to obey more sustainable policies, and a policy process that is dominated by a relatively autonomous central state, affording little or no role for social actors or their representatives (Beeson 2010). This weakness is sought to be remedied by a different literature on green institutions, the one started off by Robyn Eckersley’s The Green State.

5.

FROM ENVIRONMENTAL STATES TO GREEN STATES

Robyn Eckersley envisions the emergence of an ecological democratic state whose regulatory ideals and democratic procedures are informed mainly by concerns for sustainability. She adopts a constructivist approach to the so-called “growth predicament,” arguing that the historical contingency of GDP growth as an overriding policy priority of states is far from inevitable. Rather, it reflects particular historical, social and ideological circumstances (Eckersley 2004). In the same way as the bourgeoisie served as the vanguard for the creation of the liberal democratic state in the 18th and 19th centuries, and the labor movement was at the forefront of the social forces that created the social democratic state in the 20th century, she envisages the environmental movement and a broader green movement to be the harbingers of the democratic ecological state. In essence such a Green state has high levels of state environmental capacity and intervention, and is able to integrate economic, social welfare and environmental welfare policies (Christoff 2005). Eckersley argues against the inevitability that the social structures of international anarchy (political realists), global capitalism (Marxists) and the exigencies of the liberal democratic state (liberalists) foreclose the transformation of states into agents of a broad sustainability transformation. There are three premises for this to emerge: The first is the rise of “environmental multilateralism,” including environmental treaties and international environmental standards that modify the structures of international anarchy. The second is the emergence of sustainable development and “ecological modernization” as competitive strategies of corporations and states that make the exigency of capitalism less ecologically destructive. The third is the emergence of environmental advocacy within civil society and of new democratic discursive designs within the administrative state that makes the exigency of liberal democracy more compatible with real sustainability. This includes for example community “right to know” legislation, third-party litigation rights, environmental and technology impact assessment, and statutory policy advisory committees. At the core of the argument is state legitimacy. Eckersley argues that, in the past, state legitimacy “was acquired by the provision of military and domestic security and the regulation and enforcement of contracts. Nowadays that legitimacy is primarily

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acquired by appeal to democracy, typically representative democracy of the liberal democratic variety” (Eckersley 2004: 1). The Green state moves beyond this and can be conceived of as a “post-liberal state” with four core dimensions: it is a system of regulation, an administrative apparatus, a corpus of ideas and expert knowledge, and a site of contestation and decision-making (Duit, Feindt and Meadowcroft 2016: 7). However, while there is increasing documentation of the existence of actual “environmental states” both in Europe, the US and the Global South (Dryzek et al. 2003, Sommerer and Lim 2016), there is much less agreement whether the existing environmental states actually have the potential of being transformative. “Environmental states” may be defined as to include the existence of environmental institutions and laws that make the management of environmental problems an irreducible element of what governments actually do (Duit, Feindt, and Meadowcroft 2016). The existing “environmental states,” however, have mainly enabled new forms of “green growth” or “ecological modernization.” There is much less evidence as to the extent to which the state is able to engender a real socio-environmental transformation. The “environmental states” appear to have primarily succeeded in shielding their citizens from environmental harm (for example as in local pollution), but have had much less success in minimizing their negative impact on the earth system, and in particular on the breaching of crucial planetary boundaries of climate and biodiversity (Hausknost and Hammond 2020). There appears to be a limit, or “glass ceiling” to what the modern state can do (Hausknost 2020). At the basis of the discussion is whether it is possible to actually overcome the “state imperatives” sketched above. The political economy of the state will dramatically change if growth is reduced as much as is necessary to achieve a real sustainable transformation, and this will necessarily impact on the state’s fiscal role. One proposal to move away from the growth predicament is to critically look at the practices of money creation and the viability of existing debt relations (Bailey 2020). A much less debated issue is the relevance of the “green state” literature for the Global South. While there are pioneers among the “green states” in the Global South (Sommerer and Lim 2016), most research is based on cases from Europe, Australia and the United States. Moreover, the “green state” literature does not problematize the particular predicaments of post-colonial states, including deep divisions between elites and the broad population, low levels of integration of populations within a polity, and the frequent existence of elites that compete with the state for authority in vast swaths of the territory (O’Donnell 1993). To the contrary, Eckersley explicitly presupposes that the state has resolved basic issues of territorial control when she argues that state legitimacy no longer hinges on the provision of basic domestic security, but rather on liberal democracy. This ignores that in many countries in the Global South, basic security and regulatory functions are not in place. In the following I will discuss how the “green state” literature can be enriched by examples from the Global South.

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6.

A TRANSFORMATIVE POST-DEVELOPMENTAL STATE?

At the core of post-colonial thinking about the state is a recognition that not all states are born through the same processes. There is a profound difference between states that were created as a result of colonialization or opposition to it, and those that grew out of wars, alliance building and gradual extension of the authority of a specific center, as the Weberian and bellicist theory of the state suggests. In the colonies, the modern state is an imposition, established essentially to benefit the colonial power. However, the circumstances under which this happened and the extent to which the states have subsequently established territorial control and legitimacy varies. Indeed, part of the lessons from the developmental state literature was that the form of colonialism experienced in the “Asian Tigers” had encouraged the establishment of a strong state apparatus that subsequently benefited the countries in generating growth (Kohli 1999). However, in many cases there is a significant continuity in state elites and state structures that are geared towards catering to narrow, often local, elite or foreign interests (Centeno and López-Alves 2001, Migdal 1998). The first overall perspective on development that sought to capture the consequences of colonial institutions and economic relations was different versions of the dependency theory – in many aspects a forerunner to post-colonial thought. At the core of its argument was that a “comprador state” led by a small elite foreclosed the development of national capitalism and the evolution of a domestic bourgeoisie. It tied the former colonies to exploitative patterns of global trade that would lead to a dynamic process of “underdevelopment” and production of ever deeper poverty (Bull and Bøås 2012, Evans 1979). The export of natural resources was always a central element in that relationship of exploitation (Alimonda 2011), and thus, across many countries, the state-bearing national elites have been associated with resource extractivism and export agriculture, for example oil exploitation (Coronil 1997), coffee (Paige 1998) or mining (Paredes 2013). The control over key natural resources allowed elites to construct states without the establishment of bureaucratic capacity and accountability mechanisms that tended to result from the need to extract income from taxation (Moore 1998). While dependency theory doubted the ability of the existing states to end underdevelopment, it saw a renewed state based on control by the ruling classes or a class compromise as a potential instrument of emancipation. While building on dependency theory, post-colonial thinking differs from it by rejecting the modern state as an instrument for emancipation of people and nature. However, most social movements and academics that work to de-colonialize societies place demands on states and seek to transform state–society relations, rather than to abolish the state (Machado and Zibechi 2017). Among the proposals is the establishment of a different idea of citizenship and establishment of plural structures of authority in a given territory that respect different cultures and forms of life, transforming the state, but not abandoning it (Radcliffe 2012). The start of this has to be a discussion of what a transformative state would do. It is increasingly accepted that a key task would be to end the growth predicament

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of current global capitalism. The requirement of constant growth has led to an exponential growth in material extraction from the Global South that show no signs of abating.1 It is impossible to confront the climate crisis and the nature crisis at the same time without reimagining progress beyond GDP growth. The idea that global economic growth can continue decoupled from an exponential growth in natural resource use and depletion is largely debunked, at least if decoupling is not accompanied by sufficiency-oriented strategies, that is the direct downscaling of economic production in many sectors and parallel reduction of consumption, and strict enforcement of absolute reduction targets (Haberl et al. 2020). As argued by Hickel, this requires a broad transformation of global capitalism, and probable hard limits by capping resource and energy use (Hickel 2020). However, as has recently been recognized in the “degrowth” literature, the proposal lacks a theory of the state (D’Alisa and Kalis 2020, Akbulut 2019). There is a presupposition of the existence of institutions with the legitimacy and capacity to introduce new taxes, prohibitions and caps required for a transformation. It is also clear that many of the measures proposed to move the world away from a growth addiction need to be implemented by the states in the Global North, and through international cooperation. However, it must be coupled with action taken by states in the Global South that are able to bring populations together around common goals. In order to retain high levels of legitimacy those policies must involve both improved living conditions for the majority and reduced material footprints. Can the “developmental state” literature help us imagine such a state? To do so would imply to reimagine the “sense of purpose for the state,” away from being to foster growth as a means to promote national security and prestige (Thurbon et al. 2021), to a vision more aligned with climate mitigation and adaptation as well as reduction of nature loss. One could imagine a state whose sense of purpose is to promote national prestige through environmental leadership, and domestic leadership through protecting the citizens from environmental hazards and providing a good life. This state would have to rest on a strong “elite bureaucracy” of highly skilled personnel with an “espirit de corps” and a shared vision of the goals of a transition towards sustainability. There is significant evidence of the emergence of such groups, not only in states that generally have competent and uncorrupt bureaucracies, but also elsewhere. Research from Latin America, for example, shows such environmental elite bureaucracies to have emerged in states that overall score very differently in terms of state capacity (Bull and Aguilar-Støen 2015). Such bureaucracies need to have sufficient connections to societal actors to be able to extract necessary information to formulate feasible policies, yet at the same time sufficient autonomy not to be limited and hindered by special interests, as formulated in Peter Evans’ concept “embedded autonomy” (Evans 1995). Translated to policies for a green transformation, this would mean, for example, keeping close dialogue with existing businesses in order to understand where the potential and competence for shifting investments to more sustainable sectors are, while not shying away from limiting profitable activities against the will of other existing companies.

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This points to a well-documented broader democratic problem: That in deeply unequal societies, elites that benefit from the current model have disproportionate political influence both in bringing governments to power and in influencing policy making and policy implementation (North and Clark 2018, Amsden, Di Caprio, and Robinson 2012). However, the developmental state literature showed that resistance from entrenched elites is not impossible to overcome if the state is able to make visible benefits for the economy as a whole. However, this is a tough endeavor given that it is likely that in most countries, some of the elites that are set to lose most are precisely those that have been the main supporters of the present state, as for example in the countries dependent on mining and oil (Hogenboom 2015). A less discussed democratic problem stems from the cases where income from extractive sectors is used directly to distribute to the poor. This occurred for example in Venezuela and Ecuador, where leftist governments used income from oil extraction to build state capacity and distribute directly to the poor (Rosales 2013, Andrade 2015), in what has been labeled a “neo-extractivist” model cementing the consensus about the desirability of commodity extraction and exports (Svampa 2013). Recent processes in Chile may provide some guidance as to how, in spite of all this, a transformation may occur, as well as causes of concern. After the return of democracy in 1989, Chile experienced significant economic growth as well as poverty reduction. As a result it is often referred to as a model for other Latin American countries (Ahumada 2019). This, however, has occurred in parallel with a deepening of inequality (Rodríguez Weber 2019) and environmental problems. These range from the pollution of waters and soil from intensive fish-farming, industrial agriculture and mining, to loss of biodiversity, deforestation and droughts. The environmental issue that most directly concerns the majority of Chileans is the severe water scarcity,2 resulting from a combination of climate change, intensive water use for mining and export agriculture and unsustainable management. After two prior broad uprisings (2006 and 2013), a rebellion of dimensions hitherto not seen in democratic Chile started in October 2019. The main overall demands of the protesters were the end to the neo-liberal development model that had produced deep inequality and environmental devastation. After weeks of both violent uproar and large scale, pacific protests, an agreement was reached by political parties and movements to start a process to rewrite the constitution of 1989. This was written during Agosto Pinochet’s dictatorship, and gives strong rights to private property but provides weak social and environmental rights. More than 80% of the Chileans voted for this initiative in a referendum, and chose an assembly with 50/50 men and women, special indigenous seats and wide representation by independents, indicating the desire to create a real change. In the midst of the constitutional process (May 2021–June 2022), former protest and student leader Gabriel Boric won the presidential elections as a representative of a broad left-wing coalition. He promised a transformation of Chile towards a more egalitarian and just, more diverse in terms of gender and ethnicity, and importantly, towards a more sustainable country. As a means of forging such a transformation, he envisioned a new “inclusive” state, built on a broad coalition of forces.3 Key focuses were the energy transition, the fight

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against biodiversity loss and the water crisis.4 At the same time, he confirmed Chile’s association with a Western dominated global security system, by strongly condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and confirmed the need to continue selective growth, through strategic governmental interventions. He also sought to re-establish Chilean international leadership on environmental issues, initially by reverting his predecessor’s rejection of ratification of the important Latin American agreement on public participation in environmental decision-making (the Escazú Agreement).5 In his effort, Boric could build on a state with significant capacity for intervention – also in environmental issues – but which historically mainly has acted as a facilitator for private capital, rather than as a key coordinator of development in a broad sense (Clark 2018, Kurtz 2001). With the significant public awareness of environmental issues and climate change, primarily due to the widespread water crisis and frequent climate-related forest fires, his coalition could also construct the role of the state around a need to protect people against further climate- and environment-related catastrophes. Constructing such a narrative has been an important part of his coalition’s campaign. It has also been a main focus of the constitutional process that seeks, for example, to handle the negative environmental impact of lithium extraction – an important mineral for production of batteries needed for the global renewable transition – by allowing the state a more important role. The reforms in Chile could be an example of a process to give a new social purpose to a state apparatus that harbors significant capacity to transform the economy and societies. It is based, not as in the evolution of the 20th-century welfare state – on a coalition between labor, capital and the state – but on a coalition between on the one hand broad social movements representing environmental groups, feminist groups, indigenous groups, and many others, and on the other, business groups and the state. So far the approach appears to be based on a form of “selective modernization” of improving analytical capacity and institutional mechanisms for policy implementation in sectors strategic to a green transformation. The challenges of the experiment abound: The constitutional process has met many obstacles, including the people’s decreasing appetite for broad changes with uncertain outcomes. Chileans’ overall lack of trust in political parties and the government gives little space to the state to provide leadership and be the spearhead of a real transformation. Chile also has entrenched elites that may seek to retain the old model. The indigenous group Mapuche in southern Chile is equally unwilling to compromise on their demands after years of conflict and oppression. Moreover, although the critique against the existing development model is widespread, the consumerism upon which it is based has become deeply embedded in Chilean culture. In spite of this, if the broad coalition headed by Gabriel Boric is able to unite a significant part of the Chilean people around a new vision, it can provide one example of a transformative state for the Anthropocene.

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7. CONCLUSION The last decades have seen a rich literature on the institutional conditions for a transition into an industrial, high growth society. An important part of this was based on the so-called East Asian Miracle states that challenged the West’s industrial domination as well as dominant neo-liberal theory of development during the last decades of the 21st century. This chapter has reviewed the literature on the institutional underpinning of a state able to lead a transformation towards sustainability in the Anthropocene, rejecting the goals of high growth and industrialization, but embracing a vision of reduction of the use of natural resources. While the literature on this referring to the Global North is rich, there is much less literature that simultaneously considers the challenges of post-colonial states and the common challenges to the north and the south of simultaneously facing up to the climate and nature crisis, while rejecting authoritarianism. Based on experiences mainly from Latin America, I argue that taking on such a challenge requires at least three elements: First, the development of a new “sense of purpose” for the state as a protector of the population against the threats of climate change and natural resource depletion. This could entail the establishment of a state image as an international environmental leader, mirrored in a domestic state identity as a protector of nature as well as the welfare of human and non-human beings. Second, it requires the development of a new form of coalition. This cannot be a traditional tripartite coalition between labor, capital and the state, such as the one that supported the evolution of welfare states in the mid-20th century, but must involve broad social and environmental movements as well as business and the state. Third, it must rest on the development of an environmental and economic bureaucracy with both internal cohesion and technical capacity, and sufficient contacts with social and economic actors to be able to adopt knowledge and provide leadership. If efficient, this can provide a new economic path that seeks less resource incentive growth, including also degrowth in certain sectors. There are numerous financial, political and international challenges against such a process in most contexts. However, the example of Chile shows that although difficult, it is not impossible to both shift the direction of a “developmental state” and keep some important elements of it.

NOTES 1. 2.

This is well illustrated in www​.materialflows​.net. For a survey of attitudes amongst Chileans on environmental urgencies, see: https://​www​ .greenpeace​.org/​chile/​noticia/​issues/​bosques/​encuesta​-urgencias​-ambientales​-para​-chile​ -2022​-rechazo​-a​-dominga​-y​-escasez​-de​-agua​-deben​-ser​-las​-prioridades​-del​-proximo​ -gobierno​-segun​-los​-chilenos/​(accessed 30 August 2022). 3. https://​radio​.uchile​.cl/​2021/​11/​10/​gabriel​-boric​-queremos​-construir​-un​-estado​-que​-acoja​ -no​-un​-estado​-que​-abandone/​ (accessed 30 March 2023); https://​www​.elmostrador​.cl/​ noticias/​pais/​2022/​03/​11/​los​-horizontes​-del​-presidente​-gabriel​-boric​-entre​-la​-epica​-de​ -un​-nuevo​-relato​-politico​-y​-la​-dura​-realidad/​(accessed 30 March 2023).

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4. 5.

https://​boricpresidente​.cl/​propuestas/​crisis​-climatica/​. https://​www​.emol​.com/​noticias/​Nacional/​2022/​04/​20/​1058496/​boric​-escazu​-retomar​ -liderazgo​-pinera​.html.

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GDP, Resource use and GHG Emissions, Part II: Synthesizing the Insights.” Environmental Research Letters 15 (6):065003. doi: 10.1088/1748-9326/ab842a. Han, Heejin. 2017. “Singapore, a Garden City: Authoritarian Environmentalism in a Developmental State.” The Journal of Environment & Development 26 (1):3‒24. doi: 10.1177/1070496516677365. Hausknost, Daniel. 2020. “The Environmental State and the Glass Ceiling of Transformation.” Environmental Politics 29 (1):17‒37. doi: 10.1080/09644016.2019.1680062. Hausknost, Daniel, and Marit Hammond. 2020. “Beyond the Environmental State? The Political Prospects of a Sustainability Transformation.” Environmental Politics 29 (1):1‒16. doi: 10.1080/09644016.2020.1686204. Hickel, Jason. 2020. Less is More: How Degrowth will Save the World. London: Penguin Books. Hogenboom, Barbara. 2015. “New Elites around South America’s Strategic Resources.” In Environmental Politics in Latin America Elite Dynamics, the Left Tide and Sustainable Development, edited by Benedicte Bull and Mariel Aguilar-Støen, 113‒130. London and New York: Routledge. Holifield, Ryan, Jayajit Chackraborty, and Gordon Walker. 2018. Routledge Handbook of Environmental Justice. Oxford and New York: Routledge. Jessop, Bob. 1990. State Theory: Putting Capitalist States in their Place. Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press. Jessop, Bob. 2008. State Power: A Strategic Relational Approach. Cambridge: Polity Press. Johnson, Chalmers. 1982. MITI and the Japanese Miracle: The Growth of Industrial Policy, 1925–1975. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Johnson, Chalmers 1995. Japan, Who Governs? The Rise of the Developmental State. New York: Norton & Company. Kalinowski, Thomas. 2021. “The Politics of Climate Change in a Neo-developmental State: The Case of South Korea.” International Political Science Review 42 (1):48‒63. doi: 10.1177/0192512120924741. Kim, Sung-Young, and Elizabeth Thurbon. 2015. “Developmental Environmentalism: Explaining South Korea’s Ambitious Pursuit of Green Growth.” Politics & Society 43 (2):213‒240. doi: 10.1177/0032329215571287. Kohli, Athul. 1999. “Where Do High-growth Political Economies Come From? The Japanese Lineage of Korea’s ‘Developmental State’.” In The Developmental State, edited by Meredith Woo-Cumings, 93‒136. New York: Cornell University Press. Kurtz, Marcus. 2001. “State Developmentalism Without a Developmental State: The Public Foundations of the ‘Free Market Miracle’ in Chile.” Latin American Politics and Society 43 (2):1‒26. doi: 10.1111/j.1548-2456.2001.tb00397.x. Kurtz, Marcus J., and Andrew Schrank. 2012. “Capturing State Strength: Experimental and Econometric Approaches.” Revista de Ciencia Política 32 (3):613‒621. Leftwich, Adrian. 1995. “Bringing Politics Back In: Towards a Model of the Developmental State.” The Journal of Development Studies 31 (3):400‒427. doi: 10.1080/00220389508422370. Machado, Diego, and Raúl Zibechi. 2017. Cambiar el mundo desde arriba: Los límites del progresismo. La Paz: CEDLA. Mann, Michael. 1993. The Sources of Social Power. Volume II, the Rise of Classes and Nation-States, 1760‒1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Migdal, Joel. 1998. Strong Societies and Weak States: State-Society Relations and State Capabilities in the Third World. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Moncayo C, Victor Manuel. 2012. “Como aproximarnos al Estado en América Latina?” In El Estado en América Latina: Continuidades y Rupturas, edited by Mabel Twaithes Rey, 19‒50. Buenos Aires: CLACSO y Editorial Arcis.

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Moore, Mick. 1998. “Death without Taxes. Democracy, State Capacity, and Aid Dependence in the Fourth World.” In The Democratic Developmental State. Politics and Institutional Design, edited by M. Robinson and G. White, 84‒121. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nordhaug, Kristen. 1998. “Development Through Want of Security: The Case of Taiwan.” Forum for Development Studies, 25(1), 129‒161. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1080/​08039410​.1998​ .9666078 Nordhaug, Kristen. 2005. “The United States and East Asia in an Age of Financialization.” Critical Asian Studies 37(1), 103‒116. doi: 10.1080/1467271052000305296. North, L. L., and T. D. Clark 2018. Dominant Elites in Latin America: From Neo-Liberalism to the Pink Tide. London: Palgrave Macmillan. O’Donnell, Guillermo. 1993. “One the State, Democratization and Some Conceptual Problems: A Latin American View with Glances at Some Postcommunist Countries.” World Development 21 (8):1355‒1369. Paige, J. M. 1998. Coffee and Power: Revolution and the Rise of Democracy in Central America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Paredes, Maritza. 2013. “Shaping State Capacity: A Comparative Historical Analysis of Mining Dependence in the Andes, 1840s‒1920s.” PhD, Department of International Development, Oxford University. Pempel, T. J. 1999. “The Developmental Regime in a Changing World Economy.” In The Developmental State, edited by Meredith Woo-Cumings, 137‒181. New York: Cornell University Press. Radcliffe, Sarah A. 2012. “Development for a Postneoliberal Era? Sumak Kawsay, Living Well and the Limits to Decolonisation in Ecuador.” Geoforum 43 (2):240‒249. doi: http://​ dx​.doi​.org/​10​.1016/​j​.geoforum​.2011​.09​.003. Robinson, W. I. 2010. Global Capitalism Theory and the Emergence of Transnational Elites. WIDER Working Paper. Helsinki, Finland: UNU-WIDER. Rodríguez Weber, Javier. 2019. Desarrollo y Desigualdad en Chile (1850‒2009). Santiago de Chile: Centro de Investigaciones Diego Barros Arana. Rosales, Antulio. 2013. “Going Underground: The Political Economy of the ‘Left Turn’ in South America.” Third World Quarterly 34 (8):1443‒1457. doi: 10.1080/01436597.2013.831538. Saylor, Ryan. 2012. “Sources of State Capacity in Latin America: Commodity Booms and State Building Motives in Chile.” Theory and Society 41 (3):301‒324. doi: 10.1007/ s11186-012-9168-6. Schneider, Ben Ross. 2015. “The Developmental State in Brazil: Comparative and Historical Perspectives.” Revista de Economia Política 35 (1):114‒132. Soifer, Hillel David. 2013. “State Power and the Economic Origins of Democracy.” Studies in Comparative International Development 48 (1):1‒22. doi: 10.1007/s12116-012-9122-7. Sommerer, Thomas, and Sijeong Lim. 2016. “The Environmental State as a Model for the World? An Analysis of Policy Repertoires in 37 Countries.” Environmental Politics 25 (1):92‒115. doi: 10.1080/09644016.2015.1081719. Stubbs, Richard. 2009. “What Ever Happened to the East Asian Developmental State? The Unfolding Debate.” The Pacific Review 22 (1):1‒22. doi: 10.1080/09512740802650971. Svampa, Maristella Noemi. 2013. “Consenso de los commodities y lenguajes de valoración en América Latina.” Nueva Sociedad 244 (Marzo–Abril 2013):30‒46. Thurbon, Elizabeth, Sung-Young Kim, John A. Mathews, and Hao Tan. 2021. “More ‘Creative’ Than ‘Destructive’? Synthesizing Schumpeterian and Developmental State Perspectives to Explain Mixed Results in Korea’s Clean Energy Shift.” The Journal of Environment & Development 30 (3):265‒290. doi: 10.1177/10704965211013491. Tilly, Charles. 1985. “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime.” In Bringing the State Back In, edited by Peter Evans, Theda Scokpol and Dietrich Rueschemeyer, 169–191. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Tilly, Charles. 1990. Coercion, Capital and European States, A.D. 990‒1990. Oxford: Blackwell. Wade, Robert. 1990. Governing the Market: Economic Theory and the Role of Government in East Asian Industrialization. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Weber, Max. 1971. Makt og Byråkrati. Oslo: Gyldendal. Original edition, 1922. Weber, Max. 1978. Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretative Sociology. Berkeley: University of California Press. Weiss, Linda. 1998. The Myth of the Powerless State. New York: Cornell University Press. Weiss, Linda, and John M. Hobson. 1995. States and Economic Development. New York: Wiley. Woo-Cumings, Meredith. 1998. “National Security and the Rise of the Developmental State in South Korea and Taiwan.” In Behind East Asian Growth: The Political and Social Foundations of Prosperity, edited by H. S. Rowen, 319‒337. London: Routledge.

7. A Chinese Communist Party perspective on development and the environment: socialism through environmental development? Bjørn Leif Brauteseth

1. INTRODUCTION For many years now China has been a target of environmental critique. China has become the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases (see chapter by Skodvin), the largest producer and consumer of coal as well as the origin of a number of zoonotic diseases due to unsustainable agro-industries (see chapter by Aguilar-Støen and Jakobsen). In response to this, the PRC government has launched its own approach to a form of ‘green development’ named Ecological Civilization. But what has any of this to do with sustainability? The purpose of this chapter is to discuss the meaning and possible impact of Ecological Civilization in the PRC and beyond. Over the past decade, the Chinese government has reimagined parts of the ideological narrative of the Communist Party. These narratives are powerful because they have created the policy and legal space for certain environmental norms to develop, whilst keeping others at bay (Geall and Ely 2018). Today these eco-narratives have especially formed around technological innovation, yet they also include energy use, recycling, emissions reduction, conservation, afforestation, local environmental performance, a circular economy, environmental human rights and the yearly evaluation of the environmental performance of Party and government officials. Under the Chinese legal slogan of ‘Ecological Civilization’ (henceforth EC), there is also an assumption that ‘socialism is more suited to the realization of sustainable development than capitalism’ (Zhou 2006). This is a popular narrative in the West too, unfortunately, be it capitalism, socialism or a blending of the two, powerful oligarchies will always emerge and dominate our political arrangements. The less accountable oligarchies are, the more easily they can exploit the Earth’s natural systems and resources. Furthermore, the Chinese practice capitalism both globally and nationally. Ending Chinese state capitalism would mean fiscal instability and the potential collapse of the Communist Party. EC’s most prominent spokesperson and former vice minister of the Ministry of Environmental Protection defined EC as economic growth, environmental protection and social justice (meaning the socialist system) (Zhou 2006). Indeed, there were early scholars like Wen Tiejun who imagined 100

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a revitalized Chinese agrarian civilization built within the values of modern Chinese socialism (Oswald 2014). However, most scholars have focused on green growth and a green socialist economy. Nevertheless, what socialism really means in the modern Chinese context does not easily reflect visions of worker–peasant solidarity and freedom from the sin of capital accumulation. Rather, socialism’s reality manifests itself as a Leninist social control system that keeps the population loyal to the Party so that the influences of Chinese state capitalism do not destabilize the Party’s hold on power. This control system is assisted by the largest surveillance apparatus in the world. This apparatus assures that the monopoly on capital accumulation remains in the hands of the top members of the Communist Party. EC cannot simply be divorced from the framework of authoritarianism. However, the narrative of EC has had a powerful impact on Chinese law and policy. Indeed, this vision of environmental socialism with capitalistic characteristics is an example of the internationalization of Chinese Communist Party values. In this chapter we will discuss the official ‘green’ developmental approach of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) which is called EC. Our understanding of EC is based primarily on the theories of governance developed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as well as legal scholarship on the role of symbolic performance and ideology in the governance of China. In 2018 Xi Jinping’s administration made EC into a legal concept (Government of China 2018). In the context of development, the Chinese government has established a clear position that human rights can only be achieved through development, and that development must be a state-controlled programme (Government of China 2016). What this essentially means is that the role of justiciable rights and courts to protect and ensure the equal treatment of all stakeholders in development projects is extremely limited. This gives the state the maximum room to pursue its targets and achieve fast results, but with weak procedural systems that cannot guarantee predictable consultation and accountability mechanisms. In China the legal system does not have strong procedural laws that can activate the limited substantive recognition of human rights. Yet it is through human rights, especially the right to a healthy environment, that many environmental issues can be raised. Nevertheless, in China there has been an explosion of environmental public interest litigation, however these cases are rarely based on human rights claims1 and avoid ‘politically sensitive’ cases (Xie and Xu 2021). Be that as it may, these developments present opportunities and risks for other states too. The opportunities are that states could curate specific Chinese legal tool kits to work within the limitations of Chinese legal norms to address environmental and social governance issues in China related to foreign aid and development. The risks are that by strengthening the internationalization of some Chinese norms, states could inadvertently weaken procedurally robust mechanisms that ensure substantive rights, which could in turn cause sustainable transitions to become even more arbitrary, elite driven and political.

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2.

IS ECOLOGICAL CIVILIZATION ABOUT SUSTAINABILITY OR GREEN DEVELOPMENT?

EC is the first of the ‘civilizational slogans’2 to have an international vision and application. It calls on citizens to think seriously about the environmental role of Chinese global leadership. These eco-narratives have formed pathways that support a developmental state’s vision of green progress and ecological modernization. These narratives create real pathways of change, yet they may not be the sort of change we are hoping for. Nowhere in the current policy space or legislation does EC reimagine a slower, less materialistically powerful Chinese state. There is not much of a de-growth focus in the official iterations of EC. Sustainability is not imagined separately from development in EC, thus it can still be defined as ‘development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’. A rapid green modernization of the Chinese state is imagined. Phrases like High-Quality development are common in policy documents (Hongwu and Rong 2021). The goal is an overhaul in systems innovation, but the system nevertheless cannot subvert the needs of authoritarianism. Chinese green solutions are being packaged and sold as a ‘sustainable’ way to build a socialist future not just in China but also for other developing nations. Yet there are few ideological or legal mechanisms in EC that can assist Chinese leaders to choose environmental protection over other political or economic targets. Nevertheless, the EC narrative has had the effect of expanding environmental consciousness, greening industries, conservation areas and even access to environmental damage compensation through the courts. At the same time other sometimes less costly pathways to sustainability are narrowed, even if they may be more locally applicable and effective.

3.

SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT AND CHINESE SOCIALISM

Although a strong environmental overtone has been integrated into the development concepts of Chinese law and policy, the positioning of EC as a form of Chinese sustainable development does not solve the problem of consultation or accountability. The PRC has a sovereign right to pursue its own policies in its territory, however the Chinese state is promoting this form of procedurally weak environmental development overseas. Furthermore, EC is promoted in tandem with other Chinese developmental solutions in infrastructure and cyber technology which have been developed within the context of a top-down authoritarian system. If not managed carefully, otherwise vital aid and investment could undermine a host government’s ability to protect its long-term interests (Wright 2021). When host state elites endorse Chinese aid or investment, the Chinese parties tend to perceive elite endorsement as satisfying the needs of the host state. There are not enough procedures on the Chinese side that include civil society, indigenous peoples, activists or even Chinese actors who may need training in environmental or social governance. Overseas Chinese state

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actors and enterprises are not yet bound by any Chinese substantive or procedural laws that would force them to adhere to higher environmental and social governance standards, especially when a host state may lack certain capacities. Although there are many new laws and policies on environmental protection in China, there is yet to be a specific law on EC that would clarify jurisdictions, enforcement, accountability, compensational and arbitrational systems. As the effects of a globalizing China is felt across the world, such a law would help transform China’s green image from one of rhetoric to justiciable action. At the international level the Party-state has promoted the theme of EC at UN conventions like the Convention on Bio-diversity in the Kunming Declaration, which states the intent to ‘build a community of shared futures for all life on earth’ (United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity 2020, pp. 1–2). This phrase could be interpreted as a new vision for international law, a deep green conceptualization of human interconnectivity with all living things. However it is important to consider CCP norms, and how ideology interacts with and limits law. All states have ideologies, yet in the PRC its prominence is significant.3 Law in China is subservient to the Party (Creemers 2020; Government of China 2018, art. 1–3), as law must be used to build socialism, and thus the likelihood of environmental norms ever having the ability to override other political, economic or ideological considerations remains limited. Nevertheless, the CCP is deeply aware of the global environmental crisis and is, within the limitations of its ideology, doing what it can to show the Chinese people and the world a new vision of green development. Substantively, both the Party and the State are responsible for building EC (Government of China 2018, art. 46; Government of China 2017). This is significant because EC has now been included as one of the main spheres of governance which the Party is mandated to focus on, as it guides the people on the path of socialist development. Before EC became one of these spheres, the CCP had identified four other spheres of ‘civilization’ through which it coordinates the building of socialism. These are economic, social, political and cultural civilization. EC has been added in the Xi era, and his administration has emphasized its importance in a way that is highly significant within the ideological framework of Chinese Socialism. However, its content as a formal norm has been difficult to define even for Chinese legal professionals and academics (Pan 2006; Wang and Karl 1998; Yu 2005). Fortunately, since 2021 there has been progress in terms of defining its principles (Pan et al. 2021). These Principles are as follows: (1) (2) (3) (4)

Civilization prospers when ecology prospers; Clear waters and lush mountains are invaluable assets; A sound ecology is the most inclusive form of welfare; Mountains, waters, forests, farmlands, lakes and grasslands form a biotic community; (5) Protect the ecology with the strictest regulations and laws; (6) Mobilize the whole society to build a beautiful China; (7) Jointly promote a global ecological civilization.

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4.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF ECOLOGICAL CIVILIZATION

Before Xi came to power, scholars in the PRC advanced various environmental governance theories that sat under the umbrella term of EC (Goron 2018). Some EC scholarship was very similar to sustainable development concepts, others were not. What all the work on EC did have in common was that it embodied a call on government to do more to protect the environment. However, when Xi came to power in 2013, he remoulded the concept in order to create an ideological environment which made environmentalism a central feature of socialist development. In this way, the PRC and the CCP can show a strong commitment to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, albeit with its own interpretation of what sustainable development is (based on the idea that the most important human right is the right to development (United Nations 2018)). Today, EC is primarily a subset of Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era (hereafter XJPT).4 The goal is to strive for ‘the strong awareness of green development, efficient use of resources, strict protection of the environment and effective control of carbon emissions’ with the purpose of showcasing ‘China’s leadership in the global effort towards a green transition and our commitment to building the world into a better and cleaner place and laying the groundwork for a new development paradigm’ (Government of China 2021b). The evolution of EC can be traced back to 1972, when China attended the UN conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm. It was nearly a year since the country had joined the UN and its reaction to the Stockholm Declaration was to use the conference as a platform to decry capitalism and emphasize that environmental problems were due to capitalism (Ma Tianjie 2021). Ten years later, Deng Xiaoping was firmly in command of the Party-state and sought to change the direction of the country. Whilst Mao’s policies focused on class struggle, Deng’s administration tactfully concluded that ‘enemy classes’ had been eliminated by Mao’s policies and that a new stage of socialism had begun (Government of China 1981). In short, Deng understood that one could not simply leapfrog to communism nor undermine Mao’s legacy. At that time many in the CCP, especially Deng’s supporters, believed that Marxism offered a more nuanced approach to governance and development. Along this road, Deng believed the citizens of the Party-state would need to generate material wealth (Government of China 2021b). The CCP is not necessarily a monolithic entity, but the organization does try to create a consensus on its approach to governance and its interpretation of the epistemological sources that inform governance. This epistemological source is the CCP’s interpretation of Marxism. Central to the CCP’s interpretation of Marxism is a concept that was adapted by Mao Zedong, the Doctrine of Contradictions (Mao 1957). Deng continued to employ this doctrine by expanding its application beyond class struggle, and therefore enhancing the mandate of the Party to use its resources and expertise to accurately identify what primary contradictions the Party-state faced in each era of social development. The Deng era contradictions that defined the reform and opening up of the PRC remained a central

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feature of CCP guiding ideology until President Xi Jinping took office in 2013, when Xi identified a new set of contradictions.

5. IDEOLOGY AND CONTRADICTIONS The point of this next section is to assist readers in understanding how the Party understands itself and thinks about development. Since the founding of the PRC in 1949, the Party has created three major sets of primary contradictions which have acted as guiding posts for all of the policy decisions taken in each era. Mao’s contradictions focused on tensions between the peasantry-proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Deng’s contradictions focused on the tensions between ‘The ever-growing material and cultural needs of the people versus backward social production’ (Government of China 1981). Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao expanded on how to solve Deng’s primary contradictions but did not change them. Currently, Xi’s contradictions focus on tensions between ‘The people’s ever-growing need for a better life and unbalanced and inadequate development’ (Government of China 2021a). Although these ‘contradictions’ are essentially political programmes, they are presented by the Communist Party as ‘correct’ scientific observations. Viewing development and progress in this way divides socialist development into teleological stages on a path towards communism, where each of these stages or eras are governed by a set of contradictions. The Party believes that human progress can be managed holistically through a top-down approach by identifying and solving contradictions. Accordingly, society is ruled in this view of Marxism by certain ‘scientific’ laws that only Marxists have the expertise to identify, similar to how physics is ruled by laws that the scientific method can reveal through experimentation. In this way, the Party equates itself with a scientific approach to governance, even using the same Mandarin terminologies used in natural sciences. These nuances are lost once translated into English.5 In reality these stages reflect political dispensations, offering flexibility for leaders to forge new paths and policies provided they have enough political clout to gather support for new ideological directions within the Party. However, contradictions are presented to the public as part of a holistic and scientific method of governance (Creemers and Trevaskes 2020). Contradictions do not in themselves indicate innovative policy making; we should understand that contradictions are used within an ideological landscape to legitimize the Socialist Programme and shape reality to suit its purposes. An emerging theory on primary contradictions is that whatever is identified as a solution to a set of contradictions becomes the focus of the public’s expectations and scrutiny, and hopefully state performance (ibid. 54‒55). In Mao’s era the solution was class struggle and continuous revolution, the expectation was equality. In Deng’s era the solution was market socialism, the expectation was better living standards and increased wealth in which Deng spoke about building a material and spiritual civilization. In the Xi era the solution is a constellation of security, stability and environmentalist measures, the expectation is a sustainable

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future and the rejuvenation of China.6 Nevertheless the ‘solutions to contradictions’ create ‘opportunity zones’ of cooperation as well as pressure points for rights activists. In Deng’s time the zone of cooperation was economic, today these zones are economic, environmental and security orientated. From this perspective Beijing is increasingly cooperative, going above and beyond its previous commitments. For the CCP, Marxist theoretical systems have made it possible to not only ‘scientifically’ develop China, but also to ‘scientifically’ expand areas of cooperation with other states (CCP theory online Quishi 2018). One could perhaps substitute the word ‘scientific’ for the phrase ‘ordered priorities’. If we understand this view, we might have more cognitive empathy for how the Party-state perceives its own achievements and its frustrations with a liberal democratic insistence on a human rights based approach to development. We could also build up a more predictable model of what China is willing to cooperate on, and what it is not. The Party state will tolerate and even cooperate with democracies on sustainable development issues. However if democratic societies infringe on the PRC’s expanding ideas of national sovereignty they will be punished. As China expands its sovereignty claims on its land borders with India, on the sea, in extraterritorial law (Huo and Man 2021), in enterprises, in space and cyberspace, its ideological system is continuously challenged by other systems. In the case of Taiwan (the Republic of China), despite the formal recognition of the PRC as the government of China, the United States has promised to assist Taiwan if it is attacked by China.7 Now that Taiwan is a democracy the United States cannot abandon the island without losing legitimacy as a power in the Indo-Pacific region. A bolder Beijing has also increased its threats against the democratic island which the communists have never ruled. Taiwan’s democracy presents the Chinese people with an alternative reality, a Chinese society that is free, open and increasingly environmentally conscious. Beijing cannot allow Taiwanese democratic culture to influence the Mainland public. The recent visits to Taipei by lawmakers from the EU, Japan and the USA have, in Beijing’s view, breeched the One China principle. Immediately after (US Congress Speaker) Nancy Pelosi’s departure from Taiwan in early August 2022, China cancelled its environmental cooperation with the United States. This event illustrates how the US is caught between standing up for democratic values and placating a Chinese leadership that overreacts whenever it feels threatened. Unfortunately the current ideological climate ensures that Chinese society is constantly reminded of existential threats. Nevertheless, the PRC does not acknowledge the existential challenges it has created. The PRC has dammed rivers that feed India and South East Asia, it has also militarized islands in the South China Sea, at great cost to the environment. Beijing exhibits less and less capacity to respect the democratic values or pluralistic attitudes of other societies when it believes its sovereignty is under threat. Moreover, as the perceptions of the boundaries of its sovereignty expand, the PRC will most certainly take a more defensive role in these areas and tolerate less and less contestation of its claims. The more powerful the PRC becomes the more costly resistance to its norms will be. This drama will most certainly be played out in multilateral institutions. China is an active member of the United Nations and embraces concepts like ‘sustainable development’ (UN) and the ‘green economy’

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(UNEP). The use of international language and definitions in its own policies and legal frameworks gives Beijing a substantive way to align itself with global values. Much of China’s interpretation of sustainable development is complementary with the views of most states, which are by no means perfect. However, as the following section will explain, these international concepts are always viewed through the lens of Chinese Socialism, which is currently preoccupied with the project of ‘the great rejuvenation of the Chinese race’ 中華民族偉大復興 zhonghua minzu weida fuxing. It is hard to say where the final borders of this great rejuvenation will eventually fall. Most low income nations do not have the capacity to challenge China. Nevertheless, it is clear that the Chinese leadership is eager to work with other nations on green growth, especially those that do not challenge its narratives. Beijing most certainly supports multilateral institutions, they are a legitimate fora through which it can garner support to shape international law. This is why Beijing has positioned itself so strategically within the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda at the UN (Shapiro and Li 2020). Despite the many contested views on how to implement Sustainable Development, most of the world’s scientific information points out that there are non-linear and unpredictable changes occurring in the Earth’s systems that require diverse solutions (Halskov, Hansen and Liu 2018). EC offers humanity an anthropological assurance that a sustainable future will be achieved as long as everyone follows the Party (ibid.). What is concerning here is that if the US and China cannot de-escalate tensions, narratives like EC could be used to justify conflicts. The securitization of the environment would be a gloomy future indeed. EC reiterates an old idea that the CCP can always find a predictable and scientific path forward through the insights of Marxism. These narratives narrow and widen different pathways. But does that mean it is willing to work on sustainability without growth?

6.

LAW, LEGITIMACY AND XI JINPING THOUGHT ON ECOLOGICAL CIVILIZATION IN THE NEW ERA

In the words of Xi: Now as the principal contradiction in our Society has been transformed into one between the people’s ever growing need for a better life and unbalanced and inadequate development, the people’s need for a beautiful environment has become an important aspect of this contradiction and the broad masses of the people look forward to an improvement of the ecological environment.8

Xi goes further to identify that China must build an excellent EC, that a healthy ecological environment is essential for the security of China and that China has a responsibility to be an example in this regard ‘otherwise, it will become an excuse for forces with ulterior motives to attack us’.9 At least ideologically, Xi is telling his comrades that in order to achieve national rejuvenation and the next stage of social-

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ism, China must build a sustainable future. Thus, the Xi administration is centring part of its legitimacy on building a green future. Without direct elections or political freedoms, the performance of the Party-state in solving primary contradictions is an important source of legitimacy creation. However, what sort of green development are we talking about? This green development is situated in Xi’s new development concept which seeks to ride the wave of a third industrial revolution in which data revolutions, green energy and improved transportation will take the Party-state to new heights and surpass its competitors (Qiushi Journal 2021). However, the CCP’s ideology is based on a conceptualization of the Party-state that is developmental and by that logic, the regulatory and government agencies entrusted with environmental, civil and labour protection must be weaker for economic agencies to exert their full strength (Ding 2020). Although the Party-state has improved its legal regimes and even improved the powers of environmental agencies, like the Environmental Protection Bureau, under Xi, the Party-state is returning to a more ideologically fundamentalist position. Legal scholars such as Rogier Creemers, Susan Trevaskes, Li Ling and others have generally abandoned the hope that China is on a path to a procedural or ‘thin’ form of the rule of law, and many believe that Ideology is not merely an external device that sits outside of the law to justify or rationalise legal rules, actions and decisions of Party state actors. Rather, ideology is intrinsic to the logic of legal rules, actions and decisions: Therefore it permeates all aspects of law and is in essence the architectural scaffolding within which the law operates. (Creemers & Trevaskes 2020, p. 3)

Creemers and Trevaskes define the mandate of the Party as the following: (1) To lead China towards a predetermined, utopian future. (2) The rulers should be those who have correct knowledge to realize this process. (3) The CCP alone, can identify and resolve this task by way of its correct political theory. The foundations of this are known, but it needs to be researched how these foundations should be turned into action. (4) The question depends on correctly identifying the primary contradiction defining a particular historical period, as well as subordinate contradictions. (5) Once these contradictions are identified they can be tackled by researching the applicable objectives or laws (規律 guilu). This requires experimentation and political flexibility. When solutions are found they eventually crystalize into doctrine, as well as stronger legal and policy norms (Creemers and Trevaskes 2020, p. 13). Importantly, CCP ideology rejects pluralism in favour of a monist conception of reality that assumes all genuine questions must have a true answer, and only one answer, all others are errors; there must be a dependable path to discovering the true answers; the true answers, when found, will be compatible with one another, forming a single whole; for one truth cannot be incompatible with another. This, in turn, is

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based on the assumption that the universe is harmonious and coherent (Cherniss and Hardy 2013). Creemers (2020, p. 43) then says that ‘in party ideology, monism entails that what is scientifically correct is also morally preferable and in the interests of the people, who remain an undifferentiated mass, diverse but not pluralistic’. He writes that ‘any conflict between the needs of diverse groups are identified as contradictions that need to be resolved. These conflicts are not seen as legitimate yet incommensurable interests that can only be mediated’. If these scholars are correct, this ideological framework is naturally in tension with universal human rights and the role of civil society to legitimately defend human rights against the state. Furthermore, as human rights defenders also play an important role in defending the right to a healthy environment, the Party-state has to develop mechanisms that allow society to improve environmental governance without undermining political interests, strengthening human rights or giving environmental actors too much power. Although environmentalism can enhance the legitimacy of the regime, its legal effects need to be closely policed. Recently China created a separate category of six ‘environmental human rights’.10 Although this development is cause for some celebration, this new legal class can also act as an isolated zone of legal rationality that can be policed in such a way that cases do not influence jurisprudence in political or cultural rights. In Chinese law, large sections of preambles are often devoted to historical and ideological retellings of socialist development. One of the most important documents we can use to understand the CCP’s perspectives on development is the recent Historical Resolution of the 6th Plenum of the CCP (Government of China 2021a). The CCP has drafted this iteration of its history to be evidence of the ‘Glorious and Correct’ path of Chinese Socialism. At the plenum, political violence and disasters were glossed over or recast as part of ‘the great struggle on the path to socialism’. Moreover, the contributions of previous leaders like Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao (who are often identified as political rivals of Xi Jinping) are barely mentioned. Even Deng’s contribution to socialist development is framed by the document as flawed in comparison to ‘Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics of the New Era’, which is said to ‘embody the best of Chinese Culture and Ethos in our times and represents new breakthroughs in adapting Marxism to China’ (Government of China 2021a, sec 4 para 15). So what are these breakthroughs and what do they have to do with development?

7.

A FUTURE VISION FOR AN ECOLOGICAL CIVILIZATION

The 6th Plenum text instructs Party members that in promoting a new vision of socialist development ‘We must use Marxist positions, viewpoints and methods to observe, understand and steer the trends of the times, and constantly deepen our understanding of the laws underlying governance by a communist party, the building of socialism and the development of human society’ (Government of China 2021a).

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A plain reading of this text shows us that the CCP’s understanding of Marxism should not only be something for China, but that China has a responsibility to use these insights to help the development of human society. A more nuanced reading seems to indicate that the Party is not about to compromise on Marxist or socialist values like it did during previous administrations. This is perhaps a political breakthrough. In the same document, the Party seeks to activate Xi’s new development concept through what is called The Five Spheres (五位一體 wuweiyiti) and Four Comprehensives (四個全面 sigequanmian). The five spheres are economic, social, political, cultural, and EC. These spheres once identified, mandate the Party to focus the organization of civilization around these specific concerns. The four comprehensives are building a moderately prosperous society, deepening reform (which means greater control for the Party rather than less), governing the country according to law (which is not the same as the supremacy of the law over the Party), and finally, Party building and discipline (Garrick and Bennet Chang 2018). Without an independent judiciary or other formal separations of powers, Party inspection and discipline is the main mechanism that the CCP uses to maintain order and accountability within the functions of the Party-state. The disciplining of Party members operates outside of the formal judiciary, with its own norms and sanctions, many of them arbitrary. Under Xi, the various anti-corruption units and the Party Discipline and Inspection Commission have been merged into an all-powerful National Supervisory Commission (NSC), which has been granted new powers to monitor the conduct of the 90 million strong membership of the CCP, managers of state-owned enterprises (SOEs), hospitals, educational and cultural institutions, sports organizations, research institutions, village and local governments (Li 2021; Government of China 2018). These breakthroughs seem to indicate a substantive mandate to centralizing and strengthening the authoritarian system without being procedurally specific. The NSC now ranks alongside the central government and above the judiciary. The CCP promotes this form of internal supervision as the foundation for a more effective form of governance that leads to clear, decisive policy actions and a people-centred and benevolent rule (Thornton 2021). What is especially interesting, however, is that it is unclear if powers of the NSC apply to various actors who are not always operating within the territory of the PRC, especially in relation to SOEs in the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Xi has reiterated that Party building is central to the Chinese governance model, and one would imagine that Zhongnanhai (the Party compound next to the Forbidden City) would prefer to exert control over its citizens, institutes and companies not only at home but also overseas in order to help the development of human society and promote the image of China as a benevolent partner. It is therefore interesting that in a country like Zimbabwe, where Chinese enterprises now own the majority share of the mining industry, most of the Chinese firms are only incorporated in Zimbabwe and have tenuous ties to its parent company, or no official ties to the Party, or the home state. Controlling these enterprises does not seem like a priority for Beijing according to the Zimbabwean Environmental Law Association (ZELA 2021). Resistance to Chinese mining activities in conservation areas has been

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pursued by local activists and lawyers who eventually forced the Zimbabwean courts to ban mining in national parks (VOA 2020). This was a Zimbabwean environmental initiative not a Chinese one. Zimbabwean-incorporated Chinese companies continue to challenge the abilities of the fragmented Zimbabwean state to enforce its laws. At the same time these companies often lack training or the capacity to understand the environmental needs of the communities and landscapes they operate in. At home, the Party-state has expanded the roles of Party organizations (or Party cells) in public enterprises, substantial private enterprises and institutions which, along with various responsibilities, does the ground work for the Party Centre and the NSC (Government of China 2020). Although Party cells do not yet have the same role in overseas NGOs and enterprises, they represent an opportunity for the Party to expand enforcement of its norms extraterritorially. Of course this sort of extraterritorial duty comes with its own risks and benefits depending on the focus of future regulations. Chinese scholars are encouraged to create narratives about the future economy of the world and what EC would look like as a global system. For example, Yi Huang and Shuying Tang, write about EC-based trade and the importance of ‘democratic centralism’.11 A central theme of their article is the idea of a harmonious coexistence. They write ‘The lofty ideal of harmonious coexistence of multiple civilizations is expressed by Xi Jinping in his concept of a common human destiny’ (2020, p. 63). When we try to understand what harmony may mean to the average Chinese intellectual, the authors say it best when they write that there is a major dichotomy in the thinking of Western democratic nations: This dichotomy is based upon two approaches to the market and its effects on the environment. The first is that the markets represent a natural equilibrium that should not be regulated because any human management is disruptive. The second is that only orderly systems are designed by humans and must be managed by humans in every detail. (Huang and Tang 2020, p. 63)

The authors claim that Chinese thinking is what they call ‘Organic Thinking’ in that it is able to integrate both these perspectives, due to the unique form of governance in China which does not lead to the politicization of such important matters. By having one party leadership, China is able to avoid this unreasonable dichotomy which the authors claim is the basis for most of the political conflict in the West (Huang and Tang 2020). What they are doing here is identifying what they believe harmony is not; harmony is not democracy based on multi-party competition. They claim that Western political parties generally align themselves around one of the two dichotomies. They claim that to the Chinese mind, this duality is inherently wrong. They also claim a monopoly on harmony and reject other approaches. Thus they portray Western political traditions as ineffective in providing a solution to the problem. Their position makes a point that globalization is an irreversible trend in the development of world history. Thus EC should not mean a cessation of trade but a transition to fair trade that is personalized, real and reciprocal. The goal of this trade will be to achieve sustainable

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societies rather than sustainable growth. As for sustainability itself, it is hard to see if there is a clear division between sustainability and growth. One of the points they make is that before the Industrial Revolution, societies traded luxuries and produced their own necessities. Today, they critique, we trade for necessities and produce our own luxuries which has caused major vulnerabilities as regions are thus controlled by whoever produces the necessity. They propose that EC would involve a restoration of those older conditions of trading in luxuries, and the local production of necessities (Huang and Tang 2020). Although there is some truth to their criticism of ‘Western’ systems, they express no critical awareness of their own system. Be it through the political institutions of Party control, ideology or academic discourse, the strength of the Chinese vision for a sustainable future is limited by its intolerant perception of democracy and its overconfidence in authoritarianism.

8.

UNDERSTANDING THE COMMUNIST PARTY’S HISTORICAL CONTEXT

So how did Communist China get to this point of confidence? After the chaos of Mao’s bizarre attempts to leap towards communism, Deng made it clear that the Party-state was still in the primary stage of socialism, and would remain so for a long time. Under Deng the Party began to experiment with market socialism. This was not always easy, as there where many conservative leaders who resisted anything that stank of capitalism. In the end however, Deng was victorious. Deng ensured that there was at least a formal separation of the Party and the state, a limit of two terms in the office of the President of the PRC and a rebuilding of the socialist legal system which had evaporated under Mao. In the West, investors and state leaders mistook these gradual developments to be a sign that their economic engagement with the Party-state would make it more open and democratic. In reality, the chaos of reform in the USSR, its eventual fall and the Tiananmen Square Protests galvanized the Party to maintain stability at all costs and actively manage the transition from agrarian to industrial power. From Deng to Xi, a guiding principle of the CCP has been ‘pursuing progress while ensuring stability’. In practice stability has meant avoiding the delinking of the Party-state from society and the economy, precisely the opposite of perestroika and glasnost. In 2018 Xi went even further to dismantle the Deng era constitutional separation of the Party and State, and re-establish the central role of the Party as the ‘main feature of Chinese socialism’. Furthermore out of the fourteen principles in Xi Jinping Thought, the first is ‘Party Leadership over all work’.12 During the last two decades of the Cold War, the US exploited the frosty relations between Moscow and Beijing, courting the PRC in an attempt to isolate the USSR. US economic integration with the PRC was understood as a strategic move to safeguard global peace and stability. The belief was that the more the PRC’s interests aligned with the US, the less likely the Party-state would become a systemic competitor. Thus, the US needed the CCP’s cooperation. Even if the CCP did not need

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the US in the same way, the Party could not allow for China to stay poor forever, risking instability. CCP leaders knew they would have to be on their guard if they made a deal with the US, but unlike the democratic leaders of the West, Beijing’s political elite had time, ultimate power and the largest labour force in the world at their disposal. The Party had the bargaining power. Over the next four decades the Party-state exploded onto the world stage and became the factory of the global economy. However during this incredible race to industrialization, a fundamental ideological shift occurred. The socialist country gradually came to admit that it too, along with capitalist nations, faced the problem of pollution and environmental damage in its search for development. From the 1980s and into the first decade of the 21st century, what can only be described as a tsunami of laws and regulations were created in a constant attempt to keep up with the growth of the socialist market economy. Laws were also needed to ensure that there was a favourable legal environment for foreign direct investment. However, the solutions to Deng’s primary contradictions created laws, regulations and policies that focused mainly on increasing social production, without effective legal mandates to protect human rights or the environment. This dynamic made the Party-state one of the most desirable destinations for foreign investment, all that was needed on the part of foreign enterprises was a good working relationship with the Party and the CCP would take care of all the regulatory difficulties that would otherwise be impossible to navigate. Environmental and human rights were not part of the solution to Deng’s contradictions nor were they within the scope of responsibilities enterprises had to their shareholders. From a CCP perspective, economic growth and the resulting development of material and cultural goods was the foundation on which human dignity can be improved. Universal human rights, if they exist, can only be brought into reality through an organized civilization. The dignity of the human being, in this view, is based on developmental factors which are organized through the state and the work of the Party (Piccone 2018). Rights are thus only applicable once they are tested through the socialist path of development which involves a holistic, gradual solving of a set of ordered priorities. Although the Party-state signed Human Rights treaties and agreements, ideologically these rights were understood as something to be achieved at a later stage of development and could not simply exist without material development. From a Chinese Communist perspective, the most important human right is the fundamental project of socialism, which in turn means state-led development; without it, progress is meaningless and incorrect. Importantly, Xi has made environmentalism a central feature of solving the contradictions of his new era, and under the logic of contradictions, its solutions should become more enforceable and actionable, just as during Deng’s era when economic considerations became a major focus of law and public scrutiny.

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9.

REFORM, COMMITMENTS AND PERFORMANCE

Since 2017, there have been some major advancements in the PRC’s environmental laws (Xie and Xu 2021) (30 laws and 130 regulations to be exact), and the strengthening of the power of the Ministry for Ecology and the Environment and Environmental Protection Bureaus to enforce these regulations. A series of environmental law enforcement campaigns have also been carried out countrywide. Unfortunately, the literature on campaign style governance indicates that enforcement is often short-lived (Hui Fan and Wang 2015). There are still many structural issues that Environmental Protection Bureaus face in relation to financing and autonomy which we do not have space to discuss here. These agencies are still weaker than other state organs and often lose ambitious and talented officials and bureaucrats to other agencies (Ding 2020). There are also educational campaigns on EC in schools, Party schools and even downloadable apps that test citizens on their knowledge of Xi Jinping Thought which includes EC. Environmental courts have been set up throughout the country, however some of the courts have a very light case load, indicating that in some regions there is an unease about engaging in such litigation (Wang 2018). Ecological protection zones and massive nature reserves have been set up in recent years, with a goal to set aside 30% of PRC territory for conservation. The practice is called ecological red lining, however there have been cases of citizens, especially minorities, being removed from their lands on the basis of conservational efforts. Hydroelectric dams are another important and ‘green’ industry that the government promotes which has had negative impacts on environmental, minority and transboundary rights (Shi 2021). Officially Environmental Impact Assessments are required by law, and are increasingly becoming the norm. Furthermore, after a major review of the Environmental Protection Law and the new Civil Code, certain NGOs (that satisfy stringent requirements), the state procurator and local governments can now undertake Environmental Public Interest Litigation for criminal, administrative and civil cases. This is an exciting development that is relatively new and has resulted in an explosion of environmental cases. In particular, the role of NGOs in civil litigation cases is interesting because of the innovative remedies and high profile cases NGOs have been involved in.13 These have caught public attention, becoming symbolic of a new trend in Chinese jurisprudence. Nevertheless, the Leninist features of the Party-state and its permeation of every level of society nullifies the independence of courts and NGOs. It is thus difficult to establish if this new avenue will produce substantive or actual performance in improving environmental protection (Xie and Xu 2021). At the international level, there is a bewildering array of ‘efforts’ by the Party-state to show active engagement in green or sustainable development. Policy documents have suggested exporting or transplanting Ecological Red Lining conservation systems to BRI partner states. From the UN to regional agreements like the Forum on China–Africa Cooperation, China has internationally promoted EC. Recently in July 2021, the Ministry of Commerce and the Ministry of Ecology and Environment jointly issued the Guidelines for Green Development in Foreign Investment and Cooperation.

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One of the most interesting lines in the document states that in relation to greening the BRI, ministries will ‘encourage companies to adopt international or Chinese standards in investing activities where local laws and regulations are non-existent or too lenient’ (Government of China 2021b). How and which Chinese standards will be adopted raises interesting questions about jurisdictions, responsibility and interference in other states on the grounds of environmental standards. Xi has also committed to cancelling all coal-fired power stations in Chinese overseas projects despite increasing coal production at home (Government of China 2019). Xi has signalled the EC is at the heart of reforming the Chinese system, however reform has been used since the 1980s to reinforce a message that the Party-state leadership and planning are essential to China’s future (Wang 2018). Recent literature indicates that when public scrutiny is high and the capacity of state agencies is low, these agencies will engage in performative governance, a sort of theatre of showing action and concern, engaging with the public, being seen to enforce norms, even if their actual capacity to make substantive changes is limited in practice (Ding 2020). Alex Wang writes extensively on the topic of governance reform as a means of substantive legitimation. He indicates that environmental reforms operate within a social environment that has been influenced by the Leninist organizational system of the CCP in which complexity, information asymmetry and information manipulation causes uncertainty in assessing the actual/substantive performance of reforms. This aspect of performance allows the central leadership to pass as a performance-oriented state, regardless of actual results (Wang 2018). He goes even further to suggest that the public may even prefer symbolic performance by the state, rather than actual performance that requires the public to make sacrifices or changes. Although symbolic performance does not preclude actual performance, and perhaps in the long run even lead to substantive change, one of the major concerns highlighted in the literature is that the institutional dynamics of the Chinese system ‘maintain or exacerbate uncertainty. Without a fundamental shift in the verifiability of performance any other proposed reforms risk becoming symbolic themselves’ (Wang 2018, p. 760). Unfortunately, there is a significant gap between substantive promises and procedural clarity, making it hard to understand how commitments will translate into real environmental protection at home or overseas. In the end, EC could help guide Chinese actors to protect the environment, but it also might make the world safer for authoritarianism.

10. CONCLUSION It is clear that the Party-state is undertaking efforts to show that it is committed to a ‘green and sustainable future’ for China and the world. However, EC has not emphasized the importance of human rights as a method to deal with power relations, and has rather emphasized harmony and a ‘community of shared human futures’. When we understand that Party leadership under Xi has created an environment where Party loyalty, a monist conception of human development, a universal rejection of

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multi-party democracy and human rights, we also understand that the positive developments of EC might be concerning for those who support a human rights-based approach to development. One of the major challenges with EC is that, despite its innovations in relation to green development in Party ideology, the Leninist system of the CCP leads to information asymmetry, information manipulation and control, which makes the assessment of ‘real progress in sustainability’ difficult. Nevertheless, an understanding of Party ideology presents opportunities for other state actors and civil societies to take a less adversarial and more strategic approach to China. Wealthy democratic societies need to understand that in order to compete with EC, which is essentially an environmental authoritarianism, they will have to be more democratic, more open and more respectful to developing states, and provide better environmental and investment strategies, which will be expensive. If wealthy democracies are not willing to make long-term efforts to strengthen democratic institutions, economies and the environmental futures of the Global South, then the Global South will eventually find ways to work within Chinese norms. This will help China reformulate the fundamental principles of international law. The challenge here is that Chinese legal norms as they stand, are not orientated around individual rights. Moreover, there has yet to emerge a system of law that can supplant the power of individual rights to protect us from arbitrary abuses of power. Grand state narratives and development plans cannot be challenged easily, even in democracies. In China the narrative of environmentalism is ‘scientifically correct’, admitting that we are in a crisis, but calling on us to follow the Party. Environmental narratives in China, like economic, security and political narratives, must support the primary function of ensuring that the CCP stays in power so that it can build socialism. Although EC is a step in the right direction, the official ecological narrative does not place the natural world first; rather it places the Chinese Communist Party’s right to rule the natural world first. In this way, the natural world is still subservient to the state and its ideology. There is little to no desire to reduce state power on behalf of sustainability; rather sustainable innovations (the intellectual property of which is owned by the state) must create the conditions for the continuation of the socialist project. For the most part, there is little about China’s vision for global development that marks it as radically different from other forms of ‘green growth narratives’. The greatest difference, however, is that one political party believes it has the answers, which is less about environmental protection and more about ‘Green Growth and Sustainable Leninism with Chinese Characteristics’. If EC is sustainable development, we mean it is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. The Party’s authoritarianism and monist view of reality could compromise the needs of present and future generations to find new pathways to sustainability. This is because the Party is not open to narratives that challenge its views on socialism, development, capital or growth. However, the fact that China is trying to address these issues gives all stakeholders an opportunity to engage in positive dialogue whilst being clear-eyed about the vested interest and ideological limitations of the Party-state.

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NOTES 1. However, the Chinese state has issued a 2021 Human Rights Action Plan which has created a new category of environmental human rights. It remains to be seen how well these will be implemented in the courts. 2. Social, Political, Economic, Cultural Civilizations are CCP slogans that denote the need to improve and change aspects of society. EC is the first of these slogans that not only applies to China but also to the world. 3. Definition of ideology: ‘A complex arrangement of ideas and assumptions that explains the world as it is and provides normative recommendations for political action.’ 4. XJPT is the epistemological basis on which contemporary theories of governance are developed in China. In essence it is the most important source of law and morality in the Party-state. It is also always being reworked. 5. For example the word for a law of physics 規律 guilv, is used to talk about the fundamental insights of Marxism, rather than employing 法律 falv, as in legislation. Furthermore, other scientific verbs and nouns commonly replace other more literary words to give Party documents the veneer of scientific respectability. For example, the verb to focus; which in Mandarin can be written as 集注 jizhu or 矚目 zhumu, is often replaced by the verb used in physics 聚焦 jujiao, as in to focus a laser. 6. Xi’s vision for his nation is a blend of both nationalism and communism in which China is restored to formal imperial glory and leads the world in building global communism. 7. As long as Taiwan does not declare unilateral independence. The Taiwanese ROC government holds a position that Taiwan ROC is already an independent state and therefore does not need to declare independence. 8. ChinaDaily (2017) ‘Principal contradiction facing Chinese society has evolved in new era: Xi’ Principal contradiction facing Chinese society has evolved in new era: Xi - China - Chinadaily.com.cn. 9. Collaborative Innovation Centre for Western Ecological Safety (2021) ‘President Xi Jinping pushes China’s ecological civilization to a new level’ (CICWES, 3 March 2021) 西部生态安全省部共建协同创新中心 (lzu.edu.cn). 10. See Human Rights Action Plan of China (2021‒2025). 11. Internal discussion and voting within the Party is allowed, but once a decision has been made, Party members may not challenge that position (Thornton 2021). 12. Xi Jinping Thought (Principle ideological and theoretical framework of CCP) Xuexiqiangguo 学习强国, ‘XJPT on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for the New Era’ (Public Relations Research Center of the Propaganda Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China 2019) https://​www​.xuexi​.cn/​f54​7c0f321ac9​ Accessed 11 a0a95154a2​1485a29d6/​1c​dd8ef7bfc3​9196502065​90533c3d2a​.html, December 2020. ‘Of the principles identified we have attempted to categorize them into the following sections of the four comprehensives, Committing to a people-centered approach (prong 1); Adopting a new vision for development (prong 1); Seeing that the people run the country (prong 2); Ensuring every dimension of governance is law-based (prong 3); Upholding core socialist values (prong 4); Ensuring and improving living standards through development (prong 1); Ensuring harmony between human and nature (prong 2); Pursuing a holistic approach to national security (prong 4); Upholding absolute Party leadership over the people’s forces (prong 4); Upholding the principle of ‘one country, two systems’ and promoting national reunification (prong 4); Promoting the building of a community with a shared future for mankind (prong 2); Exercising full and rigorous governance over the Party (prong 4).’ 13. See: Ningxia Ruitai Science and Technology Co., Ltd. Vs China Biodiversity Conservation and Green Development Foundation ‘Tengger Desert Case’ (2016) Supreme People’s Court of the People’s Republic of China Civil Ruling (2016) Zui Gao Fa Min Zai No.47,

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China Biodiversity Conservation and Green Development Foundation vs. Ningxia Ruitai Science and Technology Co., Ltd. (www​.informea​.org).

REFERENCES CCP theory online Quishi (2018) ‘Broader Dimensions for Marxism in Contemporary China and the 21st Century’, Xi Jinping, 4 May 2018, https://​qstheory​.cn, Accessed 21 July 2022. Cherniss, J. & Hardy, H. (2013) Isaiah Berlin. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://​plato​.stanford​.edu, Accessed 2 May 2021. Creemers, R. (2020) ‘Party Ideology and Chinese Law’, chapter 2 in Rogier J.E.H. Creemers and Susan Trevaskes (eds), Law and the Party in China: Ideology and Organization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Creemers, R. & Trevaskes, S. (2020) ‘Ideology and Organization in Chinese Law’, chapter 1 in Rogier J.E.H. Creemers and Susan Trevaskes (eds), Law and the Party in China: Ideology and Organization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ding, I. (2020) ‘Performative Governance’, World Politics 72(4): 525‒556. Garrick, J. & Bennet Chang, Y. (2018) ‘Xi Jinping Thought: Realisation of the Chinese Dream of National Rejuvenation?’ China Perspectives 1(2): 99‒105. Geall, S. & Ely, A. (2018) ‘Narratives and Pathways towards an Ecological Civilization in Contemporary China’, The China Quarterly 236: 1175–1196. Goron C. (2018) ‘Ecological Civilisation and the Political Limits of a Chinese Concept of Sustainability’, China Perspectives 4(115): 39‒52. Government of China (1981) Central Committee of the CCP (Historical Resolution), ‘Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party Since the Founding of the People’s Republic Of China’, https://​www​.en​.people​.cn/​dengxp/​vol2/​text/​b1420​.html, Accessed 18 May 2022. Government of China (2016) State Council of the PRC ‘The Right to Development: China’s www​ .gov​ .cn, Accessed 29 Philosophy, Practice and Contribution (Full Text)’, https://​ January 2022. Government of China (2017) ‘National Congress of the CCP, Chinese Communist Party Constitution’, Revised and adopted at the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China on 24 October 2017. Preamble. Government of China (2018) ‘Constitution of the People’s Republic of China’, National People’s Congress of the PRC, Constitutional Amendments (11 March 2018), Preamble and Art. 46. Government of China (2019) ‘Order of the President of the People’s Republic of China  No. 33, Resource Tax Law of the People’s Republic of China’, National People’s Congress of the PRC, 26 August 2019, enforced 1 September 2020. Government of China (2020) ‘The Regulations on the Work of Grassroots Organizations of State-owned Enterprises of the Communist Party of China’, CCP Central Committee, https://​interpret​.csis​.org/​translations/​the​-central​-committee​-​-of​-the​-communist​-party​-of​ -china​-issues​-the​-regulations​-on​-the​-work​-of​-grassroots​-organizations​-of​-state​-owned​ -enterprises​-of​-the​-communist​-party​-of​-china​-for​-trial​-implementatio/​, Accessed 25 January 2023. Government of China (2021a) ‘Resolution of the CPC Central Committee on the Major Achievements and Historical Experience of the Party over the Past Century’, CCP Central Committee, 11 November 2021, www​.news​.cn/​english/​2021​-11/​16/​c​_1310314611​.htm, Accessed 25 January 2023. Government of China (2021b) ‘Green Development Guidelines for Overseas Investment and Cooperation’, Notice by the Ministry of Commerce and the Ministry of Ecology

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and Environment, 21 July 2021, www​.clientearth​.org/​media/​jufbkljf/​green​-development​ -guidelines​-for​-overseas​-investment​-and​-cooperation​.pdf, Accessed 24 January 2023. Halskov Hansen, M. & Liu, Z. (2018) ‘Air Pollution and Grassroots Echoes of “Ecological Civilization” in Rural China’, The China Quarterly 234: 320–339. Hongwu, Z. & Rong, F. (2021) ‘Evaluation of China’s High-quality Development from the Perspective of Ecological Civilization’, Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research, vol. 569, available at https://​www​.atlantis​-press​.com/​proceedings/​ desd​-21/​125959379, Accessed 11 June 2022. Huang, Y. & Tang, S. (2020) ‘Radical Trade Reform: From Industrial to Ecological Civilization by Yi Huang and Shuying Tang’, American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 79(1): 49–72. Hui Fan, D.H. & Wang, H. (2015) ‘Environmental Consequences of Damming the Mainstream Lancang-Mekong River: A Review’, Earth-Science Reviews, 146: 77‒91. Huo, Z. & Man, Y. (2021) ‘Extraterritoriality of Chinese Law: Myths, Realities and the Future’, The Chinese Journal of Comparative Law, 3(9): 328‒358. Li, L. (2021) ‘The “Organizational Weapon” of the Chinese Communist Party: China’s Disciplinary Regime from Mao to Xi’, chapter 7 in Rogier J.E.H. Creemers and Susan Trevaskes (eds), Law and the Party in China: Ideology and Organization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ma Tianjie (2021) ‘Stockholm 1972: The Start of China’s Environmental Journey’, China Dialogue, www​.chinadialogue​.net, Accessed 12 January 2023. Mao, Z. (1957) ‘On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People’, Speech at the Eleventh Session (Enlarged) of the Supreme State Conference, 27 February. Comrade Mao Tsetung went over the verbatim record and made certain additions before its publication in the Peoples Daily on 19 June 1957. Available at ON THE CORRECT HANDLING OF CONTRADICTIONS AMONG THE PEOPLE, https://​www​.marxists​.org/​reference/​ archive/​mao/​selected​-works/​volume​-5/​mswv5​_58​.htm, Accessed 13 January 2023. Oswald, J.P.F. (2014) ‘What does Ecological Civilization Mean?’ The China Story, www​ .thechinastory​.org/​2014/​09/​what​-does​-eco​-civilisation​-mean/​, Accessed 11 June 2022. Pan, J. et al. (eds) (2021) Beautiful China: 70 Years Since 1949 and 70 People’s Views on Eco-civilization Construction. Singapore: China Environment Publishing Group & Spring Nature Singapore. Pan, Y. 潘岳 (2006) ‘论社会主义生态文明’ (Lun shehuizhuyi shengtai wenming, On a socialist ecological civilisation). Lüye, www​.zhb​.gov​.cn/​hjyw/​200702/​t20070206​_100622​.htm, Accessed 12 June 2022. Piccone, T. (2018) ‘China’s Long Game on Human Rights at the United Nations’, Brookings Institute, www​.brookings​.edu/​research/​chinas​-long​-game​-on​-human​-rights​-at​-the​-united​ -nations/​, Accessed 9 June 2022. Qiushi Journal (2021) ‘Understanding the New Development Stage, Applying the New Development Philosophy, and Creating a New Development Dynamic’, 8 July, http://​en​ .qstheory​.cn//​2021​-07/​08/​c​_641137​.htm, Accessed 12 June 2022. Shapiro, J. & Li, Y. (2020) China Goes Green: Coercive Environmentalism for a Troubled Planet. Cambridge: Polity Press. Shi, C. (2021) ‘On the Dissemination Channels of Xi Jinping Thought on Ecological Civilization’ in J. Pan et al. (eds) Beautiful China: 70 Years Since 1949 and 70 People’s Views on Eco-civilization Construction. Singapore: China Environment Publishing Group & Spring Nature Singapore. Thornton, P. (2021) ‘Of Constitutions, Campaigns and Commissions: A Century of Democratic Centralism under the CCP’, The China Quarterly, 248(S1): 52‒72. United Nations (2018) General Assembly, National report submitted in accordance with paragraph 5 of the annex to Human Rights Council resolution 16/21** China, A/HRC/WG.6/31/ CHN/1, section C.

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United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, Kunming Declaration (2020) ‘Ecological Civilization: Building a Shared Future for All Life on Earth’ CBD/COP/15/5/Add.1, www​ .cbd​.int/​doc/​c/​c2db/​972a/​fb32e​0a277bf1cc​fff742be5/​cop​-15​-05​-add1​-en​.pdf, Accessed 6 June 2022. VOA (2020) ‘Zimbabwe Bans Mining in National Parks After Uproar Over Chinese Grants’, www​.voanews/​a/​africa​_zimbabwe​-bans​-mining​-national​-parks​-after​-uproar​-over​-chinese​ -grants/​6195662​.html, Accessed 10 June 2022. Wang, A.L. (2018) ‘Symbolic Legitimacy and Chinese Environmental Reform’, Environmental Law, 48(4): 699‒760. Wang, H. & Karl, R.E. (1998) ‘Contemporary Chinese Thought and the Question of Modernity’, Social Text, 55: 9‒44. World Commission on Environment and Development (1987). ‘Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development: Our Common Future’ – Harvard (18th edn). Oxford, Oxford University Press, https://​su​stainabled​evelopment​.un​.org/​content/​ documents/​5987our​-common​-future​.pdf, Accessed 7 January 2022. Wright, C. (2021) ‘China’s Digital Colonialism: Espionage and Repression Along the Digital Silk Road’, Recorded Future, Insikt Group Cyber Threat Analysis, www​.recordedfuture​ .com/​china​-digital​-colonialism​-espionage​-silk​-road, Accessed 2 January 2022. Xie, L. & Xu, L. (2021) ‘Environmental Public Interest Litigation in China: Findings from 570 Court Cases Brought by NGOs, Public Prosecutors and Local Government’, Journal of Environmental Law, 34: 1‒29. Yu, K. 俞可平 (2005) ‘科学发展观与生态文明’ (Kexue fazhan guan yu shengtai wenming) Scientific development and ecological civilization, 馬克思主義與現實 (Makesizhuyi yu xianshi), Marxism and Reality, (4): 4‒5. ZELA (2021) The Handbook of Zimbabwe China Economic Relations. Harare, Zimbabwe: Zimbabwe Environmental Lawyers Association. Zhou, J. (2006) ‘The Rich Consume and the Poor Suffer the Pollution’, www​.chinadialogue​ .net, 27 October, Accessed 11 June 2022.

PART II RETHINKING THE ENVIRONMENT: FROM INFINITE RESOURCE TO FRAGILE SUBJECT

8. The river as subject: legal innovations and their consequence for rights and development John A. McNeish

1. INTRODUCTION Rivers have been granted rights as legal subjects or legal persons in diverse settings across the world in recent years. These cases have been interpreted by media reports1 and analysts (Strang, 2020) at the international level as concrete manifestations of broader development proposals of giving legal rights to nature. Whilst the concept of rights for nature is not new, recent cases of riverine rights are among the first examples of legal personhood rights being recognized for a specific, identifiable, bounded natural feature (a river and its catchment area). These cases have for the first time anchored ideas of the rights of nature as a means of environmental protection and of securing the rights of Indigenous peoples and other local communities in concrete legal rulings and arrangements. By recognizing the legal personhood of rivers, these cases create new legal and cultural precedents. Moreover, by transforming human relationships to our planet it is argued by growing international rights of nature2 and rights of rivers3 movements that the recognition of riverine rights is generative of a new legal social paradigm based on living in harmony with nature. Academic and activist proponents suggest that the legal personhood of rivers, and an expanding wave of related eco-centric law, not only has specific significance as a fresh pathway for water course management. By legally changing an understanding of human– nature relations the legal personhood of rivers—and by extension, nature—has direct implications for the wider practice of a range of development-related practices including human rights and environmental justice. In this short chapter I aim to explore the claims regarding the development implications of riverine rights. Observing the rapid spread and influence of legal rulings on the rights of rivers I confirm below in line with my colleagues their potential to transcend seemingly ineffective regulatory frameworks for rivers and “reveal potential paths towards transformative change” (Macpherson et al., 2021: 439). However, noting their caution and observing at closer hold through recent field research focused on the Atrato case in Colombia, I question in this chapter whether rulings are correctly termed to address the problems as intended. Rather than a panacea for all problems of rights, governance, and development, I propose that the Atrato case is 122

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telling of the difficulty of legal rights of river cases to overcome embedded structures of power, violence, and existing patterns of resource exploitation. The chapter suggests that, whilst each case of river rights recognition needs to be studied in context, the Atrato case is suggestive of patterns in political ecology and development that can be found elsewhere. The river as subject inspires important legal conversations regarding nature–human relations, but the possible impact of this legal innovation on development is intertwined and reliant on pre-existing politics and power relations. Emphasizing the difficulty of legal innovation in a context of contested authority the chapter speaks to one of the wider themes of this volume, that is, the contradictions and tensions that exist between the preservation of nature and continued patterns of political and economic development.

2. NATURE HAS RIGHTS The recognition of complex, landscape scale systems as legal and/or living beings represents one of the biggest structural changes in environmental law in decades (O’Donnell, 2020). However, whilst the current trend recognizing features of our natural world (forests, valleys, lakes, paramos, etc.) as legal persons/subjects is relatively new, the idea of stretching the law to nonhumans is not. In the Roman Republic, personhood was commonly extended to municipalities and voluntary associations. This entailed, among other things, that such collective bodies had rights and responsibilities independent of their individual members. They were not themselves individual human beings, but they donned a mask4 by which they presented themselves to the world as singular characters (Smith, 2021). In the early modern period, with the rise of powerful joint stock companies for the funding and orchestration of global trade, the idea of corporate personhood became common. Constructed legal personhood, or the donning of a mask, was for example one of the innovations of the British East India Company, and the limited liability of modern corporations today. From the legalist perspective, the legal person is nothing more (or less) than a construct of law (Naffine, 2017). The idea of the rights of nature also has a more multifaceted history than is commonly acknowledged (Tanasescu, 2022). The standard version of the history of the rights of nature starts with the work of the legal scholar Christopher Stone. Stone (1972, 2010) explicitly argued that the environment could enjoy legal rights. For Stone, as well as his followers, the question of legal standing for nature is intrinsically tied to its moral standing: nature should have legal standing because it is morally worthy of such. This argument was importantly reinforced by parallel legal developments in animal rights, where the moral status of an animal is deemed one of the most important features for determining its legal status. For a long time, the only way under the law to protect an animal from wanton abuse was to characterize the abuse as harm to property. As for morality, if it was to enter the question at all, it was indirect incitement to moral depravity brought on by abuse of animals that justified any prohibition on harming them. During the 20th century these ideas of

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animal protection were challenged and expanded, with significant subcategories of wildlife becoming legally protected as part of large-scale conservationist efforts. Efforts would also be made to expand the legal personhood of animals (Kurki, 2021). Around the same time that Stone was writing, lesser known but also influential Godolfo Stutzin (Stutzin, 1984) was forming the basis for environmental advocacy in Chile. His arguments were similar to Stone’s but also contained a different emphasis, arguing that granting nature rights logically “implies overcoming the anthropocentric bias of law” (Tanasescu, 2022: 25). This simple eco-centric formulation has far-reaching consequences for the way in which rights of nature are understood and the way legal provisions are written. Rather than recognizing rights as invented or granted by humans, Stutzin’s formulation suggests that nature’s rights are recognized, that is, a translation of what is already the case. For Stutzin, as well as his followers, the moral standing of nature demands legal standing, and solutions to environmental problems made possible through alignment with this moral sensibility. Whereas for Stone legal standing pragmatically led to formatting nature as legal personality, for Stutzin it is the literal personality of nature that demands we recognize its rights (Tanasescu, 2022). This school of thought has clear linkages to efforts to merge ecological and theological thought starting at the end of the 19th century. This includes the influential writings of figures such as John Muir, commonly recognized as the father of US national parks and founder of the Sierra Club, who was explicit in deriving the values he saw inhering in the natural world from the “fact of creation.” It also includes the later influential work of Thomas Berry (2000), who, wishing to reconcile Christian theology with modern science, particularly cosmology and ecology, focused on the formulation of a grand narrative that explained the way in which the Universe came into being and evolved.

3.

RIVERS AS LEGAL SUBJECTS

Rivers and wetlands are some of the most threatened ecosystems on the planet (Vörösmarty et al., 2010). The health and extent of river and wetland ecosystems has been in decline for decades (Millenium Ecosystems Assessment, 2005). The World Economic Forum consistently identifies water as one of its top global risks (World Economic Forum, 2020). Climate change is also further increasing the likelihood and intensity of extreme drought and floods, and the global urban population is growing rapidly, with an expected increase in water demand of up to 80 percent by 2050 (Flörke et al., 2018). Since 2017 a growing number of important rivers and lakes vital for both humans and natural biodiversity have been recognized as legal persons and/or legal entities, with a range of legal rights and systems of protection (Clark, 2020). It is argued by proponents that these profound legal changes allow the law to “see” complex systems as legal subjects and to harness the power of environmental law to prevent their future destruction (O’Donnell, 2020).

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A clear connection has been made in these efforts for legal change with the development of ideas of the rights of nature mentioned above. In addition, recent cases and rulings are tied to a growing transnational movement that specifically aims to recognize rivers as legal and/or living beings in (settler) state laws. Although the rights of nature movement and the river rights movement have largely grown out of a “western legal” construct (Macpherson, 2019a), in these legal cases there is also commonly specific reference to long-standing and cultural protocols of Indigenous peoples, and their recent history of legal and political engagement with states to overturn reductive colonial legal judgments on the ownership and definition of rivers. Indigenous relationships with natural resources are often cited as evidence of diverse societal attitudes or regulatory approaches to natural resource use (Macpherson, 2019a: 40). Indeed, analysts suggest that the legal rights for rivers appear to have gained most traction where pursued by Indigenous groups (Macpherson, 2019a: 41).

4.

TRANSCENDING RIGHTS AND DEVELOPMENT NORMS

Over the last three decades, reflecting a broader tendency for sustainable development the provision for environmental protection or rights in national constitutions has expanded dramatically. It is estimated that 150 constitutions now have some reference to environmental protection (O’Gorman, 2017). While the UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm in 1972 is credited with initiating the drive towards both sustainable development and environmental constitutionalism (Boyd, 2011) the great majority of these environmental references have been included after 1990 (May, 2006). This is partly because many domestic constitutions were rewritten from the 1990s onwards, expressing an era in which rights protections were expanded to previously marginalized sectors of the population such as Indigenous peoples, women and children, and a growing international awareness about climate change and environmental degradation. The growth in normative environmental provisions was accompanied by a growing judicialization of politics, in which “the domain of the litigator and the judge has radically expanded” and activist lawyers and judges are increasingly producers of legal reform, especially in the constitutional law field of “rights” (Shapiro and Stone Sweet, 2002: 19). The linking of environmental interests to existing procedural and substantive human rights protections has assisted the project of global environmental constitutionalism, as in most legal systems human rights already have constitutional status (Shelton, 2020). The connection between human rights and environmental rights is evident at the start of the declaration made following the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment.5 Many countries now include the “right to a clean and healthy environment” in their national constitution (Shelton, 2020: 163), which have been called “Fundamental Environmental Rights” (May, 2006). Indeed, the UN General Assembly declared in July 2022 that everyone on the planet has a right to a healthy planet.

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Riverine rights key directly into and significantly add grounded concrete legal actions towards these constitutional acknowledgments, “setting the stage for more fundamental environmental reforms” (Macpherson et al., 2021: 465). These legal precedents create new mechanisms and institutions for individual and social protection, whilst challenging earlier anthropocentric assumptions favoring humans over nature and legal principles protecting nature only in its capacity as property or resource to humans (Clavijo Ospina and Macpherson, 2019). Recognizing that earlier histories of Indigenous peoples’ struggles for autonomy and territorial rights are a common feature of these cases, the claim is made that recognizing riverine rights represents “a highly significant development in the recognition of Indigenous rights: settling complex claims by Indigenous Peoples to a river, in a way that attempts to reflect Indigenous worldviews with respect to the natural environment” (Magallanes, 2015: 273). Indigenous peoples are said to emphasize respect for all beings and responsibilities to care for lands and waters. “Trees, mountains and plants are relatives, not commodities that can be privately owned and exploited.”6 As river rights cases proliferate and extend beyond Indigenous territories, they have also generated hopes of how they can act as mechanisms to reframe wider exploitative relationships between people and nature and environment and repair the unequal distribution of benefits and burdens resulting from economic development.

5.

ATRATO RIVER, CHOCÓ

In 2015, the social justice research center Tierra Digna filed a tutela (a legal writ based on a claim of a breach of “fundamental” constitutional rights) on behalf of an alliance of organizations based in Colombia’s department of the Chocó. The tutela was directed against 26 responsible government agencies for failing to stop well-documented illegal mining throughout the Atrato River Basin (Defensoria del Pueblo Colombia, 2014a, 2014b). Plaintiffs claimed that this failure had led to the systematic violation of their rights, that is, rights to life, dignity, health, a healthy environment, freedom of movement, water, food security—and those of specially protected “ethnic” groups to autonomy, culture, and territory (Corte Constitucional de Colombia, 2016). The Chocó department sits in the northwest part of Colombia and is highly regarded for its high levels of cultural and biological diversity. Ninety-seven percent of the Chocó’s residents are protected “ethnic” groups (87 percent Afro-descendant and 10 percent Indigenous) (Corte Constitucional de Colombia, 2016). Ninety-seven percent of the Chocó’s surface area is made up of collective territories under common ownership, including 600 Afro-descendant communities governed by 70 community councils and 120 Indigenous reserves (Macpherson, 2019a). Both the Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities of the Atrato River depend on the river for their physical and spiritual sustenance, and have a deep interconnection with the river as a “space to reproduce life and recreate culture” (Corte Constitucional de Colombia, 2016). Furthermore, 90 percent of Chocó is protected forest—including a vast range

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of ecosystems, endemic species, and watersheds including the Atrato River. The Atrato River Basin spans 60 percent of the Chocó and more than 15 rivers and 300 streams run through it. The Atrato is the longest river in Colombia and third most navigable (Macpherson, 2019a). Prior to Spanish colonization, Indigenous communities in the Chocó region had a long history of artisanal gold mining. When Spain colonized Chocó in the 1500s, they trafficked enslaved Africans into the area and forced Indigenous peoples to mine gold for the Spanish crown. As a result, the Chocó became the largest gold producer worldwide under Spanish colonial rule, yet almost all the generated wealth was exported, with little reinvestment in the area. After independence, slavery was abolished, and many Afro-descendants settled along the coastal regions alongside Indigenous groups. Mining remained the primary economic activity. Since then, administrative authorities have continued to receive royalties for mining concessions without reinvesting socially or environmentally, as demonstrated by the Chocó’s high rate of unmet basic needs and deteriorating ecological conditions (Comite de Seguimento, 2020a). Semi-mechanized mining in the Chocó began in the 1980s when an influx of foreign actors and armed groups—paramilitaries, BACRIM (criminal) organizations, cartels, and guerilla organizations—began illegal mining operations. This development encouraged a new phase of the over 50-year armed conflict7 in the country, enabling armed actors with a new mechanism to both access and move financial resources overseas. These actors sought to extract gold buried in the river using high-impact equipment and toxic chemicals which are cheap and portable, and ease the process of gold extraction (Suárez and Aristizabal, 2013). Since then, there has been a proliferation of illegal mining in the region. Drug traffickers are known to launder cocaine profits by smuggling gold in and out of Colombia, by actively taxing and coercing local governments that benefit from mining, and by running shell companies that attribute gold discoveries to fictitious mines (Tubb and Sivaramakrishnan, 2020). According to available data, in 2011 a total of 99.2 percent of the Chocó’s 527 registered Mining Production Units had no mining titles or licenses, making it the region with the highest concentration of illegal mining operations in Colombia (Corte Constitucional de Colombia, 2016). The proliferation of illegal mechanized mining has caused severe socio-ecological consequences. High-impact mining has resulted in the loss and contamination of water and food supplies. It has devastated subsistence and livelihoods and gravely impacted residents’ health. A resident cited in the court ruling stated, “before mechanized mining, the river was crystalline, healthy, with clear waters, and that local populations were dedicated to fishing, agriculture, and artisanal mining. These were core subsistence activities for residents and at the center of cultural life” (Corte Constitucional de Colombia, 2016: 70). Bereft of alternatives, many residents have had to turn to illegal mining themselves, rent land to miners, or engage in sex work (Corte Constitucional de Colombia, 2016). Loss and contamination of food and water due to high-impact mining have also led to the deaths of more than 30 children,

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impaired child development, and caused miscarriages, skin diseases, malaria outbreaks, malnourishment, and dehydration (Comite de Seguimento, 2020b). High-impact mining has also had devastating consequences for the Atrato River Basin’s ecological health. The use of heavy machinery and toxic chemicals has destroyed water supplies, impaired hydrological cycles, and led to increased sedimentation. In some places, little identifiable water flow remains. Mechanized mining has destroyed habitats, leading to biodiversity loss, deforestation, and the loss of genetic diversity within species. Even if high-impact mining were to cease, toxic contamination can persist for long periods of time (Corte Constitucional de Colombia, 2016). By the time the Constitutional Court ruling was issued in late 2016, ecological damage to the Atrato River Basin was estimated to cover hundreds of thousands of hectares, and the full extent unknown (Delfado-Duque, 2017).

6.

ATRATO RULING

The Court affirmed that violation of plaintiffs’ rights had occurred as a result of government failure to confront the proliferation of illegal mining. As a basis to remedy these complex, interdependent issues and restore conditions that guarantee plaintiff rights, the Constitutional Court issued a set of mandates tied to recognizing the Atrato River Basin as “an entity subject of rights of protection, conservation, maintenance, and restoration by the State and ethnic communities” (Corte Constitucional de Colombia, 2016). Among these mandates set in place by the Court were provisions to increase the participation of residents in decision-making processes with implications for the health and well-being of residents and the Atrato River Basin (Corte Constitucional de Colombia, 2016; Macpherson, 2019a). In this way, the Court aimed to strengthen legal protection to guarantee the human rights which rely on the Atrato’s ecological health and functioning (Corte Constitucional de Colombia, 2016). The Court brought the social, economic, and cultural rights together with environmental provisions to comprise what it called the biocultural rights of the Atrato River and the ethnic communities living by and from it. The Court found that the State had breached all the constitutional human rights protections alleged by failing to protect the river and its communities. The Court named the State and local community representatives to be co-guardians of the Atrato River Basin (Order 4). It ordered the Presidency to assign a state official as co-guardian, whilst plaintiffs were to elect a local Guardian as the official representative of the river. The Court also ordered plaintiffs to elect a body of River Guardians—composed of one representative of the local community and one representative of the government—and called for a Panel of Experts to assist the River Guardians and help to ensure their participation was guaranteed in all processes (Corte Constitucional de Colombia, 2016). Furthermore, the Court issued several more mandates to help cumulatively restore conditions to guarantee plaintiffs’ rights, assigning responsible authorities to each one.8

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7.

THE PROBLEM OF CONTEXT AND POLITICS

There is no doubt that the Atrato ruling is a carefully researched9 and groundbreaking piece of legal work in the context of Colombia. Given the numerous other cases in Colombia and elsewhere that refer to the ruling as legal precedent,10 it has also without doubt had tremendous impact on environmental law and policy. It is notable that in 2019 Colombian legislators proposed a constitutional amendment to include a provision which recognizes nature’s rights in Article 79. Article 79 affirms the human right to a healthy environment (Lozada Vargas, 2019). However, whilst recognizing the importance and precedence of the Atrato case—six years after the ruling—critical questions need to be asked as to whether the ruling on the rights of the Atrato River has sufficiently addressed in practice the constitutional claims for human rights protection and governmental response to the impacts of illegal mining on which it was founded. A common criticism of the Atrato decision is that the model of river guardianship is overly ambitious, idealistic, and impractical (Macpherson, 2019b). Recognizing that a shift was made in the course of the court case, Tanasescu (2022: 99, emphases original) has also importantly commented that “this case begins as a violation of the rights to nature of the local residents (as well as a host of other human rights) and becomes – through the decision of the judge – a case of rights for nature.” In recent interviews conducted in Quibdó (January 2022), two of the River Guardians made it clear that the legal case and ruling had served an important role in enabling cooperation between Indigenous and Afro-descendant stakeholders, and between these communities and the State. Mirroring this comment, Cagüeñas et al. (2020) suggest that by doing so the case was a unique opportunity for “ecopolitical imagination.” As the Guardians suggest, the case also importantly forced the government to both recognize their close cultural reliance on the river and to open channels of communication with government institutions regarding compliance with the order of the rulings. However, the River Guardians also emphasized that they had to adjust the interpretation of its orders regarding guardianship. Local community representatives seized on the opportunity of the ruling to develop the model further. As Tanasescu (2022: 104) notes, “simply fulfilling the court’s order of appointing one guardian from local communities would have been widely insufficient in getting across the multiplicity that is inherent in the river itself and in its human neighbors.” Seizing the opportunity to influence the State community representatives used the order of the court to expand the model of guardianship to 14 people. These represent the seven local communities interacting with substantively different portions of the river. The communities appointed one male and one female guardian to ensure equitable representation. Both moves go beyond the decision of the court itself (Macpherson et al., 2020). Despite the improvements to representation made by the Guardians, it is still important to note that they are still only 14 people representing a rough cross section of communities in the region. The Guardians recognize that effective guardianship requires communication and collaboration across multiple riverine communities

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spread over the vast area of the Atrato watershed (covering 40,000 sq km and stretching 750 km from the Andes to the Gulf of Urabá on the Caribbean Sea, and in which there are rich and diverse ecosystems). Whilst the Guardians intend to meet this ambition, they also recognize that many interests and voices will not be part of the conversation (Comite de Seguimento, 2018). Each community has a unique relationship with the river. Quietly there is some recognition of tensions between communities and the Guardians themselves. Given its centrality to the local economy, some groups continue to have an interest in traditional and small-scale mining11 in their territories. The Atrato ruling and guardianship does not answer these complications as much as it generates a need to confront and think them through. As Cagüeñas et al. (2020: 171) suggest this “represents a challenge for the eco-political imagination, as it requires the creation of translation mechanisms that allow the behavior of all beings that make up the Atrato basin, both human and non-human, to be covered by the legal logic that encourages the sentence.” In our interviews, the River Guardians were also clear in their view of the ruling as but one instance—although significant—in a much longer history of social mobilization to gain recognition from the State and to push for actions to address the series of threats and challenges they face in the Chocó. They clearly viewed the timelines set for the orders resulting from the ruling as unrealistic given the complexity and history of those threats and challenges. Whilst intent on continuing to push for the ruling to be fully respected, given the historical experience in their region they were also skeptical and somewhat resigned to the fact that the Colombian State would fail to comply with the ruling’s orders regarding decontamination, monitoring, and intervention to address illegal mining. Although the court ruling produced policy innovation on the ground, it was locals themselves that were most aware of the dangers of working together with a state apparatus that has always excluded them (O’Donnell, 2020). The weakness of Colombian environmental institutions and insufficient state response to persisting armed conflict and the insecurity it generates in the Chocó is also noted by other authors (Macpherson et al., 2021). The River Guardians commented that in the six years since the Atrato ruling circumstances regarding the river’s contamination resulting from illegal mining and the operation of armed actors to control and tax the rights and security context in the region had worsened not improved. Human rights, environmental justice, and prospects for development have clearly not been enhanced by state actions following the Atrato ruling. Recent media and NGO reports from Colombia12 and the Chocó13 further evidence the gravity of persisting insecurity and lack of rule of law in the country. Indeed, recent reports from Colombia worryingly indicate the rising power of the Clan del Golfo criminal cartel in the region.14 According to the River Guardians this situation is the result of the Colombian State’s limited governmental intervention in the region. The government sends the military to burn the dredging and filtering machines used in illegal mining and maintains an average level of public funding to the region.15 According to our interviews, however, the government has failed to sustain a strong military presence and to use everyday governance measures to regulate mining concessions, limit the sale of contaminants used in mining, and

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control the movement of gold or financial flows from the region. There is also a lack of specific State financing in support of the ruling, leaving the Guardians to operate on a largely voluntary basis and decontamination efforts reliant on existing budgets. The Atrato ruling was intended to confront a demonstrably noncompliant government. The ruling implied required actions and specified that disciplinary measures should be applied in the event of noncompliance. In early 2018 the compliance updates (Comite de Seguimento, 2018) indicated active discussions around appropriate sanctions due to the low level of State response to the orders of the ruling; however, whilst challenges and actions towards the orders are mentioned in the 2019 update (Comite de Seguimento, 2020b), no clear mention of disciplinary action is made. To date, no clear decision has been made by the constitutional court on sanctions because of the State’s persistent noncompliance with the court ruling (Richardson and McNeish, 2021).

8. CONCLUSION The rights of nature are not primarily about nature … In fact, they are not primarily about the environment at all, but about creating new relations through which environmental concerns may be differently expressed. What “environmental concerns” look like is entirely dependent on the power configuration that births them. (Tanasescu, 2022: 17)

This comment realistically captures the potential and limits of rights of nature rulings, including that of the ruling on the Atrato River. Whilst rulings such as that on the legal subject rights of the Atrato River certainly force new perspectives and actions towards addressing rights and development, their practical outcome is highly contingent on the power relations and political context into which they are introduced. Colombia and the region of the Chocó are of course exceptional contexts of violence and insecurity, but the visible limits, weakness, and lack of political will of state institutions to fulfill the court’s orders are not. This conclusion on the significance of political context highlights the commonly dislocated and somewhat unspecified notion of “rights of nature” applied in recent legal cases. This is an inheritance of earlier eco-theological thinking that conceives of nature as an all-encompassing totality (Nature with a capital N). According to Tanasescu (2022: 33) this reliance on “totality” is important and problematic, because it is “one of the main bridges between rights of Nature and the neoliberal expansion of a particular mode of development predicated on the existence of a universal Human with universal rights.” It assists with an obfuscation of a social and environmental reality in which nature and humans have “place.” As Tanasescu (2022: 34) writes “[i]n actual fact, the human that stands for Humanity is consistently of particular socio-economic backgrounds inextricably linked with a removal from actual environments that is the modern abstraction par excellence.” Acknowledgment of the homogenizing results of nature with a capital N also helps to raise doubts about the usefulness of the “ecocentric/anthropocentric divide” char-

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acterized in recent legal thinking on the rights of rivers (Macpherson et al., 2020). Besides a lack of consistency in its explanation, Tanasescu (2022: 101) suggests there are two basic problems with thinking in terms of the opposition anthropo-eco: it repeats exactly the same opposition that is foundational for modernist ways of thinking (obsessed with grand narratives and binary oppositions) and is therefore impotent to overcome these; and it depoliticizes rights by making it seem as if the problem of environmental degradation and destruction is nothing but a problem of having the wrong kind of consciousness (rooted in the “anthropo-”). Rather than breaking with modernist schemes of thought, the legal formulation of the rights of river are in danger then of just rewording (or greenwashing if you like) existing understandings and conditions. Finally, comparative legal scholars studying the now rising number of river rights cases ponder the practical implications of the generalization and lack of specificity regarding the nature they refer to. New and important legal notions, such as biocultural rights, can be born out of these cases. However, legal scholars also note that in the drive to innovate, existing law and regulation are unnecessarily ignored or sidelined. In the case of the Atrato, illegal mining was already outlawed and there were existing mechanisms including a progressive national constitution (often called an ecological constitution) at its disposal to protect the well-being of local inhabitants, humans and nonhumans alike. These were not actively employed in the ruling. A lack of specificity in the legal rulings on the rights/personhood of rivers has also commonly left rivers without a voice other than through formal Guardians and without clarity on the rights to the water that constitutes the body of the river (O’Donnell, 2020). The attribution of legal personhood might help to protect a river, but it does not reflect the particularities of a spiritual ancestor that Indigenous and Afro-descendant people express. The Constitutional Court of Colombia identified with the Atrato ruling four specific rights the river would hold (protection, conservation, maintenance, and restoration), but in common with other cases it did not hold the right to hold property (thus excluding rights to water) or empower the River Guardians to play a decision-making role in the management of the catchment and the decontamination of the river—left in the hands of state institutions (O’Donnell, 2020: 658). This lack of specificity regarding property and decision-making is also predicted to be generative of further problems for riverine communities. As an example of this Macpherson (2019a: 166) highlights that while the Atrato communities’ biocultural rights are positioned as being territorial in nature, and although the Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities successfully claimed with the case a failure to protect their right to “territory” the Court did not recognize a right to property for communities in the river, nor for the river to own itself.

She suggests that this might present a possible loophole through which state authorities (retaining legal ownership over the subsoil) might feasibly contest claims to territory in the interest of extractive interests in the region (Macpherson, 2019a).

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Given these circumstances, instead of the rights of Atrato being the tool that the State lacked for environmental protection, it may prove to be another tool that it can use to exclude locals (Tanasescu, 2022: 106). To conclude, it is evident that river rights are an important legal trend inspiring new perspectives and mechanisms for human rights, environmental justice, and development. They create new spaces that historically subjugated people can use to inject radically different legal and philosophical traditions into mainstream Western law. This shift in perspective is also clearly of wider significance in an era of climate change and drastic environmental degradation. However, as this chapter has demonstrated with reference to the Atrato, care must also be taken to consider the interplay of power and political context in any judgment of their real significance to the protection of people and planet.

NOTES 1.

P. Barkham, 2021. Should rivers have the same rights as people? The Guardian. Accessed March 14, 2022 at: www​.theguardian​.com/​environment/​2021/​jul/​25/​rivers​-around​-the​ -world​-rivers​-are​-gaining​-the​-same​-legal​-rights​-as​-people. 2. See www​.garn​.org/​about​-garn/​. 3. See www​.rightsofrivers​.org/​#declaration. 4. The term “persona” in Latin originally signified “mask”, that is, a “role” one might take on in a theatrical performance. The dramatis personae, literally the “masks of the drama,” are simply the roles in a play. 5. UN Action Plan for the Human Environment, June 16, 1972. Accessed February 16, 2022 at: www​.un​-documents​.net/​aphe​-a​.htm. 6. Rights for Nature: How granting a river “personhood” could help protect it. The Conversation.com. June 3, 2021. Accessed February 17, 2022 at: https://​theconversation​ .com/​rights​-for​-nature​-how​-granting​-a​-river​-personhood​-could​-help​-protect​-it​-157117. 7. A conflict that has resulted in the deaths of around 262,000 people and the internal displacement of over 5 million people. Civilian Casualties of Colombia’s armed conflict. Colombia Reports, July 20, 2019. Accessed February 28, 2022 at: https://​colombiareports​ .com/​civilians​-killed​-armed​-conflict/​. 8. Orders required that assigned authorities collaboratively develop and implement: (1) short-, medium-, and long-term plans to decontaminate and restore the Atrato River Basin (Order 5); (2) a comprehensive plan to neutralize and eradicate illegal mining in the region within six months (Order 6); and (3) a comprehensive plan to recuperate plaintiffs’ traditional livelihood and subsistence models, also within six months (Order 7). These action plans were to be informed by epidemiological and toxicological studies (Order 8), to be completed between three to nine months of the ruling. The Court also ordered a Follow-Up Committee (Order 9), led by the Attorney General of Colombia, to oversee implementation efforts and evaluate compliance. Lastly, the Court ordered the State to ensure the Intersectoral Commission for Chocó to comply with the Ombudsman’s 2014 Resolution 064, which was issued to address the socio-ecological humanitarian crisis in Chocó (Corte Constitucional de Colombia, 2016). 9. Including an extensive exploration of the region’s history and of the impacts of mining on the river.

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10. These include over 14 cases including the following “eco-regions”: the Amazon, Páramo de Pisba, La Plata River, Coella, Combeima and Cocora Rivers, Cuaca River, Pance River, Otun River, Magdalena River, Quindío River and “Nature” in Nariño and Boyacá. 11. Given the lack of regulation and pressure from armed actors there is often also a fuzzy line between small-scale and medium-scale illegal mining. 12. See Steven Grattan, Indigenous activists’ deaths highlight surging Colombia conflict. Aljazeera, February 4, 2022. Accessed February 25, 2022 at: www​.aljazeera​.com/​ news/​2022/​2/​4/​colombia​-Indigenous​-land​-defender​-killings​-spur​-calls​-to​-action​?fbclid​=​ IwAR2e5Z​co4R2WMGuD​NwuWAr6frP​McjZfhLYZm​cKkZy4riOj​_szgNla5dE3J4. 13. See Elizabeth Dickenson, La guerra en el Chocó de la que nadie está hablando. Razonpublica, February 13, 2022. Accessed February 25, 2022 at: https://​razonpublica​ .com/​l a​- guerra​- choco​- la​- nadie​- esta​- hablando/​? fbclid​= ​I wAR0Y9JFvmNMsbrbp​ -xjOn4t57v​-Kn​Kpc4hvKBIc​6H6brf5QEBaPHlmFBPmc. 14. El Clan del Golfo tiene tomado todo el departamento: Iglesia del Chocó. Santiago Ramírez. El Espectador, February 25, 2022. Accessed February 28, 2022 at: www​ .elespectador​. com/​c olombia​- 20/​c onflicto/​i glesia​- catolica​- denuncia​- vinculos​- del​ -estado​-con​-paramilitares​-en​-choco/​?fbclid​=​IwAR3ilDI7H6d5tf8Z​-rq​AHnXDGSxRQ​ piJ4lA9Ino​foagK2TqyYenT2NGHEdM. 15. ¿Cuáles son los departamentos más pobres del país? Y no son el Chocó y Guajira. Semana, September 9, 2019. Accessed February 28, 2022 at: www​.semana​.com/​pais/​ articulo/​por​-que​-guainia​-es​-el​-departamento​-con​-mas​-pobres/​276406/​.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Berry, T., 2000. The Great Work: Our Way into the Future, Reprint edition. New York: Crown. Boyd, D.R., 2011. The Implicit Constitutional Right to Live in a Healthy Environment. Review of European Community & International Environmental Law 20, 171–179. https://​doi​.org/​ 10​.1111/​j​.1467​-9388​.2011​.00701​.x Cagüeñas, D., Orrego, M.I.G., Rasmussen, S., 2020. El Atrato y sus guardianes: imaginación ecopolítica para hilar nuevos derechos. Revista Colombiana de Antropología 55(1), 169‒196. Clark, C., 2020. Can You Hear the Rivers Sing? Legal Personhood, Ontology, and the Nitty-Gritty of Governance. Ecology Law Quarterly. www​.ecologylawquarterly​.org/​ print/​can​-you​-hear​-the​-rivers​-sing​-legal​-personhood​-ontology​-and​-the​-nitty​-gritty​-of​ -governance/​(accessed February 15, 2022). Clavijo Ospina, F., Macpherson, E., 2019. The Pluralism of River Rights in Aotearoa, New Zealand and Colombia. Journal of Water Law 25(6) 283‒293. https://​doi​.org/​10​.31235/​osf​ .io/​rdh4x Comite de Seguimento, 2020a. Quinto Informe de Seguimiento Sentencia T-622 de 2016 [Fifth Follow-Up Report Ruling T-622 from 2016]. Comite de Seguimento, 2020b. Quinto Informe de Seguimiento Sentencia T-622 de 2016. Corte Constitucional de Colombia. Comite de Seguimento, 2018. Tercer Informe de Seguimiento Sentencia T-622 de 2016. Corte Constitucional de Colombia. Corte Constitucional de Colombia, 2016. Corte Constitucional Case T-622/16. La Sala Sexta de Revisión de la Corte Constitucional. Defensoria del Pueblo Colombia, 2014a. Crisis humunitaria en Chocó: Diagnostico, valoracion y acciones de la Defensoria del Pueblo. Defensoria del Pueblo Colombia, 2014b. Resolución Defensorial No. 064: Crisis humanitaria en el Departamento del Chocó 2014 [Ombudsman Resolution No. 064: Humanitarian crisis in the Department of Chocó 2014].

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Delfado-Duque, L. de los ángeles, 2017. El papel de los grupos ambientalistas contra la minería ilegal en Chocó: más allá del lobby [WWW Document]. Flörke, M., Schneider, C., McDonald, R.I., 2018. Water Competition Between Cities and Agriculture Driven by Climate Change and Urban Growth. Nature Sustainability 1, 51–58. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1038/​s41893​-017​-0006​-8 Garma International, 2008. Garma International Indigenous Water Declaration. Islam, M.S., O’Donnell, E., 2020. Legal Rights for the Turag: Rivers as Living Entities in Bangladesh. Asia Pacific Journal of Environmental Law 23, 160–177. https://​doi​.org/​10​ .4337/​apjel​.2020​.02​.03 Kurki, V., 2021. Legal Personhood and Animal Rights. Journal of Animal Ethics 11, 47–62. https://​doi​.org/​10​.5406/​janimalethics​.11​.1​.0047 Lozada Vargas, J.C., 2019. Proyecto de Acto Legislativo “por el cual se modifica el artículo 79 de la Con-stitución Política de Colombia” [Legislative Act Project “to Modify Article 79 of the Colombian Constitution”]. Macpherson, E.J. (ed.), 2019a. Indigenous Water Rights in Law and Regulation: Lessons from Comparative Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Macpherson, E.J., 2019b. Rivers as Subjects and Indigenous Water Rights in Colombia. In Indigenous Water Rights in Law and Regulation: Lessons from Comparative Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 131–160. https://​ doi​ .org/​ 10​ .1017/​ 9781108611091​.006 Macpherson, E., Borchgrevink, A., Ranjan, R., Vallejo Piedrahíta, C., 2021. Where Ordinary Laws Fall Short: “Riverine Rights” and Constitutionalism. Griffith Law Review 29(4), 438–473. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1080/​10383441​.2021​.1982119 Macpherson, E., Torres Ventura, J., Clavijo Ospina, F., 2020. Constitutional Law, Ecosystems and Indigenous Peoples in Colombia: Biocultural Rights and Legal Subjects (SSRN Scholarly Paper No. ID 3697748). Social Science Research Network, Rochester, NY. Magallanes, I.J.C., 2015. Maori Cultural Rights in Aotearoa New Zealand: Protecting the Cosmology that Protects the Environment (SSRN Scholarly Paper No. ID 2677396). Social Science Research Network, Rochester, NY. May, J.R., 2006. Constituting Fundamental Environmental Rights Worldwide (SSRN Scholarly Paper No. ID 1341179). Social Science Research Network, Rochester, NY. Millenium Ecosystems Assessment, 2005. Ecosystems and Human Well-being. Washington, DC: Island Press. Naffine, N., 2017. Legal Persons as Abstractions: The Extrapolation of Persons From the Male Case. In Kurki, V.A.J., Pietrzykowski, T. (eds), Legal Personhood: Animals, Artificial Intelligence and the Unborn. Berlin: Springer, pp. 15‒27. O’Donnell, E., 2020. Rivers as Living Beings: Rights in Law, But No Rights to Water? Griffith Law Review 29, 643–668. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1080/​10383441​.2020​.1881304 O’Gorman, R., 2017. Environmental Constitutionalism: A Comparative Study. Transnational Environmental Law 6, 435–462. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1017/​S2047102517000231 Poelina, A., Taylor, K.S., Perdrisat, I., 2019. Martuwarra Fitzroy River Council: An Indigenous Cultural Approach to Collaborative Water Governance. Australasian Journal of Environmental Management 26, 236–254. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1080/​14486563​.2019​.1651226 Richardson, W., McNeish, J.-A., 2021. Granting Rights to Rivers in Colombia: Significance for ExtrACTIVISM and Governance. In McNeish, J., Shapiro, J. (eds), Our Extractive Age. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 155–175. Shapiro, M., Stone Sweet, A., 2002. On Law, Politics, and Judicialization. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1093/​0199256489​.001​.0001 Shelton, D., 2020. Human Rights and the Environment: What Specific Environmental Rights Have Been Recognized. Denver Journal of International Law & Policy 35, 121‒171.

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Smith, J.E.H., 2021. Nature Is Becoming a Person. Foreign Policy. https://​foreignpolicy​.com/​ 2021/​11/​24/​nature​-person​-rights​-environment​-climate​-philosophy​-law/​ (accessed February 14, 2022). Stone, C.D., 2010. Should Trees Have Standing? Law, Morality, and the Environment, third edition. New York: Oxford University Press. Stone, C.D., 1972. Should Trees Have Standing?: Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects. Southern California Law Review 25, 450–501. https://​doi​.org/​10​.2307/​1297132 Strang, V., 2020. The Rights of the River: Water, Culture and Ecological Justice. In Kopnina, H., Washington, H. (eds), Conservation: Integrating Social and Ecological Justice. Cham: Springer, pp.  105–119. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1007/​978​-3​-030​-13905​-6​_8 Stutzin, G., 1984. Un imperativo ecológico: reconocer los derechos de la naturaleza. Ambiente y Desarrollo 1, 97–114. Suárez, L.G., Aristizabal, J.D., 2013. Mercury and Gold Mining in Colombia: A Failed State. Universitas Scientiarum 18, 33–49. https://​doi​.org/​10​.11144/​Javeriana​.SC18​-1​.mgmc Tanasescu, M., 2022. Understanding the Rights of Nature. New Rockford, ND: Transcript Publishing. Tubb, D., Sivaramakrishnan, K., 2020. Shifting Livelihoods: Gold Mining and Subsistence in the Chocó, Colombia. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Vörösmarty, C.J., McIntyre, P.B., Gessner, M.O., Dudgeon, D., Prusevich, A., Green, P., Glidden, S., Bunn, S.E., Sullivan, C.A., Liermann, C.R., Davies, P.M., 2010. Global Threats to Human Water Security and River Biodiversity. Nature 467, 555–561. https://​doi​ .org/​10​.1038/​nature09440 Weis, L.K., 2017. Environmental Constitutionalism: Aspiration or Transformation? (SSRN Scholarly Paper No. ID 3439884). Social Science Research Network, Rochester, NY. World Economic Forum, 2020. The Global Risks Report 2020 [WWW Document]. World Economic Forum. www​.weforum​.org/​reports/​the​-global​-risks​-report​-2020/​ (accessed February 15, 2022).

9. Oceans: the new economic frontier? Mads Barbesgaard1

1. INTRODUCTION For many, the ocean is the new economic frontier. It holds the promise of immense resource wealth and great potential for boosting economic growth, employment and innovation, and it is increasingly recognized as indispensable for addressing many of the global challenges facing the planet in the decades to come, from world food security and climate change to the provision of energy, natural resources and improved medical care. (OECD 2016, 13)

The OECD here sums up a sentiment that has become increasingly widespread on the heels of the UN’s Conference on Sustainable Development in 2012 – 20 years after the original Rio Earth Summit. In Rio in 2012, the oceans having been somewhat marginalized by the overarching focus on moving towards a “green economy,” the notion of a “blue economy” was also put forward. No less visionary and wide-ranging (and, some would say, contradictory) than its green counterpart, the development of a blue economy draws on particular visions of human–ocean relations. As Jennifer Silver and colleagues’ (2015) fieldwork in Rio uncovered, this initially spanned: oceans as natural capital; oceans as good business; oceans as integral to Pacific small island developing states; and oceans as small-scale fisheries’ livelihoods. Despite this initial somewhat plural vision of the blue economy, the vision that is most dominant in multilateral donor agencies’ work as well as national-level policies oriented towards a so-called blue economy seems to be that of oceans as natural capital and/ or good business (Barbesgaard 2018). This has resulted in criticism from fisher peoples’ movements of the blue economy being little more than a smokescreen for ongoing processes of dispossession and displacement of coastal populations (e.g. see testimonies from various movements from South- and Southeast Asia at http://​ blueeconomytribunal​.org; and broader literature on ocean grabbing: Franco et al. 2014; Bennett et al. 2015; Brent et al. 2020). As the notion of a blue economy has spread amongst and been contested by different development actors, so too has academic work proliferated. For the most part, this follows up on Silver and colleagues’ (2015, 153) call for analysis of both “the broad discourses of ocean finance and capitalization and to local case studies of project implementation.”2 This spurt of academic literature has been useful for interrogating the catalysts, motivations and implications underpinning the rise of the blue economy discourse and associated calls for an overhaul of ocean governance across scales. However, the general consensus in much of the literature seems to be one 137

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of blue economy (and related questions around ocean governance) to be “primarily a product of institutional discourses and performances characteristic of contemporary environmental politics” (Mallin & Barbesgaard 2020, 122). Underprioritized in contemporary accounts then is, on the one hand, a more long-run historical analysis of the changing use and control of the oceans and, on the other hand, quite curiously, a centering of arguably the central actor in the appropriation and transformation of oceans under capitalist development: the corporation. Drawing inspiration particularly from a recent intervention on how studying the corporation can enrich resource geography, this chapter seeks to contribute through a historical analysis that places a spotlight on the role of corporations in the oceans and how their changing practices have led to changes in the use and control of oceans across different moments in capitalism’s historical development. In order to think about the environment–development relation, I here draw on scholars that have emphasized how capitalism should be understood as an “ecological regime” (Moore 2011; see also Smith 2010). An ecological regime entails, “those relatively durable patterns of governance (formal and informal), technological innovations, class structures, and organizational forms” that can be identified across capitalism’s history structuring the relation between nature (here oceans) and society (Moore 2011, 34). This chapter traces the changes in capitalism’s ecological regime as it pertains to the oceans over time in tune with its temporal and spatial development.3 I thereby seek to lay out a political economy of the oceans, by examining the changing relation between the oceans and the capitalist mode of production over time. The rest of the chapter is organized as follows: the next section argues for the importance of grappling with corporations for any treatment of questions around environment and development – herein the oceans. The following three sections are dedicated to different periods and expressions of capitalist development and associated uses of the oceans: as a trade route; as a site of extraction; and as an environmental and developmental savior. For each of the periods, a distinct corporation is chosen as a case to illustrate the dominant role of the ocean. The chapter closes with some reflections on the current hyperbolic claims of the oceans as a new economic frontier.

2. CORPORATIONS, ENVIRONMENT AND DEVELOPMENT Plainly, the history of capitalism is a history of enterprises appropriating and transforming nature at ever-increasing scale and pace. (Campling 2021, 189)

As put “plainly” by Campling here, the practices of corporations are fundamental for questions surrounding both environment and development. Nonetheless, the vast literature on corporations, as approached through the lens of global value chains and, later, global production networks, has for the most part not grappled with the “problem of nature” (Baglioni & Campling 2017). Conversely, while this problem is raised in queries around industrial strategies in so-called “nature-facing industries”

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(e.g. Boyd et al. 2001; Boyd & Prudham 2017), much of the literature across geography and political ecology for the past two decades has tended to focus less on specific business strategies and more on questions around the regulatory and ideological processes of commodification and/or financialization of nature (see e.g. the body of work on neoliberal natures and green grabbing). Especially following the commodity boom in the 2000s and then what has been called the convergence of crises (finance, food, climate, energy) in the 2010s, such work typically examines impacts at “community” scale with reference to processes of accumulation by dispossession in the form of resurgent land and wider resource grabs (for a review see Oliveira et al. 2021). To the extent that corporations are dealt with in this literature, it is often done “in an untheorized and ahistorical way” that pits “communities” (good) against corporations (bad) (Campling 2021, 191) – while neglecting the contradictory unfolding of capitalist social relations across scales (for related critique see Hall 2012, 2013; and Jakobsen in this volume). The importance of addressing this lacuna is increasingly recognized with, for example, calls for a “more situated analysis of corporations” (de los Reyes 2017, 251) along with a more general return to “the relationship between capital accumulation and non-human natures” with specific attention to “the range of strategies through which industrial capital ‘takes hold of nature’” (Banoub et al. 2021, 3, 7; see also Werner 2022). Similarly, in a re-evaluation of Boyd et al.’s (2001) aforementioned invitation over 20 years ago, Boyd and Prudham (2017, 877) retain that “there is something specific about those sectors in which firms are involved in a direct and immediate way in the appropriation and transformation of nonhuman nature.” Finally, turning to literature on the oceans, in Havice and Campling’s (2022, 383) recent review of literature on oceanic accumulation, they close with a call for work that explicitly interrogates “what are the accumulation strategies of capitalists in the oceans?” In grappling with the corporation in this chapter, I draw on the tradition of Marxist political economists’ elucidations of the capital–state–nature relation. Under capitalism, to borrow an apt analogy from Ben Fine (1984, 36), corporations are “in the same boat” in that they face a situation of competitive capital accumulation in which they must take part. For individual corporations, this competitive accumulation is felt “as an external coercive force. Accumulate or die; there are few exceptions” (ibid.). Accumulation plays out through the capture and distribution of surplus value that is produced through the exploitation of labor and appropriation of nature (Campling 2021). How exploitation and appropriation is organized is subject to the agency of particular corporations, but any given corporation operates under the imperative of accumulation “colliding with others trying to do the same, sometimes succeeding, sometimes just surviving and sometimes failing altogether” (Shaikh 2016, 259). Particularly for corporations directly engaged in the appropriation of nature, the question of the relation to the state is a central one (Coronil 1997; Bridge 2008; Parenti 2015).4 In such industries, the state is a constitutive force, mediating resource-seeking corporations’ access to the resources that are subject to the state’s sovereignty. This goes especially for extractive industries (e.g. fisheries, mining),

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where the state is often the de jure (if not always de facto) resource owner as well as the agent that creates the institutional conditions for resource access (i.e. “natural resource management”). Conversely, as we will see, mediating this access can also be constitutive of the state itself as part of asserting territorial control over spaces and resources hitherto outside the purview of the state. As such, “states have played a historically enduring role” in natural resource industries and they therefore “bear the stamp of the historical geography of imperialism and colonialism” (Campling & Baglioni 2020, 265). The state–capital relation in natural resource industries, then, is a contested process with the state asserting its sovereignty through struggles and/ or cooperation with firms over the distribution of surplus value. Corporate strategies therefore also develop in relation to these socio-ecological struggles with the state. Of course, when we analytically move to specific industries and corporations, we run into the “innumerable different empirical circumstances” that we can identify concretely in the real world (Marx 1991, 927). As an initial introduction to these empirical circumstances in the oceans, recent work by Virdin and colleagues (2021) has provided an overview of the largest 100 transnational corporations in the ocean economy. These corporations span a wide range of industries including offshore oil and gas, seafood production, port activities and container shipping. In Virdin et al.’s definition, offshore oil and gas companies today account for 45 percent of revenues in the ocean economy, seafood production for 15 percent and container shipping for 8 percent. But how did we get to this current situation with massive transnationally organized corporations playing an ever-larger role in the appropriation of the oceans and their resources in their pursuit of profits? Just as on land, this changing role depends on reworkings of the use of the oceans and ocean resources. The next sections trace these changes through the practices of particular corporations over time.

3.

THE OCEANS AS A TRADE ROUTE: THE DUTCH EAST INDIA COMPANY

The oceans played a pivotal role in the emergence of commercial capitalism, “lasting from roughly the fifteenth century to the early nineteenth,” wherein what Marx calls commercial capital was the dominating form of accumulation (Campling & Colas 2021, 53). In this early phase of capitalism, the oceans facilitated the exchange of commodities (herein enslaved humans and raw materials) and a continuing expansion of the market. This use of the oceans was seized upon by commercial capital and was what in this phase drove the absorption of ocean space into capital’s economic purview. Commercial capital does not create surplus value directly (as per above based on the exploitation of labor and appropriation of nature), but instead “helps to extend the market” and thereby enables “capital to operate on a bigger scale” (Marx 1991, 392–393). Accumulation under commercial capitalism, then, is based on the practice of “buy[ing] cheap and sell[ing] dear” and generally “cut[ting] down the turnover

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time” (ibid., 447, 393) of this circulation process as much as possible – as part of capital’s general “drive beyond every spatial barrier” in its infamous quest of “annihilation of space by time” (Marx [1857–1858] 1993, 524). In this era, the oceans would prove particularly useful for this quest as they did not require state support in building and maintaining costly and geographically fixed infrastructure but could be traversed with the use of ships – and large distances could be covered at much greater speed than land-based travel allowed for. It was by way of ocean-based trade routes facilitating access to distant markets that “great revolutions … took place in trade in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries” (Marx 1991, 450). This expansion in the space and scale of trade in turn entailed the “expansion of the world market, the multiplication of commodities in circulation, the competition among European nations for the seizure of Asiatic products and American treasures, the colonial system” all of which paved way for the emergence of a more developed form of capitalism “shattering the feudal barriers to production” with significant implications for questions around environment and development (ibid.). Appropriation of ocean space in this period was therefore primarily oriented around securing trade routes. Shifting control of these trade routes that allowed for channeled circulation of commodities became the economic basis for the rise (and fall) of a series of what Scammel (1981) calls maritime empires in Europe, most notably (and in chronological order) the Genoese, Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch and English (see also Arrighi 2010). All of these were based on differing degrees of violence and occupation in order to incorporate far-flung geographies into the new commodity circuits. It was the Dutch maritime empire though that took processes of profit-making under commercial capitalism to new scales (Scammel 1981). This relied especially on the institutional innovation of the joint-stock company. First formally established in 1555 through the English Muscovy Company, the characteristics of this institutional form were of “shared risk, raising capital through stock shares and a unified management controlled by majority shareholders” (Campling & Colas 2021, 33). These characteristics were particularly useful for managing the complex operations of ocean-based trade. Typically, companies were formed only for the duration of a single voyage to be liquidated upon return. This changed, however, with the formation of the English East India Company in 1600 and following closely on the heels of the English, the Dutch East India Company, or in Dutch Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC) in 1602. Both “introduced limited liability and a legal separation between ownership and management” and allowed for smaller shareholders “to invest in permanent, as opposed to one-off, long-distance business ventures” (Campling & Colas 2021, 38). Both were also formed through close cooperation with their respective states and in this manner balanced “the class interest of merchants and nobility in the combined quest for geopolitical, territorial ‘power’ and commercial, economic ‘plenty’” (ibid.). The VOC was based on the merger of existing companies from across the port towns of Amsterdam, Middelburg, Delft, Hoorn, Rotterdam and Enkhuizen, which would subsequently constitute a “chamber” each in the management structure of

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VOC, contributing directors to the 17-man governing board (Heeren-17). The limited liability structure allowed for “money flow[ing] from the whole range of society,” from starch-makers to magnate merchants from Hamburg (Scammel 1981, 403). All could participate as investors in the commercial undertaking. As with its English counterpart, the VOC was also bolstered by a state monopoly on the trade east of the Cape of Good Hope – initially for a 21-year period. Furthermore, the company could make treaties with different local rulers it would encounter on behalf of the Dutch republic and was also granted the right to “occupy lands, declare war, own ships, raise armies, erect fortresses and appoint officers to their command” (Scammel 1981, 403). All of which it did. With this setup, “the company soon showed itself to be one of the most efficient instruments of colonial exploitation as yet devised” (ibid., 404). As a concretization of European commercial capitalism, this was based on the setting up of trading posts and gradually occupying the Dutch East Indies (most of contemporary Indonesia) from which the company facilitated and intensified the sea-based circulation of commodities. The Asian maritime economy was particularly lucrative for the VOC and for a time “had a vigorous life of its own to which trade with Europe was ancillary” with profits from the Asian trade eclipsing those from the European, as Scammel (1981, 407) notes, [b]y the mid-1600s the Dutch were shipping Sinhalese and Malaysian elephants to Bengal, employing Chinese gold obtained in Taiwan to buy cloth in Coromandel, exchanging Indian textiles for Indonesian spices, selling Japanese copper throughout the east, and using local rather than imported silver where necessary.

In this manner, the VOC and its English counterpart were “quintessential forms of commercial capital, insofar as they derived immense profits by reducing the turnover time between distant marketplaces” and arguably became the first transnational corporations (Campling & Colas 2021, 61). As mentioned, concerning the different rights guaranteed to VOC by the Dutch republic, this rise in the role of the VOC was of course neither a smooth nor conflict-free process and the company (on behalf of the republic) was variously at war with local populations as well as their European competitors over control of the most valuable routes and commodities. In terms of the developmental consequences for the areas incorporated into this trade, Marx (1991, 448–449) doesn’t mince his words concerning the implications: Commercial capital, when it holds a dominant position, is thus in all cases a system of plunder, just as its development in the trading peoples of both ancient and modern times is directly bound up with violent plunder, piracy, the taking of slaves and subjugation of colonies; as in Carthage and Rome, and later the Venetians, Portuguese, Dutch, etc.

Where the developmental consequences of the use of the oceans were therefore significant, as of yet the environmental consequences were minimal. While the Dutch also excelled in fisheries, and whaling was developing at industrial scale in certain places in the late seventeenth century (see next section), “commercial capital’s sway over the political geographical relations of the seas fundamentally outweighed those

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of industrial capital, and prevailed as the determining force driving spatial organization until the 20th century” (Mallin & Barbesgaard 2020, 126). As an ecological regime, then, commercial capitalism had a relatively minimal imprint on the ocean and its resources – beyond the use that the likes of VOC had for it as a trade route. This, however, began to significantly change with the development of a more industrial form of capitalism and the associated rise of industrial fisheries and other new seaborne industries such as oil and gas extraction to which the next section turns.

4.

THE OCEAN AS SITE OF EXTRACTION: TOTAL AND FRIENDS IN MYANMAR

Though the cut-off year between commercial and industrial capitalism is usually set at 1850, it was of course a gradual transition and despite the above, using the ocean as a site for the production of surplus value also took place under commercial capitalism. For example, following a failed attempt to locate a Northeast passage to China, the Muscovy Company initiated industrial-scale fishing upon discovering walrus on and eventually whales around the island of Svalbard. Both provided the “raw material for a new energy regime that lit the streets, industries and homes of the growing urban populations of Western Europe and its settler colonies from the late seventeenth century onwards,” consequently driving the commodity frontier of especially whaling “harder, faster and further” (Campling & Colas 2021, 188–189). On the other side of the Atlantic, whaling from the 1690s has been considered a key part of the “beginning of early American industrialization” (Sievers, quoted in ibid.) and would continue to be a driving force along the East coast until the decline of the use of whale oil for energy purposes at the end of the nineteenth century. With the decline of whaling for this purpose (although it of course continues for other purposes to this day), it was the development of industrial fisheries more generally and industrial offshore oil extraction that cemented the transition towards the ocean becoming a site of extraction – and surplus value production – with ensuing new requirements for the management of ocean space. The requirement of commercial capital for the political geography of the oceans was one of securing the free flow of commodities with state control of the oceans otherwise oriented around a three-nautical-mile zone from the coast. However, with the expansion of fisheries and oil industries – based on the appropriation of nature in particular places beyond three miles from the coastline – new types of management in order to facilitate the orderly expansion of extractive activities were necessary. Following state-subsidized advances in fishing technology from the 1880s especially in Japanese fishing fleets, the 1930s saw “a number of fishing disputes, in particular between the United States and Japan over North Atlantic salmon fisheries” (Steinberg 1999, 412). Simultaneously, offshore oil drilling, pioneered in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Louisiana in 1937, also became possible beyond the three nautical miles. Following the most devastating war in human history and in the midst of prior and ensuing developments in the forces of production, President Truman made two

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seminal proclamations in September 1945 that would ultimately culminate in the “largest single enclosure in history” (Campling & Havice 2014, 714). These proclamations entailed first that all known and potential resources “of the subsoil and seabed of the continental shelf” contiguous to the coast of the United States were “subject to its jurisdiction and control” (Department of State 1945a). Second, that the United States was in its right to control and regulate fisheries contiguous to its coast as well as any area where US nationals were already engaged or planning to engage in industrial fishing (Department of State 1945b). Both proclamations emphasized that the right to “free and unimpeded” navigation across the high seas was in no way affected by these proclamations. In this manner, the proclamations sought a compromise between competing uses of the oceans: on the one hand allowing for setting up the control and regulation of ocean industries that required clear and delineated property rights for the protection of investments (e.g. extraction of oil), while on the other hand not impeding the interests of industries that required free movement across ocean space (e.g. shipping). The proclamations came in the broader context of US challenges against the old capitalist empires – exhausted as they were in any case – and assertions of the US’s central role in what we now know as development. As President Truman put it in a speech in 1947, “We are the giant of the economic world. Whether we like it or not, the future pattern of economic relations depends on us” (quoted in Panitch & Gindin 2010, 93). These economic relations were ones that would facilitate a move away from the old formal empires to what Panitch and Gindin (2010) call an informal empire, through which the US State would actively take it upon itself to launch a global capitalism. Indeed, as Truman noted in his more famous inaugural speech in 1949, this would play out through his Point-IV program with support for what he termed “underdeveloped areas” based on “foster[ing] capital investment in areas needing development” (Truman 1949). On the heels of these proclamations by the US State concerning control of extractive activities in oceans contiguous to its coast there followed a decades-long process of a state-led scramble for control of ocean space. In the context of Third Worldist challenges to the structure of the world economy (e.g. the New International Economic Order), this process was especially driven by the newly independent states of the Global South as a means to secure “national” resources for economic development (Campling & Havice 2014). This set off a series of conferences from 1958, eventually culminating in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which many states ratified in 1982 (but only came into force in 1994). Importantly for the discussion here, through establishing the Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs), whereby states gained exclusive control of resources within 200 nautical miles of their coasts, UNCLOS institutionalized a central role for the state in the development of extractive oceanic industries. The creation of EEZs enclosed some 659,662 square kilometers, the equivalent of 66 percent of land territory (Brent et al. 2020 and see Figure 9.1). Hereinafter, “coastal states sit at the nexus of rent appropriation and other distributional struggles around surplus value, (perceived) ‘national interest’, geopolitics, resources management and industry regulation in EEZs” (Campling & Havice 2014, 715).

Figure 9.1

Overview of different maritime zones as per UNCLOS

Source: Bähr (2017, 32). Reproduced under the Creative Commons “Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)” license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/en/legalcode).

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States thereby came to de jure mediate productive capital’s access to natural resources within their EEZs and appropriate rents in the process.5 To illustrate these dynamics more concretely, the case of Myanmar and a range of companies active there is instructive of the more intensive use of oceans and ocean resources along with the state–capital–nature nexus and associated ecological regime that this period of capitalism ushered in. Taking over from the prior dominance in Southeast Asia of the Japanese fishing fleet, by the 1960s it was the Thai fishing fleet that had led to a “great diaspora of Thai trawlers” prowling through first the Gulf of Thailand into what would become the waters of Cambodia, Vietnam and Malaysia, and eventually migrating to the Andaman Sea into what would become the waters of Burma (Butcher 2004, 198). In the midst of this expansion of the Thai fishing fleet, in the late 1960s and 1970s the governments of Cambodia, Vietnam and Burma proceeded to lay claims to their “national” waters, formally barring off the Thai trawlers from some 280,000 square kilometers of fishing grounds – or half the area once used by the Thai fleet (MFR 1988). In Burma, the military regime (led by the Revolutionary Council) in 1968 first made its claim of territorial waters 12 nautical miles from the coast and in 1977 the Burmese Socialist Programme Party (BSPP), under the auspices of a new constitution, established an EEZ. Over the next decade, the BSPP followed an unsuccessful strategy of asserting control of the EEZ by opposing the presence of Thai fishing fleets. By the late 1980s, however, in the midst of political and economic crises, the military regime reconstituted itself into the State Law and Order Restoration Council and dramatically transformed its approach to extractive industries on land and at sea. The Foreign Investment Act of November 1988 had the aim of “[e]xploitation of abundant resources of the country” through “exporting whatever surplus available” (Union Government of Myanmar 1988, 1). This shifted the relation to Thai fishing capital, where the approach now became one of asserting dominance in the EEZ through facilitating Thai fishing and appropriating rents from the Thai vessel owners. To the frustration of Thai vessel owners, struggles over the distribution of this rent ensued between the military regime and a number of ethnic armed organizations (EAOs), often leading to vessel owners having to pay both the military regime and the EAOs if they wanted to fish in the bountiful waters of Burma – with EAOs threatening the confiscation of vessels if payments were not made. By the late 1990s, through a series of military offensives and strategic divide-and-conquer tactics waged against EAOs active in Southern Myanmar,6 the military regime had by then not just de jure, but also de facto become the sole resource owner in the EEZ. The ensuing rents appropriated from the Thai fishing fleet were paramount to initially stem off the economic crisis that the military regime was facing in the late 1980s, while simultaneously undercutting the economic base of the EAOs (Barbesgaard 2019). Figures dwarfing the rents accrued from fisheries, however, would come through the military regime’s cooperation with the oil- and gas-producing corporations Total, Unocal (later Chevron) and PTT Exploration and Production. Each of these corporations are part of the vast offshore oil and gas industry. From the humble beginnings of the above-mentioned offshore oil well two miles off the coast of Louisiana in five

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meters of water in 1937 has developed a global oceanic oil infrastructure consisting of more than 3300 seabed oil wells, 75,000 km of oil and gas pipelines along the seabed and transport of oil and gas alone accounting for one-third of seaborne trade on over 4000 oil tankers (Watts 2012). The oil and gas sector in particular, then, is characterized by “the aggressive pursuit of economies of scale in production and refining, and transportation,” which in turn pushes the frontier of oil and gas extraction to the “ends of the earth, or more properly a mad gallop to the bottom of the ocean” (Watts 2012, 442; see also Chalfin 2015, 2018; Zalik 2009). It was this mad gallop that sent these three oil and gas corporations into an alliance with the military regime’s Myanmar Oil and Gas Enterprise (MOGE) to develop the offshore gas fields off the coast of Southern Myanmar in the early 1990s. By 2002, a decade into this partnership, the regime “exported over USD 800 million worth of gas, which contributed to its first ever trade surplus” (Alamgir 2008, 981) and in the period between 1989 and 2010 (after which the so-called “transition to democracy” began) the oil and gas sector secured the most foreign direct investment (FDI) of any sector in the economy (Barbesgaard 2019). Beyond the control of ocean space, because the gas was destined for neighboring Thailand, the extraction of offshore gas was also “reliant on land-side infrastructure and property regimes” as is indeed always the case (Campling & Colas 2018, 783). As alluded to above though, in the early 1990s the military regime was not in full control of Southeastern Myanmar, where it was at war with especially two EAOs. For the corporations engaged in the mad gallop this situation had to change – as dryly noted by a Total executive, “unless the area is pacified, the pipeline won’t last its thirty-year duration” (quoted in ERI 1996, 13). Consequently, as documented tirelessly by human-rights activists, the investments especially from Unocal and Total helped the military regime in ramping up their military spending in order to make space for land-side infrastructure and property regimes conducive to the oceanic extraction (ERI 1996). In 1992, the very year that Total and the Myanmar Oil and Gas Enterprise signed a production-sharing agreement, the military regime set an all-time high in military spending, “importing USD 390 million in military hardware” (ERI 1996, 5). Though of course a particularly violent case, these socio-ecological struggles around Myanmar’s EEZ reflect broader dynamics in the post-1945 world, whereby coastal states – especially across the Global South – have sought to fundamentally repurpose the role of oceans and ocean resources in the pursuit of facilitating capital accumulation within their territories through the new ecological regime that UNCLOS formalized. In this manner, the strategic partnership between state and capital in Myanmar facilitating the extraction of ocean resources – first fisheries and then oil – had profound consequences for environment and development (and indeed democracy!). As noted by the human-rights group Earth Rights International (ERI 2009, 62), “[b]y virtue of generating multi-billion dollar revenues for the regime … Total and the Yadana consortium [a subsequent offshore gas project] have arguably contributed to the intransigence of the military regime more than any other single, external contributing factor.”

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5.

THE OCEANS AS ENVIRONMENTAL AND DEVELOPMENTAL SAVIOR: THE METALS COMPANY

Just as the vision of green growth reinforced the earlier contention of sustainable development that economic growth is a prerequisite for rather than an obstacle to environmental sustainability, so too blue growth is premised on synergies between economic growth and environmental stewardship of oceans and ocean resources (Barbesgaard 2018). Consequently, since the Rio+20 meeting, the last decade has seen significant changes in the discursive justifications of state and corporate practices in oceans. As the opening quote from the OECD in this chapter suggests, the oceans and ensuring the somewhat elusive blue growth are increasingly mobilized as a panacea for a whole host of contemporary global challenges concerning environment and development. For example, for WWF (2017, 4) a sustainable blue economy “provides the social and economic benefits for current and future generations, by contributing to food security, poverty eradication, livelihoods, income, employment, health, safety, equity, and political stability.” No tall order! These lofty discursive claims of the potential role of the oceans in securing sustainable development through blue growth rarely grapple with the actually existing political economy of the oceans as the previous sections have given a snapshot of. And indeed, amidst the plethora of multi-stakeholder conferences purportedly dedicated to “creating sustainable blue economies” (as the 2022 Our Ocean Conference in Palau discussed)7 the relentless expansion of old and rise of new ocean industries has continued. Beyond fisheries and oil and gas discussed above, established industries vying for a particular use and control of ocean space include aquaculture, cruise tourism, marine conservation, shipping – and emerging ones include offshore renewable energy and deep-sea mining. Whether and how these industries actually will lead to a blue-tinged growth remains unclear, but discussions at these conferences emphasize how new approaches to ocean management are needed. Following the careful balancing of different interests in ocean space laid out by the Truman declarations, UNCLOS has been conceptualized as a division of ocean space reflecting a compromise in conflicts between competing industrial interests: those requiring mobility within and beyond EEZs (e.g. shipping, cruise tourism) and those requiring fixed property regimes for spatially immobile investments (e.g. extractive industries) for resources within EEZs (see Steinberg 2001; Campling & Colas 2021). However, as presciently noted by Phil Steinberg over 20 years ago (1999, 415), “it is only a matter of time before new ocean use requiring spatially fixed investments … reopens this conflict.” Indeed, the inadequacy of current ocean regulations is vilified by the likes of the OECD for hampering the development of the very ocean industries that are to ensure the oceans begin to play the necessary role in solving the different global challenges quoted in the opening from food to energy production. As the same report notes, “the regulatory and governance gaps identified … create a decision-making vacuum for many ocean industries, notably in respect of future

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investment” (OECD 2016, 150). One of the new ocean uses poised at the precipice of significant future investment is deep-sea mining. For proponents of the industry, such as Gerard Barron, the CEO of The Metals Company, deep-sea mining provides a solution to many of the environmental and developmental challenges of the land-based mining industry. It is otherwise the land-based miners that are currently centrally positioned to provide the different “transition minerals” (copper, nickel, manganese, lithium, cobalt and rare earth elements) necessary for new renewable energy technologies (e.g. wind turbines, batteries for electric vehicles). However, The Metals Company discursively justifies itself through critiques of land-based mining: “There’s no point thinking you’ve done the planet a favour by driving an electric vehicle if those materials have been mined by the hands of children or you have had to deforest important rainforest assets” (quoted in Financial Times 2018). By contrast, the company claims that deep-sea mining (defined as below 200m) for the polymetallic nodules that contain copper, nickel, manganese and cobalt can solve the challenges around the environmental and social footprint facing land ores on a range of parameters, with deep-sea mining entailing “no deforestation, no social displacement, no fixed infrastructure” (The Metals Company 2021, 22). But where are these minerals to come from? Under UNCLOS, resources of the seabed beyond the EEZs found in the High Seas – “The Area” – are under the control of the International Seabed Authority (ISA). Of particular interest for the deep-sea mining adventure is the Clarion-Clipperton Zone in the Pacific Ocean, which is the most significant concentration of polymetallic nodules currently known. The challenge for industry actors is that, at time of writing, there exist no regulations for the terms of extraction of resources. So far, only exploration licenses have been granted by the ISA and actual production through the extraction of minerals is yet to take off. Furthermore, licenses (exploration and, potentially, extraction) are submitted by states, in cooperation with companies. So, any deep-sea mining activity requires, so-called, sponsorship from a state. As is the case within any industry, “production is always initiated on the basis of prospective profits” and so far, these prospective profits have been wanting (Shaikh 2016, 615). However, in light of the expected looming supply gap within a decade for these transition minerals (IEA 2021), profit expectations due to surging prices are beginning to form. It was in this context that the small island developing state (or large ocean state, as the Pacific Island states are increasingly rebranding themselves) Nauru took the unprecedented step of invoking the so-called two-year trigger in the ISA in June 2021 – in partnership with The Metals Company. This two-year trigger means that the ISA is now committed to completing and adopting regulations pertaining to deep-sea mining in The Area by July 2023 at the latest. This adventure would take the state–capital–nature nexus into a new (and final?) frontier within ocean space under the banner of blue growth purportedly facilitating the so-called green transition. As especially the environmental ramifications are largely unknown – despite the claims of the involved corporations – the pending

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question is of course with what implications for environment, and for the states involved, development.

6.

SO, ARE THE OCEANS A NEW ECONOMIC FRONTIER?

As should be clear from this snapshot, the oceans have for centuries been incorporated under the economic purview of capital. In this sense, contra the opening quote from the OECD, the ocean certainly is not a new economic frontier. And yet, in the era of “sustainable development” and under the paradigm of a green- and blue-tinged growth, new capitalist uses of the oceans are developing – amidst continuing expansion of the old. As the OECD quote makes clear, the envisioned role of the oceans in contributing to sustainable development is paramount – and deep-sea mining is but one of many emerging and/or expanding industries. All of these come with their own claims to resources and subsequent requirements for management. Aquaculture springs to mind as a useful example – in 2014 the aquaculture sector’s contribution to fish for human consumption for the first time overtook that of wild-caught fish (Boyd et al. 2022). While this was heralded as a success by the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization, much aquaculture does not solve the pressure on global fish stocks as many aquaculture species are dependent on wild-capture fish as feed, thereby if anything deepening the pressure on fish stocks (Longo et al. 2019). In this manner, the oceans and the existing and envisioned corporate practices herein perhaps better than anything else shed light on the inherent contradictions of sustainable development: a development that continues to drive existing resource extraction (e.g. fisheries, offshore oil) at record speed, all the while inventing and expanding new ones (e.g. deep-sea mining) in order to face up to environmental and developmental challenges.

NOTES 1. The author was supported by Wallander Stipend W20-0043. 2. See, for example, the special section of Journal of Political Ecology 26(1) on the blue economy in Africa. 3. In so doing, I also draw inspiration from Campling and Colas’ recent book (2021) that is structured around the changing role of the ocean across different expressions of capitalism: commercial, industrial and neoliberal, although I do not follow these exact periods. 4. As well as various non-state institutions that under certain conditions can assume a similar role to that typically associated with the state (Capps 2016). 5. In Marxist terms, the state assumed the class function of modern landed property. For further discussion of the state as modern landed property in fisheries, see Campling and Havice (2014), while for fisheries and offshore gas extraction see Barbesgaard (2019). For further elaboration on the class function of modern landed property generally and its continuing salience under contemporary capitalism see Capps (2016) and Coronil (1997). 6. In June 1989, the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC) changed the name of the country to Myanmar.

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7. For video recordings from the event, emphasizing how “putting a sustainable blue economy at the heart of ocean management is essential for our ocean, our people, and our prosperity”, see https://​ourocean2022​.pw/​video/​. The Our Ocean Conference is an annual event initially launched under US President Obama in 2014. Similarly, The Economist has hosted an annual World Ocean Summit since 2012. The increasing role and significance of such multi-stakeholder gatherings outside of formal UN spaces and processes reflects the broader shift “from public planning to private initiative” in questions of climate and environmental policy discussed by Gómez-Baggethun & Naredo (2015, 392).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Alamgir, J. 2008. Myanmar’s foreign trade and its political consequences. Asian Survey 48(6), 977–996. Arrighi, G. 2010. The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times. London: Verso. Baglioni, E. & L. Campling 2017. Natural resource industries as global value chains: Frontiers, fetishism, labour and the state. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 49(11), 2437–2456. Bähr, U. (2017), Ocean Atlas. Facts and figures on the threats to our marine ecosystem, Heinrich Böll Foundation Schleswig-Holstein, Heinrich Böll Foundation, and University of Kiel’s Future Ocean Cluster of Excellence. www​.boell​.de/​sites/​default/​files/​2021​-09/​WEB​ _170607​_Ocean​_Atlas​_Vektor​_US​_V102​.pdf (accessed 20 January 2022) Banoub, D. et al. 2021. Industrial dynamics on the commodity frontier: Managing time, space and form in mining, tree plantations and intensive aquaculture. Environment and Planning E 4(4), 1553–1559. Barbesgaard, M. 2018. Blue growth: Savior or ocean grabbing? Journal of Peasant Studies 45(1), 130–149. Barbesgaard, M. 2019. Ocean and land control-grabbing: The political economy of landscape transformation in Northern Tanintharyi, Myanmar. Journal of Rural Studies 69, 195–203. Bennett, N. et al. 2015. Ocean grabbing. Marine Policy 57, 61–68. Boyd, C.E., A.A. McNevin & R.P. Davis 2022. The contribution of fisheries and aquaculture to the global protein supply. Food Security  14, 805–827. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1007/​s12571​ -021​-01246​-9 Boyd, W. & S. Prudham 2017. On the themed collection, “The Formal and Real Subsumption of Nature”. Society & Natural Resources 30(7), 877–884. Boyd, W. et al. 2001. Industrial dynamics and the problem of nature. Society & Natural Resources 14(7), 555–570. Brent, Z., M. Barbesgaard & C. Pedersen 2020. The blue fix: What’s driving blue growth? Sustainability Science 15, 31–43. Bridge, G. 2008. Global production networks and the extractive sector: Governing resource-based development. Journal of Economic Geography 8, 389–419. Butcher, J.G. 2004. The Closing of the Frontier: A History of the Marine Fisheries of Southeast Asia c. 1850–2000. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Campling, L. 2021. The corporation and resource geography, in Himley, M., E. Havice & G. Validivia (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Critical Resource Geography, Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 188–200. Campling, L. & E. Baglioni 2020. The political economy of natural resources, in Kitchin, R. & N. Thrift (eds), International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, second edition. Elsevier, pp. 259–266. Campling, L. & A. Colas 2018. Capitalism and the sea: Sovereignty, territory and appropriation in the global ocean. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 36(4), 776–794.

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Campling, L. & A. Colas 2021. Capitalism and the Sea: The Maritime Factor in the Making of the Modern World. London: Verso. Campling, L. & E. Havice 2014. The problem of property in industrial fisheries. The Journal of Peasant Studies 41(5), 707–727. Capps, G. 2016. Tribal-landed property: The value of the chieftancy in contemporary Africa. Journal of Agrarian Change 16(3), 452–477. Chalfin, B. 2015. Governing offshore oil: Mapping maritime political space in Ghana and the Western Gulf of Guinea. South Atlantic Quarterly 114(1), 101–118. Chalfin, B. 2018. On-shore, off-shore Takoradi: Terraqueous urbanism, logistics, and oil governance in Ghana. Environment and Planning D 37(5), 814–832. Coronil, F. 1997. The Magical State: Nature, Money, And Modernity in Venezuela. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. de los Reyes, J. 2017. Mining shareholder value: Institutional shareholders, transnational corporations and the geography of gold mining. Geoforum 84, 251–264. Department of State 1945a. Policy of the United States with respect to coastal fisheries in certain areas of the high seas. www​.trumanlibrary​.gov/​library/​proclamations/​2668/​policy​ -united​-states​-respect​-coastal​-fisheries​-certain​-areas​-high​-seas​-1 (accessed 20 January 2022) Department of State 1945b. Policy of the United States with respect to the natural resources of the subsoil and sea bed of the continental shelf. www​ .trumanlibrary​ .gov/​ library/​ proclamations/​2667/​policy​-united​-states​-respect​-natural​-resources​-subsoil​-and​-sea​-bed (accessed 20 January 2022) ERI 1996. Total Denial. Chiang Mai, Thailand: Earth Rights International. ERI 2009. Total Impact: The Human Rights, Environmental, and Financial Impacts of Total and Chevron’s Yadana Gas Project in Military-ruled Burma. Chiang Mai, Thailand: Earth Rights International. Financial Times 2018. Electric vehicles spur race to mine deep sea riches. www​.ft​.com/​ content/​00b2e3c8​-e2b0​-11e8​-a6e5​-792428919cee (accessed 22 September 2022) Fine, B. 1984. Marx’s “Capital”. London: Macmillan Education. Franco, J., N. Buxton, P. Vervest, T. Feodoroff, C. Pedersen, R. Reuter & M. Barbesgaard 2014. The global ocean grab: A primer. Retrieved from the Economic Justice Program of the Transnational Institute website: www. tni. org/briefing/global-ocean-grab-primer-0 (accessed 20 January 2022) Gómez-Baggethun, E. & J.M. Naredo 2015. In search of lost time: The rise and fall of limits to growth in international sustainability policy. Sustainability Science 10, 385–395. Hall, D. 2012. Rethinking primitive accumulation: Theoretical tensions and rural Southeast Asian complexities. Antipode 44(4), 1188–1208. Hall, D. 2013. Primitive accumulation, accumulation by dispossession and the global land grab. Third World Quarterly 34(9), 1582–1604. Havice, L. & L. Campling 2022. Industrial fisheries and oceanic accumulation, in Akram-Lodhi, H., K. Dietz, B. Engels & B. McKay (eds), Handbook of Critical Agrarian Studies. Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 274‒386. IEA 2021. The Role of Critical Minerals in Clean Energy Transitions. IEA World Energy Outlook Special Report. Longo, S.B. et al. 2019. Aquaculture and the displacement of fisheries captures. Conservation Biology 33(4), 832–841. Mallin, F. & M. Barbesgaard 2020. Awash with contradiction: Capital, ocean space and the logics of the Blue Economy Paradigm. Geoforum 113, 121–132. Marx, K. 1991. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Vol. 3, Translated by David Fernbach). London: Penguin Classics. Marx, K. [1857–1858] 1993. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft). London: Penguin Books.

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MFR 1988. The Fisheries of Southern Thailand. Washington, DC: Marine Fisheries Review. Moore, J.W. 2011. Transcending the metabolic rift: A theory of crises in the capitalist world-ecology. Journal of Peasant Studies 38(1), 1–46. OECD 2016. The Ocean Economy in 2030. Paris: OECD Publishing. Oliveira, G.D.L., B.M. McKay & J. Liu 2021. Beyond land grabs: new insights on land struggles and global agrarian change. Globalizations 18(3), 321‒338. Panitch, L. & S. Gindin 2010. The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire. London: Verso. Parenti, C. 2015. The environment making state: Territory, nature and value. Antipode 47(4), 829–848. Scammel, G.V. 1981. The World Encompassed: The First European Maritime Enterprises, c. 800–1650. London and New York: Methuen. Shaikh, A. 2016. Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crisis. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Silver, J.J., N.J. Gray, L.M. Campbell, L.W. Fairbanks & R.L. Gruby 2015. Blue economy and competing discourses in international oceans governance. The Journal of Environment and Development 24(2), 135–160. Smith, N. 2010. Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space, third edition. London: Verso. Steinberg, P.E. 1999. The maritime mystique: Sustainable development, capital mobility, and nostalgia in the world ocean. Environment and Planning D 17, 401–426. Steinberg, P.E. 2001. The Social Construction of the Ocean. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. The Metals Company 2021. Revolutionizing the mineral supply chain for fast growing EV demand. https://​investors​.metals​.co/​static​-files/​cbbbf70e​-cc80​-4cef​-a18c​-5e272d591756 (accessed 22 September 2022) Truman, H. 1949. Inaugural address. www​.trumanlibrary​.gov/​library/​public​-papers/​19/​ inaugural​-address (accessed 20 January 2022) Union Government of Myanmar 1988. The Union of Myanmar Foreign Investment Law. Virdin, J. et al. 2021. The Ocean 100: Transnational corporations in the ocean economy. Science Advances 7, eabc8041. Watts, M. 2012. A tale of two Gulfs: Life, death, and dispossession along two oil frontiers. American Quarterly 64(3), 437–467. Werner, M. 2022. Geographies of production III: Global production in/through nature. Progress in Human Geography 46(1), 234–244. WWF 2017. Principles for a Sustainable Blue Economy. http://​d2ouvy59p0dg6k​.cloudfront​ .net/​downloads/​15​_1471​_blue​_economy​_6​_pages​_final​.pdf (accessed 20 January 2022) Zalik, A. 2009. Zones of exclusion: Offshore extraction, the contestation of space and physical displacement in the Nigerian Delta and the Mexican Gulf. Antipode 41(3), 557–582.

10. The Arctic: last frontier for energy and mineral exploitation? Ragnhild Freng Dale and Lena Gross

1. INTRODUCTION Historically, the Arctic has been imagined as the last frontier to conquer, tightly connected to ideas of manhood, adventure, and survival of the fittest. In the last decades, the Arctic has caught new interest as a resource frontier for tourism, trade, energy, and minerals. Climate change has both opened new waterways in the Arctic Ocean and altered living conditions drastically for Arctic communities. On the one hand the Arctic is a region undergoing rapid and dramatic changes and in need of climate adaptation strategies, on the other the Arctic thaw is seen as providing business opportunities for states and multinational companies alike. Imaginaries of undiscovered reserves of hydrocarbons, minerals to satisfy increased global demand and consumption of electronic gadgets and electric vehicles, and renewable or “green” energy such as wind and hydropower compete and simultaneously complement romantic notions of the Arctic as a place of untouched nature and vanishing yet still preserved traditional Indigenous lifestyles. Consequently, the Arctic is imagined as an unexplored, spacious, and undeveloped frontier. Multinational companies that come to explore for oil, gas, minerals, and wind power, tend to receive the blessing of the nation on which territory the resources are located. Indigenous peoples who have occupied these lands since before the existence of these nation-states are yet again exoticised, displaced, or see their land appropriated for industrial purposes. Infrastructure associated with “development” often displaces current land use that utilises the region’s resources in a non-invasive manner. Ideas of a “win–win” situation for development and the environment, then, are as contested today as in the aftermath of the Stockholm Conference in 1972. This chapter focuses on the impacts of such expansions and expropriations in one area of the Indigenous Arctic, in the Western part of Sápmi, and calls for attention both to what a sustainable land use in Arctic regions is, and who should set the terms of development decisions. In a region heavily marked by assimilation policies of Indigenous and ethnic minorities, such questions are both complex and important to discuss.

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2.

DEFINING THE ARCTIC

“The” Arctic per se is not a fixed geographic location but is an imagined space with a multitude of definitions and meanings. The Arctic Circle is most commonly seen as the border that defines which regions are included in “the Arctic”. The Arctic Circle is an imaginary line at 66° 34' N, which marks the latitude above which the sun does not set on summer solstice and does not rise on the winter solstice. Arctic regions can also be defined by ecological and climatical markers, such as the Arctic tree line, north of which the landscape is characterised by the presence of shrubs and lichen. Other defining ecological features are the presence of permafrost (i.e., soil that stays frozen for at least two consecutive years), and high latitude regions with an average monthly temperature below 10º Celsius. Climate change, however, is rapidly changing the living conditions in the Arctic, including ecological and climatical markers. With thawing permafrost, the Arctic is indeed shrinking, if not vanishing, if defined by climate and ecology alone. The Arctic can also be culturally or politically described by lifestyles, political authorities, or as the homelands of northern Indigenous populations. About one million people of the total Arctic population of just over 10 million are Indigenous, representing over 40 different ethnic groups (Heleniak 2020, 150; Jungsberg et al. 2019, 8). Neither the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) in 2007 nor the International Labour Organization Convention 169 (ILO 169) in 1989 contain a clear universal definition of what it means to be Indigenous, whereas such definitions do exist on a national basis. These are, however, slightly different and often contested across the Arctic states. Contrary to common imaginaries of a wild Arctic, there is a general trend towards urbanisation and a decline in smaller settlements. In 2020, two-thirds of the Arctic population lived in settlements with more than 10,000 inhabitants (Heleniak 2020). All Arctic states are high-income countries except for Russia, which is also the only Arctic country with a significant and steady population decline since the 1990s. Most Arctic states have fertility rates at a below replacement level, immigration as the major source of population increase, and all but Russia have high levels of life expectancy. However, there are substantial demographic differences between the Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations in the Arctic, amongst others being that the Indigenous population has a younger age profile (Heleniak 2020, 138). Politically, the Arctic Council is perhaps the institution that defines which states belong to the Arctic. It includes the eight states of Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Russia, and the United States, and six Indigenous People’s Organizations that are Permanent Participants in the Council: the Aleut International Association; Arctic Athabaskan Council; Gwich’in Council International; Inuit Circumpolar Council; Russian Association of the Indigenous Peoples of the North; and the Saami Council. As a soft-law intergovernmental forum, its working groups on Arctic peoples and ecological factors in the Arctic play a major role in knowledge-creation and agenda setting in and of the Arctic. Reflecting the increasing interest in the Arctic by non-Arctic states, NGOs, and intergovernmental organi-

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sations, the number of observers to the Arctic is currently at 38 (of which 13 are nations). Indigenous rights however are different across these Arctic nations. Whilst Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Denmark supported the adoption of the UNDRIP in 2007, Russia abstained whilst Canada and the United States initially rejected the declaration. The latter two have since adopted it. ILO 169 is only signed by two Arctic states, Norway and Denmark. Furthermore, being a signatory to these declarations does not mean the nations concerned always respect Indigenous rights or work sufficiently to support the development of Indigenous culture within their borders.

3.

WHAT DO WE MEAN BY “FRONTIER”?

The Arctic, then, is both a vast and diverse region in the Northern Hemisphere, a homeland, and a region that has often been viewed in terms of its resource potential or as a place of adventure and discovery. Theorising topics related to the Arctic in the social sciences, especially resource extraction and Indigenous rights, is often done by looking at the Arctic in terms of the colonial legacy that is still at play, notably displayed in “frontier” thinking. Like “the Arctic”, frontier does not have a clear-cut definition. Frontiers are more of an imaginary space than a geographical place, imagined as landscapes that need discovery, exploration, and domestication. In the Arctic such frontiers are often associated with dreams of resources such as oil, gas, and minerals, but are also linked to longer histories of exploration, trade, and exploitation that have transformed Indigenous communities across the region (Nuttall 2010). Frontiers are not seen as homes and can therefore be used and taken into possession or get sacrificed. Rasmussen and Lund (2018, 388) argue that a frontier is not even a space, but that frontiers are taking place in and to space, created by and representing the discovery or invention of new resources. Frontier dynamics unsettle or dissolve property systems, political jurisdiction, rights, and social contracts (ibid.). From the eyes of the state and potential investors, the north is frequently imagined as a place to be developed through the extraction of its resources; places, that is, viewed more as “spaces” than as places in their own right, with the complex human– non-human relations they entail. Such narratives are amongst the many Arctic imaginaries – competing and constantly evolving ideas of what the Arctic is and should be (Steinberg et al. 2015). Most of the Arctic futures conceptualised in reports and scenarios tend to perceive the driving forces of change in the Arctic as coming from outside the region itself. One study of 50 such scenarios from governments, private organisations, business interests, researchers, and (exclusively male) travelogues found that most such future imaginaries did not involve Arctic people as stake- and rightsholders in the making of the report, and that Arctic peoples remained marginal compared to geopolitical aspects (Arbo et al. 2012). Whilst Indigenous people consistently stress the Arctic regions as home and not as a remote frontier to be exploited, this focus on the geopolitics, resources, and shipping that becomes available with receding ice are frontier imaginaries that bring ideas of development and (global)

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connection, which indirectly frames Indigenous peoples as past and as part of the natural environment (if they do not become part of the modernising vehicle themselves). Such imaginaries drive continued colonial interactions with Arctic regions. Following Nuttall (2010), certain types of landscapes or geographic areas are more likely to fit into a frontier imaginary than others but are in one way or another seen as remote or peripheral relative to imagined centres and capitals. This dynamic can be seen at play in Norway, where governmental Arctic strategies have coined the term “the High North”, focused on centring the north as important to Norwegian identity and Norway’s place in the world (Steinveg and Medby 2020). Though these strategies always mention the people living in the north, they are mostly narrated from the south (ibid.). Across shifting governments, they remain focused on exploitation of the north’s “natural resources”, oil and gas, minerals, and more recently wind resources. The future in the north is seen as dependent upon industrialisation and exploitation of natural resources as vehicles for development, understood as increased revenue and population growth. An example of the growing policy interest in the Arctic in the last decades is the proliferation of Arctic Conferences, which since the 2000s have taken on a role at the science–policy–business interface (Steinveg 2021). Arctic Conferences are geopolitically significant, not just for policy formation but also for states making claims to be part of the Arctic and as a space of identity-building as Arctic states (Depledge and Dodds 2017). Arctic Frontiers in Tromsø is an example of this identity-building for the Norwegian state, hosted at UiT The Arctic University of Norway with partners from several Norwegian universities, research institutes, the Norwegian research council, and sponsored by major economic players including petroleum companies.1 In the eyes of critics, the scholarly design of conferences such as Arctic Frontiers greenwashes its main reason: providing a space for businesses that include industries that have a high environmental, social, and cultural impact. The use of “frontiers” in the name speaks for more than just scholarly frontiers of knowledge: It plays into a colonial imagination of the Arctic as a white, adventurous no man’s land and connects it to frontier masculinities.

4.

WHY FOCUS ON SÁPMI?

Conflicts about industrial development on Indigenous territory are well known all over the world. These conflicts are not necessarily between the Indigenous population and the non-Indigenous governments or industries, as there – as in all communities – at times exist different, and at times opposing, interests also inside Indigenous communities. Reindeer herders in Sápmi are a minority of a minority. The same is true for First Nation, Métis, and Inuit members that still rely to some extent on subsistence activities hunting, fishing, trapping, and gathering in Canada. These activities, however, have a cultural meaning that goes far beyond their economic significance or the number of people who are directly connected to them for subsistence. People continuing these traditional land-use practices are knowledge keepers

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and often also language keepers for their nations. Any encroachment on the land on which these activities depend are therefore also an encroachment on the material basis of Indigenous culture and language. Whilst most regions belonging to the Arctic are currently undergoing change in similar ways (marked by climate change, increased geopolitical interest, and the potential for resource extraction, energy production, and tourism), they are also very different. Arctic states are, as mentioned above, different in their politics, legislations, and values. When discussing energy and resource extraction policies of “the Arctic”, it is therefore necessary to differentiate between different parts of the Arctic, and the way in which nation-states and their policies, colonial expansions, and present-day regulations interact with the Arctic regions and their inhabitants, particularly Indigenous groups. In Scandinavian Sápmi; Finland, Norway, and Sweden, there are national Sámi parliaments that differ in structure and political power. The Saami Council organises member organisations from across Sápmi, also including the Russian side where the Sámi people are significantly more marginalised. Unlike in the North American Arctic, the Sámi do not ask for sovereignty over specific territories or reserves, but increased self-determination and proper land rights in the regions that are part of Sápmi. On the Norwegian side, the Finnmark Commission and the Finnmark Estate is part of a decade-long effort to determine land rights in the northernmost part of Norway, but the work has thus far moved slowly. On the Swedish side, reindeer herding is defined as a “national interest”, but in practice several land-use conflicts over mining and forestry in Indigenous areas show that this is no guarantee of protection from impacts of resource extraction. Additionally, other Sámi traditional land-based practices like fishing or berry picking are not legally protected. Therefore, the majority of the Sámi population in Sweden has no access to Indigenous land rights. In Russia, only Indigenous peoples that are under a certain member number, live in certain areas, and practise their livelihoods in specific ways are defined as Indigenous peoples, and the Russian Sámi have not been treated well by the Russian state. The cross-border aspects of Sámi collaboration across Russia and the Nordics have been met with scepticism by Russian authorities, and activism for a Sámi Parliament on the Russian side led to accusations of subversive activities and separatism (Berg-Nordlie 2015). After Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, formal relations have been almost entirely wiped out. The Nordic countries are seen as some of the most egalitarian democracies in the world with fair decision-making and due process for infrastructural development. However, Norway, Sweden, and Finland have a history of internal colonialism2 that continues in new and different forms today. The three Nordic countries all treated the Sámi population as inferior people who either should be segregated from or assimilated fully into majority society. When Norway gained its independence from Sweden in 1905, the cross-border reindeer herding was made difficult, and many Sámi lost their pasture lands when Sámi that were considered Swedish together with their reindeer herds were forcibly relocated from their summer homes in Northern Norway to Sweden, mostly the areas around Arjeplog, Jokkmokk, and Tärnaby. In all nation-states, the northern regions have been mined, logged, dammed for hydro-

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power, and otherwise exploited for the gain of majority society, often at the expense of land, rights, and livelihoods of the Sámi population. Assimilation policies, displacement of communities, boarding schools, and loss of language were all part of the internal colonisation processes, the effects of which continue to this day. Similar patterns are recognisable across Arctic states, as varieties of colonial thinking continue to permeate imaginaries of the region. In this chapter, we have chosen to focus on cases from the western parts of Sápmi, to demonstrate the patterns, similarities, and differences in frontier thinking and its impacts on land and livelihoods in the north.

5.

GREEN COLONIALISM AND EXTRACTIVISM IN THE ARCTIC

A new term that has recently gained prominence in research focusing on Sámi rights in the Scandinavian part of Sápmi is “green colonialism”. It was coined by Sámi activists and politicians before it was taken up in academia, most prominently by Eva Maria Fjellheim (forthcoming PhD thesis) and Susanne Normann (2021). Aili Keskitalo, former president of the Sámi parliament in Norway, refers to policies and practices around large-scale wind power facilities, mining for minerals that are needed for the so-called “green shift”, and the planned “Arctic railway” as green colonialism. She has described green colonialism as “when colonialism has dressed up in nice green finery and we are told to give up our territories and our livelihoods to save the world because of climate change” (The Arctic Circle 2020). Like other colonial processes, Indigenous lands, rights, and livelihoods important for cultural continuity are taken, minimised, or endangered. The difference is that in the circumstances of green colonialism, this happens under the moral imperative of common good, namely, to fight climate change that threatens the world as we know it. The areas in question become “green sacrifice zones” (Zografos and Robbins 2020), where acts of violence are “erased, trivialized, naturalized, justified and rendered as innocuous or necessary” (Reinert 2018, 598). These mechanisms of constructing prettifying narratives continue a pattern of colonial Arctic history where forced displacement and domestication of Arctic Indigenous peoples, Indian residential schools, and large-scale environmental destruction for oil and gas extraction are all justified by narratives of the common good like the improvement of life conditions, education, or energy security. Knowledge gaps and misconceptions in majority society about Sámi reindeer herding leads to misunderstandings, seeing Sámi concerns about their further existence as reindeer herders as greed for compensation or an unwillingness to contribute to a “greener” future (Normann 2021). The colonial aspect of dispossession is made visible by several artists’ work in recent years, including Máret Ánne Sara and Anders Sunna who both critique the Norwegian and Swedish states’ colonial policies in the 21st century in their art, and explore alternative strategies and alliances for Indigenous future-making. While the physical, social, mental, and cultural tolls of

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constantly increasing extractivism3 in so-called resource frontiers are by now well known all over the world (Kröger 2016), the effects of green colonialism are still under-researched and given less publicity. Using the need for sustainability as an argument against Indigenous livelihoods is, however, not new: a common trope in Norway is that there are “too many reindeer” on the tundra and that reindeer herding is unsustainably practised, which is used as a justification for forced reduction policies – even when the methods and data these decisions are based upon, and their inbuilt preconceptions, have been heavily critiqued (see e.g., Benjaminsen et al. 2015). Simultaneously, reindeer herders face increased encroachment from industrial developments, cabins, roads, and other infrastructure, which comes in addition to the added stress of climate change adaptation (Skarin et al. 2015, Skarin and Åhman 2014). We now turn to examples of some of these industrial developments, and how they impact land use and Indigenous livelihoods in different ways.

6.

MINERAL EXTRACTION IN NORWEGIAN AND SWEDISH SÁPMI

Since the early 2000s, there has been an increase of mining activities or proposed mining projects all over Sápmi. The most well-known cases are the iron ore mining of LKAB in Giron (Kiruna) and the proposed copper mine by Nussir ASA that will deposit the tailings in the fjord in Riehppuvuotna (Repparfjord). Another, less-known, case which can illustrate some of the reoccurring features in conflicts surrounding mining projects in Sápmi is the Násávárre case.4 In 2004, Elkem, a Chinese-owned company, applied for a concession to mine quartz at Násávárre. The border between Sweden and Norway crosses Násávárre, and the whole area is in use for reindeer herding by both Swedish and Norwegian Sámi reindeer herding units. Quartz as a raw material is needed for the metallurgical production of ferrosilicon and silicon metal, materials that are needed for solar cells, batteries, and more. It is therefore a raw material necessary for a “green shift”. The quartz found in Násávárre is amongst the purest in the world, which makes refining less energy-intensive. There is a refinery not far from the proposed extraction site, which cuts down transportation costs and related environmental impacts, even though there is no access road to the site of the proposed location of the mine. However, Násávárre is also an important reindeer grazing area and on traditional Sámi reindeer herding territory. The proposed location for the mine is in an area that is used for both winter and summer pasture, as well as calving ground. The calving period is one of the most sensitive times of the year where reindeer herds are extremely vulnerable to disturbance. There are no eligible alternative grazing pastures for the herders, and if the mine is realised it will mean a major risk for the mixing of herds with neighbouring districts, decline of animal well-being and health, or losing reindeer that get away from their herds. Even with mitigation measures like building fences and pausing extraction for some weeks during calving season,

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Sámi reindeer herders expect that the mine is not compatible with reindeer herding at Násávárre, and that at least one community would be forced to discontinue reindeer herding. Due to a disputed municipal land regulation process and contested environmental impact assessments (EIA), the basis for consent-based decision-making was not given. The conflict between Sámi land right holders and Elkem peaked in 2017 when Elkem threatened to file an expropriation motion, whilst simultaneously promising further funding for EIAs if consent was given in advance. When the reindeer herding communities did not agree and insisted on their right to free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC), Elkem indeed asked for expropriation. As at the time of writing, March 2023, the decision is still pending. Násávárre is in many aspects an in-between place, which is a typical characteristic of frontier spaces (Rasmussen and Lund 2018, 390). It is, as mentioned, a border area between Sweden and Norway, and since the early 2000s, cross-border reindeer herding between these two countries is not clearly legally regulated. The former Reindeer Grazing Convention, which had been in force since 1972, expired in 2002. Sweden and Norway could not agree on the terms of a new convention before 2009, but this new convention was never ratified by the Swedish Parliament. The legal status of reindeer herders in the cross-border area of Norway and Sweden is thus a legal grey space, at the same time as it is highly regulated by both national and international laws. As is typical for (Arctic) environmental and natural resource regulations on Indigenous territories, Násávárre and its surrounding area is in a multi-level governance situation that can be hard to navigate for reindeer herders and local bureaucrats alike. Raitio et al. discuss this complexity in the context of Sweden, identifying the following regulations: international law on Indigenous peoples’ rights; national law on Sámi and reindeer herding rights; national law on mining and permits related to the environment; and implementation and bureaucratic practices by public authorities (Raitio et al. 2020, 2). Historically, the making of nation-states, drawing of borders, and related conventions that controlled border crossing have been colonial tools all over the Arctic and other colonised Indigenous territories. The Reindeer Grazing Convention of 1919 between Sweden and Norway that specifically regulated the access to the regions of Troms fylke and Nordlands fylke in Norway and Norrbotten län, Västerbottens län, and Jämtlands län in Sweden, for example, led to the forced migration of several Swedish Sámi communities in the 1930s. On the Norwegian side, the municipality holds an important role through the Planning and Building Act, where they can set aside areas for certain purposes. What is often not appreciated in full is the limitations of their power at later stages in a process: a “yes” to an impact assessment often means a “yes” to the mine itself, as the decisions at the later stages after the EIAs are done happens at a higher level of governance (Dannevig and Dale 2018). Furthermore, the lack of political representation of migrating reindeer herders on the municipal level means they have less of a say in the democratic processes at the local level (Nygaard 2016). As herders have pastures in several municipalities, and as in the Násávárre case at times in several nation-states, this poses a problem for due recognition of their rights and continued

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use of the areas they depend on (Dale and Dannevig 2023). Consultation with stakeand rightsholders and “interests” is a legal requirement, but in both the Nussir and the Násávárre case we see that practitioners of Indigenous livelihoods have not been given a final say in a yes or no to the mining project as they would if the framework of FPIC was followed.

7. HYDROCARBONS IN THE NORWEGIAN ARCTIC Compared to other Arctic states, petroleum exploration in the Norwegian Arctic is happening in a more temperate environment due to the presence of the Gulf Stream. Exploration activities in the southern parts of the Barents Sea were first initiated in the 1980s but concerns over a vulnerable (local) environment in the oceans and a political will to regulate the pace of exploration on the Norwegian continental shelf led to a pause of nearly 30 years (Ryggvik and Smith-Solbakken 1997). Distance to existing infrastructure has also been an important reason for this late development, with no pipelines for gas stretching this far north. With new areas becoming available for petroleum exploration, the Norwegian government’s renewed interest and expansion of petroleum exploration has been termed “opportunistic adaptation” to a changing climate, seeking to profit on the opportunities created by receding ice (Kristoffersen 2015). The first petroleum project to be approved in the Barents Sea was the gas project Snøhvit, with Equinor as operator. As the first field in the Barents Sea, its approval was rife with controversies. Concerns over climate change and local environmental impact led to protests from Nature and Youth and other environmental NGOs, as it was approved before the new regulations in the Integrated Management Plan of the Barents Sea and Lofoten areas, which was in process at the time. The Norwegian government and the petroleum company Equinor (formerly Statoil) turned the environmental discourse on its head by arguing that Norway with its stringent environmental regulations should drill before Russia started in the Barents Sea, to set a responsible environmental standard (Jensen 2011). Snøhvit was approved in 2001, as an LNG facility located just outside the town of Hammerfest. Its construction turned the city into a boom town for petroleum in the north, which was followed by the oil field Goliat operated by Eni Norge (now Vår Energi), which was approved in 2009 and started production in 2016. Since then, the 23rd licensing round opened new and previously unexplored areas in the Barents Sea South East (BSSE) in 2016 and was subject to a lawsuit by environmental NGOs Greenpeace and Nature and Youth, who claimed the licences were invalid. The state won this case in the Supreme Court in 2020, but six youths took the case to the European Court of Human Rights in 2021, where it is still pending at the time of writing. Whilst no viable fields have been discovered in the BSSE, two new fields outside West Finnmark are planned, both of which will be operated by Equinor as many other companies have pulled out of the region.

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Whilst petroleum developments are largely located offshore, the onshore elements of such operations bring with them numerous onshore impacts. For the municipality in Hammerfest, the property tax has led to a boost in yearly income, which the municipality has channelled into infrastructure for the town’s inhabitants; schools, kindergartens, and a landmark cultural centre. It has also generated optimism in the town, but for the surrounding regions the petroleum developments have been a disappointment as the activity is centred around Hammerfest and does not ripple out into neighbouring municipalities in a way that they had hoped when the industry entered two decades ago (Dale 2018). The onshore activity means land has been set aside which was formerly used for reindeer herding. Increased traffic leads to disturbances for the herders whose summer pastures are on the Fála island. A power grid with capacity to electrify the LNG production will further encroach on reindeer pastures in larger parts of Finnmark, whilst plans for a blue hydrogen facility will claim important coastal pastureland. Cumulatively, petroleum development and other related industries encroach on areas important for traditional livelihoods and cultural practices in the West Finnmark region, as predicted in a report commissioned by the International Centre for Reindeeer Husbandry during the development of Snøhvit (Vistnes et al. 2009). Furthermore, the tone in public debate is harsh, with reindeer herders frequently accused of standing in the way of development and prosperity. Those who oppose or are critical of industrial development and the jobs it supposedly will bring are mostly framed as “outsiders”, even when they are from the region in question and some of coastal Sámi heritage themselves (Dale 2019).

8. HYDROPOWER AND WIND POWER IN NORWEGIAN SÁPMI In Sápmi, hydropower has caused much upheaval and conflict as the damming of rivers have flooded and altered large land areas. Sweden’s development of hydropower in the 1900s led to large-scale displacements of families and herds that still affect families and livelihoods in Sápmi today. On the Norwegian side of Sápmi, struggles over the Alta hydropower development led to one of the biggest political mobilisations in Norwegian environmental history, which came to a head in 1979–82. The aftermath of these events led to a greater recognition of the rights of the Sámi people, including the first Sámi rights committee (Samerettsutvalget), the formation of the Sámi Parliament, and other political processes concerning Indigenous rights to land and culture on the Norwegian side of Sápmi (Minde 2003). Large-scale hydropower development in Norway came to an end after the Alta struggle. More than 90 per cent of Norway’s electricity has been supplied with renewable electricity from hydropower, but a push to develop more renewable energy to meet a projected demand for electrification and export (in the transition from fossil fuels) led to the design of incentive systems and a flurry of project applications in the 2010s. Many of these projects took a long time to develop, and with

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their construction an increasing controversy around wind power has emerged across Norway (Inderberg et al. 2019). Several wind power plants have been constructed or are proposed in Sámi areas, displacing traditional users of the land and posing a threat to the future of traditional reindeer herding and other traditional land use (cf. Normann 2021). In 2021 the Supreme Court in Norway stated two of the licences for wind power development in the Fosen region, at Storheia and Roan, were invalid. The wind power plants take up land which denies the reindeer herders the right to practise their culture, and therefore breaches Article 27 in the UN Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (Supreme Court judgment, 11 October 2021, HR-2021-1975-S). The judgment has based this conclusion on longer-term research on the impacts of construction and operation phases of wind power plants in Norway and Sweden, and the stress on the reindeer and behaviour of avoidance which means that the grazing land is in practice lost for the herders (ibid.). Though the Fosen region is formally outside the Arctic, the verdict sets an important precedent for traditional land use and human rights for Sámi reindeer herders in Norway. To increase the legitimacy of wind power projects in Norway, the government has proposed revisions to the legal framework which will grant more power to the local communities and ensure the municipality receives a larger share of the returns for giving up parts of their land areas for industrial development. With legislative changes to the licensing process, the municipality’s role and influence over the process will increase. As for mining projects, this is no guarantee that Indigenous land use is recognised, whether for reindeer herding or other forms of nature-based cultural practice (see Nygaard 2016) as it has not yet developed a way to include land use across municipal borders in decision-making. Within some parts of Sápmi, wind power development has been declared unwanted by local municipalities, such as in Narvik in Nordland County. In Finnmark, the situation is different. Finnmark county council has a long-term wind power plan where they aim to develop more of the region’s “wind resources”, possibly linked with hydrogen production and other industries (Finnmark fylkeskommune 2013), and many municipalities in East Finnmark are positive towards wind power development. One of the current wind farms, the Raggovidda wind farm in Berlevåg municipality, was initially seen as a “conflict-free” project in the media with good dialogue between the reindeer herders and the developer before construction, but reindeer herders have experienced difficulties in their work because of the wind turbines and oppose further development in the region (Wormdal and Lieungh 2016). Another example is the Davvi project, which is proposed in a part of Lebesby municipality that is also used by people who live in the neighbouring municipalities of Tana and Porsanger, as well as affecting several reindeer herding districts. Initially a portion of the wind power plant was planned in Tana municipality’s area, but as Tana no longer welcomes the development, the company has removed that part of the area from its plans. This means people living in Tana will have to live with the same negative impact on the landscape, but none of the potential monetary compensation that Lebesby’s inhabitants will receive if the project is realised. Simultaneously, the

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reindeer herders affected by the proposed project are mostly registered in Karasjok municipality, and are thus not included in the municipal deliberation process. In both the Raggovidda and Davvi cases, coastal municipalities are hoping for income, jobs, and development based on new industries, but these industries demand land that displaces other livelihoods and cause conflict between majority and minority populations, and sometimes also between minority and minority (coastal and reindeer herding Sámi). Such problems again pose questions of representation and recognition in licensing processes, and of what a just transition is to entail for Indigenous communities (Dale and Dannevig 2023).

9.

WHERE TO IN THE FUTURE?

As a growing international interest in the Arctic and a melting of the ice exposing the Northern Sea Route between Asia and Europa is currently underway, new Arctic imaginaries are emerging. China’s Arctic White Paper (2018) on a Polar Silk Road for international shipping and trade, and China’s positioning as a stakeholder in Arctic affairs, is but one example for this. Furthermore, geopolitical events in Europe, notably Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, have led to increased focus on long-term decarbonisation in the EU to become independent of Russian gas (but also an internal focus in petroleum-producing Arctic states like Norway and the US to increase production for export). In the medium to long term, technologies like hydrogen production (both from petroleum and renewable energy) are receiving attention, alongside the mining, wind, and petroleum projects discussed in this chapter. There is, then, reason to believe interest in resource extraction and pressure for “development” of the Arctic’s resources will increase rather than decrease in the years to come. Conflicts that arise from specific industrial projects, whether mining, petroleum, or “green” energy, need therefore to assess the cumulative impacts, not only the specific project proposed. Any potential project needs to carefully consider what is at stake and for whom, both in the present and in the future, which history/ ies have led to the situation, and which competing rights and interests exist, both on a micro and on a macro scale, going from local land users and residents towards international corporations and nation-states. The projects we have discussed in this chapter, as well as similar studies elsewhere in Sápmi and other parts of the Arctic, call for greater attention from policymakers, academics, journalists, and other members of civil society towards how governance mechanisms work and who holds decision-making power over land and livelihoods in the North. In particular, there is a need to focus on how governance mechanisms can be improved to ensure a fair process of development that includes cumulative impacts and local knowledge (see e.g., Kløcker Larsen et al. 2022). Alongside such a process, the idea of the Arctic as a “frontier” region should be replaced by a focus which centres people and sustainable livelihoods in more than rhetorical terms.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Ragnhild Freng Dale wishes to acknowledge funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 869327, and the Norwegian Research Council, grant no. 296205. Lena Gross wishes to acknowledge funding from the Norwegian Research Council, grant no. 288598.

NOTES 1. For a list of partners see www​.arcticfrontiers​.com/​partners/​. 2. For more discussion about the differences and commonalities between overseas and internal colonisation, see for example Coates and Broderstad (2020). 3. Durante, Kröger, and LaFleur define extractivism as “a particular way of thinking and the properties and practices organized towards the goal of maximizing benefit through extraction, which brings in its wake violence and destruction” (2021, 20). 4. Násávárre is the name of the mountain in Lule Sami. Northern Sámi, Pite Sami, and Ume Sami which are all in use of the region have different names. Here we follow Statens Kartverk’s choice of the name. The Norwegian name is Nasafjellet and in English Násávárre is called Nasa-mountain.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Arbo, P., A. Iversen, M. Knol, T. Ringholm, and G. Sander. 2012. “Arctic Futures: Conceptualizations and Images of a Changing Arctic.” Polar Geography, 36(3), 163–182. doi: 10.1080/1088937X.2012.724462. Arcticfrontiers.com. 2022. About the Conference. Retrieved 16 February 2022 from www​ .arcticfrontiers​.com/​about​-the​-conference/​. Ballari, Aslak, and Stian Strøm. 2014. “Åpnet Konfliktfri Vindpark.” NRK Sápmi, 25 September. www​.nrk​.no/​tromsogfinnmark/​apnet​-konfliktfri​-vindpark​-1​.11951998. (accessed 16 February 2022). Benjaminsen, Tor A., Hugo Reinert, Espen Sjaastad, and Mikkel Nils Sara. 2015. “Misreading the Arctic Landscape: A Political Ecology of Reindeer, Carrying Capacities, and Overstocking in Finnmark, Norway.” Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift – Norwegian Journal of Geography 69 (4): 219–29. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1080/​00291951​.2015​.1031274. Berg-Nordlie, Mikkel. 2015. “Two Centuries of Russian Sámi Policy: Arrangements for Autonomy and Participation Seen in Light of Imperial, Soviet and Federal Indigenous Minority Policy 1822–2014.” Acta Borealia 32 (1): 40–67. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1080/​ 08003831​.2015​.1030849. Coates, Ken S., and Else Grete Broderstad. 2020. “Indigenous Peoples of the Arctic: Re-taking Control of the Far North.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Arctic Policy and Politics, edited by K. Coates and C. Holroyd. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 9–15. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1007/​ 978​-3​-030​-20557​-7​_2 Dale, Ragnhild Freng. 2018. “Petroleum in the Barents Region: Local Impacts and Dreams at Sea.” In Energy, Resource Extraction and Society: Impacts and Contested Futures, edited by Anna Szolucha, 37–52. Abingdon: Routledge. https://​doi​.org/​10​.4324/​9781351213943.

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Dale, Ragnhild Freng. 2019. “Making Resource Futures: Petroleum and Performance by the Norwegian Barents Sea.” PhD Thesis, University of Cambridge. Dale, Ragnhild Freng, and Halvor Dannevig. 2023. “Planning for Whose Benefit? Procedural (In)justice in Norwegian Arctic Industry Projects.” In Arctic Justice: Environment, Society and Governance, edited by Corine Wood-Donnelly and Johanna Ohlsson. Bristol: Bristol University Press. Dannevig, Halvor, and Brigt Dale. 2018. “The Nussir Case and the Battle for Legitimacy: Scientific Assessments, Defining Power and Political Contestation.” In The Will to Drill – Mining in Arctic Communities, edited by Brigt Dale, Ingrid Bay-Larsen, and Berit Skorstad, 151–74. Cham: Springer International Publishing. Depledge, Duncan, and Klaus Dodds. 2017. “Bazaar Governance: Situating the Arctic Circle” in Governing Arctic Change, edited by Keil, K, Knecht, S. London: Palgrave Macmillan: 141–160. Durante, Francesco, Markus Kröger, and William LaFleur. 2021. “Extraction and Extractivism. Definitions and Concepts.” In Our Extractive Age: Expressions of Violence and Resistance, edited by Judith Shapiro and John-Andrew McNeish, 19–30. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Fine, M., and J. Ruglis. 2008. “Circuits and Consequences of Dispossession: The Racialized and Classed Realignment of the Public Sphere for Youth in the U.S.” Transforming Anthropology 17 (1): 20–33. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1111/​j​.1548​-7466​.2009​.01037​.x Finnmark fylkeskommune 2013. Regional Vindkraftplanplan Finnmark 2013‒2025 [Regional Plan for Wind Power in Finnmark 2013‒2025]. Vadsø: Finnmark Fylkeskommune. Fjellheim, E.M. 2023. “You Can Kill Us with Dialogue:” Critical Perspectives on Wind Energy Development in a Nordic-Saami Green Colonial Context. Human Rights Review, 24, 25–51. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1007/​s12142​-023​-00678​-4 Heleniak, Timothy. 2020. “Polar Peoples in the Future: Projections of the Arctic Populations.” Nordregio Working Paper 2020:3, 4 May. http://​doi​.org/​10​.6027/​WP2020:​3​.1403​-2511 Holmberg, Aslak. 2018. “Bivdit Luosa – To Ask for Salmon. Saami Traditional Knowledge on Salmon and the River Deatnu: In Research and Decision-Making.” MA Thesis: UiT The Arctic University of Norway. Inderberg, Tor Håkon Jackson, Helga Rognstad, Inger-Lise Saglie, and Lars H. Gulbrandsen. 2019. “Who Influences Windpower Licensing Decisions in Norway? Formal Requirements and Informal Practices.” Energy Research & Social Science 52: 181–91. https://​doi​.org/​ https://​doi​.org/​10​.1016/​j​.erss​.2019​.02​.004. Jensen, Leif Christian. 2011. “Norwegian Petroleum Extraction in Arctic Waters to Save the Environment: Introducing ‘Discourse Co-Optation’ as a New Analytical Term.” Critical Discourse Studies 9 (1): 29–38. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1080/​17405904​.2011​.632138. Joks, Solveig. 2016. “‘Laksen Trenger Ro’. Tilnærming Til Tradisjonelle Kunnskaper Gjennom Praksiser, Begreper Og Fortellinger Fra Sirbmá-Området.” PhD Thesis: UiT Norges arktiske universitet. Jungsberg, L., E. Turunen, T. Heleniak, S. Wang, J. Ramage, and J. Roto. 2019. Atlas of Population, Society and Economy in the Arctic. https://​doi​.org/​10​.30689/​WP2019:​3​.1403​ -2511 Kløcker Larsen, Rasmus, Maria Boström, Muonio Reindeer Herding District, Vilhelmina Södra Reindeer Herding District, Voernese Reindeer Herding District, and Jenny Wik-Karlsson. 2022. “The Impacts of Mining on Sámi Lands: A Knowledge Synthesis from Three Reindeer Herding Districts.” The Extractive Industries and Society 9: 101051. https://​doi​ .org/​https://​doi​.org/​10​.1016/​j​.exis​.2022​.101051. Kristoffersen, Berit. 2015. “Opportunistic Adaptation.” In The Adaptive Challenge of Climate Change, edited by Elin Selboe and Karen O’Brien, 140–59. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://​doi​.org/​DOI: 10.1017/CBO9781139149389.009.

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Kröger, Markus. 2016. “Spatial Causalities in Resource Rushes: Notes from the Finnish Mining Boom.” Journal of Agrarian Change 16 (4): 543–70. Minde, Henry. 2003. “The Challenge of Indigenism: The Struggle for Sami Land Rights and Self-Government in Norway 1960–1990.” In Indigenous Peoples: Resource Management and Global Rights, edited by Svein Jentoft, Henry Minde, and Ragnar Nilsen, 75–104. Delft, the Netherlands: Eburon Delft. Normann, Susanne. 2021. “Green Colonialism in the Nordic Context: Exploring Southern Saami Representations of Wind Energy Development.” Journal of Community Psychology 49 (1): 77–94. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1002/​jcop​.22422. Nuttall, Mark. 2010. Pipeline Dreams: People, Environment, and the Arctic Energy Frontier. Copenhagen: International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs. Nygaard, Vigdis. 2016. “The Extractive Industries and Society: Do Indigenous Interests have a say in Planning of New Mining Projects? Experiences from Finnmark, Norway.” The Extractive Industries and Society 3: 17–24. Pedersen, Steinar. 2007. “Lappekodisillen av 1751 – ‘Samene’ – Det Grenseløse Folket.” In Grenseoverskridende Reindrift Før og Etter 1905, edited by Else Grete Broderstad, Einar Niemi, and Ingrid Sommerseth, 9–20. Tromsø: Sámi dutkamiid guovddaš/Senter for Samiske Studier. Raitio, Kaisa, Christina Allard, and Rebecca Lawrence. 2020. “Mineral Extraction in Swedish Sápmi: The Regulatory Gap Between Sami Rights and Sweden’s Mining Permitting Practices.” Land Use Policies 99: 1–15. Rasmussen, Mattias Borg, and Christian Lund. 2018. “Reconfiguring Frontier Spaces: The Territorialization of Resource Control.” World Development 101: 388–99. https://​doi​.org/​ 10​.1016/​j​.worlddev​.2017​.01​.018. Reinert, H. 2018. “Notes from a Projected Sacrifice Zone.” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies  17(2): 597–617. https://​acme​-journal​.org/​index​.php/​acme/​article/​ view/​1592 Ryggvik, Helge, and Marie Smith-Solbakken. 1997. Norsk Oljehistorie. Bind 3. Oslo: Norsk Petroleumsforening. Skarin, A., and B. Åhman. 2014. “Do Human Activity and Infrastructure Disturb Domesticated Reindeer? The Need for the Reindeer’s Perspective.” Polar Biology 37: 1041–1054. https://​ doi​.org/​10​.1007/​s00300​-014​-1499​-5 Skarin, A., C. Nellemann, L. Rönnegård et al. 2015. “Wind Farm Construction Impacts Reindeer Migration and Movement Corridors.” Landscape Ecology 30: 1527–40. https://​ doi​.org/​10​.1007/​s10980​-015​-0210​-8 Steinberg, Philip E., Jeremy Tasch, Hannes Gerhardt, Adam Keul, and Elizabeth Nyman. 2015. Contesting the Arctic: Politics and Imaginaries in the Circumpolar North. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Steinveg, Beate. 2021. “Exponential Growth and New Agendas – a Comprehensive Review of the Arctic Conference Sphere.” Arctic Review 12 (June): 134–60. https://​doi​.org/​10​.23865/​ arctic​.v12​.3049. Steinveg, Beate, and Ingrid Agnete Medby. 2020. “Nordområdenarrativer Og Identitetsbygging i Nord.” Internasjonal Politikk 78: 535–44. (4 SE-Fokusartikkel-fagfellevurdert). https://​ doi​.org/​10​.23865/​intpol​.v78​.2380. The Arctic Circle. 2020. “Arctic-Global Indigenous Dialogue on Indigenous Guardianship and Self-Governance” [Video]. YouTube, 17 January. Retrieved from www​.youtube​.com/​ watch​?v​=​Dpbh4ED​_NPA​&​feature​=​youtu​.be NVE www​.nve​.no/​energi/​energisystem/​ kraftproduksjon/​hvor​-kommer​-strommen​-fra/​ (accessed 1 April 2023). Vistnes, Ingunn Ims, Philip Burgess, Svein Mathiesen, Christian Nellemann, Anders Oskal, and Johan Mathis Turi. 2009. “Reindeer Husbandry and Barents 2030: Impacts of Future Petroleum Development on Reindeer Husbandry in the Barents Region.” Report prepared for StatoilHydro. Kautokeino: The International Centre for Reindeer Husbandry.

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Wormdal, Bård, and Erik Lieungh. 2016. “Mener Rein Skyr Beiteområder Rundt Vindpark.” NRK Sápmi, 11 August. www​.nrk​.no/​tromsogfinnmark/​mener​-rein​-skyr​-beiteomrader​ -rundt​-vindpark​-1​.13082969 (accessed 16 February 2023). Zografos, Christos, and Paul Robbins. 2020. “Green Sacrifice Zones, or Why a Green New Deal Cannot Ignore the Cost Shifts of Just Transitions.” One Earth 3 (5): 543–46. https://​ doi​.org/​https://​doi​.org/​10​.1016/​j​.oneear​.2020​.10​.012.

11. The international development of food and agriculture: global food regimes, environmental change and new configurations of power Jostein Jakobsen

1. INTRODUCTION It has become increasingly commonplace to find assessments of the state of food and agriculture in the contemporary globalized world as being ‘broken.’ Central to such assessments is the configuration of a global food system that causes a planet of ‘stuffed and starved’ (Patel, 2012), where the provisioning of commercial global markets takes precedence over the provisioning of human needs in specific localities, and where pervasive social inequities are intertwined with escalating ecological degradations from, inter alia, chemical run-off, monocultural expansion, CO2 emissions and groundwater depletion. Indeed, the food we eat is ‘fossil food’: the globally dominant system for food provisioning is inseparable from ecological crises, driven as it is by the very matrix of fossil fuels and unsustainable resource extraction (Holden, White, Lange, & Oldfield, 2018). The global food system is characterized by a strong degree of corporate concentration, with a handful of giant transnational companies controlling much of the trade in such key aspects of agricultural production as seeds and agrochemicals, making decisions taken at the farm-level ultimately determined by decisions taken in boardrooms across the world (Clapp, 2021). If these defining traits of the world of food and agriculture were not already evident to the bare eye, the COVID-19 crisis put existing tendencies into sharp relief. It revealed such pernicious tendencies in the global food system as the extent to which starvation persists (UN, 2020), the fragility of convoluted supply chains, the sufferings of migrant farmworkers, the import dependence for basic foodstuffs in many parts of the world and the negative environmental effects of industrialized food production – effects that include rising zoonotic diseases (see Aguilar-Støen & Jakobsen, this book). Notably, the Scientific Group of the UN World Food Systems Summit (2021) calculated existent ‘externalities’ in the global food system in terms of ‘hidden costs’ to human and environmental sustainability, estimating that these externalities amount to as much, in monetary terms, as double that of world food consumption. While calculations like these undoubtably contribute to public awareness surrounding the detrimental effects for people and the planet of the currently dominant industrialized 170

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system for producing and consuming agricultural goods, they may nevertheless reinforce the economic valuation of human and non-human nature, a hegemonic tendency that arguably drives processes of commodification towards deepening unsustainability (e.g. Bigger et al., 2018; Gómez-Baggethun & Ruiz-Pérez, 2011; McAfee, 2012). Meanwhile, over the last decades, the unsustainability of the global food system has gained unprecedented attention among social movements pushing for more structural change using vocabularies less of economic valuation and more of socio-environmental justice. Especially prominent globally has been the transnational movement La Vía Campesina – ‘the peasant way’ – struggling for ‘food sovereignty’ since the early 1990s. In their analysis, the global food system is currently dominated by transnational agribusiness companies with the backing of international trade agreements while small-scale farmers are being pushed out of their livelihoods (Desmarais, 2007). The field of world food and agriculture, consequently, is currently politicized to an unprecedented extent. Closely aligned with the efforts of Vía Campesina and others pursuing socio-environmental justice we find streams of critical social science scholarship emphasizing the structural mechanisms shaping the international development of food and agriculture. Under the rubric of food regime analysis, a growing stream of scholarship argues for analyzing the incorporation of food and agriculture into capitalism and its environment-making logics to understand ‘how systems for the production, distribution and consumption of food are integrated in a manner that both reflects and supports global cycles of capital accumulation’ (Brown, 2020, p. 188). What this chapter seeks to do, then, is provide an overview of the food regime approach, as it has developed in recent years, and as it seeks to provide a world-historical frame of explanation for the international development of food and agriculture, with its ensuing patterns of agrarian and environmental transformation resulting in the ‘brokenness’ of our current conjuncture. While food regime analysis by no means is unique in addressing the contradictions, tensions and dynamics of the global food system in its currently capitalist shape, the approach has nevertheless drawn such interest, and offered such strong claims, that renowned agrarian studies scholar Henry Bernstein recently asserted that ‘it is impossible, or at least fruitless, to consider agrarian change in the world today without engaging with the issues and ideas generated by food regime analysis over the last 25 years’ (Bernstein, 2016, p. 637). With a particular emphasis on the so-called ‘third’ food regime ostensibly arising in the period of unprecedented globalization in agro-food since the late 1980s, recent debate has paid sustained attention to corporate power and influence, as well as the uneven ramifications of the global food regime for social justice and environmental transformations. Lately, evolving scholarship has increasingly acknowledged new configurations of power, with shifts towards the ‘South’ and the ‘East’ shaping an increasingly ‘multipolar’ or ‘polycentric’ food regime in the 21st century. This chapter traces current debates in food regime literature to take stock of these emergent dynamics. After having presented key characteristics of the food regime approach, the chapter outlines the vocal debate surrounding the ‘third’

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food regime and, thereafter, proceeds to explore recent scholarship pertaining to new configurations of power including the ‘rise’ of China in the realm of agro-food.

2.

THE FOOD REGIME APPROACH

Food regime analysis takes ‘food’s contribution to capital accumulation’ (McMichael, 2013a, p. 41) on a world scale as its point of orientation. In a foundational 1989 paper, Harriet Friedmann and Philip McMichael set out ‘to explore the role of agriculture in the development of the capitalist world system, and in the trajectory of the state system’ (Friedmann & McMichael, 1989, p. 93). A distinctly global approach, food regime analysis distinguished itself by foregrounding ‘struggles among social movements, capital, and states’ (Magnan, 2012, p. 370). Through holistic and relational analysis, it takes as its subject of study the historical making of the mechanisms, rules and institutions that govern the accumulation of capital in agriculture in the world system incorporating both production and circulation of food and agriculture, locating these processes within global patterns of developmental and environmental change (McMichael, 2009). Initially, food regime analysis combined French regulation theory and world systems theory, recognizing that food and agriculture had been accorded a relatively marginal position in ‘world systems and other approaches to history of global capital and shifts in inter-state power’ as well as in studies of class power in global capitalism (Friedmann, Daviron, & Allaire, 2016). The influence from regulation theory is evident in the emphasis on distinct accumulation regimes pivoting on configurations of ‘institutional forms,’ where the latter ‘make possible or problematic an accumulation regime, but they result from a very complex process combining social struggles, political deliberation and law enforcement’ (Boyer, 2007). Moreover, food regime analysis arguably embodies a variety of ‘end-of-Fordism theory’ emphasizing the restructuring of global capitalism from the 1970s economic crises onwards (Bonanno & Constance, 2008, p. 34). This restructuring, as is widely acknowledged, implied a momentous opening of ‘Third World’ countries’ economies through debt-incurred Structural Adjustment Programmes, coinciding with – and facilitating – the expansion of transnational companies. Yet, as Friedmann explains, food regime analysis does not use terms such as ‘Fordism’ in order to avoid becoming entangled in dynamics internal to specific (Euro-American) economies, aiming rather to study a globally emergent system (Friedmann et al., 2016). A prominent aspect of the food regime approach is the identification of a sequence of distinct food regimes, marked by relative stability, with periods of relative instability or crises in between. Relative stability has – particularly in earlier formulations – been defining, such as in Friedmann’s (1993, pp. 30‒31) view of a food regime as ‘the rule-governed structure of production and consumption on a world scale.’ Yet, insofar as the food regime approach focuses, centrally, on the intertwinement of food and capitalism specifically, stability is necessarily partial. Capitalist relations are both very stable ‘because of the perpetuum mobile of the pursuit of capital’ and

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simultaneously and for the very same reason highly destabilizing (Malm, 2018, p. 170). Food regimes are therefore inherently contradictory, containing co-existing tendencies driving towards destabilization and rupture as well as relative stability. While conceived as sequential, food regimes do not succeed each other linearly but in multi-layered patterns. As McMichael (2013a, p. 6) puts it: ‘While each regime has its institutional profile, it is the case that elements of former regimes carry over into successor regimes, in reformulated fashion.’ Distinct food regimes, then, center on cycles of capital accumulation in combination with the formation and crumbling of broader institutional legitimizing rules and relationships (Friedmann, 2005; Friedmann & McMichael, 1989; McMichael, 2013a). Gerardo Otero provides a detailed formulation: A food regime is a temporally specific dynamic in the global political economy of food. It is characterised by particular institutional structures, norms and unwritten rules around agriculture and food that are geographically and historically specific. These dynamics combine to create a qualitatively distinct ‘regime’ of capital-accumulation trends in agriculture and food, which finds its durability in the international linking of agrifood production and consumption relations in accordance with global capital accumulation trends more broadly. Each food regime is thus grounded in relatively stable (albeit typically unequal) international trade relations. (Otero, 2012, p. 283)

While the idea of a third food regime is contested (see below), there is substantial agreement about the prior sequence. The most common periodization sees a first food regime – centered on the British Empire – between 1870 and 1914. Following this, there was a transition period leading to the emergence of a post-WWII second food regime – centered on the US – which then dissolved with the early 1970s global food and oil crisis (Friedmann, 1993; Friedmann & McMichael, 1989). The two first food regimes thus assemble around singular world hegemons and the structuring of capital accumulation through these hegemons’ hold over international rules and institutions, trade and so on. Central to the food regime concept is the ‘subjection of international circuits of foodstuffs to a governing market price’ (McMichael, 2013a, p. 24). ‘Markets’ here are not autonomous devices but rather, in a Polanyian vein, embedded in institutional, social and political contexts including state policies (Friedmann & McMichael, 1989; Polanyi, 2001 [1944]). The determination of such market price evinces world-historical patterning. Following Winders et al. (2016, p. 74), the two first food regimes contrast as follows: ‘These food regimes differed regarding two fundamental aspects: the extent and quality of state intervention into the market (such as, tariffs and subsidies), and the direction of trade flows (for example, from colonies to the hegemons).’ Thus, in the first food regime, mercantilist policies of the British Empire shaped the world economy and brought flows of agricultural commodities from peripheries to the imperial core. These were simultaneously environment-making processes, generative of distinct geographical zones of agricultural specializations, specific forms of utilization of local ecological systems for the purpose of world-systemic trade. In the second food regime, nation states used supply management policies to protect their agricultural sectors. The US also used

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its dominance in the world economy to structure trade flows, increasingly from core nations to the peripheries – in particular in grains through US food aid (Friedmann, 1993). Through the ‘Green Revolution’ of agricultural standardization, mechanization and reliance on chemical inputs, in their turn built upon strong agro-corporate involvement in the entire food chain, the environment-making of the second food regime laid the foundations for the further intensification of ‘petrofarming’ – in other words, the underpinnings for the current patterns of environmentally unsustainable and socially unjust international development of food and agriculture.

3.

DEBATING THE THIRD FOOD REGIME

It is not, however, these historical questions that have fueled much of the debate surrounding food regime analysis. What is at stake, academically and politically, in this field is rather how we are to understand the present food regime – the global structuring of food and agriculture in the period since the 1980s. This is the period in which the international development of food and agriculture has taken on a new urgency publicly through struggles such as those of Vía Campesina. It is also the period in which environmental degradation has accelerated ensuing from an industrialized, mechanized and increasingly corporate-controlled mode of producing and consuming agricultural goods. The food regime approach distinguishes itself by ambitious, encompassing claims about the present. These claims are, however, disputed within the scholarship, with markedly differing views of the third, contemporary food regime, even disagreements as to whether and to what extent it actually exists. Exemplifying this, a recent contribution asserts that ‘the contours of the contemporary food regime remain undefined’ (Werner, 2019, p. 1). Undoubtedly, McMichael’s (2005, 2009, 2013a) ‘corporate food regime’ is the most influential conceptualization. In the corporate food regime, McMichael argues, there is a worldwide ‘broad dispossession of smallholders’ fueled by corporate-led expansion and agro-industrial intensification amidst detrimental environmental changes (McMichael, 2013a, p. 45). Ecological ramifications of the corporate food regime, the literature broadly asserts, include – to name but a few notable processes – the expansion of monocultures into new parts of the tropics amidst deforestation, land degradation and soil exhaustion; the substitution of genetic diversity for genetically patented seeds; the conversion of multifunctional agrarian livelihoods into elements of the ‘industrial grain-oilseed-livestock complex’ (Weis 2013) fueling rapidly rising meat consumption and, unintentionally, causing socio-ecological ruptures whereby zoonotic diseases are unleashed onto the world (see Aguilar-Støen and Jakobsen, this book). In McMichael’s conceptualization, there is a ‘fundamental contradiction’ (McMichael, 2013a, p. 60) between agro-food capital and the world’s ‘peasantry,’ holding that there is a ‘growing movement,’ opposing the workings of the global food regime, frequently identified as the transnational peasant and small-farmer movement La Vía Campesina. Going beyond the identification of increasing inci-

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dence of ‘food riots’ across the world – especially since the convergence of crises in 2007/8 (Bush & Martiniello, 2017) – we find that McMichael, in Polanyian terms, perceives Vía Campesina as representing a ‘counter-movement’ responding to the crisis tendencies of the present conjuncture (see also Jakobsen, 2018b). This is where we find food regime scholarship most overly politicized, aligning explicitly with Vía Campesina as an act of resistance to the dominant traits of the ‘brokenness’ of international development in food and agriculture. Unsurprisingly, this analytic has had its share of critique, including by Bernstein (2014, 2016), who finds it to represent a problematic ‘peasant turn’ – reminiscent of recurrent forms of ‘agrarian populism’ – that universalizes and homogenizes rural populations and their politics and, consequently, is unhelpful to understanding actually existing agrarian change. There is a common perception in relevant scholarship that the period after the collapse of the second food regime has seen transnational corporations emerging as ‘the major agents attempting to regulate agrofood conditions’ (Friedmann, 1993, p. 52). A key argument in the food regime literature has been in pointing to regulations that transcend the scale of the nation states. ‘Reflecting the organizational logic of global capitalism,’ Bill Pritchard (2009, p. 305) writes, ‘food regime theorists generally agree that any ultimate successor to the second food regime will arise in governance arrangements that transcend above and beyond the traditional domains of state sovereignty.’ Around the turn of the millennium, food regime analysts discussed the World Trade Organization (WTO) as a potential successor (McMichael, 2000). This scenario arguably never actualized, and the WTO has remained a case of ‘hegemonic contestation in the world food system’ (Pritchard, 2009, p. 306). Pritchard argues that unceasing contestation around the WTO is evidence of its inability to establish a hegemonic institutional order, unlike the prior food regimes. While arguably not becoming the hegemonic institutional node of a new food regime, the WTO and its Agreements on Agriculture can be seen as signaling a shift from a regime governed by national interests and institutions towards privatization and the ‘freeing’ of markets; in other words, the global shift towards neoliberalism (Weis, 2007). McMichael takes a strong view of these dynamics, arguing that the corporate food regime embodies the ways that corporate capital has become hegemonic in global capitalism through the subjugation of states and with the backing of international institutions that include the WTO, the World Bank and the IMF (McMichael, 2013a). While McMichael (2013a, pp. 44‒45) concedes that ‘the WTO itself is by no means hegemonic,’ he sees it as instrumental in consolidating neoliberal principles in world agriculture and thus ‘suggests a corporate hegemony insofar as neoliberal doctrine, in elevating “markets” over “states”, transforms the latter into explicit servants of the former.’ States, in this view, take a subordinate role as they ‘accommodate transnational capital’ (McMichael, 2010, p. 612). Meanwhile, other authors focus on the role of intellectual property rights in consolidating the third food regime. As Pechlaner (2012, p. 244) argues in the context of Latin America: ‘The third food regime would indeed seem to be constituted by a state-supported international structure of intellectual property rights that facilitates local-level expropriationism and agricultural production based on biotechnological “packages” produced by a highly concentrated

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corporate sector.’ The massive ongoing mega-mergers and acquisitions in the world of agribusiness, leading to the mentioned structure of pervasive corporate concentration, could not happen without this underlying structure of intellectual property rights (IPES-FOOD, 2017). While McMichael’s line of argument largely sidesteps the question of the state, there has been recent debate on how to go further in conceptualizing the role of the state in the structuring of the current conjuncture (Jakobsen, 2021). A number of contributions have discussed the role of the state in processes of neoliberalization (Jakobsen, 2018a; Pechlaner & Otero, 2010; Pritchard, Dixon, Hull, & Choithani, 2016; Werner, 2019), with others arguing that novel patterns of renewed state action in the current conjuncture signal a break with the corporate food regime (Belesky & Lawrence, 2018) with potentially transformative world-systemic implications for development and environment. Such ‘novel patterns,’ as the section below proceeds to explore, are perceived to emanate from new configurations of power in global capitalism.

4.

NEW CONFIGURATIONS OF POWER

As McMichael puts it, ‘[t]he “food regime” concept was a product of its time: of declining national regulation and rising “globalization”’ (McMichael, 2013a, p. 1). Such defining emphasis on ‘globalization’ is inseparable from the food regime approach’s distinctly global scale analytics, which has drawn increasing critique, including by rethinking questions of spatiality (see Jakobsen, 2021). Recent work has sought to interrogate new axes of power in the global agro-food system, departing from the spatiality of the North/South axis defining most of the earlier world within the food regime approach. McMichael writes: So far food regime analysis has focused on time and space coordinates associated with Anglo-American temporal and spatial relations – arguably because these coordinates have shaped recent world orders and/or how we think about such ordering. These coordinates are losing their salience in today’s multi-polar world, and, accordingly, the original food regime conception is undergoing a transformation as we experience transition and massive global uncertainty. (McMichael, 2013a, p. 7)

Several contributions to food regime scholarship in the last decade or so speak of ‘multipolar’ or ‘polycentric’ tendencies with significant world-systemic ramifications for developmental patterns in the realm of governance as well as for patterns of environmental change, in need of further scrutiny. Scholars note that ongoing global economic restructuring since the ‘convergence of crises’ of 2007/8 involves increasing integration of agro-food with feed, fuel and finance in an emergent unsustainable socio-environmental complex where countries in the Global South assume new positions (Borras, Franco, Isakson, Levidow, & Vervest, 2016; McMichael, 2012). It is, therefore, necessary to think beyond North/South binaries in conceptualizing current dynamics in food regime terms (Borras, McMichael, & Scoones, 2010; McMichael,

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2010; Weis, 2007, 2013). ‘Current trends,’ Borras et al. (2012, p. 862) write, ‘suggest multiple centres of power, and a more diverse range of key international actors within the governance structure of the food-energy complex, both sectorally and geopolitically.’ In terms of geopolitical dynamics, these authors as well as others (Cousins, Borras, Sauer, & Ye, 2018; McKay, Hall, & Liu, 2016) argue, we need more attention to emerging processes and tensions revolving around the rise of ‘BRICS’ countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) as well as numerous Middle Income Countries (MICS) – and the relations between all of these. Reworking key international institutions such as the WTO through novel coalitions of ‘rising powers,’ the BRICS certainly contribute to the tearing apart of previously dominant North/ South axes of power (Hopewell, 2016), although not necessarily by way of ‘Southern solidarity’ but possibly rather by advancing their own interests (Hopewell, 2021) in ways that may compound rather than challenge existing disparities in development not only in the realm of food and agriculture (Bond, 2015). With an eye for dynamics of multipolarity and concomitant ‘regionalizing’ processes in the global food regime (McMichael, 2013a; Wang, 2018), Jakobsen and Hansen (2020) for example analyze the emergence of an Asia-centered ‘meat complex’ where India and China both figure in key roles, including in terms of agribusiness capital. Precisely agribusiness capital emanating from outside of the erstwhile Western heartlands of the corporate food regime has been emphasized by others as well, such as Dixon (2014) dealing with Egypt, and Henderson (2021) on Gulf capital. Henderson even claims that ‘new capitals in the current system remain understudied,’ with a prevailing emphasis on the BRICS hiding from view other, smaller capitals (Henderson, 2021, p. 1). Based on these overarching tendencies, what more precisely do terms like ‘multipolarity’ and ‘polycentrism’ imply for the reconfiguration of hegemony in the current food regime conjuncture, with what ramifications for development and environment? Echoing broader debates about the role of BRICS and ‘rising powers’ in global capitalism, there are two main positions taken in current food regime scholarship. Some authors argue that, while the tendency towards multipolarity is a real empirical process, generating changing dynamics in the world of food and agriculture, it does not in fact entail that new powers have taken on hegemonic positions. Rather, what we find evidence of in emergent agro-capitals outside of the capitalist core is a continuation of Northern hegemony with the new agro-capitals, such as those in the Gulf region, as a ‘sub-imperium’ (Henderson, 2021; Tilzey, 2018). Others take more of an agnostic view on the issue of hegemonic shift, such as in the more descriptive view of an ‘Asian meat complex’ actualizing polycentric tendencies (Jakobsen & Hansen, 2020). Escher (2021) explores the current conjuncture as one of capitalist ‘diversity’ for a more nuanced understanding of the role of BRICS, arguing that: capitalist diversity stems largely from the historically embedded legacy of the agrarian question in the institutional foundations and class relations of each country that the dynamics of the agrifood systems influence their development trajectories in decisive ways and

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that the BRIC(S)-driven polycentric shifts in the contemporary food regime are crucial to the destiny of global capitalism. (Escher, 2021, p. 47)

McMichael, meanwhile, seems more convinced that hegemonic shifts are unfolding. ‘Evidently,’ he writes, ‘northern states are losing their centrality in organizing and dominating the food/fuel regime’ (McMichael, 2013a, p. 129). This is where the ‘re-emergence’ of China in the global political economy, and its role in challenging Euro-American hegemony, is especially central to current debate, where the following arguments have been made: First, China has adopted a neomercantilist foreign policy that aims to secure access to agro-food imports for domestic consumption. Second, the Chinese state has channeled sovereign wealth funds into state-owned and private enterprises to expand the international influence of its agribusiness industry and challenge transnational corporations’ control over agro-food production, processing, and distribution. Third, China has both entrenched, and reconfigured, the dominant relations of neoliberal market rule for its own strategic purposes. (Green, 2021, p. 4)

The role of the Chinese state is key here. Belesky and Lawrence (2018) argue – albeit based on relatively limited evidence – that the global political economy as such is characterized by ‘varieties of capitalism,’ demanding new analytical approaches to comprehend the roles of ‘rising powers’ in an increasingly multipolar agro-food order. On this basis, they argue that the strong involvement of the Chinese state – ostensibly concerned with issues of food security – in the recent rise of new agro-food and chemical companies from/in China substantially challenges the organizing principles of the corporate food regime. These developments, Belesky and Lawrence argue, point to another modality of capitalism than the neoliberal and corporate dominated prevalent modality – likely a form of ‘state capitalism’ and/ or ‘neomercantilism.’ The ‘neomercantilist’ tendency, drawing on an earlier paper by McMichael (2013b), has to do with the overriding of global trade arrangements such as the WTO for the purpose of national self-sufficiency, organized through the extensive operations of state-owned enterprises, thus potentially marking something of a rupture with dominant development governance arrangements. Speaking skeptically to this discussion, however, Henderson (2021) interjects that new agribusiness capitals arising in the Gulf region with heavy state involvement do not in fact show much evidence of a departure from the profit-motive driving Western agribusiness, nor a concern for ‘security’ that state direction may seem to imply. Similar assessments have also recently been made of Chinese state-owned enterprises in other sectors (Jones, 2020), inviting careful assessments of the actual degree to which ‘multipolarity’ of this kind breaks with patterns of action among more ‘established’ development actors (see also Hung, 2015). Characteristically, the most striking formulations about China’s role in the global food regime writ large come from McMichael. In a recent and already much-discussed paper, he puts forward an indicative – even purposely speculative – analysis of the possible emergence of a new, that is, fourth, food regime transitioning

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away from the corporate food regime (while also reliant on aspects of the neoliberal trade order), now to be centered on China (McMichael, 2020). Here, China’s Belt & Road Initiative (BRI) is viewed as evidence of China’s new food regime strategy, reliant on neomercantilist logics crucially concerned with issues of food security through strategies of direct land access and the overruling of WTO trade rules, for example in the context of feed grain trade for China’s sprawling industrial meat complex. A recent contribution takes this approach with its focus on neomercantilism further empirically by scrutinizing the activities of Chinese investments in Latin-America through the major company COFCO (Wesz Junior, Escher, & Fares, 2021). Another recent contribution takes a more grounded empirical approach to ‘an emerging Chinese food regime’ by looking at concomitant processes of agrarian transition in Cambodia (Green, 2021). Largely missing from these contributions centered on neomercantilism, however, is the question of imperialism. Critical agro-food scholarship on relations between China and Latin America has pointed to the emergence of new commodity complexes – with soy being a prominent example – intertwining the two regions in and through exploitative and uneven relations of resource control and dependency, leading some scholars to draw upon the notion of a ‘new imperialism’ (McKay, Alonso-Fradejas, Brent, Sauer, & Xu, 2016). Simultaneously, recent research has warned against exaggerated views of Chinese land grabs in Latin America and pointed to the similarities between Chinese companies’ actual practices and those of Western counterparts (Oliveira, 2018). Based on these critical arguments, we need to question whether the broad characterization of ‘China’ – as a relatively unitary actor – hides from view more than it reveals for our understanding of key patterns of change in the world of food and agriculture.1 Engaging with McMichael’s postulation of an emergent Chinese food regime, Yan Hairong criticizes the very notion of neomercantilism based on research among Chinese agro-investers in Africa, finding that profit motives among investors that largely serve host-countries’ domestic rather than Chinese markets blatantly contradicts the ‘neomercantilist thesis.’ So, in this view, the conceptualization of an unfolding food regime reorientation along a ‘Chinese’ pathway risks ignoring the ways that the deployment of capital and labor by actually existing firms is driven by the pursuit of profit, pitting them in competition with each other and in frequently uneasy relationship to the agency of the Chinese state. In short, ground realities reveal complicated state–capital relationships that may be clouded by aggregated concepts of ‘China’s role’ in the singular.2 Similarly, recent scholarship on China’s recent ‘rise’ in the global political economy has stressed its ‘fractured’ character: rather than a monolithic actor with a ‘grand strategy’ seeking geopolitical aims (à la the mentioned focus on the BRI), we find a multiplicity of contending profit-seeking capitalist actors pursuing their own interests amidst perhaps surprisingly permissive and fragmented state apparatuses (Jones & Hameiri, 2021). All of this calls for disaggregating the notion of a ‘Chinese state-led strategy’ to reveal variegation and constitutive capital–state–labor relations (Oliveira, McKay, & Liu, 2021). It also arguably calls for caution in assessing claims about the extent to which China’s role

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in emergent multipolar patterns of global governance involve rupture and transformative change in the fields of development and environment more broadly.

5. CONCLUSION If the global food system, as frequently recounted in public and scholarly accounts alike, is indeed fundamentally ‘broken’ and inseparable from social injustice and cascading ecological crises, it does not suffice to think of this as a matter of getting the ‘externalities’ right, pace what recent calculations made by UN agencies and others may indicate. What is needed – to understand no less than to change – against such ‘brokenness’ is unflinching attention to the mechanisms and key relations of global capitalism and its environment-making logics. And capitalism arguably shows distinct patterns of world-historical change in the realm of agro-food, patterns that can be analyzed in terms of a sequence of global food regimes. Offering a comprehensive, structural lens on the international development of food and agriculture, food regime analysis has emerged as an influential, yet disputed, framework. With macro-oriented structural frameworks comes also frequently dangers of simplification, rigidity and lacking nuance (see Bernstein 2016; Jakobsen 2021). The very breadth of the food regime approach and its partisan positionality vis-à-vis social movements such as Vía Campesina has also opened for several kinds of critique, as this chapter has recounted. While this chapter has outlined existing critiques pertaining to issues of state and of peasantry, aspects of the discussion above may also provide scope for rethinking received notions of the nature of another central actor in global capitalism and its environment-making logics: the (agro-food) corporation. As key decision makers for the trajectory of the international development of food and agriculture, the political economy of firms themselves – what goes on inside the ‘black box’ of the firm (see Barbesgaard, this book) – remains nevertheless understudied in the food regime literature. While in part understandable given the food regime approach’s predominantly macro-scale orientation, configurations of capital–labor relations in a global food regime defined, to a significant extent, by corporate control, can hardly be comprehended without attention to the workings of actually existing firms. Taking further into consideration ongoing patterns of transformation towards ‘multicentricity‘ in the contemporary food regime, as outlined in this chapter, a multitude of firms are emerging to take on new positions of relative power. The international development of food and agriculture and its consequences for environmental change in years to come will, in no small degree, be shaped by such emerging firms, their interactions with capitalist states and other regulating bodies, as well as variegated reactions among social movements, laborers and others embroiled in the global food system in the 21st century.

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NOTES 1. Similarly, while beyond the purview of this chapter, the methodological nationalism that shines through in discussions of the ‘rise’ of China in the world system (and, arguably, in the Food Regime approach as such) may warrant critical rethinking for making sense of global processes of capital accumulation. (See Arboleda 2020). 2. Transnational Institute (2021) ‘Global Food Regimes and China: Agrarian Conversations Episode 2’ at Global food regimes and China: Agrarian Conversations episode 2 – YouTube. www​.youtube​.com/​watch​?v​=​pJRGHXl3lTU. www​.youtube​.com/​watch​?v​=​ pJRGHXl3lTU

REFERENCES Arboleda, M. (2020). Planetary Mine: Territories of Extraction under Late Capitalism. London & New York: Verso. Belesky, P., & Lawrence, G. (2019). Chinese state capitalism and neomercantilism in the contemporary food regime: contradictions, continuity and change. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 46(6), 1119‒41. doi:10.1080/03066150.2018.1450242 Bernstein, H. (2014). Food sovereignty via the ‘peasant way’: a sceptical view. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 41(6), 1031‒1063. doi:10.1080/03066150.2013.852082 Bernstein, H. (2016). Agrarian political economy and modern world capitalism: the contributions of food regime analysis. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 43(3), 611‒647. doi:10.108 0/03066150.2015.1101456 Bigger, P., Dempsey, J., Asiyanbi, A., Kay, K., Lave, R., Mansfield, B., … Simon, G. (2018). Reflecting on neoliberal natures: an exchange. Environment and Planning, 1(1–2), 25‒75. doi:10.1177/2514848618776864 Bonanno, A., & Constance, D. H. (2008). Stories of Globalization: Transnational Corporations, Resistance, and the State. Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Bond, P. (2018). East-West/North-South – or Imperial-Subimperial? The BRICS, Global Governance and Capital Accumulation. Human Geography, 11(2), 1–18. https://​doi​.org/​10​ .1177/​194​2778618011​00201BRICS Borras, S. M., Franco, J. C., Gómez, S., Kay, C., & Spoor, M. (2012). Land grabbing in Latin America and the Caribbean. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 39(3‒4), 845‒872. doi:10.10 80/03066150.2012.679931 Borras, S. M., Franco, J. C., Isakson, S. R., Levidow, L., & Vervest, P. (2016). The rise of flex crops and commodities: implications for research. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 43(1), 93‒115. doi:10.1080/03066150.2015.1036417 Borras, S. M., McMichael, P., & Scoones, I. (2010). The politics of biofuels, land and agrarian change: editors’ introduction. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 37(4), 575‒592. doi:10.108 0/03066150.2010.512448 Boyer, R. (2007). Capitalism strikes back: why and what consequences for social sciences? Revue de la régulation. Capitalisme, institutions, pouvoirs (1). Brown, T. (2020). When food regimes become hegemonic: Agrarian India through a Gramscian lens. Journal of Agrarian Change, 20(1), 188‒206. doi: https://​doi​.org/​10​.1111/​joac​.12344 Bush, R., & Martiniello, G. (2017). Food riots and protest: agrarian modernizations and structural crises. World Development, 91, 193‒207. doi: https://​doi​.org/​10​.1016/​j​.worlddev​ .2016​.10​.017 Clapp, J. (2021). The problem with growing corporate concentration and power in the global food system. Nature Food, 2(6), 404‒408. doi:10.1038/s43016-021-00297-7

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Cousins, B., Borras, S. M., Sauer, S., & Ye, J. (2018). BRICS, middle-income countries (MICs), and global agrarian transformations: internal dynamics, regional trends, and international implications. Globalizations, 15(1), 1‒11. doi:10.1080/14747731.2018.1429104 Desmarais, A. A. (2007). La Vía Campesina: Globalization and the Power of Peasants. Halifax & London: Fernwood Publishing & Pluto Press. Dixon, M. (2014). The land grab, finance capital, and food regime restructuring: the case of Egypt. Review of African Political Economy, 41(140), 232‒248. doi:10.1080/03056244.2 013.831342 Escher, F. (2021). BRICS varieties of capitalism and food regime reordering: a comparative institutional analysis. Journal of Agrarian Change, 21(1), 46‒70. doi: https://​doi​.org/​10​ .1111/​joac​.12385 Friedmann, H. (1993). The political economy of food: a global crisis. New Left Review, 197(1), 29‒57. Friedmann, H. (2005). From colonialism to green capitalism: social movements and emergence of food regimes. In F. H. Buttel & P. McMichael (Eds), New Directions in the Sociology of Global Development (pp. 227‒264). Oxford: Elsevier. Friedmann, H., Daviron, B., & Allaire, G. (2016). ‘Political economists have been blinded by the apparent marginalization of land and food.’ An interview with Harriet Friedmann. Revue de la régulation. Capitalisme, institutions, pouvoirs (20). https://​journals​.openedition​ .org/​regulation/​12145 Friedmann, H., & McMichael, P. (1989). Agriculture and the state system: the rise and decline of national agricultures, 1870 to the present. Sociologia Ruralis, 29(2), 93‒117. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9523.1989.tb00360.x Gómez-Baggethun, E., & Ruiz-Pérez, M. (2011). Economic valuation and the commodification of ecosystem services. Progress in Physical Geography: Earth and Environment, 35(5), 613‒628. doi:10.1177/0309133311421708 Green, W. N. (2021). Placing Cambodia’s agrarian transition in an emerging Chinese food regime. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 49(6), 1249‒72. doi:10.1080/03066150.2021.19 23007 Henderson, C. (2022). The rise of Arab Gulf agro-capital: continuity and change in the corporate food regime. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 49(5), 1079‒1100. doi:10.1080/030661 50.2021.1888723 Holden, N. M., White, E. P., Lange, M. C., & Oldfield, T. L. (2018). Review of the sustainability of food systems and transition using the Internet of Food. NPJ Science of Food, 2(1), 18. doi:10.1038/s41538-018-0027-3 Hopewell, K. (2016). Breaking the WTO: How Emerging Powers Disrupted the Neoliberal Project. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Hopewell, K. (2022). Heroes of the developing world? Emerging powers in WTO agriculture negotiations and dispute settlement. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 49(3), 561‒584. doi:1 0.1080/03066150.2021.1873292 Hung, H.-f. (2015). The China Boom: Why China Will Not Rule the World. New York: Columbia University Press. IPES-FOOD. (2017). Too big to feed: exploring the impacts of mega-mergers, consolidation and concentration of power in the agri-food sector. www​.ipes​-food​.org/​images/​Reports/​ Concentration​_FullReport​.pdf Jakobsen, J. (2019). Neoliberalising the food regime ‘amongst its others’: the right to food and the state in India. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 46(6), 1219‒39. doi:10.1080/03066150 .2018.1449745 Jakobsen, J. (2018). Towards a Gramscian food regime analysis of India’s agrarian crisis: counter-movements, petrofarming and cheap nature. Geoforum, 90, 1‒10. doi: https://​doi​ .org/​10​.1016/​j​.geoforum​.2018​.01​.015

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Jakobsen, J. (2021). New food regime geographies: scale, state, labor. World Development, 145, 105523. doi: https://​doi​.org/​10​.1016/​j​.worlddev​.2021​.105523 Jakobsen, J., & Hansen, A. (2020). Geographies of meatification: an emerging Asian meat complex. Globalizations, 17(1), 93‒109. doi:10.1080/14747731.2019.1614723 Jones, L. (2020). Beyond China, Inc.: understanding Chinese companies. Transnational Institute. https://​longreads​.tni​.org/​stateofpower/​understanding​-chinese​-companies​-beyond​ -china​-inc (accessed 27 April 2022) Jones, L., & Hameiri, S. (2021). Fractured China: How State Transformation is Shaping China’s Rise. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Magnan, A. (2012). Food regimes. In J. M. Pilcher (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Food History (pp. 370‒388). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Malm, A. (2018). The Progress of this Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World. London: Verso. McAfee, K. (2012). The contradictory logic of global ecosystem services markets. Development and Change, 43(1), 105‒131. doi: https://​doi​.org/​10​.1111/​j​.1467​-7660​.2011​.01745​.x McKay, B. M., Alonso-Fradejas, A., Brent, Z. W., Sauer, S., & Xu, Y. (2016). China and Latin America: towards a new consensus of resource control? Third World Thematics: A TWQ Journal, 1(5), 592‒611. doi:10.1080/23802014.2016.1344564 McKay, B. M., Hall, R., & Liu, J. (2016). The rise of BRICS: implications for global agrarian transformation. Third World Thematics: A TWQ Journal, 1(5), 581‒591. doi:10.1080/238 02014.2016.1362323 McMichael, P. (2000). Global food politics. In F. Magdoff, J. B. Foster, & F. H. Buttel (Eds), Hungry for Profit: The Agribusiness Threat to Farmers, Food and the Environment (pp. 125–145). New York: Monthly Review Press. McMichael, P. (2005). Global development and the corporate food regime. In F. H. Buttel & P. McMichael (Eds), New Directions in the Sociology of Global Development (pp. 269‒303). Oxford: Elsevier Press. McMichael, P. (2009). A food regime genealogy. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 36(1), 139‒169. doi:10.1080/03066150902820354 McMichael, P. (2010). Agrofuels in the food regime. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 37(4), 609‒629. doi:10.1080/03066150.2010.512450 McMichael, P. (2012). The land grab and corporate food regime restructuring. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 39(3‒4), 681‒701. doi:10.1080/03066150.2012.661369 McMichael, P. (2013a). Food Regimes and Agrarian Questions. Rugby: Fernwood Publishing and Practical Action Publishing. McMichael, P. (2013b). Land grabbing as security mercantilism in international relations. Globalizations, 10(1), 47‒64. doi:10.1080/14747731.2013.760925 McMichael, P. (2020). Does China’s ‘going out’ strategy prefigure a new food regime? The Journal of Peasant Studies, 47(1), 116‒154. doi:10.1080/03066150.2019.1693368 Oliveira, G. d. L. T. (2018). Chinese land grabs in Brazil? Sinophobia and foreign investments in Brazilian soybean agribusiness. Globalizations, 15(1), 114‒133. doi:10.1080/14747731 .2017.1377374 Oliveira, G. d. L., McKay, B. M., & Liu, J. (2021). Beyond land grabs: new insights on land struggles and global agrarian change. Globalizations, 18(3), 321‒338. Otero, G. (2012). The neoliberal food regime in Latin America: state, agribusiness transnational corporations and biotechnology. Canadian Journal of Development Studies / Revue canadienne d’études du développement, 33(3), 282‒294. doi:10.1080/02255189.2012.711 747 Patel, R. (2012). Stuffed and Starved: From Farm to Fork: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System (2nd edn). London: Portobello Books. Pechlaner, G. (2012). Corporate Crops: Biotechnology, Agriculture, and the Struggle for Control. Austin: University of Texas Press.

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Pechlaner, G., & Otero, G. (2010). The neoliberal food regime: neoregulation and the new division of labor in North America. Rural Sociology, 75(2), 179‒208. doi:10.1111/j.1549-0831.2009.00006.x Polanyi, K. (2001 [1944]). The Great Tranformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Boston: Beacon Press. Pritchard, B. (2009). The long hangover from the second food regime: a world-historical interpretation of the collapse of the WTO Doha Round. Agriculture and Human Values, 26(4), 297–307. doi:10.1007/s10460-009-9216-7 Pritchard, B., Dixon, J., Hull, E., & Choithani, C. (2016). ‘Stepping back and moving in’: the role of the state in the contemporary food regime. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 43(3), 693‒710. doi:10.1080/03066150.2015.1136621 Tilzey, M. (2018). Political Ecology, Food Regimes, and Food Sovereignty: Crisis, Resistance, and Resilience. London: Palgrave Macmillan. UN. (2021). World Food Systems Summit. www​.un​.org/​en/​food​-systems​-summit UN. (2020). Global Report on Food Crises. www​.wfp​.org/​publications/​2020​-global​-report​ -food​-crises (accessed 27 April 2022) Wang, K.-c. (2018). East Asian food regimes: agrarian warriors, edamame beans and spatial topologies of food regimes in East Asia. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 45(4), 739‒756. doi:10.1080/03066150.2017.1324427 Weis, T. (2007). The Global Food Economy: The Battle for the Future of Farming. London, New York, Halifax and Winnipeg: Zed Books & Fernwood Publishing. Weis, T. (2013). The Ecological Hoofprint: The Global Burden of Industrial Livestock. New York & London: Zed Books. Werner, M. (2021). Placing the state in the contemporary food regime: uneven regulatory development in the Dominican Republic. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 48(1), 137‒58. doi:10.1080/03066150.2019.1638367 Wesz Junior, V. J., Escher, F., & Fares, T. M. (2021). Why and how is China reordering the food regime? The Brazil–China soy-meat complex and COFCO’s global strategy in the Southern Cone. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 1‒29. doi:10.1080/03066150.2021.1986 012 Winders, B., Heslin, A., Ross, G., Weksler, H., & Berry, S. (2016). Life after the regime: market instability with the fall of the US food regime. Agriculture and Human Values, 33(1), 73‒88. doi:10.1007/s10460-015-9596-9

12. Will development kill us? Globalized livestock production in the “Pandemic Era” Mariel Aguilar-Støen and Jostein Jakobsen

1. INTRODUCTION The Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) declared in 2020 that we are living in a “Pandemic Era” of zoonoses, that is, increasing disease transmission between animals and humans, and between wild and domestic animals. The frequency at which pandemics emerge has increased since the 1960s. Whereas forty years passed between two pandemic outbreaks in the first half of the 20th century (Spanish flu 1918‒1919 and Asian Flu 1957‒1958), the world experienced seven pandemic outbreaks during the following fifty years.1 The IPBES points to the trade and consumption of wild animals, agricultural expansion and industrial meat production as the key interlinked global changes driving pandemics. Leading experts associated with IPBES warn that future pandemics will emerge more often, spread more rapidly, and destroy more lives and economies, unless there is transformative change in high-risk activities like globalized industrial livestock production. It is estimated that over 60% of human pathogens have crossed from animals to humans (Molyneux et al. 2011) and the International Organization for Animal Health estimates that 60% of all infectious diseases in humans are zoonotic. Zoonoses cause 2.5 billion cases of illness each year and 2.7 million deaths in humans (The Meat Atlas 2021). Our promiscuous relations with microorganisms, and with zoonoses, have accompanied us throughout human history (Kelly and Nading 2019), and particularly since we began rearing livestock for food (Scott 2017). However, the pace at which new zoonotic diseases with epidemic and pandemic potential emerge has indeed increased in the last sixty years. The risk of disease transmission is also high between domestic animals. For example, outbreaks of the avian flu, an infectious type of influenza that spreads among birds and in some cases from birds to pigs, are a cause of concern for two reasons. Domestic poultry flocks are especially vulnerable to infections, and outbreaks can rapidly result in epidemics among domestic bird populations. Between 2014 and 2015, 51 million birds were culled in the USA alone in the largest outbreak of avian influenza in recorded history. According to the European Centre for Disease 185

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Prevention and Control, 22.9 million poultry were culled to prevent the spreading of a highly pathogenic avian influenza in 2020‒2021. Avian flu can in other words have devastating economic consequences for the industry. Some strains of avian flu can also be passed to humans, and public health authorities are aware of the potential of the virus to mutate into varieties capable of causing human disease. Indeed, scientific and global public health authorities consider avian flu to be one of the most probable risks of a pandemic in the future. This is largely due to human proximity to poultry and increased urbanization and human mobility (Taubenberger et al. 2007; Brenner and Ghosh 2022). There is a high threat of a new influenza pandemic emerging soon. The conditions under which meat production and consumption are organized in late capitalism play a central role in the transmission to humans, as well as in the transmission of diseases between wild and domestic animals. In this chapter, we illuminate the links between livestock production and pandemics. We argue that it is important to understand pandemics and epidemics not only as public health problems but as processes constituted by interlinked ecological, economic and political dynamics that respond to the way in which capital organizes nature (cf. Moore 2015). We conceptualize epidemics and pandemics as the expression of bundles of relations dealing with technology, labor, ecology and finance operating at different scales. This approach does not posit a direct causal relationship between meat production and pandemics. Instead, we argue that there is a relational web between capitalist meat production and consumption that conjointly facilitate the outbreak of disease. Industrial meat production and interrelated industrial agriculture contribute to breaking the barriers that kept humans and animal diseases separated, as well as bringing domestic animals more frequently into contact with diseases that are common in wild animals, through the encroachment of forests and the expansion of industrial activities and infrastructure into forest margins. Extensive human presence in wildlife habitats, the destruction of such habitats, the extremely high number of domestic animals reared in concentrated operations usually located close to urban areas, and increased human mobility combine to make the perfect storm for the transmission of diseases from animals to humans (The Meat Atlas 2021). While mainstream discourse, and quite a significant portion of the scientific community, holds small-scale livestock systems as primarily responsible for zoonotic disease emergence, we argue that industrialized meat production, of pork and poultry, creates the conditions for the emergence and rapid evolution of zoonotic diseases with pandemic potential. It does this by promoting novel interspecies relations and ecologies created by homogenization, concentration and integration (see Wallace 2016; Wallace et al. 2020; Davis 2005; Weis 2013; Brenner and Ghosh 2022). The chapter starts with a section challenging the commonly held conception that associates small-scale farming and mixed farming systems with zoonoses and pandemics. The second part of the chapter discusses the links between industrialized meat production and pathogenic virus circulation. The third part examines the ecology of the pandemic–industrial meat nexus. In the conclusion, we suggest that although industrial livestock production directly contributes to the emergence of

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infectious diseases with pandemic potential, little is being done by governments, financial institutions and corporations to modify this trend.

2.

DISLOCATING THE EPICENTER OF PANDEMICS

Small farmer and peasant production systems have been the target of development interventions for decades. Development interventions have sought to “fix” and rearrange peasants’ and small farmers’ agricultural practices to increase productivity and efficiency, sometimes with disastrous consequences (Escobar 2011; Ferguson 2013). The origin of pandemics has been attributed by some influenza experts to the mixed swine and poultry agriculture of south China (see Davis 2005; Fearnley 2020b) and consequently numerous interventions target, again, small farmer and peasant production systems, now targeting pandemic threats through biosecurity and animal welfare. Lyle Fearnley suggests that the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) incorporated pandemic preparedness into the idiom of rural development precisely through the concept of biosecurity. The fight against zoonoses and pandemics was in this way incorporated into rural development programs across developing countries. New rural development initiatives directed at livestock production aim at restructuring the poultry sector through processes of integration and standardization closely associated with larger-scale, capital-intensive farming (Fearnley 2020b: 67‒73). The World Health Organization traced both the 1957 and 1968 influenza pandemics to a source somewhere in China, and based on that, virologists Shortridge and Stuart-Harris suggested the idea of an epicenter of influenza pandemics in the 1980s. This notion of an epicenter, as suggested by these and other virologists, involves the identification of both an ecological and a geographical source of a pathogen that causes pandemics (Fearnley 2020a). The ecological component within this idea was described as the agrarian landscapes of southern China, the ecology of which would facilitate the exchange of viruses between animals and humans. According to the “epicenter” idea, the complex ecosystem of rice paddies, waterways and poultry and pig farms, densely populated by humans, was an ideal place for viruses to be interchanged between different host species (Fearnley 2020b). The ideas of such an epicenter and its agro-ecological implications are powerful among virologists and other scientists, despite recent outbreaks of avian flu originating in several other locations, including the USA, the Netherlands and Canada (Davis 2005: 81‒95). Further, new historical research has dismantled the hypothesis of the Spanish flu originating in Asia, placing its origin rather in Haskell County, Kansas (Barry 2004). The quantity of meat produced in the world today has more than quadrupled since 1961. During the same period, the geography of meat production has also changed significantly. Whereas Europe and North America dominated meat production in the 1960s, Asia is presently leading, accounting for around 45% of total meat production. However, despite the shift in the dominant role in meat production of Asia over Europe and North America, total output has increased in both locations (Ritchie and Roser 2017). The world produced 44.9 million metric tons of meat in 1960,

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increasing to over 200 million metric tons by 2002, and 340 million tons by 2018, with the FAO projecting that global meat supply will reach 374 million tons by 2030. Global meat production is led mainly by growth in poultry production. While pork production as percentage of total meat production has remained stable (35%), beef is clearly declining, from 39% in 1961 to 20% in 2018, while chicken has more than tripled from 11% to 34% of total meat production during the same period (OECD/ FAO 2021). The main bulk of the total production is projected to come from poultry production in China, Brazil and the United States, but pork will also increase if, as estimated by the FAO (OECD/FAO 2021), China, the Philippines and Vietnam recover from the 2019 outbreak of African Swine Fever. Global consumption of meat is also estimated to increase over the next decade. This increase will come mainly from poultry consumption but for different reasons in different parts of the world. In lower income countries, higher poultry consumption is in part explained by price: poultry is cheaper than other meats. In high-income countries, poultry consumption is to a certain degree associated with increased preference for white meats perceived as healthier food choices. Most increases in meat consumption will occur in low and lower-middle income countries, driven significantly by urbanization, income and population growth, especially so in the case of poultry. Yet, per capita consumption of meat will level off in high-income countries due to changing consumer preferences, aging and slower population growth and a move towards consumption of higher-value meat cuts (OECD/FAO 2021). Livestock production and meat consumption have, as suggested above, undergone dramatic changes over the past fifty years. Large-scale livestock production accounts for over 80% of total production increase, and most increases in meat consumption are happening in low and lower-middle income countries. Poultry and pork currently consumed in the world is produced in large-scale and vertically integrated operations and not in small-scale or peasant agro-ecologies. Furthermore, livestock production has been dislocated from agriculture, creating a global geography where grain and feed production are spatially separated from livestock production (Davis 2005; Weis 2013). In the next section, we explain the political economy of a transition by way of which the meat supply chain has transmuted into a meat-virus supply chain. With “meat-virus supply chain” we want to signal the interconnectedness between meat production and virus emergence. In the following section, we will discuss the ecology of the pandemic–industrial meat nexus.

3.

INDUSTRIALIZED MEAT PRODUCTION AND THE MEAT-VIRUS SUPPLY CHAIN

During the second half of the 20th century, a remarkable change occurred in meat production in the USA. Livestock went from being reared in thousands of family owned farms to industrial operations that resemble animal factories where thousands and thousands of animals are confined. Animals were no longer killed in slaughterhouses owned by several local firms but in concentrated and massive animal slaughter

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operations.2 The so-called “Tyson model” emerged. An entrepreneur and middleman in the chicken business in the US South in the 1930s, John Tyson pioneered a shift from initially transporting chicken to actively incorporating the various segments of the supply chain, developing a novel model of industrial meat production characterized by consolidation and vertical integration (Striffler 2005: 38‒39). In this model, control and ownerships of many of the processes in the commodity production chain are integrated and owned by a handful of companies, making previously independent segments of the supply chain, such as transportation firms, obsolete. This model has turned into the worldwide norm first in poultry and then in pork, increasingly shifting its geographical center from the North to the South (see e.g., Winders and Ransom 2019). The pattern has now emerged of a global industry in which a small number of meat production business groups own a monopoly of meat processing plants, slaughterhouses, transport companies, distribution operations as well as the animals involved. Farmers are subcontracted to raise the animals with inputs also provided by big companies. In the 2000s especially, this ascendant model has become increasingly concentrated horizontally as well, with frequent acquisitions and mergers among leading and second tier firms (Sharma 2018). Tyson Foods is presently the world’s second largest meat processing company, after the Brazilian company JBS S.A. The integration of processes involved in industrial meat production goes further than the raising, slaughtering and processing of animals. Industrial meat production also involves the decoupling of animal husbandry from the nature that surrounds it. This means that soy and maize are used to prepare animal feed produced in locations that are different from where animals are raised. Geographer Tony Weis conceptualizes modern meat production as an industrial grain–oilseed–livestock complex of integrated husbandry and cultivation of plants (Weis 2013). Animal meat and byproducts amount to a quarter of international agricultural trade. Grain production worldwide is dominated by feed crops. The industrial grain–oilseed–livestock complex occupies 30% of all arable land globally, amounting to a massive “hoofprint” with implications for climate, biodiversity and food security (Weis 2013). Land used for beef and soy production are calculated by the WWF as the two leading causes of tropical deforestation, which in turn is a key driver for zoonotic spillovers and for the “Pandemic Era,” as the IPBES (2020) notes. In the 1990s two important geopolitical changes occurred that transformed global meat production. The first is that China opened its economy to foreign direct investments welcoming international capital and industry. With further support from the Chinese state, in what Mindi Schneider (2017) calls an “industrial meat regime” centered on a state–agribusiness alliance, the industrialization of meat production in the country advanced quickly. The number of farms producing meat fell considerably between 1991 and 2009, while the number of larger farms increased notably (Oliveira and Schneider 2016). Between 1991 and 2009 the number of pigs in Chinese meat factories increased from 945 per farm to 8,389. The second geopolitical change is that Brazil and Argentina implemented a series of neoliberal policy measures that attracted an influx of international capital to soy production. Transnational

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companies started to buy and concentrate land where soy was already produced and domestic companies expanded into areas without previous cultivation of soy, like the Cerrado region (a vast area of savannah) in Brazil. Fifty-seven percent of global soy production happens in South America today and East Asia is the world’s largest market for soy, forming what some scholars call the “soybean nexus” in which Chinese firms play dominating roles, arguably reproducing “core–periphery relations” (Giraudo 2020). The expansion of industrialized agriculture, driven significantly by the industrial grain–oilseed–livestock complex, has displaced small-scale farmers, who are frequently forced to migrate to nearby cities, or to foreign countries. Migrants to nearby cities tend to move to marginal neighborhoods lacking basic services such as water, health services, public transportation, and so on (UN Habitat 2020). The exodus of people from Central America’s countryside is illustrative of this context. Central America is the second-fastest urbanizing region in the world, and its urban population is expected to double by 2050. Today, one out of four urban residents live in informal settlements lacking access to improved sanitation and other basic services (Augustin et al. 2017). Migration from Central American countries to the USA increased at the end of the 1990s. The number of people displaced by industrial agriculture and trying to find means to survive abroad is now higher than what it was during the period in which Central American countries were submerged in bloody armed conflicts and civil wars. Many migrants end up working in meatpacking and meat processing plants. While in the past, meatpacking in the USA was predominantly an urban industry relying heavily on immigrant men of diverse backgrounds, during the last decades the industry shifted production to rural areas. In areas such as the USA’s South, poultry processing was, since its initiation in the 1940s, based in rural localities of abiding poverty, reliant on Afro-American women and men, but the industry in this part of the country has turned to immigrant labor as well (Striffler 2005). Rural areas had weaker traditions of unionizing and weaker unions, which has meant that workers can be exposed to more exploitative working conditions (Schwartzman 2013). At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, meatpacking plants the world over were revealed as hotspots for viral transmission (Middleton et al. 2020).3 Policy changes at national and international levels and free trade agreements meant to stimulate the production of cheap meat, greased by substantial lobbying from leading meat firms (Sharma 2018), as well as techno-scientific development and improved infrastructure, have facilitated all the above changes. So has another key aspect of economic globalization or, in Moore’s (2015) terms, of capital’s specific way of organizing nature in the 21st century: finance. Writing shortly after the coronavirus turned into a pandemic, Wallace et al. (2020) warned against “typical orientalism” in the prevalent popular focus on Chinese wet markets, similar to scientific emphasis on pandemic “epicenters.”4 Rather, we need to focus on the “relational geographies” in which wet markets, or specific Amazonian cattle ranches for that matter, are immersed (Wallace et al. 2020; see also Brenner and Ghosh 2022). Thinking in terms of relational geographies allows for revealing that financial

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centers like New York, London and Hong Kong, are enmeshed in the processes that create the conditions of possibility for the emergence of zoonotic diseases anywhere in the world in which industrial meat production takes place. Both wet markets and financial centers become, under relational lenses, hotspots of pandemic production. To illustrate, Wallace et al. (2020) describe how US private equity investment firm Goldman Sachs took majority stock in Shanghai Investment and Development, which is part of the WH Group that bought Smithfield Foods in 2013, as well as buying up poultry and pork farms in Chinese districts neighboring Wuhan. This entrance of global finance capital into Chinese meat production was facilitated by the country’s FDI policies in which the opening of the agricultural economy was spearheaded by industrial zones such as the intensive poultry industry powerhouse Guangdong: the very same district that became an ‘epicenter’ of the lethal H5N1 avian flu outbreak in 1997 (Wallace 2016: 69‒71). The Brazilian world-leading meat firm JBS, which is documented to be sourcing from cattle ranches involving extensive illicit deforestation and labor rights abuses, has significant shareholder investments from financial institutions such as Deutsche Bank and Barclays (Monteiro and Van Der Merk 2021). Other nodes in the industrial grain–oilseed–livestock complex are also increasingly shaped by financial actors and instruments, such that commodity trading firms that hold oligopolistic control over the global grain trade, including notably oilseed and maize for livestock feed, engage in financial activities like speculation on commodity futures (Clapp and Isakson 2018: 116‒117). What we call “the meat-virus supply chain” can be seen to encompass multiple integrated socio-material elements and processes, ranging from the destruction of forested tropical habitats for the raising of cattle, through the contested and sometimes violently obstructed pathways of migratory laborers, and all the way to the upper echelons of finance capital. Martín Arboleda (2020: 5) describes mining in late capitalism as an integrated planetary process that “vastly transcends the territoriality of extraction and wholly blends into the circulatory system of capital, which now transverses the entire geography of the earth.” Arboleda suggests moving away from the idea of “the ‘global’ as the proverbial blue marble” to thinking instead of these as “planetary” processes “in which the earth reemerges as an unfamiliar place riddled with eerie, destructive, and menacing forces” (Arboleda 2020: 15). These seem uncannily fitting terms for the meat-virus supply chain. As much as it does not suffice that we study specific spaces of mineral extraction for understanding the complex socio-material architecture of the “planetary mine,” neither does it suffice to focus on spaces of deforestation, slaughter or meat processing to understand the meat-virus supply chain that brings together people, wild and domestic animals and microbes in new and transformative ways. Moreover, the supply chain breaches alleged rural–urban divides. Transportation and logistics systems involve roads and railways linking spaces of land expansion for meat and soy production to airports and domestic spaces of consumption, fragmenting potentially pathogen-hosting forests, while generating semi-urban sprawl (Malm 2020; Wallace et al. 2020; Brenner and Ghosh 2022). In

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lower and middle-income countries, where the bulk of meat consumption rise is projected to take place, accelerated commodity flows are closely linked to urbanization. Urbanization is a defining trend in low income and lower-middle income countries around the world urban growth is accelerating at a high pace and extreme poverty is projected to concentrate in marginal urban areas in poorer parts of the world by 2030 (Seto et al. 2012). Massive economic disparities have emerged in urban centers mirrored by profound health inequalities. Urbanization of low-income countries raises new health challenges not only for poor countries, but for all societies around the world (Alirol et al. 2011). In the following section, we examine the ecology of the pandemic–industrial meat nexus.

4.

THE ECOLOGY OF THE PANDEMIC–INDUSTRIAL MEAT NEXUS

Viruses are the ultimate biological expression of liminality, in a constant state of life/no life.5 They are in persistent limbo until they penetrate a living organism and reorganize their genetic material to survive at the expense of the host. Viruses are primarily nano-microscopic structures of interaction moving constantly between organisms, occasionally crossing between species by developing the ability to spread to a new host that was not previously exposed or susceptible. This phenomenon is known as spillover and is the key mechanism behind zoonosis. Spillover involves increased exposure to a particular virus and/or the acquisition of genetic variation allowing the virus to overcome barriers to infection in the new host (Fermin 2018). During the last thirty years spillover between species, that is the number of virus that cross the species barrier, have increased, as we mention in the introduction. The key causal ecological link between zoonoses and meat production has three axes. First are viruses that emerge within industrial operations, which can spill over to humans. Second are viruses that spill over to humans via their contact with wildlife. The third axis consists of viruses spreading from wild to domestic animals and onwards to humans. The case of the swine flu pandemic of 2009 illustrates the first axis. The virus that caused the swine flu pandemic originated in and around one of Smithfield’s pork factories in Mexico. Researchers investigating the origin of the virus documented that the virus came from and was confined to a very small geographical area in Mexico, and that it had been there for ten years before one strain developed the capacity to infect humans (Mena et al. 2016). The virus that caused the swine flu pandemic was a genetic cocktail, with some parts that were unknown to exist in any part of the world, some parts that came from a strain that has been circulating in Europe and Asia for years and another that has been circulating in North America. Mena and colleagues documented that the latter strain originated from the blending of an avian, a human and a swine virus (Mena et al. 2016). The virus that caused the swine flu was, in other words, the result of a 10-year process of nature’s trial and error that resulted in a strain that could jump to

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humans. The “original virus” still exists in Mexico. An interesting question is how do viruses that circulate among pigs in Europe meet viruses that circulate in North America and viruses that were native to Mexico? Insofar as the meat industry continues to contribute to mix influenza strains from different geographical locations, the next pandemic might originate in areas where industrial meat production takes place. Further, Smithfield pig factories in Mexico are located very close to urban areas, contributing to creating the conditions of possibility for epidemic and pandemic diffusion. COVID-19 illustrates the second axis. Many early cases of the SARS-CoV-2 virus were connected to a wet market in Wuhan, China, probably housing the animal source from which the virus jumped to humans. The virus that infected humans is similar to SARS-CoV occurring naturally in bats, and scientists believe that bats serve as a reservoir host for the progenitor of the virus that caused the latest pandemic. Pangolins, illegally imported into Guangdong province in China, also have coronaviruses similar to SARS-CoV-2. It is unclear if the virus jumped from bats to pangolins and onwards to humans, but the viruses in the three species are similar. China’s industrial meat production has also expanded to neighboring countries, restructuring agricultural sectors. Eating “exotic” wildlife like pangolins is not a traditional practice in China, rather a practice among upper classes that has expanded in the country since the 1990s (see Malm 2020). The economic opening of the country and the rise of the middle class has created an enormous market for the consumption of goods and services signalizing wealth and status. Displaced small-scale farmers are forced to find new livelihoods, and animals once hunted and consumed for subsistence by rural folks have turned into “exotic” commodities that can be sold in nearby wet markets. Such “exotic” animals are now bred in captivity to be sold as food to better-off consumers (Akram-Lodhi 2021). But small-scale farmers also supplement their livelihoods with domestic animals that are consumed as food, like pigs and poultry and higher-value domestic animals that are not traditionally eaten as food but for which a food market exists, like dogs and cats (Akram-Lodhi 2021). The conditions of possibility for spillovers between wild and domestic animals and humans are thus created where large-scale meat production displaces small-scale agriculture, and in live animal markets in urban areas. The highly pathogenic avian influenza virus H5N1, the world’s largest pandemic threat, illustrates the third axis. H5N1 occurs naturally in wild birds and occasionally spills over to domestic poultry. In 1997 this virus infected 18 people, six of whom died, in a Hong Kong outbreak linked to poultry factories. Culling 1.5 million chicken prevented the further spread of the infection. But between 2003 and 2006, the virus spread to parts of Asia and Africa causing outbreaks in birds and sporadic death of humans. In 2007, wild geese were found dead around the Poyang Lake in China were revealed to be infected with H5N1. Poyang Lake, the largest freshwater body in China and a significant congregation site for waterfowl, with surrounding rice fields and poultry grazing, created an overlap between wild waterbirds and domestic poultry. Reports of healthy wild ducks at Poyang Lake highlight the potential of migratory birds transmitting the virus outside of China (Takekawa et al. 2010).

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H5N1 has been reported in countries in the Middle East, Russia and Canada in recent years, and in 2021 it spread rapidly across Europe in the largest outbreak the subcontinent has seen to date, affecting both wild birds and commercial poultry operations in numerous countries. Between 2003 and 2020, WHO has reported 862 infections of H5N1 in 17 countries with the death of 455 people. Urban areas also play an important role in the ecology of the pandemic–meat nexus and in the spread of zoonoses. As shown by the COVID-19 pandemic, cities can become epicenters of disease transmission. The SARS-CoV-2 virus spread to virtually all parts of the world, first, among globally connected cities and further through community transmission from the city to the countryside (UN Habitat 2020). There is a high risk of disease transmission in large urban populations particularly in cities marked by high inequality with varied access to health services, increased rates of contact due to high population density and, moreover, increased mobility. Population density affects disease spread, particularly transmission via respiratory and fecal-oral routes. The WHO estimates that there are almost 140 million people in urban areas with no access to safe drinking water, and more than 600 million urban dwellers without access to adequate sanitation (WHO, UNICEF 2008). Infections affect, in all likelihood, poor and marginal urban areas first, propagating thereafter to more affluent neighborhoods and tourist areas, via the people from poorer parts of the city who work in wealthier neighborhoods and the service sector in tourist areas. Cities are perfect incubators where all the conditions are met for outbreaks to occur. In a globalized world, cities are also gateways for the worldwide spread of infections (Alirol et al. 2011). In the last 30 years, global travel has escalated in speed, distance and volume, international tourist arrivals increased from 25.3 million in 1950 to 924 million in 2008 (UNWTO 2009). Urban epidemics can reach unprecedented scales and quickly become uncontrollable, as the 2009 swine flu pandemic demonstrated. Additionally, the expansion of intensive livestock production closer to urban centers will create serious problems including increases in land and water pollution and effects on the health of both humans and animals (McDermott et al. 2010).

5. CONCLUSION “The Pandemic Era” is upon us. Nevertheless, few indications so far point to any substantial willingness among state governments, international organizations or other dominant actors in the developmental–environmental apparatus to bring about effectual changes to the key relations driving pandemics. Global deforestation continued unabated during the COVID-19 crisis (Céspedes et al. 2022). Meanwhile, globalized industrial meat production barely surfaces in mainstream discourse as an intrinsic aspect of increasing zoonotic disease emergence. Hyper-intensification of industrial dynamics is being sought to tackle zoonoses, as witnessed in planned mega swine farms in China. It would therefore not be surprising if sanctions for and bans on small-scale farming operations are introduced in coming years.

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As we have shown in this chapter, the tendency to fixate on pandemic “epicenters” has been intimately connected to the fixation of culpability on the least powerful actors in the global agro-food system. Shortly after the global spread of COVID-19 began, these tendencies came to the fore in countries like China and Vietnam hitting down upon wet markets and “exotic” animal trade. While pursuing a path that development initiatives worldwide have repeatedly taken in the pursuit of “fixes,” sometimes with disastrous consequences for local populations, such responses also do not seem interested in implicating the industrial meat production system. The global meat industry, as we have shown in this chapter, constitutes a specific way of organizing nature (cf. Moore 2015) that brings socio-material processes dealing with technology, labor, ecology and finance operating at different scales together such that zoonotic outbreak and pandemic occurrence is made possible and even probable. While the key relations of industrial meat production are interwoven in the web of life in complex ways across planetary patterns, some decisions taken by certain actors are more effectual than others (see Malm 2018). Examining the leading firms (cf. Barbesgaard, this book) in globalized meat production appears, in such regard, a fitting focus for furthering our understanding of the continuation of the Pandemic Era. We also need more nuanced concepts within the social sciences to disentangle the complex global relations implicated in the meat production–virus circulation nexus. As a recent assessment within the interdisciplinary field of development and environment holds for the case of COVID-19, we need “analysis in terms of both structural political economies and ecologies and of people’s interactions with unruly, non-equilibrium, non-human natures” (Leach et al. 2021: 2). To further our understanding of the meat production–virus circulation nexus, similarly, we need conjoined attention to political economic forces and the entanglements of humans and non-human beings, both animals and viruses. This is developing novel interspecies relationships unfolding with unknown consequences for our planetary future.

NOTES 1.

Hong Kong flu 1968‒1970; HIV/AIDS ongoing since 1981; SARS 2002‒2003; swine flu 2009‒2010; MERS 2012; Ebola 2014‒2016; and the ongoing COVID-19. 2. While these developments accelerated and intensified after WWII, parts of the US meat industry such as the Chicago stockyards were already highly complex, large scale and corporate concentrated in the late 19th century (Cronon 1991). 3. It is thus interesting to note that Tyson Foods’ recent strategy of a massive USD 1.3 billion drive towards automation of meatpacking plants is expressed in terms that include “health concerns during the COVID-19 pandemic” (Reuters 2021). 4. During the COVID-19 pandemic, such prevalent fixation on Chinese wet markets arguably also led to a form of “alimentary xenophobia” directed against Asian foodways (see Chuvileva et al. 2020). 5. The work of biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela is interesting in the discussion of how to define life, to them life is autopoiesis. In their work, Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living, Maturana and Varela emphasize the dynamic

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nature of life: “living systems are units of interactions; they exist in an environment. From a purely biological point of view they cannot be understood independently of that part of the niche with which they interact. The niche cannot either be defined independently of the living system that interacts with it. From this perspective life/no life is linked, exists together and evolve in a dynamic way. Life so understood is an evolutionary process by way of which organisms emerge as units of interaction. But, too in their perspective the living is capable of self-maintenance, is defined by interactions at all levels (proteins, cells, acids, organs etc.) and interact with the environment integrating its information into their own structure” (p. 9). Maturana and Varela’s work has been also widely criticized but as a biological concept it allows to look at life from a more holistic perspective.

REFERENCES Akram-Lodhi, A.H. 2021. Contemporary pathogens and the capitalist world food system, Canadian Journal of Development Studies / Revue canadienne d’études du développement, 42(1‒2): 18‒27, doi: 10.1080/02255189.2020.1834361 Alirol, E., Getaz, L., Stoll, B., Chappuis, F. and Loutan, L. 2011. Urbanisation and infectious diseases in a globalised world. The Lancet Infectious Diseases, 11(2): 131‒141. Arboleda, Martín. 2020. Planetary Mine: Territories of Extraction under Late Capitalism. New York: Verso Books. Augustin, M., Acero, J.L., Aguilera, A.I. and Garcia Lozano, M. eds. 2017. Central America Urbanization Review: Making Cities Work for Central America. Directions in Development. Washington, DC: World Bank. doi: 10.1596/978-1-4648-0985-9. Barry, J.M. 2004. The site of origin of the 1918 influenza pandemic and its public health implications. Journal of Translational Medicine, 2(1): 1–4. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1186/​1479​ -5876​-2​-3 Brenner, N. and Ghosh, S. 2022. Between the colossal and the catastrophic: Planetary urbanization and the political ecologies of emergent infectious disease. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 54(5): 867–910. 0308518X221084313. Céspedes, J., Sylvester, J.M., Pérez-Marulanda, L., Paz-Garcia, P., Reymondin, L., Khodadadi, M., ... & Castro-Nunez, A. 2022. Has global deforestation accelerated due to the COVID-19 pandemic? Journal of Forestry Research, 1–13. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1007/​s11676​-022​-01561​ -7 Chuvileva, Y.E., Rissing, A. and King, H.B. 2020. From wet markets to Wal-Marts: Tracing alimentary xenophobia in the time of COVID-19. Soc Anthropol, 28: 241‒243. https://​doi​ .org/​10​.1111/​1469​-8676​.12840 Clapp, J. and Isakson, S.R. 2018. Speculative Harvests: Financialization, Food, and Agriculture. Nova Scotia and Winnipeg: Practical Aid & Fernwood Publishing. Cronon, W. 1991. Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, 1848‒1893. New York: W.W. Norton and Company. Davis, M. 2005. The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu. New York: The New Press. Escobar, A. 2011. Encountering Development. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Fearnley, L. 2020a. The pandemic epicenter: Pointing from viruses to China’s wildlife trade. Somatosphere. Accessed 15 May 2023 at http://​somatosphere​.net/​forumpost/​wild​-virus/​ Fearnley, L. 2020b. Virulent Zones: Animal Disease and Global Health at China’s Pandemic Epicenter. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ferguson, J. 2013. How to do things with land: A distributive perspective on rural livelihoods in Southern Africa. Journal of Agrarian Change, 13(1): 166‒174. Fermin, G. 2018. Host range, host–virus interactions, and virus transmission. Viruses, 2018: 101–134. doi:10.1016/B978-0-12-811257-1.00005-X

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Giraudo, M.E. 2020. Dependent development in South America: China and the soybean nexus. J Agrar Change, 20: 60–78. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1111/​joac​.12333 Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). (2020). Workshop Report on Biodiversity and Pandemics. Kelly, A.H. and Nading, A. 2019. Life/nonlife revived. Somatosphere. Accessed 15 May 2023 at http://​somatosphere​.net/​forumpost/​life​-nonlife​-revived/​ Leach, M. et al. 2021. Post-pandemic transformations: How and why COVID-19 requires us to rethink development. World Development, 138: 105233. Malm, A. 2018. The Progress of this Storm. New York: Verso Books. Malm, A. 2020. Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Verso Books. Maturana, H.R. and Varela, F.J. 1991. Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living (Vol. 42). Springer Science & Business Media. McDermott, J.J., Staal, S.J., Freeman, H.A., Herrero, M. and Van de Steeg, J.A. 2010. Sustaining intensification of smallholder livestock systems in the tropics. Livestock Science, 130(1–3): 95–109. Mena, I., Nelson, M.I., Quezada-Monroy, F., Dutta, J., Cortes-Fernández, R., Lara-Puente, J. H., … and García-Sastre, A. 2016. Origins of the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic in swine in Mexico. Elife, 5, e16777. Middleton, J. et al. 2020. Meat plants: A new front line in the Covid-19 pandemic. BMJ, 370: m2716. Molyneux, D., Hallaj, Z., Keusch, G.T. et al. 2011. Zoonoses and marginalised infectious diseases of poverty: Where do we stand? Parasites Vectors, 4: 1–6. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1186/​ 1756​-3305​-4​-106 Monteiro, M. and Van Der Mark, M. 2021. Beefing up risk: The exposure of JBS’ financiers to financial, regulatory and reputational risk. Forests and Finance. Accessed 15 May 2023 at https://​forestsandfinance​.org/​news/​beefing​-up​-risk​-the​-exposure​-of​-jbs​-financiers​-to​ -financial​-regulatory​-and​-reputational​-risks/​ Moore, J.W. 2015. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. New York: Verso Books. OECD/FAO 2021. OECD–FAO Agricultural Outlook 2021‒2030. Paris: OECD Publishing. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1787/​19428846​-en Oliveira, G. de L.T. and Schneider, M. 2016. The politics of flexing soybeans: China, Brazil and global agroindustrial restructuring. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 43(1): 167‒194, doi: 10.1080/03066150.2014.993625 Reuters. 2021. Tyson Foods plans to spend $1.3 billion to automate meat plants. Accessed 15 May 2023 at www​.reuters​.com/​business/​retail​-consumer/​tyson​-foods​-plans​-spend​-over​-13​ -bln​-automation​-projects​-2021​-12​-09/​ Ritchie, H. and Roser, M. 2017. Meat and dairy production. Published online at Our World In Data. Accessed 15 May 2023 at https://​ourworldindata​.org/​meat​-production Schneider, M. 2017. Wasting the rural: Meat, manure, and the politics of agro-industrialization in contemporary China. Geoforum, 78: 89‒97. Schwartzman, K.C. 2013. The Chicken Trail: Following Workers, Migrants, and Corporations across the Americas. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Scott, J.C. 2017. Against the Grain. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Seto, K.C., Guneralp, B. and Hutyra, L.R. 2012. Global forecasts of urban expansion to 2030 and direct impacts on biodiversity and carbon pools. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109: 16083–16088. Sharma, S. 2018. Mighty giants: Leaders of the global meat complex. Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. Accessed 15 May 2023 at www​ .iatp​ .org/​ blog/​ leaders​ -global​ -meat​ -complex

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Striffler, S. 2005. Chicken: The Dangerous Transformation of America’s Favorite Food. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Takekawa, J.Y., Newman, S.H., Xiao, X., Prosser, D.J., Spragens, K.A., Palm, E.C., … and Ji, W. 2010. Migration of waterfowl in the East Asian flyway and spatial relationship to HPAI H5N1 outbreaks. Avian Diseases, 54(s1): 466‒476. Taubenberger, J.K., Morens, D.M. and Fauci, A.S. 2007. The next influenza pandemic: Can it be predicted? JAMA, 297(18): 2025–2027. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1001/​jama​.297​.18​.2025 The Meat Atlas. 2021. Facts and figures about the animals we eat. Heinrich Böll Stiftung. Accessed 15 May 2023 at https://​eu​.boell​.org/​sites/​default/​files/​2021​-09/​MeatAtlas2021​ _final​_web​.pdf UN Habitat. 2020. World Cities Report 2020. The Value of Sustainable Urbanization. United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat). UNWTO 2009. World Tourism Barometer, Vol. 7/Issue 1. Accessed 15 May 2023 at www​.e​ -unwto​.org/​doi/​epdf/​10​.18111/​wtobarometereng​.2009​.7​.1​.1a Wallace, R. 2016. Big Farms Make Big Flu: Dispatches on Influenza, Agribusiness, and the Nature of Science. New York: NYU Press. Wallace, R., Liebman, A., Chaves, L.F. and Wallace, R. (2020). COVID-19 and Circuits of Capital. Monthly Review, 72(1), 1–13. Weis, T. 2013. The Ecological Hoofprint. London: Zed Books. WHO, UNICEF 2008. Progress on drinking water and sanitation: special focus on sanitation. Accessed 15 May 2023 at www​.who​.int/​water​_sanitation​_health/​monitoring/​jmp2008​.pdf Winders, B. and Ransom, E. 2019. Global Meat: Social and Environmental Consequences of the Expanding Meat Industry. Cambridge and London: MIT Press.

PART III RECONSIDERING DEVELOPMENT POLICIES AND GOVERNANCE

13. Infrastructure, development and the environment in a landscape of spatial reconfigurations across the Global South: the case of the Belt and Road Initiative Fabricio Rodríguez and Julia Gurol

1. INTRODUCTION Physical infrastructures have long been tangible examples of how countries pursuing ‘development’ use different kinds of technology to engineer and transform the environment for societal purposes. Roads, ports and bridges as well as energy facilities and transoceanic sea lines are part of the classical canon of infrastructures used to stimulate trade, boost economic circuits, and reduce poverty in urban and rural areas. Infrastructure-building often takes place through megaprojects. They typically involve large sums of capital (above US$1 billion), transnational corporations, as well as complex negotiations and lengthy implementation processes. In contrast to small-scale projects, mega-infrastructures do not adapt to pre-existing social structures or economic flows, but rather seek to reconfigure them in ways that affect the lives of millions of people, who benefit unequally from them (Flyvbjerg, 2014, p. 6). Because of the scale and speed of its economic transformation, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is an influential case of development via infrastructural ‘modernisation’. Under this logic, transformations of ‘socio-nature’, that is, the mutually constitutive relationship between society and nature, play a fundamental role in advancing growth-led development via the commodification and appropriation of nature as an extra-societal organism, that is, ‘environment’. However, the PRC was certainly not the first entity to embrace infrastructure for both its own developmental objectives as well as for the promotion of development beyond its own borders. After the end of the Second World War, European countries saw themselves forced to rebuild the infrastructures the war had destroyed, instituting different policy banks with a specialisation in the financing of (re-)construction projects in Europe and elsewhere.1 In the subsequent decades, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) moved on to implement financing facilities for infrastructure development as a way of balancing Soviet influence in the so-called ‘developing world’. It instituted the Development Assistance Committee (DAC), which became the club of Western donors (in the Global North) tying development aid to the adoption of democratic institutions and market-liberalising 200

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policies (in the Global South). With the consolidation of US hegemony after the end of the Cold War, this neoliberal formula became the dominant standard of international development, implemented via the global operations of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), as well as different Western-led regional banks. Until today, these institutions are associated with the imposition of political conditionalities on recipient countries, which many actors of the Global South regard as disciplining practices. Yet such conditionalities also include environmental and social standards, which pressure groups in the donor countries have helped institute as a requirement for development aid in alliance with international NGOs, ever since the first UN conference on the environment in Stockholm 1972, and following subsequent events such as the UN Conference on the Environment and Development in Rio 1992. Against this backdrop, mega-infrastructures have long been the subject of critique in development studies, because they reflect the power asymmetries affecting who gets to finance what kind of project, for what purposes, for whose benefit, at what point in time, and where. In addition, the developmental target-efficiency of mega-infrastructures is deeply contested, because the techno-scientific and economic optimism inherent to their implementation has often come at exceedingly high and unacceptable social and ecological costs (Backhouse et al., 2020; Flyvbjerg et al., 2003). This puts the Chinese-financed network of transregional infrastructures, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and its promise to foster a new era of ‘common development’ via ‘global connectivity’ to the forefront. If the construction of infrastructure is nothing new, then what is the singularity of the BRI regarding the way its associated projects are conceived and implemented in different world regions? This chapter addresses this question by analysing the mechanisms of China’s BRI at the intersection of infrastructure, development and environment and discusses its implications for the Global South. It does so by focusing on China’s presence in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). The region is host to different development schemes, which have evolved both in consonance and in opposition to US hegemony and the conditionalities of Western donors that often link loans to liberalisation reforms. This historical background is helpful to discern the distinct logics of the BRI projects in the geopolitical and local contexts in which they expect to succeed. Moreover, the PRC has been co-financing different types of infrastructure to secure favourable conditions for a swift and subsequent launching of the BRI as a major developmental scheme for the LAC region in 2018. Finally, LAC is host to some of Taiwan’s last diplomatic partners. This raises the question of whether China promotes infrastructure for the sake of development or whether the BRI is simultaneously or primarily used to advance geopolitical objectives such as the One-China Policy in the Americas. The chapter scrutinises three of the most important BRI projects in LAC. While these cases could not possibly represent the full spectrum of BRI interventions, they are well-suited for identifying the context-specific dynamics of how the Party-State’s connectivity scheme induces developmental effects ‘on the ground’ while allowing us to elucidate on its general working logics, functions and potential contradictions.

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Our cases include: (1) the Chinese-financed extension of the Panama Canal, (2) the Coca-Codo Sinclair Hydropower Plant in Ecuador and (3) the Port of Chancay in Peru. In analysing these three different BRI projects, we rely on a transregional and relational understanding of space, which we understand as both the pre-condition for and the result of social interactions that shape the cultural meanings, power hierarchies, and functionalities of a given territory. Seen from this perspective, the local, the global and the national are co-constitutive scales of agency, struggle, identity and ultimately of socio-spatial changes in the shifting balance of power. ‘Infrastructure’ is hereby understood as part of an ‘infrastructuring’ set of processes and practices (Tyfield and Rodríguez, 2022a) enabling transnational and multi-scalar transformations of nature–society configurations, while simultaneously enhancing the global flow of goods, workforce and commodities as well as (re-)producing social hierarchies within and across countries and continents (Gurol and Schütze, 2022).

2.

THE BRI AND THE PROMISE OF CONNECTIVITY

While the BRI is often framed as an ‘intellectual architecture’ (Brands, 2015, p. 1) or ‘grand strategy’ that structures the PRC’s global aspirations (Narins and Agnew, 2020), understanding it as a coherent political endeavour with clearly discernible logics is a misleading analytical pathway. Instead of oversimplifying the ‘fuzziness’ (Jones and Zeng, 2019) of the BRI, we understand it as a multi-scalar process of space-making that ties together the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) efforts of nation building and the territorial extension of political legitimacy through development slogans, policies and practices (Gonzalez-Vicente, 2019; Grant, 2018; Lin et al., 2019). The centrality of ‘progress’ to this endeavour dates back to China’s 19th century and ongoing aspiration to make the country ‘wealthy and strong’ (fuqiang 富强), a project that was dovetailed by Deng Xiaoping’s ‘four modernisations’ in agriculture, industry, science and defence. Today, this modernising imperative translates into an authoritarian quest for ‘national rejuvenation’, which is connected to the CCP’s declared ambition to heighten China’s position as a powerful actor in contemporary globalisation. The underpinning logic of the CCP’s understanding of connectivity2 is that allegedly ‘backward’ regions (within and outside of China) need to overcome physical infrastructure deficits to achieve fast and steady development outcomes. This rationale emerges out of a shared history amongst Asian nations that consider infrastructure-building a crucial enabler of economic growth (Rüland, 2020). In this state-centric view, and despite a long history of Chinese thought advocating for a harmonious relationship between ‘man and nature’ (see Li, 2008), the ‘natural environment’ is considered an external entity to society: one that is subordinate to the process of ‘development’ not its co-constitutive element or ‘boundary’. According to this postulate, very much grounded in modernisation theory, it is legitimate (if not imperative) for so-called developing countries to handle ecological harm as a necessary evil on the way to development. This is a problem pertaining to most emerging

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economies (not only China), one that has called for the explicit differentiation between ‘development’ and ‘sustainable development’. However, Chinese top leaders promote the idea of global ‘connectivity’ as much more than the mere building of physical infrastructures since this process, the argument goes, requires high levels of institutional, cultural and people-to-people exchanges, leading to a ‘community of shared interests’3 and fostering ‘common development’ – something that we call the ‘promise of connectivity’. This ‘promise’ denotes a new scheme of physical and digital networks seeking to persuade different stakeholders from business and government to improve their nations’ developmental prospects by linking specific segments of the economy to China’s own developmental achievements and promising pathways. In this equation, the new elements of the CCP’s approach to infrastructure and development relate to a proclaimed commitment to equity, mutual benefit and non-interference as the principles of South–South Cooperation (SSC). Yet, BRI infrastructures also have the explicit objective of incorporating distant geographies into China’s own geostrategic orbit to expand export markets, outsource financial and constructive overcapacities and enhance access to much-needed energy and other natural resources (Mohan, 2021). This links to the politics of ‘ecological civilisation’ (shentai wenming 生态文明) in China (Geall and Ely, 2018; Tyfield and Rodríguez, 2022b),4 where the goal (now) is to move away from the idea of ‘developing first and cleaning up next’ towards the technologically mediated synchronisation of economic growth and environmental protection.5

3.

SETTING THE STAGE: THE BRI ENTERS LATIN AMERICA

China’s presence in Latin America and the Caribbean began to intensify at the turn of the century. Prior to China’s engagement in the region, LAC nations had been extremely reliant upon US-led financial institutions and Western investors to (co-) finance development, whereby the tenets of the Washington Consensus represented an unchallenged canon of neoliberal principles encompassing trade liberalisation, market deregulation and fiscal discipline as the bedrock of macro-economic stability and economic growth. The appearance of Chinese policy banks and companies offered the region more choices and flexibility, because LAC nations no longer had to implement structural adjustment programmes and adopt developmental recipes in exchange for loans as is the case with the IMF or the World Bank. Moreover, the PRC’s huge appetite for oil, minerals and agricultural goods allowed different resource-exporting countries not only to finance specific development projects but to recast the terms and prospects of their entire development models. Growing exports to China gave way to a period of bonanza that provided the material basis for a so-called ‘left turn’ (Rosales, 2013) to emerge alongside several post-Washington predicaments. Prominent examples are Venezuela’s tragic approach to a militarised notion of petro-socialism, Brazil’s neo-developmentalist

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approach to its BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) partnership, which has reinforced the commodity-export model and the re-primarisation of its economy. The list also includes post-developmental trajectories in countries like Ecuador and Bolivia where Indigenous and environmentalist movements have found themselves at odds with the neo-extractivist politics of left-leaning governments who self-identified as ‘progressive’ based on the redistribution of oil and gas rents (Gudynas, 2020; Svampa, 2019). But China also contributed to the stabilisation of conservative branches of extractivism (Gudynas, 2013) in mining countries like Chile and Peru, where the neoliberal underpinnings of the Washington Consensus had been dominant for decades. However, as China’s economy began to slow down in 2014, its resource demand began to decline. Coinciding with an end of the super-cycle of rising commodity prices between 2000 and 2014, the attractiveness of cooperating with China began to lose political ground in numerous economies of South America. This was the context in which infrastructure would be called to come to the rescue. Already in 2014, China provided the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) with important financial means to build infrastructures across the region. Eager to maintain a positive image while enhancing the nation’s trading circuits with the region, the Chinese government provided US$35 billion to CELAC for the establishment of three mechanisms: The Preferential Loan Program with US$1 billion, the Special Loan Program for China–Latin America Infrastructure Projects with US$20 billion, and the China–LAC Cooperation Fund with US$5 billion (China-CELAC Forum, 2016, p. 39). The concomitant formation of the China-CELAC Forum in 2014 served as the institutional framework for Sino–Latin American relations. The 1+3+6 framework of 2014 became the ‘Magna Carta’ of interregional development cooperation (Rodríguez and Rüland, 2022). The label stands for ‘one plan’ (the China–LAC Countries Cooperation Plan 2015‒2019), ‘three driving forces’ (trade, investment and finance) and ‘six’ areas (energy and resources, infrastructure construction, agriculture, manufacturing, scientific and technological innovation, and information technology). The BRI would later serve as the overarching framework to advance this agenda with a socio-spatial approach to SSC and global connectivity.

4. CANALS, DAMS AND PORTS: BRI INFRASTRUCTURES ON THE GROUND To understand the role and implications of Chinese state-capital in the contemporary infrastructure scramble in the LAC region, it is necessary to know the context in which this capital spending takes place, since most LAC countries face major obstacles in terms of infrastructure provision. The UN estimates the sub-continent’s infrastructure backlog to amount up to US$320 billion per year.6 Chinese firms, on their behalf, have projected to invest up to US$250 billion in infrastructural development, although there are no clear statements about the timeframe.7 Hence,

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Chinese infrastructure investments in Latin America have come to play a key role as neither the World Bank nor the IMF have comparable credit or investment portfolios for infrastructure. Yet China’s infrastructural offensive has elicited according responses from Washington. The BUILD Act (Better Utilisation of Investments Leading to Development) as well as the creation of the International Development Finance Corporation on behalf of the US government in 2018 illustrate that the CCP’s approach to development promotion is being acknowledged as a ‘cooperative counter-hegemonic’ move in the region (Rodríguez and Rüland, 2022). Yet China’s increased engagement in the promotion of connectivity has had very different dynamics and implications for how different actors reimagine and implement development projects through an infrastructural prism, as the empirical examples will show. The Chinese-Financed Extension of the Panama Canal The expansion of the Panama Canal is one of the most significant Chinese infrastructure endeavours in the LAC region. Despite the relatively small size of its territory, Panama constitutes a crucial node in China’s overall BRI strategy towards the Americas, not just because it functions as a gateway for both commercial logistics and expanded political influence in one of the most important trade avenues of the Global South (Mendez and Alden, 2021). Over the past two decades, China–Panama relations have also been thriving to the extent that Xi Jinping ascribed the bilateral relationship to be a showcase of ‘extraordinary cooperation’ (Xi, 2018). In 2017, the then-president of Panama, Juan Carlos Varela, put an end to Panama’s diplomatic ties with Taiwan and recognised the One-China Policy. Thereby he paved the way for a stronger Chinese engagement to upgrade the infrastructure of the Panama Canal (Kellner and Wintgens, 2021; Runde, 2021). One year later, in 2018, Panama was the first LAC country to officially join the BRI, opening the door for another 19 states (to date) to follow suit. In terms of connectivity, Panama’s ‘nodality is unparalleled in Latin America’ (Mendez and Alden, 2021, p. 852). The geopolitical significance of Panama mainly stems from the traditionally strong influence of the US that is now contested by Panama’s deepening ties to China. Distancing itself from the US as the sole and only ‘patron’, Panama is held up as a symbol for the PRC’s mounting economic foothold in the region (Giolzetti, 2019). Furthermore, Panama’s special role for the BRI results from the singularity of the Atlantic-Pacific transoceanic connectivity provided by the Panama Canal. Since its expansion in 2016, around 14,000 ships pass the canal every year (ACP, 2019), which renders it one of the most important strategic sea lines worldwide. Chinese companies have become heavily invested in the port infrastructure since 2016, when the China-based Landbridge Group acquired control of Panama’s largest port on the Atlantic side for US$ 900 million (Runde, 2021; RWR Advisory Group, 2021). This shows that even before the official participation of Panama in the BRI, China started to invest in the country’s infrastructure as a way to build up its strategic presence. Moreover, in 2018, the China Construction Company and the China Harbour Engineering Company won a call for tenders for

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the construction of the fourth bridge over the Panama Canal – the largest project since the expansion of the Canal in 2016. The implementation of these projects certainly enhanced China’s presence in the Canal and paved the way for the construction of the so-called Panama-Colón Container Port (PCC), financed and carried out by Chinese construction companies. Here, it becomes visible how China’s infrastructure projects are directly connected with the CCP’s geopolitical and geo-economic agenda in that they enable a broader Chinese presence while providing new logistical hubs for Chinese goods entering the continent. The growing Chinese footprint in Panama also brought to light a new playing field for US–China tensions as the expansion of the BRI into Central America not only offers new alternatives for financing infrastructural projects but also to internationally isolate Taiwan in the US immediate perimeter of interests (Rodríguez and Rüland, 2022). The Coca-Codo Sinclair Hydropower Plant in Ecuador China–Ecuador relations experienced a blossoming period during the political ‘left turn’ (Rosales, 2013) under Rafael Correa (2007‒2017), which brought to the fore a strong post-neoliberal discourse. This political setting attracted increased Chinese loans and investments but at the same time led to a major reorganisation of the country’s extractive industries (Gonzalez-Vicente, 2019; van Teijlingen and Hogenboom, 2016). The China‒Ecuador oil boom lasted until the end of a long cycle of high commodity prices in 2014. After that, the petro-nationalistic nexus between China and Ecuador became the subject of strong contestations from Indigenous and environmentalist groups calling to put an end to fossil extraction. It was in this context that the Coca-Codo Sinclair (CCS) hydropower plant was constructed, based on the statist notion of ‘good living’ (buen vivir). The latter is regarded as a ‘developmentalist’ instrumentalisation of the Kichwa8 idea of Sumak Kawsay as in ‘the right to a community-oriented life in balance with nature’ (Cuestas-Caza, 2018). Yet, CCS has to be placed within the statist idea of buen vivir and bigger discussions about water governance in Ecuador that evoke power struggles over nature and the environment (Boelens et al., 2015). The Coca-Codo Sinclair Hydropower Plant is a mega-dam, financed largely through Chinese loans. Built by the Chinese company Synohydro and operated by the Ecuadorian state electric company, it is the biggest of eight hydropower projects constructed during President Rafael Correa’s government (Garzón and Castro, 2018; Nathanson, 2017). It is being built at a cost of more than US$2 billion and shall provide up to a third of Ecuador’s overall energy needs (Secretaría Nacional de Planificación y Desarrollo, 2017). Moreover, it is planned to be the centrepiece of Ecuador’s future plan to generate up to 90 per cent of its total energy from hydropower (Diálogo Chino, 2014). Despite former President Correa’s ambitious claim in 2018 that ‘Ecuador [would] have one of the cleanest energy matrices in the world’ (Presidency of the Republic of Ecuador, 2016) and the expectation that the construction of large Chinese-financed

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hydropower plants would rid Ecuador of power shortages (Lozano, 2019), delays, accidents and high costs have overshadowed the project’s ambitions. Thereby, CCS has become the subject of environmental scrutiny because China’s deferential approach to environmental risk management has enabled the Ecuadorian government to gain funding for this high-risk project that would not have necessarily attracted capital from Western donors (Garzón, 2018; Garzón and Castro, 2018). More specifically, dams like Coca-Codo, as many in China, bear the risk of negative environmental effects due to floodplains, estuary and sediment plume (Latrubesse et al., 2017; López, 2018). In 2018, CCS attracted considerable international attention after the release of investigative reports outlining the drastic shortcomings in the dam’s construction such as the ostensibly more than 7000 cracks in the dam’s facilities (Kaplan, 2021; Ray et al., 2019). Moreover, the hydropower plant has been criticised because of the ‘extremely risky conditions’ for workers (Monni and Serafini, 2017) that resulted in extensive labour strikes in 2011 and 2012 (Kaplan, 2021). Similarly, questions pertain regarding the long-term effects of CCS on the territories and populations living in nearby areas (Reyes, 2016). And finally, wide spread accusations of bribery and corruption became public that involve many of the political officials supporting the dam (Casey and Krauss, 2018). The Port of Chancay in Peru The construction of the Port of Chancay is the single most important Chinese investment made in the construction of a South American harbour.9 Located 80 kilometres North of Lima, this port is expected to become a major connectivity hub, linking maritime trade routes between China and Peru, thereby intensifying and accelerating economic relations across the Asia-Pacific. Since the Free Trade Agreement in 2009, China has by far surpassed the US as the main destination of Peruvian exports, a process that has been nurtured by high diplomatic contact (Rodríguez 2018). Today, more than 80 per cent of Chinese imports from Peru encompass mineral resources,10 often extracted in situ by Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Their presence has further positioned Peru as the second largest destination of Chinese foreign direct investment (FDI) in Latin America, after Brazil. China’s exports to Peru comprise a wide range of manufactured merchandise including clothing, cars, industrial machinery, electronic appliances and processed construction materials (ibid.). These products leave China’s industrial centres on the East Coast via large container freights and require accordingly large and efficient logistic facilities on the other side of the Pacific. In May 2019, the Chinese state-owned enterprise COSCO Shipping Ports committed itself to investing in the construction of a multipurpose facility at the Port of Chancay.11 Today, COSCO holds a majority stake of 60 per cent in a joint venture with the Peruvian mining company Volcán acting as a minority partner with a 40 per cent share. Volcán itself is partly owned by the Swiss giant Glencore (Torrico, 2021), which is illustrative of the way Chinese state-capital merges with Western private

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capital to build infrastructures in the Global South. The Port of Chancay is a project that Volcán had been trying to implement for many years given the shortcomings of the Port of Callao, Peru’s main port near Lima. The latter currently handles 70 per cent of Peru’s container turnover, but its logistic capacities are at the brink of collapse.12 This setting provided a singular opportunity for Volcán and the Peruvian government to invite China as the financier and operator of the project, given China’s financial capacities as well as technical know-how in the construction of high-tech ports. China projects Chancay as an intercontinental hub from which the bulk of its container freights can be distributed to other parts of South and Central America, also facilitating imports from the LAC region to China. The construction of the Port of Chancay is envisioned to be concluded in 2024. It includes the revamping of the roads leading to a logistics facility located in the nearby mainland, which will connect to the actual seaport through a tunnel. The construction of these facilities requires large-scale interventions in the maritime ecosystem, such as the removal of sand, sediment, rocks and other materials. The construction of the port significantly affects fish stocks and habitats and redirects sea currents in a way that threatens local fishing. Since infrastructure-construction is bound to far-reaching changes in nature–society relations, the ‘all-affected’ principle is considered a minimal requirement in the practice of development cooperation (Rodríguez and Rüland, 2022, p. 493). However, residents of the area, technically supported by Peruvian and international NGOs, denounce the lack of transparency regarding the kinds of goods and materials that the port is expected to handle.13 For instance, COSCO has promised the creation of thousands of jobs throughout the planning, construction and operational phases of the project. However, there has been almost no information about the exact conditions under which the local population will be included in the labour force, and how those who lose their source of economic subsistence from fishing or tourism will be compensated.14 Additional conflicts are emerging, because the massive explosions required to meet the geophysical requirements of the port and its adjacent facilities have led to cracking walls and broken urban water pipes affecting the quality of life in the already precarious residential areas of Chancay (Custodio, 2021).

5.

DISCUSSION: SPATIAL RECONFIGURATIONS AND THE REIMAGINATION OF DEVELOPMENT

The juxtaposition of these three cases reveals important features of the PRC’s infrastructure and connectivity endeavours in the Global South. The BRI indeed seems to entail a novel developmental promise, building on the way the PRC projects its own astonishing economic transformation via mega-infrastructures. In making this promise, the PRC takes centre stage as a new and powerful donor and investor. Yet the Chinese Party-State does set political conditionalities despite its emphasis on ‘non-interference’ and ‘common development’, as is the case with the endorsement of the One-China Policy as a pre-condition for capital delivery.

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In this context, ‘development’ becomes a new arena of political contestation inasmuch as the PRC claims a legitimate and authoritative position to ‘facilitate’ the planetary transformation of nature–society relations via mega-infrastructures. As a result, political and business elites in the Global South do embrace the BRI to advance particularistic interests in the name of economic growth and progress, while local actors suffer the harmful consequences of these megaprojects. Hence, ‘common development’ applies mainly to the state and corporate actors involved in the planning and making of a new infrastructural landscape. While the BRI certainly offers an alternative to the establishment of Western financial institutions, it also reproduces the very problems that have been associated with the construction of mega-infrastructures in the past. Yet our contrasting analysis shows the ways in which the relationship between infrastructure, development and the environment is at stake in each context. In the case of the Panama Canal, it is safe to associate the PRC’s connectivity promise with the CCP’s core nationalistic interests and geopolitical objectives, and less so to the explicit promotion of development. For the Panama Canal is a developmental mechanism in its own right, one that has emerged out of a long and bitter history of domination by the US since the beginning of the 20th century (Donoghue, 2014). Keen to set a mark in this part of the world, China would not have financed this infrastructural measure without Panama’s decision to cut diplomatic ties with Taiwan. Moreover, China’s hand on the Panama Canal invites Panamanian actors from business and government to reimagine their place in the world by placing this key transoceanic gateway in a new map of spatial reconfigurations. Indeed, this BRI project evidences how the physical restructuring of previously existing infrastructures gives way to the reshuffling of power hierarchies from the local to the global via new maritime routes. The case of Coca-Codo Sinclair, by contrast, is much more related to the BRI promise to foster development via connectivity and less to China’s geopolitical manoeuvres in the region. At first sight, the financing of a hydroelectric facility listed in Ecuador’s clean energy plans suggests that China’s infrastructural drive is committed to the promotion of sustainable pathways to development. However, both China’s loan-for-oil deals with Ecuador as well as the technically and environmentally precarious implementation of this project contradict such notions. Ultimately, the unique feature of the BRI as a grand developmental scheme consists of its backfiring function as a lender of last resort for an environmentally dubious and technically flawed project. The Port of Chancay is probably the clearest example of how the BRI’s promise of connectivity puts infrastructure, development and the environment into a largely conflicting relationship. In this case, China’s geo-economic objectives to improve its trading routes in the Asia-Pacific, as well as its self-serving vision to use BRI-financed facilities to enhance imports from the LAC region to China, are the prime engines of its connectivity promise, not necessarily ‘development’ nor the ‘environment’. This pattern reflects China’s own experiences with an authoritarian understanding of technology as a governing instrument that strengthens the state in its role as a director of economic modernisation, whereby the high social and environmental impacts of

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this process are unquestionably subordinate to rapid industrialisation, competitive exports and technological advances. In this context, the ‘environment’ is considered a simple annex of ‘development’, leading Chinese and Peruvian policy makers and corporate groups, including Western companies, to conceive of ‘development’ as a mere slogan fostering the implementation of infrastructural projects by way of disrupting instead of enhancing the socio-economic dynamics and ecological health of the (local) environment for the sake of profit and prestige politics. Given these circumstances, the possibility to build or upgrade physical infrastructures through BRI finance offers Latin American nations and regional organisations the possibility to reimagine their economies as being part of a large map of Chinese-financed infrastructures. However, despite the creation of a South–South space of cooperation between China and LAC, this space still remains highly hierarchical and is inherently dominated by the political requirements of Chinese state-capitalism (Carmody, 2013). Its prime function is that of incorporating different regions into China’s own geo-economic orbit through the building/upgrading of canals, ports and dams, and other megaprojects. These are more clearly connected to the geopolitics of China’s own developmental pathway than to the actual needs of its partners in the Global South. The latter oftentimes lack basic infrastructure such as water and sanitation facilities, as well as roads and public transportation systems connecting residents with hospitals and schools, both in the immediate as well as beyond the areas of influence of BRI infrastructures.

6. CONCLUSION The construction of infrastructure is an all but new phenomenon. In fact, infrastructure had long been a main area of operations throughout the first decades of the Western-led project of global development after the Second World War. In this context, the promotion of infrastructure was linked to the spread of a liberal ideology and US hegemony, which included the provision of multilateral loans conditioned on institutional reforms. Yet, the BRI exhibits its own modes and mechanisms of engaging with the receiving regions in the Global South. Even though Chinese officials refrain from linking loans and state-led investment to a particular kind of development paradigm, there are geopolitical strings accompanying BRI interventions. Panama’s endorsement of the One-China Policy in exchange for Chinese investments is a case in point. Hence, the BRI entails a new mode of infrastructure promotion, which differs markedly from the Western market-oriented approach to overseas expansion via multilateral institutions. In contrast, the BRI builds substantially on bilateral deals, mobilising state-capital through powerful policy banks supporting China’s state-owned companies investing in territories that have been long and largely continue to be dominated by the US. At the same time, Chinese corporations do collaborate with Western corporations and dominant companies in situ, as the case of Puerto Chancay in Peru has shown. Yet large sums of capital and speedy construction capacities have not always matched the social and environmental standards

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expected from the construction of renewable and sustainable energy facilities, as in the case of Coca-Codo Sinclair in Ecuador. Furthermore, there are no environmental policy mechanisms that can override economic and political considerations or would mark BRI investments as any more enlightened than investments from the US, despite President Xi’s rhetoric that ecological civilization will somehow transform the BRI. Given this scenario, the BRI is redefining long-established territorial landscapes through targeted investments in the Global South. Thus, the BRI can be understood as connecting contiguous territories into new socio-spatial and economic circuits by reimagining and redefining a broad range of territories through infrastructures. While the BRI challenges the current arrangements and practices of international development by criticising the long history of North–South asymmetries and by emphasising South–South cooperation as a more equitable pathway to development, it in fact reproduces the problems that have been associated with large-scale infrastructures from the very outset of global capitalist relations. In many cases, the positive, albeit volatile, macro-economic effects of BRI investments unfold at the expense of different segments of society, who must bear with the negative political, social and environmental consequences of such projects (Rüland, 2020). This also means that policy makers imagine and implement infrastructural projects by way of disrupting instead of enhancing the social and ecological balance of the planet. Hence, the ‘promise of connectivity’ might as well be a ‘false promise’, or perhaps just a ‘self-serving promise’ in which development and the environment are spatially repurposed to sustain the expansionist rationale of China’s economy. No wonder, then, that those who are negatively affected by Chinese infrastructural projects associate these with harmful practices of capitalist accumulation (Gonzalez-Vicente, 2019), dependencies (Mielants and Salavei Bardos, 2021; Jenkins, 2012) or new expressions of ‘neo-colonialism’ (Destradi and Gurol, 2022; Lee, 2017; Rodríguez, 2018). Yet China’s ‘promise of connectivity’ does bring substantial gains to national and transnational elites (including Western companies) benefitting directly from the construction of BRI infrastructures. These actors may well endorse China’s ‘no strings attached’ exhortations as the gateway to ‘common development’ and a ‘community of shared interest’ for the Global South. While the BRI does not provide evidence of a qualitative turning point regarding the use of mega-infrastructures to foster development, the sum of these projects does point to a new map of spatial reconfigurations with Chinese state-capital at the centre of command and nature as the subsidiary ‘environment’ for its expansion. Given this scenario, the BRI has elicited a new wave of competition and debate around the provision of ‘high-quality’ and ‘sustainable’ connectivity infrastructure (Fukuyama et al., 2020). The EU–Japan Partnership on Connectivity and Quality Infrastructure, the recent launching of The Global Gateway on behalf of the EU, as well as the Build Back Better World (B3W) headed by the US are the most prominent responses to the BRI. They all raise new expectations about the future of infrastructure, development and the environment in a new and increasingly conflict-laden landscape of spatial reconfigurations.

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NOTES 1. The KFW Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau (Credit Institute for Reconstruction) in Germany is an example. Founded in 1948, it is nowadays the largest state-owned policy bank in the world. 2. In fact, what is often called a ‘Chinese view of connectivity’ is actually a Party-State or modern idea rather than a ‘Chinese’ one. The specifically ‘Chinese’ character of the BRI is not related to ethnic registers either; rather, the term is closely associated with what ‘the Party-State’ considers to be politically relevant to the discursive/ideational construction (and perception) of ‘China’ as a nation-state, both domestically and internationally. 3. The State Council of the People’s Republic of China, 2015, Action plan on the Belt and Road Initiative. Accessed 23 May 2023 at http://​ english​ .www​ .gov​ .cn/​ archive/​ publications/​2015/​03/​30/​content​_281475080249035​.htm. 4. For an in-depth discussion of ecological civilisation, see the chapter by Bjørn Leif Brauteseth in this handbook. 5. Interview in Xiamen, 2019. 6. According to Chinese President Xi Jinping in his Opening Address to the First Ministerial Meeting of The China-CELAC Forum, Beijing, 8 January 2015, The Diplomat, 28 June 2019. See also Rodríguez and Rüland (2022). 7. Ibid. 8. Kichwa is an Andean Indigenous language that may display semantic variations in Ecuador, Colombia and Peru. 9. See COSCO’s portfolio of overseas terminals: https://​ports​.coscoshipping​.com/​en/​ Businesses/​Portfolio/​#OverseasTerminals, accessed 15 January 2021. 10. The Atlas of Economic Complexity, accessed 26 January 2022. 11. See www​.coscochancay​.pe/​en/​the​-project/​, accessed 24 January 2022. 12. Informe 24: Perú tendrá el primer megapuerto de Sudamérica, https://​youtu​.be/​ Z3jLw8Dcsdg, accessed 26 January 2022. 13. Webinar with Peruvian initiative ‘Salvemos Chancay’, Kampagne Bergbau Peru, 12 May 2021. 14. Ibid.

BIBLIOGRAPHY ACP, 2019, “Tráfico por el Canal de Panamá por Segmento de Mercado: Años 2017‒2018.” Accessed 26 January 2022 at www​.pancanal​.com/​eng/op/transit-stats/ Backhouse M, Tittor A, Rodríguez F, 2020, “Energy”, in The Routledge Handbook to the Political Economy and Governance of the Americas. Ed. O Kaltmeier (Routledge, Abingdon, Oxon; New York), pp 78–92 Boelens R, Hoogesteger J, Baud M, 2015, “Water reform governmentality in Ecuador: neoliberalism, centralization, and the restraining of polycentric authority and community rule-making” Geoforum 64 281–291 Brands H, 2015, What Good is Grand Strategy? Power and Purpose in American Statecraft from Harry S. Truman to George W. Bush (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY) Carmody P R, 2013, The Rise of the BRICS in Africa: The Geopolitics of South–South Relations (Zed Books, London; New York) Casey N, Krauss C, 2018, “It doesn’t matter if Ecuador can afford this dam. China still gets paid” New York Times. Accessed 26 January 2022 at www​.nytimes​.com/​2018/​12/​24/​world/​ americas/​ecuador​-china​-dam​.html

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China-CELAC Forum, 2016, “China-CELAC Forum 2016”. Accessed 22 January 2022 at www​.chinacelacforum​.org/​eng/​ltjj​_1/​201612/​P0​2021082809​4665781093​.pdf Cuestas-Caza J, 2018, “Sumak Kawsay is not buen vivir” Alternautas 5(1) 51–66 Custodio L M, 2021, “Peru’s new Chancay mega-port shakes a village to its core”. Accessed 25 January 2022 at https://​dialogochino​.net/​en/​infrastructure/​43228​-perus​-chancay​-mega​ -port​-shakes​-village​-to​-core/​ Destradi S, Gurol J, 2022, “South–south cooperation: between cooperation on eye-level and accusations of neo-colonialism”, in Handbook on Regionalism and Global Governance. Eds J Rüland and A Carrapatoso (Edward Elgar Publishing, Cheltenham, UK; Northampton, MA, USA), pp 160‒170 Diálogo Chino, 2014, “Fatal accident at Ecuador’s flagship hydro plant amplifies expert calls for transparency”. Accessed 17 February 2022 at https://​ dialogochino​ .net/​ en/​ infrastructure/​1094​-fatal​-accident​-at​-ecuadors​-flagship​-hydro​-plant​-amplifies​-expert​-calls​ -for​-transparency/​ Donoghue M E, 2014, Borderland on the Isthmus: Race, Culture, and the Struggle for the Canal Zone (Duke University Press, Durham, NC) Flyvbjerg B, 2014, “What you should know about megaprojects and why: an overview” Project Management Journal 45(2) 6–19 Flyvbjerg B, Bruzelius N, Rothengatter W, 2003, Megaprojects and Risk: An Anatomy of Ambition (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK; New York) Fukuyama F, Bennon M, Bataineh B, 2020, “Chinese and Western approaches to infrastructure development”, in Development Studies in Regional Science. Eds Z Chen, W M Bowen, and D Whittington. New Frontiers in Regional Science: Asian Perspectives (Springer Singapore, Singapore), pp 243–264. Accessed 27 February 2020 at http://​link​.springer​.com/​ 10​.1007/​978​-981​-15​-1435​-7​_14 Garzón P, 2018, “Implicaciones de La Relación Entre China y América Latina. Una Mirada al Caso Ecuatoriano” Ecología Política 56 80–88 Garzón P, Castro D, 2018, “China–Ecuador relations and the development of the hydro sector: a look at the Coca Codo Sinclair and Sopladora hydroelectric projects”, in Building Development for a New Era: China’s Infrastructure Projects in Latin America and the Caribbean. Eds E D Peters, A C Armony, and S Cui (Center for International Studies, Pittsburgh), pp 24–58 Geall S, Ely A, 2018, “Narratives and pathways towards an ecological civilization in contemporary China” The China Quarterly 236 1175–1196 Giolzetti D, 2019, “China’s front door to America’s backyard: China’s rising influence in Panama is a case study of its ambitions in Latin America” The Diplomat. Accessed 29 January 2022 at https://​thediplomat​.com/​2019/​06/​chinas​-front​-door​-to​-americas​-backyard/​ Gonzalez-Vicente R, 2019, “Make development great again? Accumulation regimes, spaces of sovereign exception and the elite development paradigm of China’s Belt and Road Initiative” Business and Politics 21(4) 487–513 Grant A, 2018, “China’s double body: infrastructure routes and the mapping of China’s nation-state and civilization-state” Eurasian Geography and Economics 59(3–4) 378–407 Gudynas E, 2013, “Extracciones, Extractivismo y Extrahecciones. Un marco conceptual sobre la apropiacion de recursos naturales” Observatorio del Desarrollo, Centro Latino Americano de Ecología Social (CLAES). Accessed 15 January 2022 at https://​ ambiental​ .net/​ wp​ -content/​uploads/​2015/​12/​Gud​ynasApropi​acionExtra​ctivismoEx​traheccion​esOdeD2013​ .pdf Gudynas E, 2020, “Disputes over capitalism and varieties of development”, in Buen Vivir and the Challenges to Capitalism in Latin America. Eds H Veltmeyer, and E Záyago Lau (Routledge, London), pp 195–213 Gurol J, Schütze B, 2022, “Infrastructuring authoritarian power: Arab–Chinese transregional collaboration beyond the state” International Quarterly for Asian Studies 53(2) 231–249

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Jenkins R, 2012, “Latin America and China: a new dependency?” Third World Quarterly 33(7) 1337–1358 Jones L, Zeng J, 2019, “Understanding China’s ‘Belt and Road Initiative’: beyond ‘grand strategy’ to a state transformation analysis” Third World Quarterly 40(8) 1415–1439 Kaplan S B, 2021, Globalizing Patient Capital: The Political Economy of Chinese Finance in the Americas (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge; New York) Kellner T, Wintgens S, 2021, “The rise of China in Panama under Varela (2014–2019): a new Latin-American pivot of the Silk Road or a diplomatic ‘tour de valse’?”, in China-Latin America and the Caribbean: Assessment and Outlook. Eds T Kellner and S Wintgens (Routledge, London), pp 188–206 Latrubesse E M, Arima E Y, Dunne T, Park E, Baker V R, d’Horta F M, Wight C, Wittmann F, Zuanon J, Baker P A, Ribas C C, Norgaard R B, Filizola N, Ansar A, Flyvbjerg B, Stevaux J C, 2017, “Damming the rivers of the Amazon basin” Nature 546(7658) 363–369 Lee C K, 2017 The Specter of Global China: Politics, Labor, and Foreign Investment in Africa (University of Chicago Press, Chicago) Li, C, 2008 “The philosophy of harmony in classical Confucianism” Philosophy Compass, 3(3) 423‒435 Lin S, Sidaway J D, Woon C Y, 2019, “Reordering China, respacing the world: Belt and Road Initiative (一带一路) as an emergent geopolitical culture” The Professional Geographer 71(3) 507–522 López V, 2018, “Implicaciones del proyecto Coca Codo Sinclair para la Amazonía ecuatoriana”. Accessed 15 January 2022 at https://​ecociencia​.org/​implicaciones​-del​-proyecto​-coca​ -codo​-sinclair​-para​-la​-amazonia​-ecuatoriana/​ Lozano G, 2019, “Ecuador’s China-backed hydropower revolution” China Dialogue. Accessed 15 January 2022 at https://​chinadialogue​.net/​en/​energy/​11464​-ecuador​-s​-china​ -backed​-hydropower​-revolution​-2/​ Mendez A, Alden C, 2021, “China in Panama: from peripheral diplomacy to grand strategy” Geopolitics 26(3) 838–860 Mielants E H, Salavei Bardos K, 2021, Economic Cycles and Social Movements: Past, Present and Future (Routledge, New York) Mohan G, 2021, “Below the Belt? Territory and development in China’s international rise” Development and Change 52(1) 54–75 Monni S, Serafini L, 2017, “A dangerous alliance? The relationship between Ecuador and China” Development 60(3–4) 213–221 Narins T P, Agnew J, 2020, “Missing from the map: Chinese exceptionalism, sovereignty regimes and the Belt Road Initiative” Geopolitics 25(4) 809–837 Nathanson M, 2017, “Damming or damning the Amazon: assessing Ecuador / China cooperation” Mongabay. Accessed 15 January 2022 at https://​news​.mongabay​.com/​2017/​11/​ damming​-or​-damning​-the​-amazon​-assessing​-ecuador​-china​-cooperation/​ Presidency of the Republic of Ecuador, 2016, “Firma de convenios bilaterales Ecuador-China”. Accessed 15 January 2022 at www​.presidencia​.gob​.ec/​wp​-content/​uploads/​ downloads/20 16/11/2016.11.18-FIRMA-DE-CONVENIOS-BILATERALES-EC UADOR-CHINA.pdf Ray R, Gallagher K P, Sanborn C, 2019, “Managing risk in Chinese overseas development: lessons for the Andean Amazon”. Accessed 15 January 2022 at www​.bu​.edu/​gdp/​files/​ 2019/​03/​FINAL​-GCI​-Managing​-Dev​-Risk​-Policy​-Brief​-1​.pdf Reyes C V, 2016, “Territorios y cambio estructural en hábitats periurbanos: Coca Codo Sinclair, inversión china y el cambio de la matriz energética en el Ecuador” Revista Ciencias Sociales 1(38) 67–84 Rodríguez F, 2018, “Oil, minerals, and power. The political economy of China’s quest for resources in Brazil and Peru.” Doctoral Thesis. University of Freiburg. https://​doi​.org/​10​ .6094/​UNIFR/​194748

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Rodríguez F, Rüland J, 2022, “Cooperative counter-hegemony, interregionalism and ‘diminished multilateralism’: the Belt and Road Initiative and China’s relations with Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC)” Journal of International Relations and Development 25 476‒496 https://​doi​.org/​10​.1057/​s41268​-021​-00248​-6 Rosales A, 2013, “Going underground: the political economy of the ‘left turn’ in South America” Third World Quarterly 34(8) 1443–1457 Rüland J, 2020, “Old wine in new bottles? How competitive connectivity revitalises an obsolete development agenda in Asia” Journal of Contemporary Asia 50(4) 653–665 Runde D F, 2021, “Key decision point coming for the Panama Canal”. Accessed 15 January 2022 at www​.csis​.org/​analysis/​key​-decision​-point​-coming​-panama​-canal RWR Advisory Group, 2021, “China’s Landbridge Group purchases largest Panamanian port; intends to make it a ‘deep-water’ port”. Accessed 15 January 2022 at www​.rwradvisory​ .com/​chinas​-landbridge​-group​-purchases​-largest​-panamanian​-port​-intends​-to​-make​-it​-a​ -deep​-water​%db​%9d​-port/​ Secretaría Nacional de Planificación y Desarrollo, 2017, “Resumen Ejecutivo: Evaluación de los Proyectos Hidroeléctricos Coca Codo Sinclair y Soplador”. Accessed 23 January 2022 at https://​sni​.gob​.ec/​documents/​10180/​4534845/​INFORME+​EJECUTIVO+​EVALUACI​ %C3​%93N+​COCA+​CODO+​SINCLAIR+​+​Y+​SOPLADORA​.pdf/​675d7ad2​-ab29​-4bda​ -abe8​-eb7b4a8ada02 Svampa M, 2019, Neo-extractivism in Latin America: Socio-environmental Conflicts, the Territorial Turn, and New Political Narratives (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge). https://​doi​.org/​10​.1017/​9781108752589 Torrico, G. 2021, 15 May, Perú y el Megapuerto de Chancay: La Franja y la Ruta empieza por el mar. Columna de Opinión. Accessed 25 January 2022 at http://​chinayamericalatina​.com/​ peru​-y​-el​-megapuerto​-de​-chancay​-la​-franja​-y​-la​-ruta​-empieza​-por​-el​-mar/​ Tyfield D, Rodríguez F, 2022a, “Editorial: China beyond China: infrastructuring and ecologising a new global hegemony?” International Quarterly for Asian Studies 53(2) 171–180 Tyfield D, Rodríguez F, 2022b, “Against and For China’s Ecological Civilisation: Economising the Bios or ‘Life-ising’ Transition?” International Quarterly for Asian Studies 53(3) 441-469 van Teijlingen K, Hogenboom B, 2016, “Debating alternative development at the mining frontier: ‘buen vivir’ and the conflict around El Mirador mine in Ecuador” Journal of Developing Societies 32(4) 382–420 Xi J, 2018, “Avanzar juntos hacia un futuro compartido” La Estrella de Panamá. Accessed 21 January 2022 at https://​laestrella​.com​.pa/​panama/​nacional/​exclusivo​-avanzar​- juntos-haci a-futuro-compartido/24095036

14. The new middle classes: consumption, development and sustainability Arve Hansen and Ulrikke Bryn Wethal

1. INTRODUCTION The emergence of a ‘middle class’ has long been considered a prerequisite and a sign of ‘development’. Currently, the centre of gravity of the world economy is moving ‘south’ and ‘east’, which has been well established as a significant ‘global shift’ (Kaplinsky and Messner 2008, Dicken 2015, Hansen and Wethal 2015). How, over the last decades, a significant number of countries have moved from low-income to middle-income countries due to rapid economic growth (UNDP 2013) and gone from aid recipients to donors (Mawdsley 2014) illustrates this shift. Deeply entwined in these processes is the rise of the ‘new middle class’. Indeed, 80 per cent of the global middle class is expected to reside in the South by 2030, and account for 70 per cent of total consumption expenditure (Kharas 2017, UNDP 2013). However, it is not clear what this ‘rise’ entails, nor what it means for either development or sustainability. In particular, the demand side of the mentioned global shift remains curiously under-researched and undertheorised in much development research. Much of the field of development studies seems to struggle to break with a myth that runs deep in the imagination of academics, activists and the general populations alike: that it is the Global North that consumes and the South that produces (see Gregson and Ferdous 2015), and that the North overconsumes while the South underconsumes. There are of course good reasons for this myth, and the general material living standard and material footprint of the average consumer in the North is much larger than that of the average consumer in the South, with no sign of reduction. Yet, the main division between overconsumption and underconsumption does not run between countries anymore, but between classes across global borders and divides (Otero 2018). No matter the extent to which they ‘catch up’ with those consumers in affluent societies, the consumption patterns of the new middle classes will have dramatic economic, social and environmental consequences (Wiemann 2015, Kharas 2017). These knowledge gaps are the starting point of this chapter, focusing on household consumption and sustainability in a context where large parts of global consumer markets have moved or are moving to the South (Kharas 2017, Kharas and Fengler 2021). In sustainable development discourses, the consumption patterns of the new middle classes are presented as ‘both part of the problem and of the possible solutions’ (Knorringa and Guarin 2015, 202). On the one hand, new middle classes are 216

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understood to be central in driving economic development processes by creating and strengthening consumer markets in their respective societies through increased demand (UNDP 2013, Melber 2015, Kharas 2017). On the other, the middle class is simultaneously assumed to be instrumental in decreasing the resource intensity of consumption by making sustainable, greener and more ethical consumer choices (Tukker 2005, Wiemann 2015; see also Schäfer et al. 2011). The pursuit of more sustainable consumption is certainly not restricted to the affluent North (Anantharaman 2014, Guarin and Knorringa 2014, Gregson and Ferdous 2015). But given what we know about the upwards spiralling environmental footprints of household consumption patterns in affluent societies despite the increased awareness of their negative environmental impacts (e.g. Warde 2017, Ivanova et al. 2016), the idea that new middle class consumers in the South should take the lead in sustainability transformations appears to be wishful thinking. In light of the dramatic sustainability challenges the world is facing, there is need for a broader sustainability research agenda that studies in depth the changing consumption patterns of the world’s expanding middle classes and possible pathways for sustainable change. This chapter sets out to explore the dynamics between growing middle classes, consumption and development processes in the ‘Global South’. We first outline the dominant ways of approaching the concept of new middle classes in the development literature and show how this plays out in different regions in the South. We then discuss the main expectations associated with the middle classes, focusing on economic growth, inequality and environmental sustainability. We then critically assess the transformative expectations associated with the new middle classes. The chapter argues that the discussions on the new middle classes tend to mask the great heterogeneity of aspirations, lifestyles and wealth within these classes. Furthermore, in assuming a combination of seemingly eternal growth in demand to be coupled with more sustainable consumption patterns, they suffer from many of the same paradoxes that have been integral to the broader discourses on sustainable development over the last 50 years. Finally, we outline what a possible research agenda on consumption, development and sustainability could look like.

2.

WHO ARE THE NEW MIDDLE CLASSES?

As Koo (2016, 442) argues, ‘the middle class is a notoriously heterogeneous category’. In contrast to capital-owning and labour classes, categorised through their relationship to each other and the means of production, there is little agreement as to what brings together those in between. While a wide range of approaches exist, the development literature has seldom brought the concept of the middle class beyond a descriptive category of ‘the middle’, where relatively sophisticated analyses of class formation have been reduced to a question of income or consumption levels, where middle class becomes the equivalent to middle income (Reeves et al. 2018). This has in turn led to extreme simplifications and generalisations, to the extent, Melber (2015, 249) argues, that ‘middle class’ is used ‘to cover almost everything,

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thereby signifying little to nothing […]’. Both the use of the term and many of the attempts to define the middle class have received considerable criticism (see Birdsall 2015). This has led to slightly more refined definitions in the development field, but without necessarily challenging the monetary starting point. For example, the World Bank has gone from defining the middle class as, for example, anyone with a household consumption of 2 to 13 USD a day (Ravallion 2010), to separate for example between the ‘economically secure’ and the ‘global middle class’ (World Bank 2018), defined by consumer spending.1 While such categorisations may be useful for measuring middle class size, they say very little about the lives of the people in these groups, or their relations with other class structures. The large literatures in the social sciences on the middle classes and how to best define them (e.g. Bourdieu 1984) seem to have made little impact on the development field. Moreover, such categorisations seem to support outdated perceptions of GDP growth as ‘lifting all boats’ and stimulating general, even and just development across the developing world. Such an understanding masks deep patterns of inequality, as we return to below. Relatedly, the geographies of the new middle classes reveal patterns of uneven development globally. 2.1

The Geographies of the New Middle Classes

The Asian middle classes have been growing at a very fast pace and represent the vast majority of global middle-class expansion. Indeed, Kharas (2017) expects close to 90 per cent of the new middle-class entrants the coming decade to reside in Asia. There are strong expectations connected to the force these people will play in the global economy, and foreign investors have long been eying the very large markets for consumer goods and services they potentially represent. As an example, Tonby et al. (2021) of McKinsey Global Institute expects Asian consumers to represent half of global consumption growth in the 2020s and claim the ‘trailblazing consumers in Asia’ propel growth and represent a ‘$10 trillion opportunity’. Thus, they argue, ‘Disregarding Asia’s consumer markets would mean missing half the global consumption story’ (np). While China and India tend to steal the headlines, middle classes in Southeast Asia are also growing very fast, and Kharas (2017) estimates some 200 million new entrants from Southeast Asia between 2015 and 2030. By contrast, the predictions for other southern regions are much more modest, with only 6 per cent growth in Central and South America and 4 per cent growth in sub-Saharan Africa (Kharas 2017). While Latin America is already home to a sizeable middle class, reaching an estimated 38 per cent of the population in 2018 (del Carpio 2022), the low prospects for Africa have an explanation. Africa’s performance can be attributed to a weak growth in share of manufacturing value added, share of manufacturing in the continent’s export and limited labour-intensive manufacturing, which does little to curb growing unemployment rates (Melber 2013). Still, however, the generous numerical definitions used by influential scholars such as Martin Ravallion (2010) led the African Development Bank (AfDB 2012) to declare that between 300 and 500 million Africans, more than one-third of the continent’s population,

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had entered the middle classes, and thus becoming a transformative force in African economies. Indeed, through the first years of the 2010s, headlines and phrases like ‘the Rise and Rise of the African Middle Class’ (Deloitte 2013), ‘the African Lions’ (in analogy to the ‘Asian Tigers’) or ‘the Middle of the Pyramid’ (AfDB 2011) reflected a general positive economic outlook for Africa (Scharrer et al. 2018). These estimates were misleading but had real impacts on investments, as many global firms were eager to benefit from this ostensibly booming consumer market. However, as Cornel Krummenacher, then chief executive for Nestlé’s equatorial Africa region, put it in an interview with the Financial Times: ‘We thought this would be the next Asia, but we have realized the middle class here in the region is extremely small and it is not really growing’ (Manson 2015; see also Kharas and Fengler 2021).

3.

MIDDLE CLASSES, DEVELOPMENT AND CONSUMPTION

3.1

Driving Economic Growth?

The middle classes are expected to contribute to a wide range of positive development outcomes, for instance to drive democratisation processes (an empirical dubious and much criticised assumption; see Koo 1991, Jones 1998, Dahlum et al. 2019, Hansen 2020), and boost economic growth. In particular, they are thought to play a vital role in the global economy in cases of falling demand in mature capitalist countries, but crucially also for building domestic markets. For instance, increasing middle-class consumption has been located as central to the rapid growth experienced in many East Asian countries. The World Bank (2019, 12), for example, see the Indonesian middle class as a ‘major driver of economic growth in recent years’. Moreover, Peter Vanham of the World Economic Forum finds that in a context of global uncertainty and protectionism, Vietnam can count ‘on its own burgeoning middle class to deliver the next boost of growth’ (Vanham 2018, np). In Latin America, experts in the Inter-American Development Bank finds that strengthening the region’s middle class is key to sustained growth (see De la Cruz et al. 2020). Similarly, growth in African middle classes has been identified as a ‘key factor’ in the continent’s rapid and accelerated development, in line with the then much-cited ‘Africa rising’ narrative. Behind these headlines lies an expectation of a group with increasing purchasing power who will stimulate African economies through increased consumption (Neubert and Stoll 2018). It is often argued that the middle classes behave in different ways from the poorest and the richest in terms of consumption. In Africa, in contrast to the rich elite, it is argued that the middle class will increasingly spend their money in Africa, and hence drive economic development (Neubert and Stoll 2018). Furthermore, as argued by the World Bank (2019, 105): ‘A growing middle class can create structurally higher consumption growth, as it has greater disposable income than the poor and a higher marginal propensity to consume than the upper middle class.’ In terms of

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sustainability then, it is not a question of whether or not consumption increases, but how resource-intensive these consumption patterns are. In the following sections, we first discuss the characteristics of (new) middle class consumption through specific country cases, and second, we examine the prospects for more sustainable consumption patterns to develop among these new consumers. 3.2

Standardisation of Consumption Patterns or Persistent Inequality?

In two of the world’s fastest growing economies over the past decades, China and Vietnam, middle-class consumption, and changing perceptions among the communist regime towards private consumption, have been a defining part of economic and social transformations (Hansen 2020). In Vietnam, the World Bank (2018) finds that the consumption patterns of the (upper) middle classes stand out from the rest of society and represent ‘the dream of many’. They live in larger and more solid houses, which are more likely to have private bathrooms and kitchens. Moreover, middle-class houses are on average equipped with many more modern appliances than the dwellings of poorer segments, including washing machines, air-conditioners and computers. On average, the Bank finds, middle-class households spent three times as much on non-food items than the economically vulnerable (World Bank 2018). The middle classes have indeed been central to the considerable consumption boom in the country since the market reforms known as Doi Moi (Hansen 2023). A growing academic literature shows how different forms of consumption and goods have come to play central roles in class-based distinction and expectations in Vietnam (Bélanger et al. 2012), including motorbikes and cars (Hansen 2017), food practices (Ehlert 2016) and a variety of luxury items (Hansen 2020). However, this literature has also conveyed the complexity of class and consumption, for example when it comes to the vast differences in consumption patterns masked by the middle-class category, as well as how middle-class consumers, rather than drive demand, struggle to negotiate the often unhealthy and unsustainable consumption environments brought about by reforms (Hansen 2021). Furthermore, echoing research elsewhere in the region (e.g. Naafs 2018), Earl (2020) finds that the aspirations of the Vietnamese middle classes are not necessarily mainly defined by consumer goods, but by education, safer lives and a clean environment. According to Deloitte (2013), the African middle classes live in bigger and more permanent dwellings in urban centres, they are young, aspirational, educated and hold salaried jobs. They also have fewer children and opt for private education and health services as well as send their children to overseas universities. In terms of materiality, the middle class is associated with the widespread ownership of major household durable goods such as refrigerators, telephones, flat screen TVs and automobiles, and are both politically assertive and culturally self-confident (see also Ncube 2015). In South Africa, Chevalier (2015) highlights how the consumption patterns of the emerging black middle class are shaped by acquisition of goods and services previously reserved for whites. Hence, there has been increasing attention to the consumption of black middle-class members, and particularly to conspicuous

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consumption. However, such studies are criticised for portraying stereotypes of aspiring black consumers with a taste for expensive cars, designer labels and large houses, with a reputation as poor creditors (Kaus 2013, Burger et al. 2015). In a similar vein, Krige (2012) discusses how modes of consumption are shaped by apartheid history, where important symbols of agency, identity and mobility have occurred in sectors that have a long history of state involvement and control (or even monopoly) such as housing, transport and alcohol. Consumption in housing of the middle class becomes a social and political claim of belonging, and investments in motor vehicles become an important symbol of success given previous dependence on unsafe, lengthy and impractical public modes of transportation. The fact that middle class consumers are able to afford purchases beyond basic needs is associated with a sense of agency, but also shaped by a fear of losing the upward social mobility, which is one of the defining traits that distinguishes it from other classes (Chevalier 2015). Similarly, in Mozambique, housing has become particularly significant among the small group of middle-class consumers, with the importance of being located in ‘the right part of town’, with South African or European style decorations and appliances (Sumich 2016). The capital Maputo has experienced a building boom over the last decade, interpreted as local policy makers’ attempt to contribute to consolidating the growing urban middle class (Nielsen and Jenkins 2021). Moreover, similar to many other contexts (see Hansen and Nielsen 2017), car ownership has become a symbol of middle-class consumption, representing both increased autonomy and changing material aspirations. Having a car would also facilitate bulk buying and access to cheaper and more high-quality foods and clothing in neighbouring South Africa (Havstad 2019). The examples above show that in different ways and to different extents in different contexts, there is ample evidence to suggest that growing middle classes results in a wide range of more or less predictable consumption changes with shared characteristics. These changes include some of the most environmentally damaging realms, such as increased motorised mobility, increased meat consumption or increased electricity consumption through larger houses and more technological appliances (see e.g. Hansen, in press for discussion). Simultaneously, however, many middle-class consumers are more prone to saving their money than what such generalisations may suggest (e.g. Hansen 2020), in many cases, as we return to below, for the purpose of long-term investments in their children’s education. Furthermore, the rise of new middle classes also brings forth new inequality dynamics, both between classes and within the middle-class category. In the mainstream development literature, an expanding middle class is seen as core to developing more equal societies (e.g. De la Cruz et al. 2020). It appears as if the goal is for everyone to become middle class, reaffirmed by the fact that in many classifications of the new middle classes, upper or ‘global’ middle class is the highest class ‘rank’, including everyone spending more than a certain threshold per day (e.g. 15 USD in World Bank 2018, 2019). However, as summarised by Frank Trentmann (2016, 374) for the case of Asia, for most people,‘being middle class does not mean going to the mall but living on the edge in a daily struggle to pay the bills for schools and hospitals’ (see also Miao 2017). For instance, while Indonesian

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consumers have been labelled among the world’s most enthusiastic shoppers (see Jones 2018), most of the literature behind such labels revolves around the upper segments of the Indonesian middle classes, whereas the reality of lower middle classes is very different. As Naafs (2018, 63) puts it, ‘Although they often have to settle for cheap imitations of global consumer goods, confront a low quality regional education system, and are overwhelmed by nepotism, corruption and structural inequalities in the economy, they are highly aware of the promises of a better life just out of reach.’ While global middle-class lifestyles exist as ‘imagined futures’ (Beckert 2016) guiding aspirations, education defines the aspirational strategies of these classes. In this vein, the World Bank (2019) has separated between a middle class and an aspiring middle class in Indonesia, the latter a group of 115 million people which is here categorised as no longer poor, but not quite middle. Going from poor to middle class, the Bank finds, involves investing in convenience and comfort and, for example, spending considerably more on cars, on travel in general and travel for pleasure in particular, and on durable goods such as refrigerators, air conditioners and water heaters. However, it is also found that half of the middle class in Indonesia still lack access to proper sanitation, clean water and adequate housing. Similarly, in several African countries, the notion of middle class living represents more of an aspiration than a reality. In a study from Ipsos (van Blerk 2018) of the characteristics of the middle class across 10 African cities, the empirical evidence of material standards were much lower than initially expected. For instance, while people aspired to own property, 52 per cent of the middle class continued to rent housing, with only 42 per cent having running water inside their homes, with both water and electricity supply remaining unreliable. Moreover, car ownership was much lower than expected, where 68 per cent of the middle class in their sample did not own a car (van Blerk 2018). For example, in Mozambique, the country experienced tremendous growth during the early 2000s following from oil and gas discoveries, in turn expected to lead to wealth and jobs for the population as a whole, but these developmental promises have largely failed to deliver. In parallel to rapid cityscape transformations in the capital Maputo through urban construction projects, and the inflow of South African stores and brands, and cars from Asian countries, urban residents are experiencing rising living costs in terms of food, housing and transport, and increased social inequality (Havstad 2019). Rather than building a strong middle class, the extraversion of Mozambique’s development trajectory has created hundreds of billionaires, while leaving most of the population behind (Brooks 2018). For the small middle class, this has led to what Havstad (2019, 292) refers to as ‘a sense of feeling hungry amid abundance’, characterised by precariousness and tenuous livelihoods, continuous struggle and aspirations towards a better future. Being middle class hence means that there is little to no social security, and with little control over resources or means of production (Sumich 2016). While it is clear that rising middle classes lead to some predictable changes in consumption patterns, such as higher spending on food, mobility and housing, the country examples above also illustrate inequality in terms of access to different goods and services. Furthermore, the examples show how the category ‘middle class’ in

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many cases represents aspirations rather than reality. In relation to sustainability, however, the characteristics above point to how deeply entwined development is with economic growth and resource-intensive consumption. 3.3

Towards Sustainable Consumption?

Although the above discussion shows that many middle-class consumers are far from rich and are for different reasons careful with their spending, it seems clear that the middle classes deliver in terms of contributing to domestic demand through their consumption patterns. There is thus ample reason to worry about the environmental impacts of expanding middle classes. However, as mentioned at the start of this chapter, many still expect the middle classes to drive changes towards more sustainable consumption patterns. For example, the World Bank (2019) assumes that middle-class consumers are willing to pay more for higher-quality products and that they are more concerned with how environmental degradation and pollution may affect living standards and find that these concerns may serve to increase domestic supply and environmental quality for all. Furthermore, parts of the literature express hope that emerging consumer classes can ‘leapfrog’ into more sustainable consumption patterns, given that systems of consumption and production are not yet as fixed as those of the North (see e.g. Tukker 2005). For instance, while collaborative consumption requires a radical shift in consumption in many highly industrial countries, they may represent attractive solution for middle-class consumers seeking access to new consumer goods for the first time, and where consumption patterns are changing rapidly (Retamal 2019). Schroeder and Anantharaman (2017, 4) have developed the concept of ‘lifestyle leapfrogging’ to explore how sustainable consumption patterns ‘could be realized from the outset, circumventing the unsustainable lifestyles of Western consumers’. This would entail increasing well-being and wealth while maintaining moderate material consumption patterns, resisting for instance to engage in activities with high environmental impacts. While tempting, this idea seems to underestimate the complexity of the historical, cultural and social processes through which consumption patterns are shaped. Furthermore, there is currently very little empirical evidence to back such leapfrogging in practice. Rather, it seems as if the main drivers of more moderate or reduced consumption within the rising middle classes are rooted in economic concerns and relative poverty. McEwan et al. (2015) show the significance of ‘thrift’ in driving consumer choices in South African middle classes in the Western Cape as a way of facilitating consumption of goods within relatively constrained middle-class budgets. Responsible budgeting and not wasting money becomes the morally ‘right thing to do’, in order to maximise lifetime consumption and free up resources for other kinds of consumption, such as providing quality education for children or quality fresh food for the family. Earl (2020) finds similar tendencies among middle-class households in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, where the women she interviewed perform in a range of ‘green’ practices often driven by economic concerns, or concerns regarding a desire to create safe and comfortable neighbourhoods, rather than environmental ones. In

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China, where – similar to many other Asian countries – thrift has an important cultural and historical position (e.g. Zanasi 2015), marketers see a revival of more frugal practices among young consumers as a defining outcome of the uncertainties created by the Covid-19 pandemic (WARC 2020). Many more examples could be listed, but the point is that many sustainable practices are to a significant extent driven by largely involuntary constraints on consumption (see also Brons et al. 2021).2 While in consumption terms it is clearly more sustainable to be poor than rich, that is hardly a slogan suitable for rallying popular support. A crucial insight from consumption research is that rather than status-hungry consumers looking to flaunt their wealth, large-scale changes in consumption patterns take place through complex normalisation processes that involve consumers, the systems of provision that produce and sell consumer goods, the built environment and policies favouring resource-demanding consumption. Through these processes, as societies grow wealthier, a range of unsustainable practices become embedded in everyday life and are left unquestioned. For example, the search for comfort and convenience – and often combined with class-based expectations and distinction processes – tend to be prioritised over frugality and thrift over time (Shove 2003, Wilhite 2008). The dynamics of these normalisation processes need much more attention from researchers and policy makers alike. In order to avoid catastrophic environmental destruction, we need to start approaching consumption as at once societal-level and global challenges.

4.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

The characteristics of the new middle classes discussed above show the fundamental heterogeneity defined by this enormous group of people, which is continuously masked in popular simplifications. The new middle classes are not necessarily a democratic force, they are not by definition politically progressive and, importantly, they are not necessarily rich. ‘Middle class’ indeed often seems to signify aspirations rather than reality.3 The deep heterogeneity hidden by the ‘middle class’ concept and the vast differences in income and opportunities among the richest and the poorest call for a more nuanced and contextualised use of the class concept, where middle class consumers need to be understood in relation to other class formations. Relatedly, another important aspect is the inherent notions of ‘catch-up’ that is built into much of the mainstream discourse on the new middle classes. In these – ironically enough ‘class-blind’ – approaches to class, economic growth is seemingly lifting all boats and leaving no one behind. In reality, a minority of the middle classes in the South (and in the North) live the comfortable lives that exist in the imagination of global ‘middle-class lifestyles’. For instance, while the ‘Africa rising’ narrative has boosted the idea that economic salvation for Africa lies in the growth of an ‘educated, aspirant and globally aware African middle class’ (Southall 2018, 15), the challenge remains the fact that there are too few and too weak small- and medium-sized companies between large (often foreign) and micro-enterprises of African entrepreneurs.

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This has often been referred to as ‘the missing middle’, with entrepreneurship in Africa often being ‘survival-oriented’ rather than ‘growth-oriented’ (Akinkugbe and Wohlmuth 2017). In this vein, Melber (2013) has argued that the African middle classes as a source for hope is wishful thinking, rather promoting investment opportunities for foreign actors without any meaningful employment generation or local capital accumulation (see also Wethal 2018). Despite all of this, however, the expansion of the middle classes represents a transformational force. They represent the shift of global consumer markets from the North to the East and South, in the process calling into question most of the existing categorisations of the world, including the concepts of ‘North’ and ‘South’. They represent uneven development and polarisation, but also higher living standards and new expectations and aspirations. In addition to capital and governments, they represent vast investment opportunities and potentials for growth. The aspirations of the middle classes are often as much related to education and health as to consumer goods, but the changing consumption patterns that tend to accompany increasing affluence are significant. They are important from both a social and an economic perspective, but vital from an environmental perspective. The Earth is already pushed far beyond its ecological limits due to the consumption patterns of the most affluent consumers and the resources they depend on and the emissions and waste they create (e.g. Tukker et al. 2010, Yuan et al. 2022). While many of the new middle-class entrants may never become wealthy, and while consumption patterns do take different shapes in different contexts, becoming middle class tends to hold promises of increased consumption of a range of goods and services. If hundreds of millions of new middle-class consumers were to start driving cars, fly, eat more meat and adopt fast-fashion practices, it would have disastrous environmental and climatic effects. Indeed, the discussions about new middle classes seem to suffer from many of the same paradoxes as those already inherent to understandings of sustainable development, which, as long as catch-up with high-consuming societies remains the end goal of development, has come to represent an oxymoron (see also Hansen and Wethal 2015). From an environmental perspective, it is thus clear that not only must consumers in affluent societies change their consumption patterns, the world also depends on new middle classes to consume more sustainably than their counterparts in the Global North. The first step in such a monumental challenge is to understand what drives consumption and how demand is shaped through development processes. We started this chapter by calling for a broader sustainability research agenda. A first step would be to go beyond both the generalising tendencies of much development research and the macro-structural blindness of many contextually grounded approaches. While it has been well established that development does not lead to full-fledged global convergence and homogenisation in terms of consumption patterns, there are still some overarching consumption trends that can be expected to accompany economic development and capitalist expansion (see Hansen et al. 2016; Hansen, in press). A second step is to acknowledge that consumption is fundamentally social and that individual choices represent a poor starting point for understanding this. Classic studies in the field have shown how class belonging both

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define and is partly defined by the consumption of goods (Bourdieu 1984). Third, and relatedly, consumption patterns are societally shaped. The clear social patterning of consumption is related to macro-societal processes of change in terms of how people live, work, move around and spend their spare time, as well as the infrastructure and systems of provision that develop as part of these processes (e.g. Shove and Trentmann 2019). Fourth, changing consumption patterns are closely related to, and both shape and are shaped by, economic processes. Economic growth, investments and accumulation strategies, alongside governments and regulation or the lack of such, shape the availability of goods, but also play a central role in co-creating the demand for goods and services through, for example, marketing strategies. Social-scientific consumption research has convincingly demonstrated how demand is not something that exists out there that needs to be met, but something that is created (e.g. Rinkinen et al. 2020). In sum, consumption and demand are shaped by processes that are immensely more complex than what is often acknowledged. Understanding consumption changes as part of societal processes, and as shaped by both producers and consumers, enable us to connect development and consumption more closely together. Potentially, this could also help us connect consumption into broader discussions about development and the environment. While consumption was originally an integral part to the global sustainability agenda, the sustainable consumption part has since been co-opted by business-friendly approaches to ‘greening’ production processes, leading to, for example, a sustainable development goal on responsible consumption and production (SDG 12) that hardly touches on consumption at all (see Gasper et al. 2019). With this chapter we would like to call for a new research agenda on sustainable consumption in the South.

NOTES 1. The World Bank (2018) here counts as middle classes anyone spending more than 5.50 USD a day, including the two categories ‘economically secure’ (5.50‒15 USD) and ‘global middle class’ (more than 15 USD). 2. Lack of income can to some extent also function as a barrier against purchasing (often more expensive) greener products. 3. Much in line with concepts such as ‘emerging economies’ (see Hansen and Wethal 2015).

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Manson, K. 2015. Nestlé cuts Africa workforce as middle class growth disappoints. Financial Times, 17 June. Accessed May 2022 at www​.ft​.com/​content/​de2aa98e​-1360​-11e5​-ad26​ -00144feabdc0 Mawdsley, E. 2019. South–south cooperation 3.0? Managing the consequences of success in the decade ahead. Oxford Development Studies, 47(3), 259‒274. Mawdsley, E. 2014. The Rising Partners as Development Donors and Partners. The Companion to Development Studies. London: Routledge. McEwan, C., Hughes, A., & Bek, D. 2015. Theorising middle class consumption from the global south: A study of everyday ethics in South Africa’s Western Cape. Geoforum, 67, 233‒243. Melber, H. 2015. Where and what (for) is the middle? Africa and the middle class(es). The European Journal of Development Research, 27(2), 246‒254. Melber, H. 2013. Africa and the middle class(es). Africa Spectrum, 48(3), 111–120. Miao, Y. 2017. Being Middle Class in China: Identity, Attitudes and Behaviour. London: Routledge. Naafs, S. 2018. Youth aspirations and employment in provincial Indonesia: A view from the lower middle classes. Children’s Geographies, 16(1), 53‒65. DOI: 10.1080/14733285.201 7.1350634 Ncube, M. 2015. Introduction, in Ncube, M. & Lufumpa, C. (Eds), The Emerging Middle Class in Africa (pp. 1‒8). London: Routledge. Neubert, D., & Stoll, F. 2018. The narrative of ‘the African middle class’ and its conceptual limitations, in Kroeker, L., O’Kane, D., & Scharrer, T. (Eds), Middle Classes in Africa (pp. 57‒79). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Nielsen, M., & Jenkins, P. 2021. Insurgent aspirations? Weak middle-class utopias in Maputo, Mozambique. Critical African Studies, 13(2), 162‒182. Otero, G. 2018. The Neoliberal Diet: Healthy Profits, Unhealthy People. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Ravallion, M. 2010. The developing world’s bulging (but vulnerable) middle class. World Development, 38(4), 445‒454. Reeves, R. V., Guyot, K., & Krause, E. 2018. Defining the Middle Class: Cash, Credentials or Culture? Brookings Institution. Accessed April 2022 at https://​www​.brookings​.edu/​ research/​defining​-the​-middle​-class​-cash​-credentials​-or​-culture/​ Retamal, M. 2019. Collaborative consumption practices in Southeast Asian cities: Prospects for growth and sustainability. Journal of Cleaner Production, 222, 143‒152. Rinkinen, J., Shove, E., & Marsden, G. 2020. Conceptualising Demand: A Distinctive Approach to Consumption and Practice. London: Routledge. Schäfer, M., Jaeger-Erben, M., & Dos Santos, A. 2011. Leapfrogging to sustainable consumption? An explorative survey of consumption habits and orientations in Southern Brazil. Journal of Consumer Policy, 34(1), 175‒196. Scharrer, T., O’Kane, D., & Kroeker, L. 2018. Introduction: Africa’s middle classes in critical perspective, in Kroeker, L., O’Kane, D., & Scharrer, T. (Eds), Middle Classes in Africa (pp. 1‒31). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Schroeder, P., & Anantharaman, M. 2017. ‘Lifestyle leapfrogging’ in emerging economies: Enabling systemic shifts to sustainable consumption. Journal of Consumer Policy, 40(1), 3‒23. Shove, E. 2003. Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience: The Social Organization of Normality. New York: Berg. Shove, E., & Trentmann, F. (Eds) 2019. Infrastructures in Practice: The Dynamics of Demand in Networked Societies. London: Routledge. Southall, R. 2018. What’s missing? Reflections on the debate on middle class(es) in Africa. Transformation: Critical Perspectives on Southern Africa, 96(1), 1‒24.

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Sumich, J. 2016. The uncertainty of prosperity: Dependence and the politics of middle-class privilege in Maputo. Ethnos, 81(5), 821‒841. Tonby, O., Woetzel, J., Razdan, R., Choi, W., Yamakawa, N., Seong, J., & Devesa, T. 2021. The trailblazing consumers in Asia propelling growth. McKinsey Global Institute, 7 June. Accessed March 2022 at www​.mckinsey​.com/​featured​-insights/​asia​-pacific/​the​ -trailblazing​-consumers​-in​-asia​-propelling​-growth Trentmann, F. 2016. Empire of things: How we Became World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First. London: Penguin UK. Tukker, A. 2005. Leapfrogging into the future: Developing for sustainability. International Journal of Innovation and Sustainable Development, 1(1‒2), 65‒84. Tukker, A., Cohen, M. J., Hubacek, K., & Mont, O. 2010. The impacts of household consumption and options for change. Journal of Industrial Ecology, 14(1), 13‒30. UNDP 2013. The rise of the south: Human progress in a diverse world. Human Development Report. New York: UNDP. van Blerk, H. 2018. African Lions: Who are Africa’s Rising Middle Class? Ipsos Views #15, February 2018. Vanham, P. 2018. The story of Viet Nam’s economic miracle. World Economic Forum. 11 September. Accessed March 2022 at www​.weforum​.org/​agenda/​2018/​09/​how​-vietnam​ -became​-an​-economic​-miracle/​ WARC 2020. Thrift is the new watchword for young Chinese consumers. 29 May. Accessed 15 May 2023 at www​.warc​.com/​newsandopinion/​news/​thrift​-is​-the​-new​-watchword​-for​ -young​-chinese​-consumers/​en​-gb/​43664 Warde A. 2017. Consumption: A Sociological Analysis. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Wethal, U. 2018. Beyond the China factor: Challenges to backward linkages in the Mozambican construction sector. The Journal of Modern African Studies, 56(2), 325‒351. Wiemann, J. 2015. The new middle classes: Advocates for good governance, inclusive growth and sustainable development? The European Journal of Development Research,  27(2), 195‒201. Wilhite, H. 2008. Consumption and the Transformation of Everyday Life: A View from South India. London: Palgrave Macmillan. World Bank. 2019. Aspiring Indonesia – Expanding the Middle Class. Washington, DC: World Bank. World Bank. 2018. Climbing the Ladder: Poverty Reduction and Shared Prosperity in Vietnam. Hanoi: World Bank. Yuan, R., Rodrigues, J. F., Wang, J., Tukker, A., & Behrens, P. 2022. A global overview of developments of urban and rural household GHG footprints from 2005 to 2015. Science of the Total Environment, 806, 150695. Zanasi, M. 2015. Frugal modernity: Livelihood and consumption in republican China. The Journal of Asian Studies, 74(2), 391–409. www​.jstor​.org/​stable/​43553590

15. New energy transitions, old problems: the challenge of achieving a just electrification with a gendered face Kirsten Campbell and Tanja Winther

1. INTRODUCTION Energy is central to nearly every major challenge and opportunity the world faces, according to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (UN, 2018). As anthropologists who have studied energy in different contexts, we have witnessed the immense amount of time, effort and resources people without access to modern forms of energy1 put into sustaining a living, for example when women prepare evening meals only with the help of a torch or kerosene lamp. Globally, although the number is gradually coming down, almost 1 billion people still do not have access to electricity, and much larger numbers face irregular supply. Conversely, we have observed moments in rural India and sub-Saharan Africa when electricity was turned on for the very first time, providing people with light for reading, access to watching television, making children come closer to their parents’ ambitions that they achieve digital literacy – and even making people feel connected to their nations (Winther, 2015). Energy affects human life on all arenas whether at home, at work, in the organisation and delivery of public and private goods and services, or how communities and societies work. In post-development discourses in the Global North, energy primarily features as an environmental problem to be solved. In contrast, the provision of energy is a central facet of the types of development and modernity sought by many governments in the Global South, featuring prominently in electoral mandates. In this chapter, we bring attention to this kind of ‘old’ problem while asking how a just electrification can be reached with a gendered face. From the outset, it is important to frame the processes of electrification within the political economies and constructs of the processes and structures which govern societies at large and energy and resources specifically (Boyer, 2014; Gupta, 2015; Appel et al., 2018; Abram et al., 2019). The provision of electricity access to all tends to be framed as a strategy to combat poverty (World Bank, 2015). In many parts of the world, grid access and quality have drastically improved in recent years, at least as reflected in official figures, but with environmental costs. In many contexts, including China, Brazil, South Africa (Rafey & Sovacool, 2011) and Kenya (Boulle, 2019), there remain concerns around the environmental impacts of coal-intensive energy 231

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generation which has often been assumed to be necessary for increases in electricity access and quality (Urpelainen & Yang, 2019). In India, which much of this chapter utilises as an illustrative case site, a large part of the increased levels of grid supply, driven through increased political targets to elevate rural development (Kale, 2014; ESMAP, 2021) have depended on increased coal generation (Urban et al., 2009; Molyneaux et al., 2016). Despite these efforts and the increased use of fossil fuels for production, there remain a significant number of Indians living without reliable access to 24-hour power (Harish et al., 2014; Palit & Bandyopadhyay, 2017; Agrawal et al., 2020). Those without electricity tend to live in rural areas of poorer states and predominantly belong to Scheduled Caste/Dalit, Scheduled Tribe/Adivasi and Muslim groups (Dugoua et al., 2017; Saxena & Bhattacharya, 2018), reflecting wider structures of inequality and marginalisation. In recent years, there has been an increased focus in the role of gender within energy access discourses. Intersections between Sustainable Development Goal 7, focusing on clean, modern energy access, and Sustainable Development Goal 5, focusing on gender equality, have been explored in attempts to address the gendered impacts of energy poverty (UNDP, 2016; OECD, 2021) and the purported role of women in mobilising the energy transition (UN Women, n.d.; Price 2019). These concerns have contributed to multiple initiatives, such as the multi-stakeholder Gender and Energy Compact, announced in the lead up to COP 26, with the support of numerous governments, INGOs, research organisations, civil society and private sector actors (UN Energy, 2021). These discourses have been important in moving away from solely technical and economic approaches, which have dominated energy research and practice (Sovacool, 2014), to understand more of the social dynamics of energy challenges. However, these narratives have sometimes failed to critically examine the full extent of gender politics stretching across design, policy, research, supply and users’ spaces within energy systems. They are also hindered by deeply held assumptions of inherent equal benefits to women and men with the processes of increased energy access. At a first glance, the selected case for discussion, the solar micro-grid project in the village of Urjapur, Odisha, would seem to be an ideal intervention to address concerns around carbon-intensive grid infrastructures, which are often associated with unreliability and lack of reach to supply everyone in rural areas with adequate electricity. The current challenges have led to the rise of policies and practices for renewable, off-grid and decentralised energy generation technologies, ranging from small-scale solar lanterns and charging stations, to community- and industrial-scale mini-grids run by solar-, wind-, hydro- and tidal power. These have begun to transform many of the discourses and practices around energy access in the Global South,2 creating new paradigms, politics and processes associated with electricity design, use and governance. The World Bank estimates that by 2030, upwards of half a billion people will be provided with electricity access through off-grid mini- and micro-grids, where over $28 billion has already been invested in installing these in 134 countries worldwide (ESMAP, 2019), demonstrating the appetite and opportunities presented by these new technologies. Off-grid energy has captured the imagination for what rural

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and low-income communities could look like, intersecting with the developmental politics of energy access and technological transformation. An oft-embedded marker of how technology can help spur such a desired energy transition is the inclusion of smart technologies, which reflects the imaginaries of developers but which also conceal power relations, as our present case will help illuminate.

2.

A SOCIOTECHNICAL AND ENERGY JUST PERSPECTIVE

We anchor the social analysis of electrification processes, first, in a sociotechnical systems perspective (e.g. Rip & Kemp, 1998; Rohracher, 2003; Geels, 2011; Ulsrud et al., 2015). Here, technology and society are considered to develop through mutual interaction. Hence, our ‘sociotechnical electricity systems’, from their inception to their planning, implementation, distribution, maintenance and end-use, evolve under specific conditions in local contexts through interaction between heterogeneous elements (human and non-human actors) positioned within a given social and political structure. More specifically, scholars have scrutinised the way technical objects, including technical components within electricity systems such as electric meters, carry ‘scripts’ (values and norms for behaviour) which determine the way users will act (Latour, 1994; Akrich, 1992). Second, to scrutinise the selected process of electrification we draw on energy justice, which has become an important conceptual framework for studying energy transitions (Jenkins et al., 2018). In short, energy justice invites our attention both to the process of implementing a given energy policy or intervention and the social distribution of benefits and costs thereof. In the present discussion, we draw particularly on a body of literature that has examined energy justice and electrification from a gender lens. While there is a growing body of literature on the gender electricity nexus in the Global North (Henning, 2004; Clancy and Roehr, 2007; Standal et al., 2020; Feenstra, 2021), we primarily focus on works deriving from the Global South (e.g. Standal et al., 2018; Matinga et al., 2019; Winther et al., 2020; Campbell, 2020). This literature highlights that existing gender discrimination often negatively impacts women’s opportunities to take part in decision-making processes on energy and hinders women’s control over and access to energy resources as compared with men. Standal and colleagues (2018) argue that three overarching policy and research discourses on energy and development have served to conceal the underlying structures of gender inequality and thereby have also been unsuited to address the issue of how new forms of energy may enhance women’s empowerment. First, energy has been considered as gender neutral with the assumption that the arrival of electricity, for example, will benefit women and men equally. Second, women are being portrayed as ‘victims of energy poverty’, which has had the effect of undermining the agency of various groups of women. Third, access to modern energy is interpreted within the discourse of growth and economic empowerment, which centres women as the drivers and benefactors of both the growing industries supplying energy technologies and those catalysed by

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new or increased energy access. This discourse risks overestimating the agency of women in a given local context and it also effectively reduces other paths to empowerment than those going through growth in the productive sector (see also Chant and Sweetman 2012 for a critique of this discourse). In contrast, this chapter offers a structural analysis of the gender hierarchies of privilege3 associated with an energy intervention in India. We primarily draw on the Urjapur4 micro-grid project, which was studied through ethnographic fieldwork over the course of 2017–2018 by the first author (Campbell, 2020). Urjapur is located in Odisha, a state in Eastern India, and the village was among the selected sites for India’s first ‘smart’ solar micro-grids (see Figure 15.1). The micro-grids in Urjapur were installed between 2014 and 2016, and the objective of the research was to understand the localised politics and social dynamics of such projects, with a particular focus on the gendered dimensions of such sociotechnical systems from their design to their implementation and use. The village of Urjapur was one of many in the eastern state of Odisha which had never been connected to the main grid, having also been left without electricity in 2012 when nearby villages gained grid access. Government legislation prohibited the grid’s extension and other infrastructure projects within ‘core forest areas’, including Urjapur, to limit the potential impact on surrounding wildlife. To sidestep these concerns, the solar micro-grid was initiated to create a renewable, islanded energy system, which fulfilled the energy needs of the community without compromising the surrounding ecosystem. The micro-grid consisted of a 30 kW off-grid AC solar system (see Figure 15.2), connected to nearly all of the 150 households in the village.5 The project resonated with hopes of ‘leapfrogging’ technologies catalysing development in the Global South without the pitfalls of extensive resource extraction, high emissions and environmental degradation (Perkins, 2003; Szabó et al., 2013). In this sense, the Urjapur micro-grid was emblematic of general aspirations for green developments in electricity access, proposing new means for rural energy access, which captured imaginations for what rural developmental futures might look like. We will now look more into what these imaginations are and the wider developmental agendas and structures of which they form part. Then, by drawing on the energy justice framework and the literature on gender and electricity, we look at some key challenges and concerns around who is included and excluded through these alternative electrification processes and how this affects the outcomes.

3.

DEVELOPMENT AGENDAS, GLOBAL NETWORKS AND SOCIOTECHNICAL SCRIPTS

The metrics used within global development agendas to monitor progress in access to electricity relate to the share/number of households who have affordable access to electricity, with SDG 7 targeting universal access by 2030 (UN, 2015). The associated targets do not seek to scrutinise what kind of households have a connection – nor the gendered, intra-household dynamics of acquiring appliances, positioning light points or using electricity. However, a growing body of literature on the gender–energy

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Figure 15.1

Chhotkei village

nexus suggests that electrification often benefits men disproportionally at the cost of women. This is linked to men more often forming part of supply systems (getting jobs and income and influence on system design and operation) and men’s ownership of houses and higher income/decision-making power compared to women, which gives men a greater say as to end-use of electricity (for a review, see Winther et al., 2017). For example, a study of the gendered access to electricity (Winther et al., 2020) showed that 74 per cent of widows in Homa Bay, Kenya, who were living in poverty and without a man in the house, did not have any kind of electricity access, whereas the similar share of households in which a man resided was approximately

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Figure 15.2

Two solar panels

40 per cent. Electricity access is a gendered matter in many contexts, as is people’s access to acquiring and using electric appliances. 3.1

Smart Upliftment?

With the drop in prices for solar panels over the last years and the high costs of reaching remote areas with centralised grids, the push for decentralised solar-powered solutions (and other micro-generation) is increasing. In this respect, the Urjapur micro-grid design was directly representative of the developments and aims of off-grid electrification movements globally. Also, the initiative was innovative in that it went beyond solely providing an electricity connection, in approximation to its grid counterpart, or providing lighting and phone charging, as previous iterations of off-grid solar had managed (Aklin et al., 2017; Kumar, 2018; Badami, 2021). Rather, the micro-grid and its designers proposed an ambitious model for how the community should function, integrating smart technologies with aims to utilise energy for ‘smart’ agriculture, livelihood projects and education, health and e-governance programmes. Hence, the project imagined and targeted services far beyond solely providing electricity. One of the engineers on the project described these livelihood projects as ‘social upliftment’, and a means to transform the community: Livelihoods, combined with education on the app and the use of smart technology around QR codes and apps, utilising Wi-Fi from the data centre will create a greater, more observable, constructive change. There will be a lifestyle transformation and options will be opened up day to day. But with livelihoods we need more market chain and ecosystem

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development. The community do not know how to use power, so they need [to be] educated, as there is a complete lifestyle shift required. (Micro-grid engineer (man), Urjapur, March 2017)

These promises of social upliftment, in which the built-in ‘smart’ components are considered to play an important role, are seen across the off-grid and renewable energy sector in the Global South (Ulsrud et al., 2018) and represent new ways of thinking about rural development through the opportunities presented with off-grid electricity. The idea is to create a new way of living through the scripts provided by devices such as apps, Wi-Fi and a data centre, in addition to education. However, such initiatives merit scrutiny on how they intersect with global, national and local networks of actors, including the influence of existing politics of the space of their implementation, on what new structures and power dynamics are created – and on what the smart assemblage of electricity supply may achieve in practice. 3.2

Global and National Networks of Actors Influencing Localised Systems

It is important to situate the technologies and developmental agendas associated with electricity access within intersecting global, national and local networks of actors. Many analyses of off-grid electricity projects frame them as being situated within specific and bounded communities or sites, often in direct contrast to analyses of networked grid infrastructures. However, the concerns explored in this chapter stretch beyond the confines of singular projects or individual programmes and direct interplay between designers and users. Instead, the relationships at play operate within broader structures which expand across the contexts of usage and implementation, design and operations, research and policy making. In the rural context of Urjapur (located 150 km from the state capital), the project sat within an industry of off-grid development and rural electrification, where ideas took shape in a complex network of actors: policy-making organisations (internationally, federal state Delhi, state Odisha); research institutions (Delhi, internationally); the donor and development community (international); and engineering labs (university campus). The project was thus influenced by global structures surrounding funding landscapes, the processes and politics of extraction, manufacture and distribution, and waste and end-of-life infrastructures. One particular type of global influence which was notably absent from the planning processes was gender-aware policies, research and practices. To capture some of this interconnectedness surrounding the Urjapur case, the research for this study was formed through multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork, with time spent in (i) the village complemented with periods based at (ii) the university campus from where the project was designed and controlled, and finally, (iii) relevant research and policy-making organisations based in Delhi. These two latter sites, while having vastly contrasting contexts to the Odisha village, had distinct gender dynamics of their own, which intersected with who was involved in the processes of

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design, policy and research implementation and whose voices, knowledge and experiences counted: In the university campus the engineering team was entirely male dominated, though some female students took an interest in the project. However, these women faced difficulties in family expectations, experiences of campus evening curfews on their extracurricular activities and challenges in getting their perspectives heard by male faculty members. The technical design for the micro-grid took place at this campus and this was also where the control room for the village electricity system was situated. The engineering team’s understandings of the village context were abstracted through assumptions of how communities behave and what uses of energy would fulfil certain models of ‘development’. Emma Crewe (1997) treated the historical (and often failed) development and uptake of modern stoves, and observed a similar distance between designers’ assumptions (men in laboratories) and end-users’ realities and preferences (different women in different contexts). Likewise, in the research and policy organisations in Delhi, gender underpinned significant aspects of the activities that took place, in terms of who undertook research and in which locations, and how the research was analysed and published. An overall observation was that women tended more often to spend time in villages doing qualitative research, with close interaction with female participants, compared with men who often took more management- and technically oriented roles and were more involved in quantitative analysis. Numerous young women working in these research and policy spaces highlighted the challenges they faced in making their type of knowledge heard internally, and the subsequent negative impacts both for them and for the work produced by these organisations, which tended to emphasise the knowledge deriving from male colleagues’ quantitative research. The women staff also reported gender-based discrimination and harassment they had experienced within their organisation, where their roles were often dependent on the benevolence of male superiors. Despite their disproportionate work in undertaking field research in villages across India, and the tacit, contextual knowledge they co-created with women in the field, they faced barriers to inclusion within conference panels, promotional opportunities and research decisions. Thus, there is a close link between the male-dominated university campus and the type of esteemed knowledge among research and policy organisations. The latter groups are also in close contact with governments, donors and funding agencies, and although the latter kind of actors have not been researched in the present work, these gendered threads may also be researched/followed in other directions, for example looking at sites of extraction and funding. The result of these dynamics is that the nuanced gendered experiences of interlocutors in the field, as well as of women researchers and engineers, were effectively written out and the knowledge produced was filtered by the gendered hierarchies of the organisations producing them. This created something of an echo chamber, where patriarchal norms and assumptions were shaped within several spheres, often relying on quantitative data. This emphasises questions across the global networks of actors involved in energy decision making, about how gender is built into systems and

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technologies which supply electricity (see below), but also how knowledge of what energy systems are and how they are experienced is formed. The language of ‘scripts’ and ‘scripting’ (Akrich, 1992) is a helpful way of framing these linkages between broad development agendas, the networks of actors involved and the material technologies associated with off-grid electricity. In understanding technological and operational design as a process of attributing a specific script about how energy technologies will be used and about how the communities of users will function through their use of energy, it is possible to understand what values, structures and judgements are embodied within these systems. Critically, electricity systems are not value-neutral propositions, and it is important to analyse who and where they come from, the politics and positionality of their designers and the ever-changing global networks of extraction and production, technological advancement, political interests and financial systems within which they sit. The initial micro-grid system in Urjapur had been designed far from the village itself and the influences for it stemmed more from external sources than from a realistic understanding of the community or how the community perceived themselves or their future (Campbell, 2020, pp.117–141). Projects like it were intended to be replicated not just in Urjapur, but in numerous villages across the country. The design of the micro-grid system became a tool by which these intended scripts were to be ‘made durable’ (Latour, 1991, p.103) within the technologies themselves, but where ultimately the dissonances between technical design and subsequent users were apparent, particularly, as we explore here, through a gendered analytical lens.

4.

GENDERED ELECTRIFICATION PROCESSES AND THEIR GENDERED OUTCOMES Why would we ask the women? All they use the electricity for is to watch [TV serials]. (Micro-grid engineer (man) commenting on why women in the village had not been invited to consultation meetings, Urjapur, March 2017)

In rural Zanzibar, when the electricity grid was extended to Uroa village (Winther, 2008) – and in the Sundarban Island, West Bengal, when solar photovoltaic power plants and micro-grids were installed (Winther, 2014) – the female members of the local populations were not consulted. So was the case in Urjapur, as indicated in the above quote. To help account for women’s exclusion in conventional electrification processes, previous studies have pointed to the existing, gendered ownership of land and houses and found that fixed connections to the grid tend to constitute a continuity to this distribution of wealth (Winther, 2008; Winther et al., 2020). The developers tend to invite local men to consultations because they are house owners, considered as family providers, often have a higher income than women do – and are likely to become customers with the electricity supplier. Thus, from the onset of the creation of the supplier–end-user relationship women only become indirectly associated through their male partners or relatives.

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In the present section, we first account for how the consultation meetings in Urjapur took place before analysing how women’s exclusion from this initial process related to their share of benefits from the micro-grid. To understand the links between ‘process’ and ‘outcomes’ a glance at the history of developing cooking stoves in the 1960s and ‘70s is illuminating. Crewe (1997) observed that one of the main reasons why women cooks in the Global South avoided using modern stoves developed ‘for them’ was that the designers, developers and engineers of the technology (white men situated in laboratories in the North) had limited understandings of the needs of the potential end-users (women situated in cold Nepal, hot Mali and in a range of different contexts). Crewe refers to this gap as ignored tacit knowledge (‘silent traditions’, drawing on practice theory). On their side, the engineers highlighted energy-efficient stoves and brought to bear their own silent traditions, or presumptions, about how the stoves would be taken up and used. On the other hand, the cooks carried their own (or rather: many types of) ideas about how to run a kitchen in everyday life. We will now look at the consultation process in Urjapur, the ideas for end-use that the engineers had in mind (tacit knowledge) and how these became scripted in the system, before discussing this in light of the expressed needs of the women and the gendered distribution of benefits that derived from this particular type of electricity supply. In Urjapur, when the micro-grid company started working in the village, the implementer initiated a number of community meetings. Here, the engineers assessed the viability of the system, gained consent from the community and invited each household to estimate the loads that they would wish to run on the system. This information was then used to design the system. These meetings followed the same structure of existing community meetings, which were dominated by higher caste men and where women in the community were not invited. As a result, women did not play any role in the formal design processes of the micro-grid nor have a relationship with the implementers. When asked in the aftermath, most women said they would have liked to attend, but that they never attend community meetings. 4.1

Defining the Demands for Electricity ‘Productive’ and ‘Domestic’ Loads

In contrast to traditional grid infrastructures, off-grid solar photovoltaic (PV) systems have significant limitations on what power can be used and at what time, primarily based on the solar generation and battery capacities. This often creates a need for scheduling, to ensure that the system does not overload and break down, which also shapes who can use the power. Partly informed by the consultations with local men in the village, the Urjapur micro-grid engineers undertook the task of deciding who could use electricity for what devices, appliances and machinery, and when. These were framed as technical decisions, but which implied implicit value judgements as to what and who in the community were most important. An example of where a certain type of electricity use was more valued within groups in the community versus in the minds of the designers was the use of TVs. They were dismissed (see previous quote, related to opening paragraph of section) by

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the engineers as being frivolous and adding little value to the transformational aims of the project. While they could not prohibit the use of them, TVs were disregarded as being a key design consideration. Despite this, as has also been observed in the literature (Winther, 2008; Standal & Winther, 2016), it turned out that Urjapur women’s access to TV had significant and unintended impacts. TV and radio, enabled by access to electricity, connected the community to the wider world through access to soaps, movies and news programming. Their high cost meant only a few households could afford them, but they became meeting points for groups of women. These groups largely consisted of neighbourhood groups, without explicit caste divisions. As well as enjoying the entertainment, many women spoke of the ability to watch TV as making them feel more connected in a context where, being in the forest and beyond the reach of phone networks, they often felt disconnected both physically and socially. Since many women only left the forest a few times a year, it made sense that access to broadcasts from Bhubaneswar and Delhi would dramatically shift this perception. One mother of a teenage daughter went as far as to say that this connectivity had inspired her to want to get more involved in community politics. Though she herself could not read, she now got her daughter to read newspapers to her so she could be more engaged and informed on current issues. The reduction of women’s use of energy to something that was implied to be superficial was indicative of a hierarchy in what energy uses were validated, and therefore serviced, by the engineers. This reflects the hegemonic masculinities (Connell, 1995) that were built into this micro-grid technology; manifested and reproduced through the gendered expectations and knowledge of the engineers of the system and the gendered power differentials already existing in the village. This particular scripting of the system continued with design decisions that in effect separated between male and female electricity loads. In practice, to facilitate the scheduling decisions of the Urjapur micro-grid, the engineers decided to separate ‘productive’ loads, which included irrigation pumps, agricultural machinery and the power to run small shops in the village (associated with activities primarily performed by men), and ‘domestic’ loads, which included TVs, fans, lighting and anything else people used in their homes. In this context, women tend to spend more time at home than men did and they predominantly live in the village year-round, instead of migrating seasonally as men from most families did. Also, women do both care work and income-generating activities from their homes and few of the women we met had decision-making roles within the industries benefitting from productive electricity supply. Hence the system was designed to separate between men’s needs and women’s needs. There were considerable back-and-forth negotiations between community leaders and the micro-grid operators with respect to the scheduling of loads, which meant the timing changed, but the grid largely prioritised the productive loads during the day (from 9am to 9pm), and domestic loads in the afternoon and evening (from midday to 4am, with adjustments). This decision posed limitations for women in the community, and reflected how different types of work were valued. The devaluation of women’s care work has been

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noted in the literature (e.g. Standal & Winther, 2016), and this phenomenon impacted the design of the electricity system in Urjapur. When asked, many women from different caste, tribe and age groups had long lists of things that they would like to use the micro-grid for, from fridges and TVs to cooking and entertainment appliances. In cases where households could not afford them now, these appliances formed part of future aspirations and, in some cases, future dowry negotiations. However, as noted, these domestic appliances came with restricted access due to system scheduling. A young mother commented, during one of the hottest summer days, ‘I would buy a fan to keep my baby cool, but there’s no point because it won’t run during the day’. In discussions with the designers, the roles attached to the ‘productive’ load were not explicitly gendered. The engineers discussed how they could include women more directly in income-generating activities, however, there were numerous barriers to this. For one, women were often relegated to non-decision-making roles when it came to income-generating activities, meaning that while they might gain indirect benefits from the micro-grid, they rarely had opportunities to decide how it was used or how the increased income was spent. Many women lacked access to finance, training and markets and many were well aware of the risks they would be taking by investing in any such business. Nonetheless, the role of electricity in care and reproductive work was clearly devalued within the community and by the system designers. Included here was the neglect of women’s productive work from home. In centring the use of the micro-grid around narrow notions of economic productivity meant that uses beyond this particular version of productivity, by women or men, were relegated to being unimportant and underserved by the system. These design decisions, whether made out of lack of communication, wilful ignorance or other reasons, ultimately resulted in a highly gendered script of the technology (Bray, 2007). 4.2

Insisting on Smart Technology and Long-Distance Control

Smart technology is increasingly considered as a suitable way to provide energy services to people living in rural areas that are difficult to reach from the perspective of central areas. The gendered paradigms of how electricity from the micro-grid could be used and who got to decide what was important was continuously reinforced through the smart systems, which was a reflection of similar approaches to solving some of the challenges associated with off-grid energy in many contexts around the world. The Urjapur smart operating system provided the engineers with a dashboard where they could view what loads were being used in real time in the village, around 300 km away. This data was collected through smart meters, which were situated in the village, but in locked control boxes that were inaccessible to people in the community (see Figure 15.3). In addition to the benefit of being able to monitor production and consumption at a distance, the engineers highlighted that the concealed control boxes served to reduce the potential for tampering or theft. The hi-tech dashboard was not viewable in the village, and produced a power asymmetry in how

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electricity could be controlled and utilised. It made it possible for the engineers to reinforce the scripts they had designed into the project, for instance, in ensuring that power flowed to the people, places and uses that they deemed desirable.

Figure 15.3

Smart meter box

However, the project became ineffective. It met significant resistance from women and men in the village and never became socially embedded in the sociotechnical context (cf. Ulsrud et al., 2015). In particular, women had been restrained from engaging in the design processes and they found that their needs could not be met with the electricity provided (cf. script). The system became financially unviable

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and many people in the community advocated for grid connectivity, which they achieved in 2019. Hence, the initial, smart vision laid out through the set-up of the micro-grid never materialised. Nonetheless, the development agencies and engineering company continued to advertise this particular project – in the aftermath of its failure – as documentation of the success of smart solutions in rural development! This shows just how strong the idea of a model for smart and successful rural electrification remained, despite evidence of the opposite. The preoccupation with a specific technological feature (in this case ‘smartness’) as a means to deliver ‘development’ is by no means a new phenomenon. Despite being new and hi-tech, the challenges faced by smart technology are arguably reiterations of similar challenges faced by efforts to ‘technologize’ development problems (Abdelnour & Saeed, 2014) in many places and times in the past century.

5.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

While the intersection between energy access and gender equality has seen increased attention in global development agendas, empirical examples provide opportunities to explore the nuances of gender politics as embodied within the energy projects, technologies and institutions. The example presented here highlights the necessity to critically examine processes of electrification, especially within the context of new and evolving ‘smart’ mechanisms for renewable energy generation and delivery. These ‘smart’ systems are currently being promoted across India and in other countries, and even signs of their failure in practice, as in our Urjapur case, appear to be ignored. Lovell (2021) notes that the field of smart grid research is dominated by technical, rather than social science inquiry, a theme which is reflected across the interconnected sites of implementation, design and policy making. This particular vision of development – at present supported through engineering and computer science regarding smart village development – constitutes a continuity of the ‘old’ development discourse, as if the critique of development has had no impact on current strategies. To return to our case, the micro-grid project ultimately failed to live up to its aims of ‘transforming’ the Urjapur community, despite huge monetary and time investment. In 2019, in the lead up to elections, the community secured access to the main electricity grid, in large part rendering the micro-grid obsolete. The case illustrates that both in theory (i.e. how we produce knowledge) and practice, the role of ‘scripts’ needs to extend beyond a technocratic model for how communities function, to more closely mould to suit the priorities of all groups, including women, which is essential in delivering effective, but also just and inclusive transitions which can be sustained long term. The very technologies which are touted to transform how we think about electricity need to be acknowledged for their abilities to reinforce and even create more unequal power dynamics. The energy justice literature provides a helpful framework in evaluating the potential injustices which can exist within, and as a consequence of, energy interventions

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(Jenkins et al., 2016). This ethical perspective acknowledges that transitions should not solely focus on sustainability, system reliability and access, which are conventionally regarded as the three ‘competing demands’ of energy systems (Bridge et al., 2020). Energy justice directs attention to the question of who: who are recognised as stakeholders (recognition), who are involved in decision-making (process) and who gets the benefits/costs (distribution)? In the Urjapur case, we found that these interconnected tenets of justice all came into play and had negative repercussions for the female part of the population, but ultimately also for the whole community, as the system broke down. Gendered implications of the energy system, where the opportunities to gain from the project were not evenly distributed and where the lack of inclusive consultation processes served to re-entrench power over the system within the deep inequalities already existing, were both within and outside the community itself. We have also looked beyond the specific project to understand the more profound dynamics of justice, rights and power surrounding the selected electricity system. In this chapter, we decided to explore the gendered face of justice and electrification, but the analysis could also have been widened to understand intersections with other social structures, including race, class, caste, indigeneity and the legacies of colonialism. Another important strategy adopted in this chapter was to look across actor groups situated in different localities, who contributed to scripting the gendered electricity system, whether through policy making or long-distance engineering. Connected to this point, but not examined in the present discussion, is the need to follow the full material supply chain (Dunlap and Marin, 2022), including the sites of – and populations affected by – extraction and manufacturing (Normann, 2021), waste and repair (Cross and Murray, 2018). There is certainly a potential for intersecting and conflicting injustices, particularly in the global versus local dynamics of transitions. On a final reflexive note, an important question to ask in any policy, research and other effort to achieve just transition is this: whose knowledge counts and whose visions of development inform the creation of new solutions? The ways research and knowledge are produced impact the shaping of our understandings. In our case of electrification and gender, this concerns the politics of gender that suffuses the larger structure involved in knowledge production. As demonstrated in the first author’s fieldwork in Delhi, within current structures, the emphasis on certain types of knowledge at the cost of other types of knowledge, the processes of rendering generic forms of energy projects facilitated a scaling of not only policies and programmes, but also of the gendered scripts within them. They contributed to shaping the wider energy sector ecosystem that was formulated within these norms.

NOTES 1. In the current discourse ‘modern forms of energy’ are commonly taken to mean access to electricity and access to modern cooking fuels, such as electricity, ethanol and liquid petroleum gas (LPG) (World Bank 2015, pp.28–29).

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2. Decentralised systems are also emerging in the Global North but have a different set of discourses surrounding them which are not included in the present discussion. 3. Adopting the rights and justice perspectives, other social markers than gender would have been important to study, such as ethnicity, caste, class or age, but will not be treated out of space limitations. 4. Pseudonym used. 5. The capital costs of the system were funded through corporate social responsibility (CSR) donations from a transnational energy corporation, with subsequent maintenance and upgrade costs being paid for directly from community contributions through monthly usage tariffs.

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Crewe, E., 1997. The silent traditions of developing cooks. In R.D. Grillo and R.L. Stirrat (eds), Discourses of Development: Anthropological Perspectives. Oxford and New York: Berg, pp.59–80. Cross, J. and Murray, D., 2018. The afterlives of solar power: Waste and repair off the grid in Kenya. Energy Research & Social Science, 44, pp.100–109. Dugoua, E., Liu, R. and Urpelainen, J., 2017. Geographic and socio-economic barriers to rural electrification: New evidence from Indian villages. Energy Policy, 106, pp.278‒287. Dunlap, A. and Marin, D., 2022. Comparing coal and ‘transition materials’? Overlooking complexity, flattening reality and ignoring capitalism. Energy Research & Social Science, 89, pp.1–11. ESMAP, 2019. International Bank for Reconstruction and Development / The World Bank. Accessed 19 May 2023 at 2019-Tracking SDG7-Full Report.pdf (esmap.org) ESMAP, 2021. Energy Progress Report. Accessed 15 January 2022 at https://​trackingsdg7​ .esmap​.org/​ Feenstra, M.H., 2021. Gender Just Energy Policy: Engendering the Energy Transition in Europe. PhD dissertation, University of Twente, Department of Governance and Technology for Sustainability. Accessed 28 November 2021 at https://​ris​.utwente​.nl/​ws/​ portalfiles/​portal/​264781017/​561350​_Feenstra​.pdf. Geels, F.W., 2011. The multi-level perspective on sustainability transitions: Responses to seven criticisms. Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions, 1(1), pp.24–40. http://​ dx​.doi​.org/​10​.1016/​j​.eist​.2011​.02​.002. Gupta, A., 2015. An anthropology of electricity from the global south. Cultural Anthropology, 30(4), pp.555–568. Harish, S.M., Morgan, G.M. and Subrahmanian, E., 2014. When does unreliable grid supply become unacceptable policy? Costs of power supply and outages in rural India. Energy Policy, 68, pp.158‒169. Henning, A., 2004. Equal couples in equal homes: Cultural perspectives on Swedish solar and bio-pellet heating design. In S. Guy and S.A. Moore (eds), Sustainable Architectures. Critical Explorations of Green Building Practice in Europe and North America. Abingdon: Routledge, pp.89–104. Jenkins, K., McCauley, D., Heffron, R., Stephan, H. and Rehner, R., 2016. Energy justice: A conceptual review. Energy Research & Social Science, 11, pp.174‒182. Jenkins, K., Sovacool, B.K. and McCauley, D., 2018. Humanizing sociotechnical transitions through energy justice: An ethical framework for global transformative change. Energy Policy, 117, pp.66‒74. Kale, S.S., 2014. Electrifying India: Regional Political Economies of Development. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press. Kumar, A., 2018. Justice and politics in energy access for education, livelihoods and health: How socio-cultural processes mediate the winners and losers. Energy Research & Social Science, 40, pp.3–13. Latour, B., 1991. Technology is society made durable. In B. Latour and J. Law (eds), A Sociology of Monsters: Essays on Power Technology and Domination. London: Routledge, pp.103–131. Latour, B., 1994. Where are the missing masses? The sociology of a few mundane artifacts. In W. E. Bijker and J. Law (eds), Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp.225–258. Lovell, H., 2021. Making energy futures at the edge of the grid: Smart energy innovation in rural communities. In J. Webb, F. Wade and M. Tingey (eds), Research Handbook on Energy and Society. Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp.328–339.

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UN, 2018. Sustainable Development Goals: Goal 7 – ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy. Accessed 19 May 2023 at www​.un​.org/​sus​tainablede​ velopment/​energy/​ UN Energy, 2021. Multi-stakeholder Gender and Energy Compact: Catalyzing Action Towards Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment to Accelerate a Just, Inclusive and Sustainable Energy Transition. Accessed 7 January 2022 at www​.un​.org/​sites/​un2​.un​.org/​ files/​6oct​_multi​-stakeholder​_gender​_and​_energy​_compact​.pdf. UN Women, n.d. SDG 7: Ensure Access to Affordable, Reliable, Sustainable and Modern Energy for All. Accessed 8 January 2022 at www​.unwomen​.org/​en/​news/​in​-focus/​women​ -and​-the​-sdgs/​sdg​-7​-affordable​-clean​-energy. UNDP, 2016. Gender and Sustainable Energy. Accessed 7 January 2022 at www​.undp​.org/​ publications/​gender​-and​-sustainable​-energy​#modal​-publication​-download. Urban, F., Benders, R.M. and Moll, H.C., 2009. Energy for rural India. Applied Energy, 86, pp.S47–S57. Urpelainen, J. and Yang, J., 2019. Global patterns of power sector reform, 1982–2013. Energy Strategy Reviews, 23, pp.152–162. Walker, G., Simcock, N. and Day, R., 2016. Necessary energy uses and a minimum standard of living in the United Kingdom: Energy justice or escalating expectations? Energy Research & Social Science, 18, pp.129–138. Winther, T., 2008. The Impact of Electricity: Development, Desires and Dilemmas. London: Berghahn Books. Winther, T., 2014. The introduction of electricity in the Sundarban Islands: Conserving or transforming gender relations? In K.B. Nielsen and A. Waldrop (eds), Women, Gender and Everyday Social Transformation in India. London: Anthem Press, pp.47–61. Winther, T., 2015. Impact evaluation of rural electrification programmes: What parts of the story may be missed? Journal of Development Effectiveness, 7(2), pp.160–174. Winther, T., Matinga, M.N., Ulsrud, K. and Standal, K., 2017. Women’s empowerment through electricity access: Scoping study and proposal for a framework of analysis. Journal of Development Effectiveness, 9(3), pp.389–417. Winther, T., Ulsrud, K., Matinga, M., Govindan, M., Gill, B., Saini, A., Brahmachari, D., Palit, D. and Murali, R., 2020. In the light of what we cannot see: Exploring the interconnections between gender and electricity access. Energy Research & Social Science, 60, art.101334. doi: 10.1016/j.erss.2019.101334. World Bank, 2015. Beyond Connections: Energy Access Redefined. Conceptualization Report. Energy Sector Management Assistance Program (ESMAP), Sustainable Energy for All. Technical report 0008/2015, Washington, DC. Accessed 26 November 2021 at https://​openknowledge​.worldbank​.org/​bitstream/​handle/​10986/​24368/​Beyon​d0connect0​ d000techni​cal0report​.pdf​?sequence​=​1​&​isAllowed​=​y.

16. The business of sustainability as a governance tool1 Jason Miklian and John E. Katsos

1. INTRODUCTION In this chapter we survey the rapidly shifting landscape of how companies operationalize environmental, social, and governance (ESG) activities into their operations, and the wide array of social impacts of these activities. We explore how the private sector understands and employs sustainable development concepts, both as governance tools and in its role as a social actor, particularly in areas of reduced governance and societal capacity. Our opening window into this discussion is in what businesses often call their ESG portfolios, which are rapidly growing components of corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives by firms around the world and provide a strong conceptual pin for our discussion. This chapter provides an overview of global developments on business and sustainable development, focusing on the most significant advances since 2018, and then presents an analytical discussion of what this global shift means for development and governance actors in development spaces. We take as a starting point that for most of the private sector today, their engagement in society means that they are indeed governance actors whether they profess to be or not, and this recognition can serve to deliver a new perspective on their societal actions for sustainable development. We have limited the scope of our analysis in this chapter to ESG as a discourse used in practice by the private sector. Our discussion straddles the lines between a purely discourse or purely practice-oriented exploration of issues because of the fluid nature of ESG use within the private sector. ESG is used both as a lens by the private sector to frame its actions and as a tool within practice to achieve meaningful objectives. The dynamic of discourse-practice is particularly challenging in the ESG context because of its combination with sustainable development and CSR within private sector discourse and practice. The chapter is structured as follows. First, we briefly outline terms concerning concepts of sustainable development from the perspective of the firm. Second, we raise the theoretical and practical application of these issues in the form of three questions on business, sustainable development, and societal contributions writ large, specifically in the business logics of contribution to sustainability and how the choices that managers make about where to place these discussions within their firms carry deep implications for how they are addressed, and to what depth and impact. 250

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Third, we outline how sustainable development action is operationalized by firms, primarily through ESG frameworks and the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). We draw on our review of the relevant literature and interviews that we have conducted as part of other research with executives, managers, and owners over the last decade. ESG is perhaps the most popular and widespread mechanism for larger firms today to navigate and contribute to issues of environment and social sustainability, but firms often have a very different understanding of many key terms and the value of key activities than other established global governance entities. Additionally, they often use ESG in different ways to affect change that is not what development scholars might expect. Fourth, we unpack how these differences lead to conceptual and practical fractures between the private sector and international organizations and governments. Here we focus on two primary divisions: whether active or passive engagement in global governance activities by the private sector is the most appropriate and impactful approach; and how the varied employment of ‘minimalist’ versus ‘maximalist’ definitions of what each group considers development itself colors their respective positions and goals.

2.

CONCEPTS OF SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT AND THEIR USE BY BUSINESS

In this chapter we define key terms as follows: ‘business’ includes the entirety of local, national, and multinational firms, across sectors, structures, headquarters, countries, and sizes. For the purposes of this chapter, when we discuss what ‘business’ or ‘firms’ or ‘companies’ believe, it refers to the beliefs and practices of typically larger firms actively engaged in sustainable development issues. We recognize that there are significant outliers and exceptions in some cases, so our aim is to capture leading business trends as opposed to the specific action of a specific firm in a specific context. For many firms, ‘sustainable development’ is no longer the amorphous concept defined by the Brundtland Report (1987), but one synonymous with the UN SDGs. The SDGs, which in 2015 replaced the Millennium Development Goals, were meant to provide all nations – not just developing nations – with a set of shared goals to strive for together. Governments, which negotiated and signed the SDGs, have reporting requirements tied to each of the 17 SDGs with sub-targets and metrics. This is the key practical reason why companies use the SDGs: unlike many other sustainable development projects and initiatives, they appear to companies to be structured, clear, measurable, and achievable. They look similar in this way to the targets and metrics of other business areas such as finance or operations. Delivering on the SDGs, therefore, is considered by most firms to be a documented contribution to sustainable development. A ‘positive development impact’ is the outcome of a sustainable development activity determined by a target community to be beneficial to them. Many terms

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contextualize discussions of firms engaging with outsiders to achieve socio-political goals, and how corporate roles in foreign societies are represented and understood more broadly from the perspective of the firm. The most employed terms are commercial diplomacy, corporate diplomacy, economic diplomacy, and political CSR, each described in more depth below. Commercial diplomacy refers to the business support functions conducted by diplomats and their staff and agencies. In short, they are facilitators for business, networkers for business, and salespeople for business. At heart, commercial diplomacy connects ‘the activities and interests of the nation state and business, that is the public and the private in the global economy. [It] involves and creates networks of public and private actors working in domestic, regional and systemic environments in pursuit of private as well as public interests’ (Lee and Ruel 2012: xv). Increasingly, firms (particularly foreign multinational companies) see commercial diplomacy and sustainable development aims as aligned, working to merge the public and the private in the interest of profit, for example, by working with an Embassy’s commercial and environmental contacts to build projects and initiatives that can be presented as beneficial to local communities. A related term is corporate diplomacy, which is generally thought of as either ‘the behavior of actors aimed at implementing favorable conditions for carrying out corporate activities’ or ‘being good corporate citizens and representing one’s country abroad’(Leonard 2002: 48–49). It can be both, as in efforts by a firm to improve corporate citizenship through sustainability and governance-based activities. However, many firms are unclear as to the intended depth of their societal engagement and what corporate benefits might accrue to its pursuit. Even though firms wish to see themselves (and have others see them) as responsible social actors, they tend to have less interest in becoming explicit political actors for the social causes they support. Economic diplomacy constitutes a foreign ministry’s office and a business working together to advance their economic and political interests in a target foreign country or countries, including through monetary policy, trade agreements, multilateral economic dialogue, financial exchange, and the like. As concerns social action and the governance of sustainability, it is most often employed as a tool of Global North firms in a normative fashion, for example, a firm using perceptions that American and/or European firms might be seen as inherently more sustainable than developing country counterparts, then leveraging that perception to improve the image of a firm and its activities in its operational areas. Finally, political CSR is the interaction between the private sector and politics, including corporate political activity (Lawton et al. 2013), and corporate citizenship more broadly (Matten and Crane 2005; Westermann-Behaylo et al. 2015). These interactions could be domestic or international, focused on governments or international organizations, or in areas with strong or weak governance. Political CSR has become an attempt by management and business ethics scholars to capture the entirety of the private sectors involvement with politics (Steurer 2006). As we see, none of these definitions prioritize societal impact or interaction, nor do they provide significant conceptual space for such. But integrating these components

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into the theoretical strands of ESG and sustainability and their practical applications can help inform understandings of private sector roles in development and society. Therefore, in the remainder of this chapter we examine how firms view sustainable development, how these views are operationalized within firms, and the limitations and opportunities for non-business actors in engaging with the private sector on sustainable development activities.

3.

BUSINESS, ESG, AND MAKING BETTER SOCIETIES: THREE QUESTIONS

These trends encourage the exploration of three questions. First, are businesses making tangible progress on sustainable development, either individually or collectively, and to whose benefit? Or in other words, is sustainable development the business of business? Extracting from the above studies, the private sector can indeed play a positive role in sustainable development – but it often opts not to, at times is unable to, and at other times acts in demonstrably negative ways. Therefore, private sector roles are conditional, and we do not yet know which precise conditions truly enable the more peaceful, inclusive societies that the UN SDGs and many ESG frameworks promise to deliver. Moreover, there is little consensus on the comparative value of ‘push’ or ‘pull’ efforts on their effectiveness, or which actors (i.e., watchdogs, investors, governments, firms) are best placed to support multilateral frameworks on corruption, human rights, and transparency. The degree of business involvement, buy-in, and nature of business–society relationships appears to be essential variables, as such frameworks may help improve state governance, or make them governance-negative by, for instance, giving illegal actors new spaces to operate. Tracing key stakeholder processes can better decipher the relational value for inclusive business participation in such bodies for sustainable development aims, to pinpoint how business efforts for development link to violence reduction, social cohesion, and human rights. These structures conceptualize and operationalize action through lenses of risk, reputation, and prestige beyond ‘upper echelon’ theory – the idea that the CEO’s beliefs greatly influence firm strategy (Hambrick and Mason 1984). Second, if there is indeed space for business, where are the boundaries and limitations of active or passive engagement in governance activities by the private sector, and which constitute the most appropriate and impactful approaches? This question reaches to the core of how the varied employment of ‘minimalist’ versus ‘maximalist’ definitions of what business considers sustainable development itself colors its respective positions and goals, and how these positions and goals vary across and within firms. Not all firms support the sustainable development agenda. Among those who do, there are varying levels of commitment to different elements. This is no different, however, than other organizations pursuing sustainable development. It is difficult to find two governments, NGOs, or international organizations in full agreement with

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the entirety of the sustainable development agenda, or even on a common definition of ‘sustainable development’ itself. Yet these organizations find large swaths of common ground on which to cooperate. The same holds true for companies. Some firms find wide areas of agreement, some have no agreement with others, and many businesses occupy a spectrum of action of sustainable development in between. Our third and final question reaches to the forward role of ESG within the ‘business of sustainability’’: what does the future hold for the $60 trillion already invested in funds and other investment products according to ESG principles (Alareeni and Hamdan 2020), and what will prevent it from becoming hijacked or otherwise watered down to become just another corporate buzzword? We believe that the answer reaches back to the point we allude to throughout the chapter: if firms prioritize the societal impacts of their ESG portfolios to have at least and likely more importance than their financial impact upon the firm, then ESG can become an important component of global sustainable development initiatives. This is particularly true for long-term perspectives that make ESG more profitable for firms in the long run. If the priorities remain short-termist, it is unlikely that ESG initiatives will succeed in their stated goals. To achieve positive social and development impacts, firms need to overcome the deep skepticism that most practitioners and scholars in sustainable development have regarding the priorities and motivations for companies to be positive social actors. While the business and management literatures tend to gloss over negative consequences (Fort and Schipani 2007), critical studies approaches tend to gloss over the positive (Ganson et al. 2019). Meeting in the middle can deliver more systematic and ultimately beneficial analysis of the private sector’s heterogenous activities in its aims to bring sustainable development to a multitude of societies. Fortunately, the solution to overcoming these concerns is simple, if perhaps not easy. Firms must legitimately prioritize the needs and desires of local societies – importantly, as defined by local societies themselves – into their sustainable development initiatives and be dedicated enough to those goals to take a long-term perspective that prioritizes communities even if they clash with the short-term goals of the firm itself. In our experience (e.g. Katsos and Miklian 2021), firms able to align their ESG and social impact initiatives could indeed succeed both in business and in society.

4.

HOW THE PRIVATE SECTOR PURSUES SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT THROUGH ESG AND THE UN SDGs

Business–society scholarship on the private sector’s integration in complex social processes to provide a positive societal impact is growing. Studies have crafted conceptual bases for private sector roles in development (Oetzel et al. 2009), and the economic conditions that facilitate business action for sustainable development (Midtgard et al. 2017). Empirical literature includes corporate attempts to create

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peace dividends (Kolk and Lenfant 2016), conceptual mapping (Ganson et al. 2019), and empirical advancement of business–society interlinkages (Miklian and Rettberg 2019). Other studies explore the limits of marketization to improve development (Ahearne 2009; Findlay et al. 2015), the multi-directional effects of corporate imprint in contexts of weak governance (Martin and Bojicic-Dzelilovic 2017), and the conditions under which the private sector can contribute to sustainable development (Ganson et al. 2019). Collectively, these studies support the argument that under certain limited circumstances businesses can positively impact sustainable development, but there are often large gaps between the impacts that firms say they provide and how local communities view their benefits (Miklian 2019). To implement and measure their impacts, many firms have adopted ESG standards. The ESG standards and impacts of private companies are a critical tool for investors, governments, and companies to evaluate the total impact of a company beyond its basic economic outputs. The importance of ESG has risen from previous corporate failures and scandals in which businesses acted in ways counter to societal expectations. These failures have included environmental devastation, human rights violations, excess carbon emissions, mistreatment of workers, and corruption, among others (Russell et al. 2016). Launched by a consortium of financial institutions in 2004 (IFC 2004), ESG expanded upon ‘triple bottom line’ and ‘Corporate Social Responsibility’ concepts to bring a more extensive and accountable ethical framework to measure, assess, and improve corporate societal impacts. In 2021, over $17 trillion was invested in ESG assets, a doubling since 2018 (SIF Foundation 2021). This development has occurred alongside other regulatory developments such as the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs). Underlying the UNGPs is a contested set of issues related to the extent of due diligence required2 that has often led to legally mandatory human rights due diligence being written into law through corporate compliance requirements (Bueno and Bright 2020). ESG finds its normative roots in stakeholder theory, particularly as elaborated by Freeman (1984; 2004). Stakeholder theory asserts that business is responsible to both primary stakeholders (those with whom it has a direct legal relationship such as a contract) and secondary stakeholders (those who impact and are impacted by the business and its operations). Internal and external stakeholders are pushing companies to address social issues. Employees may drive organizational change while external stakeholders like NGOs and investors pressure firms from outside to change their practices. At the same time, the world has witnessed a dramatic spike in fragility, conflict, and violence since 2010 (World Bank 2022; Dupuy and Rustad 2021). Overstretched peace and development agencies are turning to new actors for help as global crises, including the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change-induced disasters, strain resources. One such actor is the private sector, which has increased its societal impact activities with the presumed motivation to make a measurable societal impact. The private sector has significantly expanded its sustainable development and environmental profile, with the resources and presumed motivation to make a measurable

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impact upon sustainable development both within immediate corporate spheres of influence and beyond. Wrapped within these changes is the role that institutions like the United Nations SDGs play, as firms see the SDGs as a key model to frame their social works (Miklian and Banik 2018), particularly the ‘S’ in ESG. SDG 16 is a cornerstone part of this vision, designed to ‘Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development (and) build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions.’ SDG 16 envisions the private sector as an engine for peaceful development, and many firms claim to make significant contributions to SDG 16 (van Zanten and van Tulder 2018). Corporate contributions are presumed to offer essential long-term legitimacy to peace ventures and societal equality. But such claims have not been extensively interrogated, aside from notable outliers (e.g. Melin 2021). Moreover, corporate infrastructures that support only violence suppression can perpetuate social inequalities, failing to address structural causes (Scheyvens et al. 2016), particularly for issues like business engagement in human rights that are non-punitive for firms that break the rules (O’Connor and Labowitz (Stern) 2017). ESG’s rapid uptake reflects stakeholder pressure and the culmination of related concepts in business–society relations. ESG moved quickly from being just another business buzzword to a critical business activity with widespread corporate adoption and stakeholder expectations. Governments, consumers, and financial institutions are pressuring businesses to deliver deeper ESG action. 28 countries mandate ESG corporate reporting, and 95% of Fortune Global 500 firms use ESG sustainability reporting (Singhania and Saini 2021). Consumers seek out companies’ ESG ratings, informing their purchasing and boycotting decisions (Lee et al. 2022). Investors are demanding ESG reporting and moving funds to firms with more positive ESG impacts (Kishan 2022). The rise and dominance of ESG discourse alongside related initiatives like the UN SDGs signals that companies increasingly realize that they must act as responsible social actors to honor their own moral commitments, retain socially conscious employees, earn investments, customers, and financing, and prevent reputational damage. When considering social sustainability, we can study business action on one specific point of ESG, the ‘S’, or social component. The ‘S’ includes corporate impacts from internal health/safety and gender equality issues to human trafficking, forced labor, and slavery. In its most expansive interpretation, the ‘S’ incorporates everything from corporate action supporting the Black Lives Matter and MeToo movements (Waas 2021) to political activism for human rights in foreign countries (Katsos and Miklian 2021). More fundamentally, corporate activities aligned with the SDGs are underpinned in the implicit (and at times explicit) assertion that businesses can and should help promote societal development in conflict-affected or fragile parts of the world. This chapter concerns itself with an exploration of scholarship on these issues, which connects across and builds upon rich literatures produced over the past two decades on business as a conflict and development actor, well summarized by Jamali and Mirshak (2010). This literature explores the reality that businesses are not just eco-

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nomic but also socio-political actors who can potentially improve societies while pursuing legitimate business interests. Academic debates include corporate positions on corporate governance, conflict sensitivity and corporate responsibility (Oetzel et al. 2009), and how firms work to enhance peace in a pragmatic and justifiable way (Fort 2016). This work is a distinct field emerging from its original ‘homes’ of political science, sustainability, business, law, international relations, human rights, and development studies. The private sector conflation of sustainable development with the SDGs – and in turn conflating the SDGs themselves with ESG goals – has meant a boom in reporting by companies on sustainable development activities through ESG. It has also come with company reports that both purport to do more than is being done and use the UN’s intentionally vague SDG targets and indicators as proof of contributions to achievement of ‘sustainable development’ through ESG. While most corporations include value statements on the importance of making a positive contribution to society beyond profit-making, the ways, means, mechanisms, and strategies that they adopt to achieve these aims can differ radically. Most firms understand that they are going to be increasingly and publicly held to account for their perceived contributions (or lack thereof) toward sustainable development, as defined by the public. Their partners in sustainable development – governments, international organizations, and non-governmental organizations – are making these contributions a pre-requisite to working together. These logics are both financial and reputational. Governments and investors are increasingly demanding that firms provide ESG information to raise capital. More than 20 governments, housing most major financial hubs, have mandatory ESG reporting requirements, including the European Union’s Non-Financial Disclosure Directive. Funds that invest in companies primarily according to ESG principles (as opposed to primarily on financial performance) are valued at over $40 trillion (Kishan 2022) and 82% of all investment professionals look to ESG reporting when making investment decisions (Amel-Zadeh and Serafeim 2018). And for good reason: companies that rate higher on ESG scores are more profitable in the long term, a consistent finding over 30 years of research (Friede et al. 2015). Yet reporting is regularly revised: in one study, 87% of company ESG scores declined because of post-hoc updates (Berg et al. 2020), suggesting either missing data in initial ESG reporting or ‘backfilling’, the intentional withholding of some information for an initial rating that is then supplemented with the complete (and worse) information later. Data reporting gets more accurate over time: the initial reporting may rely on incomplete or overly optimistic data, as companies provide more complete information after the time for investment decisions passes. This prioritizes government regulation of reporting, reducing the lag-time for reporting accurate results and increasing the consequences for misreporting. Within companies, ESG frameworks are often viewed as cost centers, not drivers of value. Companies perceive them as a sometimes-necessary hurdle to clear, not as worthwhile investments in part because of their association with CSR initiatives. CSR

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is regularly sidelined to marketing and customer relations efforts, and advertising of CSR efforts can cost more than the amount spent on the CSR effort itself. Human and labor rights initiatives are often viewed in similar (cost-saving) ways but from a legal (as opposed to marketing) perspective. Despite these perceptions, better ESG performance – which includes sub-components of CSR and human rights – leads to better corporate financial performance. ESG thus provides an opportunity for development professionals to engage with companies in ways that are in the company’s long-term financial interest and in ways that are beneficial for sustainable development. Finally, how the choices that managers make about where to place these discussions within their firms carry deep implications for how they are addressed. When a firm places sustainable development initiatives under the supervision of marketing officers, the firm sees its contributions to sustainable development as mostly (if not entirely) reputational. This is not always the case, however. We see sustainable development also reporting to human resources, facilities, finance, or even having its own C-suite level executive assigned to it. Each of these decisions indicates how the company views its role vis-à-vis sustainable development, but also implicitly limits the kinds of actions they will be able to take. For example, the UN SDGs and similar multilayer initiatives aim to pull developing countries more deeply into global governance frameworks, supported by an array of international frameworks that make provisions for and promote democratic governance, sustainable development, and human rights. Since 2010, the number of business initiatives for global governance has grown significantly, including the UN Global Compact (10,000+ signatories), the GRI G4 Sustainability Guidelines, and FTSE4Good. However, these programs are based on self-reporting and lack punitive elements for non-compliance. Further, ‘inclusivity’ is viewed narrowly in terms of access to economic opportunities, without analyzing how such lenses can hide or exacerbate exclusion based upon gender, ethnicity, disabilities, or similar. It remains unclear if business inclusivity strengthens global governance institutions or simply encourages the perception of progress, favoring business to the detriment of more vulnerable actors. Business relationships with communities incorporate practices at the heart of the conjunction of investment and development. Specifically, this can include initiatives ranging from philanthropic endeavors such as building schools and hospitals, to direct charity, to jobs/training programs, to social development programs, to direct mediation and diplomatic efforts to build peace amongst conflict actors. While a great deal of promise (and promotion) surrounds these initiatives, it remains less clear precisely how these initiatives collectively impact upon development, and the degree of their impact at multiple levels of analysis. Though substantial research has made clear that better ESG performance leads to better corporate financial performance (Landi and Sciarelli 2019), the reputation that many social initiatives have within companies – particularly with respect to CSR – have held back wider adoption of ESG initiatives. In addition, it is unclear if these financial improvements translate into societal improvements, and in which ways. In the meantime, ESG reporting has become quite popular, as nearly all large

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firms generate ESG reporting of some sort each year. Therefore, the language of ESG reporting itself (and its concomitant structures) may carry weight as a means of engaging the private sector more constructively in its sustainable development activities and their societal worth.

5.

CONCEPTUAL AND PRACTICAL FRACTURES

Business adoption of ‘S in ESG’ is a complicated normative endeavor not yet matched by significant theorization of ESG’s reframing of the private sector’s societal role, or robust empirical study of the societal consequences of these acts, particularly in fragile, conflict, and violence affected (FCV) settings. ESG promises itself to be a sea change in business–society relations, but we do not know how precisely it challenges existing efforts to address social challenges in areas of weak governance. Businesses and local communities have large gaps in what they see as the purpose and value of ESG, but we do not know how these gaps influence business–society relations. Businesses are expanding ‘S in ESG’ in areas of violence, fragility, and crisis, but we do not know if, when independently scrutinized, these initiatives make a positive difference (or reduce negative impacts) to affected communities. The focus of business on social impact and governance creates a series of tensions with other sectors. The UN SDGs for instance were signed by all UN member states, with only one goal (17: Partnerships for the Goals) ostensibly related to incorporating non-government actors like civil society and private sector. Yet businesses have taken up the SDGs with great fervor, seeing it as aligning ESG initiatives with globally agreed upon goals. This has even created tension with the UN’s own voluntary corporate sustainability initiative, the UN Global Compact (UNGC 2016). With the adoption of the SDGs and with corporate action aligning with them, UNGC has increasingly moved away from its founding ‘Ten Principles’ to reporting and events related to business contributions to the SDGs. These actions unite three emerging trends: (i) firms are realizing they cannot remove themselves from local political contexts; (ii) key actors like the World Bank and UN are pushing the private sector to engage in sustainable development as a duty; and (iii) the private sector’s own commitments to development and the environment as pushed by their boards, shareholders, and employees (Miklian, Katsos, and Forrer 2022). The business focus on ESG and the SDGs also creates tensions with governments, the sector that is reporting on accomplishment of the SDGs to the UN, as opposed to business ‘reporting on the SDGs’ which comes in the form of largely unaudited corporate reports evaluating year-on-year changes. This difference in reporting often means a company may be reporting on how it is ‘helping meet SDG targets’ by using metrics completely unrelated to government reporting. Additional tensions surround whether these goals are even for business to take up (especially given that they were negotiated and signed by governments) and whether the take up of the goals by business has taken pressure off governments to do better in the achievement of the SDGs

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and their underlying targets. In fragile contexts, the latter is particularly problematic given the capacity limitations of many governments. Within the ESG context, a fragmentation of ‘sustainable development’ is a conscious choice to make it achievable, at least in the corporate sense. Some companies use the SDGs to claim contributions toward ‘sustainable development’ even in developed nations by reporting on topics related to the SDGs. A company using the SDGs for its ESG reporting for instance might claim it is promoting sustainable development because it is increasing its research and development expenditure in line with SDG 9.5. Or a big tobacco company could claim contribution to the SDGs through ‘grower support and sustainable agriculture’ despite having been banned from joining the UN’s corporate sustainability platform, the UNGC. The use of the SDGs by private firms to assess their own contributions to sustainable development however is fraught with difficulties. First, unlike governments which report on their contributions to all 17 SDGs, private sector firms are reporting on an a la carte basis. Tobacco companies are focusing on water use and climate change and ignoring health. Oil companies are focusing on equality and employment and ignoring climate change. In short, companies are connecting with whichever individual SDGs relate to what they can show real progress on and not necessarily on where they have the greatest impact. Though the latter does happen (e.g. Coca-Cola’s focus on water rights), it is the exception to the rule. Second, unlike government reporting on the SDGs, corporate reporting is neither mandatory nor subject to any third-party evaluation. Worse still is that the targets and metrics for the SDGs are designed for governments, leaving corporations to create their own metrics, then create targets for those metrics, and use both as a means of showing their ‘contribution’ to the SDGs and by extension to sustainable development more broadly. The private sector uses the SDGs as a proxy for sustainable development because the SDGs are presented in a framework that is easy for business to digest. There are unified goals with clear explanations, underlying targets, and reportable metrics. The problem for non-business actors is that the metrics and targets are not directed at business activity but are meant for those who negotiated and signed the SDGs, that is, governments. The ease with which the SDGs were incorporated into corporate reporting paradigms indicates a willingness on the part of the private sector to engage with governments, international organizations, and civil society, although it remains to be seen if ESG is truly a forward step in this endeavor. For example, there has been limited exploration of ESG that assesses how a company organizes its social policies and their impact, beyond studies aiming to create corporate value (Gond et al. 2018). ESG frameworks are to date largely technical practices rather than ‘a “Polanyian” vehicle promulgated by civil society to (re-)embed societal values into the market’ (Clementino and Perkins 2021: 379). Therefore, they have been articulated as helping corporate and investor decision-making, with less attention paid to their societal implications. This framing shapes the commercial and calculative logic of ESG and crowds out important normative and ethical issues. This concern resonates with research on how

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new forms of stakeholder capitalism create (or restore) political legitimacy as the private sector accumulates more power in the governance of global agendas such as sustainability, resilience, equitable development, peace, and justice (Mayer and Roche 2018: 4) Scholarship that could benefit from a closer examination of the dynamics and impacts of ESG practices includes research on the sociology of business (Hsieh et al. 2018), multi-stakeholder governance and collective problem-solving, the business and human rights agenda (Ruggie 2021; Schrempf-Stirling and van Buren III 2020), and security, development, and peace (Martin and Bojicic-Dzelilovic 2019). ESG finds its roots in stakeholder theory, as elaborated by Freeman (2004). Stakeholder theory asserts that business is responsible to both primary stakeholders (those with whom it has a direct legal relationship) and secondary stakeholders (those who impact and are impacted by the business). Internal and external stakeholders also push companies. Employees may drive organizational change while NGOs and investors pressure firms from outside to change their practices. ESG and CSR are also connected concepts (Dmytriyev et al. 2021). CSR defines efforts by companies wanting to be more responsive to society, while ESG goes a step further, defining efforts by companies who want to be a responsible member of society. While leading CSR studies rarely assess the impact of CSR efforts (Barnett et al. 2020), ESG is an attempt to translate these responsibilities into reportable metrics (Signori et al. 2021). Though ESG encompasses three elements, two of these – environmental (E) and governance (G) – draw the most attention from scholars. This is partially due to the ease of data. For example, environmental strategies (reducing carbon emissions, energy efficiency, etc.) can be quantified, but social impact metrics are not well established. Social impact captures the contextual, interconnected effects of all three ESG pillars. This interconnectedness is not always visible (not least because of theoretical blinders) and hence hard to quantify. It is precisely this intersectionality that serves as a starting point for ESG theorization. The social component – the ‘S in ESG’ – is often reduced to quantifiable metrics focused on labor and supply chain relationships that lack direct integration into business or society (Pelosi and Adamson 2016). Yet, a firm’s social impacts are intertwined with governance and environmental issues (Hedstrom 2018), particularly in settings where governance is tenuous and environmental issues drive (and are driven by) social conflict. One concern is whether ‘S in ESG” performance leads to better stakeholder outcomes (Halbritter and Dorfleitner 2015), as ESG is largely designed in advanced economies. With nearly 100% of Fortune Global 1000 companies engaging with ‘less developed’ communities in some capacity, ESG metrics need to be extended to account for these unique social and institutional dynamics. One way this could be done is by having social metrics vary by social context, for instance by considering the role of both direct and structural violence into social metrics (Miklian, Katsos and Forrer 2022). The lack of accurate and sufficient information feeds a narrative about business among its non-business partners that profitability and reputation are the only drivers for business behavior on sustainable development. Profitability and reputational benefits are necessary, but not sufficient, conditions. The benefits of business contribut-

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ing to the sustainable development agenda are well known and relatively undisputed, yet few businesses truly engage at the depth needed for positive societal impact and the underlying values are rarely (if ever) part of this communication. This is a critical bridging component for engaging with business that even the most cynical non-business partner or researcher must recognize: the supporters of sustainable development within companies need profitability and reputation to justify the use of company resources and those who don’t support the agenda will not be convinced by arguments solely related to profitability and reputation, that is, conversations about values and how they underpin sustainable development must be part of the conversation in convincing those who don’t support the agenda. This can be seen in the nascent backlash to ESG in the United States over spring 2022, as industry leaders like Elon Musk as well as prominent Republicans have criticized ESG as too ‘woke’ for their tastes. Last, we return to the discussion of how the ESG agenda impacts upon corporate roles in society through commercial diplomacy, corporate diplomacy, economic diplomacy, and political CSR. The ESG agenda – and corporate willingness to participate and even drive said agenda – constitutes a sea change in our understandings of how the private sector engages with societies facing socio-economic challenges. Firms that prioritize social impact tend to have fundamentally different aims and goals in the commercial/corporate diplomacy space, claiming to want to ensure that their interactions with suppliers, partners, and local governments are positive for local communities. By incorporating such concerns within ESG frameworks, firms are re-setting their internal priorities and agendas to align more fully with a more expansive long-term vision of business–society relations, one that understands long-term profit is contingent on positive societal relationships, aligning their diplomatic aims (at least in principle) more closely with traditional development aims. Given the growing ESG backlash this shift is not guaranteed, but if firms continue to expand their ESG portfolios, and if a majority of investors demand the same, then the interconnection between the private sector and development actors will make for a foundational change in business–society relationships in the years to come.

NOTES 1. Thanks to Jennifer Oetzel, Mary Martin, Mark van Dorp, and Judith Schrempf-Stirling for their suggestions and comments to our conceptualizations. 2. While this is not the subject of the current chapter, please see Bonnitcha and McCorquodale (2017) and Ruggie and Sherman (2017) for a sense of the broad outlines of the debate.

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Alareeni, B. A., & Hamdan, A. (2020). ESG impact on performance of US S&P 500-listed firms.  Corporate Governance: The International Journal of Business in Society, 20(7), 1409‒1428. Amel-Zadeh, A., & Serafeim, G. (2018). Why and how investors use ESG information: Evidence from a global survey. Financial Analysts Journal, 74(3), 87‒103. Barnett, M. L, Henriques, I., & Husted, B. W. (2020). Beyond good intentions: Designing CSR for greater social impact. Journal of Management, 46(6). 937‒964. Berg, F., Fabisik, K., & Sautner, Z. (2020). Rewriting history II: The (un) predictable past of ESG ratings. European Corporate Governance Institute, Finance Working Paper, 708(2020), 10.2139. Bonnitcha, J., & McCorquodale, R. (2017). The concept of ‘due diligence’ in the UN guiding principles on business and human rights. European Journal of International Law, 28(3), 899‒919. Bueno, N., & Bright, C. (2020). Implementing human rights due diligence through corporate civil liability. International & Comparative Law Quarterly, 69(4), 789‒818. Clementino, E., & Perkins, R. (2021). How do companies respond to ESG ratings? Evidence from Italy. Journal of Business Ethics, 171, 379‒391. Dmytriyev, S., Freeman, R., & Horisch, J. (2021). The relationship between stakeholder theory and CSR. Journal of Management Studies, 58(6), 1441‒1470. Dupuy, K., & Rustad, S. (2021). Trends in Armed Conflict, 1946–2020. Oslo: PRIO. Findlay R., Park, C., & Verbiest, J. P. (2015). Myanmar: Building economic foundations. Asian-Pacific Economic Literature, 30(1), 42‒64. Fort, T. (2016). The Diplomat in the Corner Office. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Fort, T., & Schipani, C. (2007). An action plan for the role of business in fostering peace. American Business Law Journal, 44(2), 359‒377. Freeman, R. E. (1984). Stakeholder Management: A Strategic Approach. New York: Pitman. Freeman, R. E. (2004). The stakeholder approach revisited. Zeitschrift für wirtschafts-und unternehmensethik, 5(3), 228‒254. Friede, G., Busch, T., & Bassen, A. (2015). ESG and financial performance: Aggregated evidence from more than 2000 empirical studies. Journal of Sustainable Finance & Investment, 5(4), 210‒233. Ganson, B., Miller, B., Cechvala, S., & Miklian, J. (2019). Capacities and Limitations of Private Sector Peacebuilding. Cambridge: CDA. Gond, P., O’Sullivan, N., Slager, R., et al. (2018). How ESG engagement creates value for investors. UNEP FU and UN Global Compact. Halbritter, G., & Dorfleitner, G. (2015). The wages of social responsibility: Where are they? A critical review of ESG investing. Review of Financial Economics, 26, 25‒35. Hambrick, D. C., & Mason, P. A. (1984). Upper echelons: The organization as a reflection of its top managers. Academy of Management Review, 9(2), 193‒206. Hedstrom, G. S. (2018). Social Responsibility: The ‘S’ in ESG. Sustainability, 61‒66. doi: 10.1515/9781547400423-008 Hsieh, N., Meyer, M., Rodin, D., & van’t Klooster, J. (2018). The social purpose of corporations: A literature review and research agenda. Journal of the British Academy, 6(s1), 49–73. Intentional Finance Corporation (IFC) (2004). Who Cares Wins – Connecting Financial Markets to a Changing World. Washington, DC: IFC. Jamali, D., & Mirshak, R. (2010). Business-conflict linkages: Revisiting MNCs, CSR, and conflict. Journal of Business Ethics, 93(3), 443‒464. Katsos, J., & Miklian, J. (2021). Thriving through uncertainty: Business and crisis. Harvard Business Review, Big Idea Feature.

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Schrempf-Stirling, J., & van Buren III, H. J. (2020). Business and human rights scholarship in social issues in management: An analytical review. Business and Human Rights Journal, 5(1), 28‒55. SIF Foundation (2021). ESG Assets Under Management. New York: SIF Foundation. Signori, S., San-Jose, L., Retolaza, J. L., & Rusconi, G. (2021). Stakeholder value creation: Comparing ESG and value added in European companies. Sustainability, 13(3), 1392. Singhania, M., & Saini, N. (2021). Institutional framework of ESG disclosures: Comparative analysis of developed and developing countries. Journal of Sustainable Finance & Investment, 13(1), 516–559. Steurer, R. (2006). Mapping stakeholder theory anew: From the stakeholder theory of the firm to three perspectives on business–society relations. Business Strategy and Environment, 15, 55‒69. UN Global Compact (UNGC) (2016). Business For Peace Indicators Project. New York: United Nations. van Zanten, J., & van Tulder, R. (2018). Stepping up the Pace for the SDGs with Corporate-Driven Partnerships. Geneva: IISD Report. Waas, B. (2021). The ‘S’ in ESG and international labour standards. International Journal of Disclosure and Governance, 18(4), 403‒410. Westermann-Behaylo, M. K., Rehbein, K., & Fort, T. (2015). Enhancing the concept of corporate diplomacy: Encompassing political corporate social responsibility, international relations, and peace through commerce. Academy of Management Perspectives,  29(4), 387‒404. World Bank (2022). Fragility, Conflict, and Violence in Middle Income Countries. Washington, DC: World Bank.

PART IV RECONSIDERING ENVIRONMENTAL POLICIES AND GOVERNANCE

17. The challenges of effective international climate cooperation in an unequal world Tora Skodvin

1. INTRODUCTION More than three decades after the climate issue surfaced on the international political agenda, the international political community has still not been able to agree on an effective response to human-induced climate change. Global CO2 emissions have increased by 67 per cent since 1990 (Olivier and Peters 2020) and atmospheric CO2-concentrations are now higher than at any point in the past at least 800 000 years (Lindsey 2020a). In 2015, the year of the Paris Agreement, the global annual average surface temperature reached 1°C above the pre-industrial average (1850–1900) for the first time (UK Met Office 2015). Only five years later, the global average surface temperature had increased by almost 1.2ºC (Lindsey 2020b),1 which means that time is already running out for the Paris Agreement’s aspirational goal to stay below 1.5ºC. The status of the climate system according to key parameters thus indicates that the many climate agreements reached since the early 1990s2 have had little effect. Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are associated with all aspects of the economy, which implies that economic growth seems to be inextricably linked with GHG emissions. Complex decisions about burden-sharing and compensation schemes, particularly between developed and developing countries, are at the heart of climate negotiations. A major challenge is to find an effective international response to climate change that also allows for the redistribution of wealth and increased development and prosperity. With a particular focus on the North−South dimension of the climate problem, this chapter explores three key features that may contribute to explain why climate change is such a difficult problem for the international community to deal with. First, climate mitigation has the characteristics of a global public good and is associated with a particularly malignant incentive structure that encourages free-riding, discourages unilateral deep emissions reduction commitments, tends to generate a high level of mistrust between the parties, and represents a significant obstacle to international cooperation (see, for instance, Barrett 2003; Hovi et al. 2013). These behavioural incentives have been, and still are, very much operative in climate negotiations and are well illustrated in the climate positions of developed and developing countries. The incentive structure of climate mitigation is discussed in section 2 of this chapter, exemplified with the U.S. response to the UN Framework Convention’s 267

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principle of common but differentiated responsibilities whereby developing countries, including China, were exempted from emissions reductions commitments. Second, climate mitigation policies face a complex conflict structure between fossil-dependent and climate-vulnerable interests and stakeholders that cuts across the coalition structure of the international climate negotiations. While negotiations on climate change were cast in a North–South divide from the outset (Chan 2020), the main conflict structure runs within as well as between (parts of) the “North” and the “South”. The complexity of the conflict structure is reflected in a proliferation of coalitions that likely has reduced negotiation effectiveness. In section 3, this dynamic is exemplified by coalition fragmentation among developing countries, with a particular focus on how it affected the major developing-country coalition in the negotiations, the G77 + China. Third, the global abundance of fossil resources implies that effective international climate mitigation and decarbonisation requires that fossil resources representing enormous values must be left in the ground. Section 4 discusses the challenges of achieving a revaluation of fossil resources of the magnitude required for this to be possible, the dilemmas involved for fossil resource-rich developing countries, and how the abundance of fossil resources serves to reinforce the already difficult challenge of developing compensation and burden-sharing schemes that are perceived as fair.

2.

THE MALIGNANT INCENTIVE STRUCTURE OF CLIMATE MITIGATION

A common explanation for the lack of progress in developing an effective international response to climate change is the incentive structure associated with the climate problem (see, for instance, Barrett 2003; Hovi et al. 2013; Bechtel et al. 2019; Kennard and Schnakenberg 2021). Climate mitigation resembles a global public good, which implies that states cannot be excluded from the benefits of mitigation even if they have not themselves contributed to this outcome (Barrett 2003; Hovi et al. 2013). Climate mitigation is thus associated with a free-rider problem. Problem features such as its long-term character, high abatement costs, and complex asymmetries, further reinforce incentives to free-ride and contribute to making consensus on a fair burden-sharing difficult and justifications for free-riding behaviour easy (Hovi et al. 2013: 141). The incentive structure of climate mitigation implies that the best outcome for each party is to not implement deep emissions reductions while everyone else does, thereby avoiding reduction costs while still enjoying the benefits of climate mitigation. According to the same logic, the worst outcome for each party is to implement deep emissions reductions when no one else does, thereby carrying both reduction costs and the costs of climate change. For each party, there is therefore a great risk associated with deep emissions reduction commitments, which is likely as important for parties’ choice of behaviour as a desire to free-ride other parties’ emissions

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reductions. The lack of trust following from this incentive structure may discourage parties from taking on deep emissions reduction commitments even if they might be prepared to accept free-riding behaviour by some other parties (for instance, parties with low emissions and/or restricted economic capacity to carry major emissions reductions). While this incentive structure may obstruct the development of effective international climate cooperation, it does not prevent unilateral climate regulations and measures altogether. But unilateral regulations can be expected to be low-cost measures that generate material or symbolic benefits beyond their impact on GHG emissions. The Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) pledged by the parties of the Paris Agreement can be seen as a case in point. Apart from a compliance mechanism that is “transparent, non-adversarial and non-punitive” (Article 15, paragraph 2), the Paris Agreement does not include enforcement mechanisms. The agreement, therefore, does not include provisions to reduce free-riding behaviour and incentivise parties to take on deep commitments. Even if fully implemented, the gap between pledged emissions reductions and those required to achieve the agreement’s 2ºC goal is significant (UNEP 2021). Many of these self-determined commitments are also not fully implemented (ibid.). The behavioural incentives of a global public good have been displayed by both developed and developing countries since the climate issue first surfaced on the international agenda and have significantly contributed to obstruct the development of an effective international response to this problem. From the start, the international community acknowledged that developing countries had no historical responsibility for the climate problem and low economic and technological capacity for climate mitigation policies and thus should be exempted from GHG emissions reduction requirements, at least initially. This recognition of developing countries’ special needs was institutionalised in the UNFCCC’s Article 3.1 in a principle of common but differentiated responsibilities (CBDR), whereby all developing countries in practice were exempted from requirements of emissions reductions.3 The CBDR principle was further reaffirmed in Article 10 of the Kyoto Protocol,4 and in requiring “developed countries to reduce their aggregate emissions of greenhouse gases” (Harris 1999: 34, emphasis in original). The institutionalisation of the CBDR principle in the UNFCCC signifies the international community’s recognition of the legitimacy of free-riding behaviour by developing countries and was a major success for the G77. As it turned out, however, the United States, despite having signed and ratified the UNFCCC, was worried about what the CBDR principle actually entailed. In a remarkable 95–0 vote, the U.S. Senate made its position clear in the Byrd–Hagel Resolution from July 1997, which stated that the United States “should not be a signatory to any protocol” or “other agreement” that would “mandate new commitments to limit or reduce greenhouse gas emissions for the Annex 1 Parties, unless the protocol or other agreement also mandates new specific scheduled commitments to limit or reduce greenhouse gas emissions for Developing Country Parties within the same compliance period”.5

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In October 1997, President Clinton argued along similar lines when he issued an explicit condition for U.S. commitments in the upcoming Kyoto negotiations: [G]iven that developing country emissions will eclipse those from the developed world within several decades, these countries need to do more. … The U.S. will not assume binding obligations until developing countries agree to participate meaningfully in the challenge of addressing climate change. (Clinton 1997)6

While the Clinton administration signed the Kyoto Protocol, it never submitted the agreement to the Senate for its advice and consent to ratification, and in March 2001, the newly elected Bush administration withdrew the U.S. signature from the Kyoto agreement. In a letter to the U.S. Congress, President Bush explained that he opposed the Kyoto Protocol “because it exempts 80 percent of the world, including major population centers such as China and India, from compliance, and would cause serious harm to the U.S. economy”.7 The United States thus viewed climate change from a perspective of international economic competitiveness (Zang 2009; Najam 2005). It was worried about adverse international market implications of the Kyoto agreement, the economic costs of the agreement for the United States and the agreement’s ineffectiveness in terms of global emissions reductions when major developing countries, such as China and India, were exempted (see also Harris 1999). Major developing countries, in contrast, viewed the issue in terms of historical responsibility for the problem and global justice in its solution, which implied exemptions from emissions reduction commitments for these countries (see, for instance, Heggelund 2007). The positions and negotiation behaviour of major parties such as the United States and China thus indicate that they perceived the climate issue in terms of the incentive structure characteristic of a global public good; they pursued a position of no or little action and legitimised their positions based on the others lacking willingness to take on emissions reduction commitments. While it can be argued that a position of no action was more justified for developing countries than it was for the United States, the fact remains that the powerful disincentive of these parties to take on deep emissions reduction commitments has seriously impeded the development of an effective international response to the climate problem.

3.

THE COMPLEX CONFLICT STRUCTURE OF CLIMATE CHANGE: THE CASE OF THE G77 + CHINA

A main conflict dimension in climate policy is suggested to run between those who hold “climate-forcing” and those who hold “climate-vulnerable” assets (Colgan et al. 2021). Climate-forcing assets cause climate change, such as fossil resources, while climate-vulnerable assets are assets that are vulnerable to climate change, such as coastal property (ibid.). The conflict between these two main types of asset holders is a cross-cutting conflict dimension that runs within and between states,

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both developed and developing. Yet, when climate negotiations were organised under the auspices of the UN General Assembly (UNGA), the general framing of the climate problem as a North−South divide was established. Chan observes that “the relevant implication of the mandate for negotiations being established through the UNGA was that the G77 became the default coalition structure. … The G77 provided a ready-made coalition structure for developing countries” that also had significant implications for the negotiation process “in shaping the political understanding of climate change as a North−South problem” (Chan 2020: 56). The G77 was established in 1964, during the first session of the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) to further the economic interests of the South in North−South issues (Kasa et al. 2008). In the context of climate change, the South’s interests were initially interpreted to be legitimate exemptions from emissions control commitments for developing countries and compensation schemes for adverse impacts resulting from international decarbonisation policies and measures. The G77 position on climate mitigation was driven in particular by emerging economies, such as Brazil, South Africa, India and China (recognised during the Copenhagen meeting in 2009 as the BASIC coalition), and G77 OPEC countries (see Godbole 2016; see also Bodansky et al. 2017; Barnett 2008; Kasa et al. 2008), who worried that their economic development goals would be obstructed by emissions control requirements. The key proponent of this position was China, who argued that “increased emissions must be allowed in order for China to develop its economy and industry” (Heggelund 2007: 176). Chinese negotiators “contrasted the ‘survival emissions’ of developing countries with the ‘luxury emissions’ of developed countries”, arguing that “developed countries should change their own patterns of production and consumption, not force developing countries to remove food from people’s tables” (ibid.). The G77 position on exemptions for developing countries did not serve all G77 members equally well, however. Notably, Small Island Developing States (SIDS) and many of the least developed countries (LDCs) were particularly disadvantaged. They were sensitive and vulnerable to physical impacts of climate change, did not themselves have significant GHG emissions, and few controlled fossil resources (Kasa et al. 2008; Barnett 2008; Chan 2020). These countries needed climate change to be addressed as quickly and as effectively as possible. The G77 was thus characterised by a rather significant diversity in its internal distribution of interests. Yet, while this internal conflict was displayed in the negotiations several times, it did not break the G77 coalition (Chan 2020). Chan finds that “the G77 dominated and occupied the entire possible negotiation space for developing country coalitions [and] no opt-out was possible” (2020: 57). Rather, divergent interests within the G77 were handled through “layering”: “new coalitions [were layered] on top of the G77. … This allowed the possibility of subsets of the G77 to form and present distinct positions without disassociating themselves from the larger group itself that still presented common positions” (Chan 2020: 59). In effect, the G77 could pursue multiple positions on divided issues simultaneously: The anti-climate reform interests of the most powerful members of the G77 were

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pursued through the G77 “common” position, whereas pro-climate reform interests (mitigation and adaptation) of the coalition’s weaker and more climate-vulnerable members were pursued in subgroups of the G77 (Chan 2020; see also Kasa et al. 2008). AOSIS, the coalition of small-island states that are extremely vulnerable to the sea-level rise associated with climate change, was the only developing-country coalition that existed independently of the G77. Chan notes, however, “reflecting the limited political space available … AOSIS was also careful to not diverge too far from the G77: coordinating with AOSIS was not a substitute for coordinating with the G77 because to do so would have disavowed broader G77 membership” (2020: 58). Subgroups of the G77 that were “layered” included the LDCs group, which was established in 1999, and the African Group of Negotiators, which became active in the mid-2000s onwards (Chan 2020: 60; see also Castro and Klöck 2020). As impacts of climate change are felt more and more across the globe the conflict of interest between vulnerable and fossil-dependent developing countries has increasingly come to the fore within the coalition. This is particularly illustrated in the issue of “loss and damage” that has acquired increasing attention in the negotiations. AOSIS first raised the issue in 1991 and has been a consistent proponent for the issue since then (Vanhala and Hestbaek 2016). Initially the issue was primarily associated with the risk of sea-level rise, but also acquired the LDCs’ wholehearted support when the “relevance of the loss-and-damage frame [was broadened] beyond the idea of sea-level rise to include more focus on, for instance, climate-change related desertification and the melting of glaciers, as well as extreme weather events” (ibid.: 118). The issue of loss and damage was primarily a conflict between developed and developing countries (Vanhala and Hestbaek 2016). The issue, however, also concerned internal conflicts of interest within the G77. Thus, in the preparatory negotiations prior to the 2015 COP21 in Paris, Fry observes that “SIDS and LDCs worked tirelessly to ensure that the loss-and-damage concept was incorporated within the agreement. The first step in this strategy was to get the whole of the G77 and China on board” (2016: 107–8). With “careful text adjustments, including in relation to the concept of common but differentiated responsibilities, the G77 and China agreed to a common text on loss and damage” (ibid.). Similarly, Calliari et al. find that “some developing countries also recognise the role of major emerging economies as emitters, and the way this is causing discomfort to small island states in the G77 + China group” (2020: 6). In an interview with these authors, a developing-country negotiator stated that “there was a common understanding that compensation was not part of the G77 position” (ibid.). A similar point was made by a developed-country negotiator who “refers to the opposition by China as ‘major emitter’ to any ‘liability framework’” (ibid., emphasis in original). Calliari et al. observe that despite the G77 position in favour of loss and damage measures, disputes over this issue continued within the coalition and “importantly point to more intricate political struggles around L&D [loss and damage], rather than a simple juxtaposition between developed and developing countries” (ibid.: 7).

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The G77 + China coalition thus pursued a diverse set of interests. Despite the emergence of new coalitions and the “layering” of the G77, anti-climate reform interests seem to have dominated the G77 + China position in the sense that these interests constituted the “common position” of the coalition. While pro-climate reform interests seem to have attained more attention and a more central role in the G77 + China position over time, it does not seem to have generated a major shift in the power balance within the group. Belonging to a coalition is crucial for a party’s influence in the climate negotiations. Chan notes, for instance, that groups of countries (i.e., various forms of coalitions) “are privileged over individual states” (2020: 62) in the delivery of statements in plenary sessions, as well as in being invited to bilateral and/or informal meetings to hammer out the details of an agreement in the final stages of a climate conference or meeting (see also Bodansky et al. 2017). As indicated by the L&D issue, the dominance of the G77 seems to have implied that to be heard, the interests of the climate-vulnerable developing countries had to be incorporated in the G77 position through challenging internal negotiations. Coalitions are developed to simplify multilateral negotiations. A fragmentation of coalitions like the one seen in the climate negotiations thus generally contributes to increase complexity and reduce effectiveness. The fragmentation witnessed in the climate negotiations, moreover, was also likely disadvantageous to the climate-vulnerable members of the G77. These parties had to participate in multiple coalitions to ensure that their interests were represented. Due to the delegation constraints of small countries, effective multiple coalition participation entailed a logistical challenge to many developing countries (Castro and Klöck 2020). Further, whether multiple coalition membership served to increase climate-vulnerable parties’ influence would depend on how and to what extent the positions of different coalitions were reconciled. Castro and Klöck, for instance, note that “potential tensions between coalitions that advance divergent positions [may arise] even if these coalitions ‘share’ some members” (2020: 29). This is exemplified by African delegations in the climate negotiations who allegedly were “disenfranchised by several coalitions pursuing different interests” and “further weakened by the multiple layers of interests and coalitions” (Atela et al. 2017, cited in Castro and Klöck 2020: 28).

4.

REVALUATION OF FOSSIL RESOURCES IN A NORTH−SOUTH PERSPECTIVE

Colgan et al. (2021) suggest that the onset of climate change and the occurrence of decarbonisation policies may cause the economic revaluation of climate-forcing and climate-vulnerable assets that may also alter the power balance between pro- and anti-climate reform interests. To the extent that decarbonisation policies cause a reduction in the value of fossil resources – or investors believe such policies will cause such a revaluation of these assets within the investment period – a reinforcing dynamic may be generated whereby the currently dominant anti-climate reform inter-

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ests are weakened, pro-climate reform interests are strengthened, and more effective climate mitigation policies are possible. This optimistically suggested dynamic is useful as a point of departure to highlight a third main challenge to effective climate mitigation: no issue better illustrates the daunting magnitude of the economic revaluation that must take place for more effective climate mitigation to be possible than the abundance of fossil resources (Cust et al. 2017; Manley et al. 2017; Bos and Gupta 2018; Johnsson et al. 2019). With a specified temperature goal and knowledge about how much CO2 has already been emitted, scientists can calculate the remaining “carbon budget” (see, for instance, McGlade and Ekins 2015). Whereas the remaining carbon budget to achieve the 2ºC goal of the Paris Agreement is estimated to range between 590 and 1240 Gt CO2, the emission potential of global fossil fuel reserves8 “correspond to around two to five times the remaining carbon budget” (Johnsson et al. 2019: 260). Bos and Gupta (2018: 436) find that a 50 per cent probability of keeping global temperatures below the 2ºC target “implies that at least 33% of all oil, 49% of all gas and 82% of all coal reserves should remain underground”. An 80 per cent probability of achieving the temperature goal of the Paris Agreement implies “that only 20% of global fossil fuel reserves can be extracted” (ibid.). Johnsson et al. (2019) suggest a list of policies that, at least in theory, could contribute to a revaluation of fossil resources of the magnitude required for the resources to be left in the ground. While the list is long – including carbon pricing, emissions performance standards, the removal of fossil fuel subsidies, divestment, transition policies to phase out coal, an investment moratorium to phase out fossil fuel supply, an emission tax on imported goods, and “green labelling” schemes to transfer CO2 mitigation costs to end consumers – the authors nevertheless find that most policy options are associated with implementation challenges, often in the form of political and/or technical infeasibility (2019: 266ff.). Revaluation of fossil reserves can also take place through market mechanisms, for instance if “the market share of renewables, nuclear and other alternatives to fossil fuels could increase substantially” (Manley et al. 2017: 6; see also Bos and Gupta 2018). Further, energy efficiency measures could improve, and technology for carbon capture and storage (CCS) could be developed faster than anticipated, which would reduce the share of fossil fuels that must remain unexploited (Manley et al. 2017; Johnsson et al. 2019). At present, however, prospects for revaluation of the required magnitude seem bleak. If revaluation does not take place, effective international climate mitigation is likely to remain difficult. The abundance of fossil fuels is particularly difficult to address in ways that also take developing countries’ needs into consideration (Akiwumi 2021). If CCS technology does not become available, McGlade and Ekins (2015) find that Africa, where most LDCs are located, will have to leave 26 per cent of their oil, 34 per cent of their gas, and 90 per cent of their coal in the ground if the 2ºC target of the Paris Agreement is to be achieved. China and India are also significantly affected, having to leave 25, 53, and 77 per cent of their oil, gas, and coal (respectively) in the ground. In comparison, the United States can use almost all its oil and gas, but less than 10

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per cent of its coal (McGlade and Ekins 2015: 189). Mercure et al. (2018) find that the global wealth loss resulting from stranded fossil fuel assets could amount to as much as USD 4 trillion. High exposure and low capability to deal with carbon market risk imply that it is even more challenging for fossil fuel-rich developing countries to deal with potentially stranded fossil fuel resources and assets9 than it is for major fossil fuel corporations (Manley et al. 2017). An additional challenge is the discovered, but (yet) unexploited, fossil resources in developing countries. Bos and Gupta, for instance, note that “developing countries … such as Uganda, Ghana and Kenya have recently discovered oil and Mozambique and Tanzania natural gas. They hope to become rich fossil fuel-based economies” (2018: 437). By investing in these, however, “they run the risk of creating new stranded assets as fossil fuel becomes increasingly obsolete in a decarbonising world” (ibid., emphasis in original). A key question, therefore, is “who gets to keep using fossil fuels, and for how long, during the transition to clean energy” (Lawal 2021: 1). African countries have an abundance of fossil fuels and “argue forcefully that the rest of the world doesn’t have a right to tell Africa not to use those resources” (ibid.). By continuing to rely on fossil assets, however, they become even more exposed to the carbon market risk. Manley et al. depict two major scenarios, illustrating the fossil fuel-rich developing countries’ dilemma. According to one scenario, the carbon market risk is not realised and “carbon emissions continue past the carbon budget” (2017: 18). In this scenario, fossil fuel-rich developing countries “are able to draw benefits from their fossil fuel resources but find that climate change may adversely impact other areas of the economy, such as farming, water and low-lying coastal settlements” (ibid.). In the other scenario, the carbon market risk is realised, which means that fossil-rich developing countries “may not face significant climatic costs, but the opportunity to fund economic development via fossil fuel extraction is significantly diminished” (ibid.). If these countries’ decision to leave fossil resources in the ground in the second scenario is insufficient to prevent major climate change, moreover, they face the risk of carrying the costs of climate mitigation (abstaining from exploiting fossil fuel resources) while also having to carry the costs of climate change. The abundance of fossil resources adds complexity to the development of solutions that are acknowledged as fair by both developed and developing countries. One way in which this and similar dilemmas have been dealt with by the international community is through offers of compensation. The conflict between developed and developing countries came to a head at the Copenhagen meeting in 2009, when developing countries threatened to walk out of the negotiations due to the lack of action by developed countries. In response, as reflected in Article 8 of the Copenhagen Accord, developed countries committed to “a goal of mobilizing jointly USD 100 billion dollars a year by 2020 to address the needs of developing countries” (UNFCCC 2009). The promise for funding “was touted as a way to help developing countries avoid high-carbon pathways of development by adopting lower-emitting power sources” (Roberts et al. 2010). The funding scheme was also intended as

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a trust-building measure between developed and developing countries (Roberts et al. 2010; Roberts et al. 2021; see also Bhattacharya et al. 2020). The shortcomings of the decision were known from the start, notably the problems generated by the multitude of suggested funding sources, the lack of consistent accounting rules making it difficult to keep track of the funding provided, and the complexities of distinguishing between new, additional funds and “old” but reallocated development assistance (Roberts et al. 2010). Perhaps the most important shortcoming of the decision is that the funding basically depends on annual voluntary contributions by individual countries. Lundsgaarde et al. (2018: 12) note that “climate finance pledges generally reflect the priority attached at a domestic level to addressing climate challenges, rather than being assessments based on the given contributors’ climate impact”, or, as suggested by Roberts et al. (2021: 181) being “based on realistic assessments of developing countries’ needs”. The Paris Agreement establishes that “a new collective goal for climate finance is to be agreed prior to 2025, with USD 100 billion per year as the minimum” (Roberts et al. 2021: 181). The credibility of this promise, however, is declining. In December 2020 an independent expert group mandated by the UN Secretary-General concluded that the 2009 goal of USD 100 billion per year by 2020 cannot be reached (Bhattacharya et al. 2020). Roberts and Weikmans et al. (2021: 181) predict that this failure “likely will lead to further erosion of trust between developed and developing countries – precisely the gap the Copenhagen promise sought to bridge”. Effective climate mitigation is not possible until fair, credible, and effective burden sharing and compensation schemes are developed. Sadly, more than ten years after the climate finance decision was made in Copenhagen, the international community seems to be no closer to reaching that goal.

5. CONCLUSION Despite more than three decades of negotiations, the international political community has not succeeded in developing an effective response to the threat of human-induced climate change. Three key features of climate mitigation may contribute to explain why this is such a difficult problem for the international community to deal with. First, climate mitigation resembles a global public good and is associated with a malignant incentive structure that discourages major parties from taking on deep GHG emissions reduction commitments. Notably, both China and the United States, together responsible for more than 45 per cent of global CO2 emissions in 2021 (Olivier 202210), have both justified their own inaction by the other’s unwillingness to take on deep emissions reduction commitments. This has seriously impeded the development of effective international climate mitigation. Second, while climate negotiations were set in a North–South divide from the outset, climate mitigation is characterised by a complex conflict structure between climate-forcing and climate-vulnerable interests that cuts across developed and developing countries. This caused a mismatch between the diverse set of interests of developing countries

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and the main position of the dominant coalition for developing countries, the G77 + China. It has made it more difficult for climate-vulnerable developing countries to have their interests represented in the negotiations and has led to a fragmentation and proliferation of coalitions that may have reduced negotiation effectiveness. Third, effective climate mitigation requires that fossil resources representing enormous values must be left in the ground. The revaluation of fossil resources required for this to happen is daunting. The issue represents a particularly difficult dilemma for fossil fuel-rich developing countries and raises the challenging question of who gets to use their fossil resources in the transition period to a decarbonised economy. Separately and together the three key features of climate mitigation represent major obstacles to the development of an effective international response to the climate problem. At their core, they all concern the challenge of developing burden-sharing and compensation schemes that all parties acknowledge as fair. There is a broad consensus that developed countries, who carry the main historical responsibility for the climate problem, must take on a large share of the responsibility for emissions reductions and compensatory contributions. More controversial but increasingly acknowledged, effective climate mitigation also requires substantive commitments by the group of developing countries often referred to as emerging economies. With their increasing economic capacity and share of global emissions, emerging economies can be expected not only to control and reduce their own emissions but also to contribute to fair compensation schemes for the countries that are most exposed and least capable of carrying the physical and economic impacts of climate change and mitigation policies.

NOTES 1. See also NASA, Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet, accessed 17 January 2022 at (https://​climate​.nasa​.gov/​vital​-signs/​global​-temperature/​). 2. Examples of climate agreements include the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, the 2001 Marrakesh Accords, the 2007 Bali Road Map, the 2009 Copenhagen Accord, the 2010 Cancun Agreement, the 2011 Durban Platform, and the 2015 Paris Agreement (see Hovi et al. 2013). See also Timeline: UN Climate Talks, accessed 4 February 2022 at www​.cfr​.org (cfr.org). 3. UNFCCC Article 3.1, accessed 25 January 2022 at https://​ unfccc​ .int/​ resource/​ docs/​ convkp/​conveng​.pdf. 4. Kyoto Protocol Article 10, accessed 26 January 2022 at A:\cpl07a01.wpd (unfccc.int). 5. S.Res.98 – 105th Congress (1997–1998): A resolution expressing the sense of the Senate regarding the conditions for the United States becoming a signatory to any international agreement on greenhouse gas emissions under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, accessed 26 January 2022 at https://​www​.congress​.gov/​ bill/​105th​-congress/​senate​-resolution/​98. 6. It should be noted that this did not imply that the United States required developing countries to immediately reduce their emissions. According to Harris, the United States’ position could be interpreted “as accepting that many developing countries would increase their GHG emissions but that those increases ought to be codified in the agreement” (1999: 38, emphasis in original).

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7. “Letter from the President to Senators Hagel, Helms, Craig, and Roberts”, dated 13 March 2001, accessed 26 January 2022 at Text of a Letter From The President https://​ georgewbush​-whitehouse​.archives​.gov/​news/​releases/​2001/​03/​20010314​.html 8. “Resources” are often understood as “the quantity of oil, gas or coal remaining that is recoverable over all time with both current and future technology, irrespective of current economic conditions”. “Reserves” are understood as “a subset of resources that are defined to be recoverable under current economic conditions and have a specific probability of being produced” (McGlade and Ekins 2015: 188). 9. Bos and Gupta (2018: 437) define stranded resources as “resources which are considered uneconomical or cannot be developed or extracted as a result of technological, geographical, regulatory, political or market limitations, or changes in social and environmental norms”. Citing Generation Foundation, they define a stranded asset as “an asset which loses economic value well ahead of its anticipated useful life”. 10. See Olivier (2022).

REFERENCES Akiwumi, P. (2021). Least developed countries cannot afford to strand their assets, given their development challenges. OECD Development Matters, November 2021. Accessed 5 February 2022 at https://​unctad​.org/​news/​least​-developed​-countries​-cannot​-afford​-strand​ -their​-assets​-given​-their​-development​-challenges. Barnett, J. (2008). The worst of friends: OPEC and G-77 in the climate regime. Global Environmental Politics 8(4): 1–8. Barrett, S. (2003). Environment and statecraft: The strategy of environmental treaty-making. New York: Oxford University Press. Bechtel, M. M., K. F. Scheve and E. van Lieshout (2019). What determines climate policy preferences if reducing greenhouse-gas emissions is a global public good? 21 October. Available at SSRN: https://​ssrn​.com/​abstract​=​3472314 or http://​dx​.doi​.org/​10​.2139/​ssrn​ .3472314. Bhattacharya, A., R. Calland, A. Averchenkova, L. Gonzales, L. Martinez-Diaz and J. van Rooij (2020). Delivering on the $100 billion climate finance commitment and transforming climate finance. Independent expert group on climate finance, December 2020. Accessed 1 July 2022 at www​.un​.org/​sites/​un2​.un​.org/​files/​2020/​12/​100​_billion​_climate​_finance​ _report​.pdf. Bodansky, D., J. Brunnée and L. Rajamani (2017). International climate change law. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bos, K. and J. Gupta (2018). Climate change: The risk of stranded fossil fuel assets and resources to the developing world. Third World Quarterly 39(3): 436–453. Calliari, E., O. Serdeczny and L. Vanhala (2020). Making sense of the politics in the climate change loss & damage debate. Global Environmental Change 64, 1–10. https://​doi​.org/​10​ .1016/​j​.gloenvcha​.2020​.102133 Castro, P. and C. Klöck (2020). Fragmentation in the climate change negotiations: Taking stock of the evolving coalition dynamics. In C. Klöck, P. Castro, F. Weiler and L. Ø. Blaxekjær (eds), Coalitions in the climate change negotiations. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 17–34. Chan, N. (2020). The temporal emergence of developing country coalitions. In C. Klöck, P. Castro, F. Weiler and L. Ø. Blaxekjær (eds), Coalitions in the climate change negotiations. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 53–69. Clinton, W. J. (1997). Comprehensive framework for effective, sensible action: Participation of developing countries. The White House, Background material on President Clinton’s

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climate change proposal, 22 October. Accessed 26 January 2022 at https://​1997​-2001​.state​ .gov/​global/​global​_issues/​climate/​background​.html. Colgan, J. D., J. F. Green and T. Hale (2021). Asset revaluation and the existential politics of climate change. International Organization 75(2): 586–610. Cust, J., D. Manley and G. Cecchinato (2017). Unburnable wealth of nations. Finance and Development 54(1): 1–5 (PDF version). Fry, I. (2016). The Paris Agreement: An insider’s perspective – The role of Small Island Developing States. Environmental Policy and Law 46(2): 105–108. Godbole, A. (2016). Paris Accord and China’s climate change strategy: Drivers and outcomes. India Quarterly 72(4): 361–374. Harris, P. G. (1999). Common but differentiated responsibility: The Kyoto Protocol and United States policy. New York University Environmental Law Journal 7(1): 27–48. Heggelund, G. (2007). China’s climate change policy: Domestic and international developments. Asian Perspectives 31(2): 155–191. Hovi, J., T. Skodvin and S. Aakre (2013). Can climate change negotiations succeed? Politics and Governance 1(2): 138–150. Johnsson, F., J. Kjärstad and J. Rootzén (2019). The threat to climate change mitigation posed by the abundance of fossil fuels. Climate Policy 19(2): 258–274. Kasa, S., A. T. Gullberg and G. Heggelund (2008). The Group of 77 in the international climate negotiations: Recent developments and future directions. International Environmental Agreements 8: 113–127. Kennard, A. and K. E. Schnakenberg (2021). Global climate policy and collective actions: A comment. SocArxiv Papers. https://​doi​.org/​10​.31235/​osf​.io/​8fyvs. Lawal, S. (2021). The world needs to quit oil and gas. Africa has an idea: Rich countries first. The New York Times, 9 November. Accessed 4 February 2022 at www​.nytimes​.com/​2021/​ 11/​09/​climate/​africa​-fossil​-fuel​-gas​-cop26​.html. Lindsey, R. (2020a). Climate change: Atmospheric carbon dioxide. NOAA. Accessed 17 January 2022 at https://​www​.climate​.gov/​news​-features/​understanding​-climate/​climate​ -change​-global​-temperature. Lindsey, R. (2020b). Climate change: Global temperature. NOAA. Accessed 17 January 2022 at https://​www​.climate​.gov/​news​-features/​understanding​-climate/​climate​-change​-global​ -temperature. Lundsgaarde, E., K. Dupuy and Å. Persson (2018). Coordination challenges in climate finance. Danish Institute for International Studies, Working Paper 2018: 3. Accessed 1 July 2022 at https://​pure​.diis​.dk/​ws/​files/​2551329/​WP​_2018​_10​_Analysing​_Climate​_Finance​ _Coordination​_FINAL​_4​_dec​.pdf. Manley, D., J. Cust and G. Cecchinato (2017). Stranded nations? The climate policy implications for fossil fuel-rich developing countries. OxCarre Policy Paper 34, February. McGlade, C. and P. Ekins (2015). The geographical distribution of fossil fuels unused when limiting to 2°C. Nature 51, 187–190. doi:10.1038/nature14016. Mercure, J.-F., H. Pollitt, J. E. Vinuales, N. R. Edwards, P. B. Holden, U. Chewpreecha, P. Salas, I. Sognnaes, A. Lam and F. Knobloch (2018). Macroeconomic impact of stranded fossil fuel assets. Nature Climate Change 8: 588–593. Najam, A. (2005). Developing countries and global environmental governance: From contestation to participation to engagement. International Environmental Agreements 5: 303–321. Olivier, J. G. J. (2022). Trends in global CO2 and total greenhouse gas emissions. PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency. Summary Report 2021, April 2022. Accessed 1 July 2022 at https://​www​.pbl​.nl/​en/​publications/​trends​-in​-global​-co2​-and​-total​ -greenhouse​-gas​-emissions​-2021​-summary​-report. Olivier, J. G. J. and J. A. H. W. Peters (2020). Trends in global CO2 and total greenhouse gas emissions: 2020 Report. PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, The Hague.

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Accessed 17 January 2022 at https://​www​.pbl​.nl/​en/​publications/​trends​-in​-global​-co2​-and​ -total​-greenhouse​-gas​-emissions​-2020​-report. Roberts, J. T., M. Stadelmann and S. Huq (2010). Copenhagen’s climate finance promise: Six key questions. International Institute for Environment and Development, February. Accessed 27 June at www​.iied​.org/​17071iied. Roberts, J. T., R. Weikmans, S. Robinson, D. Ciplet, M. Khan and D. Falzon (2021). Rebooting a failed promise of climate finance. Nature Climate Change 11: 180–182. UK Met Office (2015). Global climate in context as the world approaches 1°C above pre-industrial for the first time. Research News article. Accessed 20 January 2022 at www​ .metoffice​.gov​.uk/​research/​news/​2015/​global​-average​-temperature​-2015. UNEP (2021). The heat is on: A world of climate promises not yet delivered. UNEP Emissions GAP Report 2021. Accessed 5 February 2022 at https://​www​.unep​.org/​resources/​emissions​ -gap​-report​-2021. UNFCCC (2009). The Copenhagen Accord. FCCC/CP/2009/11/Add.1. Decision 2/CP.15. Accessed 1 July 2022 at https://​unfccc​.int/​resource/​docs/​2009/​cop15/​eng/​11a01​.pdf​#page​ =​4. Vanhala, L. and C. Hestbaek (2016). Framing climate change loss and damage in UNFCCC negotiations. Global Environmental Politics 16(4): 111–129. Zang, D. (2009). From environment to energy: China’s reconceptualization of climate change. Wisconsin International Law Journal 27: 543–573.

18. The sustainability governance of global supply chains: transnational approaches and the neglect of local development agendas Almut Schilling-Vacaflor

1. INTRODUCTION Global supply chains, spanning over distant places with the aim of supplying goods and services, have gained further importance over the past few decades. While transnational corporations (TNCs), which nowadays already account for half of global exports and about one-fourth of global employment, play a dominant role in global supply chains, many small and medium enterprises are also involved in global production networks (OECD 2018). Global supply chains have contributed to economic growth, but often they have also fostered unsustainable consumption patterns related to an ‘imperial mode of living’ of consumers in the Global North and in emerging economies (Brand and Wissen 2013). In turn, the ‘shadows of consumption’ and the adverse environmental and social impacts of global trade relations have largely concentrated on the places of production, often located in the Global South (Dauvergne 2010). Existing governance arrangements have been insufficient for addressing the negative externalities associated with global trade. Multilateral binding solutions for regulating the environmental and social performance of companies involved in global trade have largely been absent and the shortcomings of private governance approaches have been comprehensively discussed. Previous literature has revealed that the contribution of private governance instruments for reducing adverse impacts in global supply chains has been limited, due to a lack of uptake of certified products in most economic sectors, weak sustainability standards, the lack of consequentiality of sustainability reporting and flawed audit systems (LeBaron et al. 2017; Bartley 2018; Mason 2020; Schilling-Vacaflor et al. 2021). While drawing on such previous literature, this chapter contributes to scholarly debates into the governance of global supply chains by arguing that transnational governance tends to concentrate on selected salient issues, while neglecting others. In particular, the voices and concerns of rightsholders and affected stakeholders from the Global South have remained clearly under-represented in both private and public governance arrangements targeting global trade, which have focused on environmen281

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tal concerns that are high on the global agenda and the interests of consumers from the Global North. To illustrate this, I will provide evidence from a case study on the sustainability governance of Brazil’s soy supply chain. The book chapter shows that while Brazilian and international environmental NGOs have collaborated with transnational business associations and companies to establish zero-deforestation policies, local actors from producing sites, which have been strongly affected by the export-oriented agribusiness, have remained excluded from the policy-making processes and implementation of transnational standards. In consequence, transnational governance has largely remained detached from more transformative agendas of civil society organizations in the sites of production. In this chapter, I argue that for enabling sustainable development and just transformation towards a climate-neutral economy, the ones most affected should have important voices when aiming to find solutions to sustainability problems.

2.

THE GOVERNANCE OF GLOBAL SUPPLY CHAINS: CORPORATE POWER AND THE NEGLECT OF LOCAL CONCERNS

While the adverse environmental and social impacts of global trade relations have increasingly been problematized in public media and scholarly work, existing governance arrangements have proven insufficient to address such complex problems. In producing countries, many of them located in the Global South, a lack of state capacity, poor regulation, lax law enforcement, corruption or a too-close relationship between business and government have often hindered the protection of human rights and the prevention of environmental harms (see Boyle 2012). Attempts to create binding international regimes or conventions for holding TNCs accountable for their human rights and environmental records abroad have previously failed, largely due to the fierce lobbying by TNCs and powerful business associations against binding measures (Clapp 2005; Simons 2012; Ruggie 2018). In turn, many states have also resisted the adoption of stringent rules for corporate accountability and have rather preferred to ‘outsource’ responsibilities to private actors (Marques and Eberlein 2021). Indeed, companies, multi-stakeholder initiatives and regulatory intermediaries, such as certifiers and auditors, have increasingly assumed central roles in the governance of global supply chains and for the strategic sourcing of responsible or sustainable products by companies. In today’s global food regime, corporations are not only particularly powerful because of accentuated corporate concentration, but companies have also increasingly become rule-setters, rather than merely rule-takers (McMichael 2009; Clapp 2017; Jakobsen in this book). This ‘trade-ification of the food sustainability agenda’ (Clapp 2017) has shaped the existing governance arrangements, which tend to respond to business interests, while sidelining more transformative agendas, including the local development agendas of stakeholders in the Global South. Sikor et al. (2013) warned that the intensifying global competition

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over land (for the purposes of food, feed and energy production) coupled with shifts toward the private governance of flows has generated land uses involving new forms of social exclusion, inequality and ecological simplification. The governance of global supply chains has largely originated from and been administered in the Global North. For instance, 73% of the 220 sustainability standards covered by the ITC Standards Map database are headquartered in OECD countries (Schleifer et al. 2019). Furthermore, lead firms have often primarily responded to consumers, civil society organizations and policy-makers on the demand-side, while shifting the costs of sustainability compliance towards producers based in the Global South (Ponte 2020). In the case of the soy supply chain from Brazil, public attention in European mass media has mainly focused on deforestation in the Amazon due to its important implications for global climate change, while there has been much less attention on direct concerns for communities in producing regions, such as conflicts about land or pesticide pollution (Mempel and Corbera 2021). Based on the quantitative analysis of over 6,000 journalistic articles in EU print media on the public perception of problems in relation to soy production in Brazil, Mempel and Corbera (2021, p. 13) concluded: ‘Therefore, it can be argued that EU print media have been more sensitive to the fate and state of ecosystems, rather than the wellbeing and struggles of people managing and living within such distant Nature.’ As I will show in what follows, the selective attention in public media and global policy circles to deforestation has manifested in private sustainability governance, which has had a rather narrow focus on this single issue. More recently, in consequence of increased evidence of the shortcomings of purely voluntary measures to address the negative externalities of global trade relations, countries in the Global North have adopted binding measures to regulate global supply chains. In Europe, we can currently observe a wave of adopting supply chain regulations that refer to the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) and the OECD Guidelines for multinational enterprises that build on a mandatory due diligence (MDD) approach. MDD requires companies to assess and address social and environmental risks throughout their supply chains. For instance, France adopted a Duty of Vigilance law (2017), Germany a Supply Chain Due Diligence law (2021) and the EU proposes to adopt a regulation on deforestation-free products and a directive on corporate sustainability due diligence in the near future. These new laws go beyond previous environmental, social and governance (ESG) criteria for classifying a company’s behavior and for steering investments towards sustainable companies. Given the recentness of new laws that build on a due diligence approach, the question to what extent they contribute to assess and address the needs and concerns of local actors affected by global supply chains is still under-researched. This chapter will enter unchartered terrain by presenting first insights and reflections about this important question.

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3. METHOD This chapter draws on empirical data I collected in Brazil during four research stays of a total of five months conducted between 2017 and 2022. I carried out eight weeks of field research in producing sites of soybeans: (1) in Paraná, in the South of Brazil, (2) in Pará, in the Brazilian Amazon and (3) in Bahia, in Brazil’s Cerrado biome. As the socioecological impacts related to the soy sector are most heavily felt by people living in the vicinity of farms and transport infrastructure, I made field visits to and conducted over 60 interviews with a broad range of local stakeholders, such as smallholders, certified and non-certified soy producers, Indigenous and Quilombola communities, organic farmers and rural workers’ unions. I also conducted 32 semi-structured interviews with policy-makers, civil society organizations and business representatives from Europe, mainly from Germany, the EU and France. Transcriptions of interviews were subsequently anonymized and citations translated into English. My own empirical insights are complemented by an extensive review of secondary literature on transnational governance instruments in relation to Brazil’s soy sector.

4.

BACKGROUND: THE SOCIAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTS OF SOY PRODUCTION IN BRAZIL

Brazil accounts for one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation. Deforestation and land use change in Brazil have mainly been caused by a combination of land grabbing and land speculation, the (largely illegal) logging of timber and the expansion of cattle ranching, indirectly driven by the expanding cultivation of crops like soybeans (Bowman et al. 2012). Indeed, soybeans, palm oil and beef are the three most important ‘forest risk commodities’ worldwide and these sectors have accounted for the majority of deforestation associated with imported products on the European market (Pendrill et al. 2019). The deforestation and degradation of the Amazon has attracted much scholarly and socio-political attention, as this rainforest is one of the key elements in the Earth’s climate system whose dieback may trigger catastrophic climate change (Pereira and Viola 2018). Since Jair Bolsonaro assumed Brazil’s presidency in 2019 and as a consequence of environmental policy dismantling under his government, deforestation rates have increased for four years in a row and images of Amazonian fires attracted much public attention. In 2021, 13,235 km2 of tropical forest were devastated.1 Accordingly, in a context of an increasing importance of global climate politics, most of the governance initiatives targeting agro-commodity supply chains from Brazil have been created and implemented with the objective of keeping hold of deforestation and land-use change. Importantly, the close link between land rights and deforestation in Brazil is key for better understanding this environmental problem and its social underpinnings. First, there are still large areas in the Amazon that are formally characterized as ‘undesig-

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nated’ public lands (Sparovek et al. 2019). Private owners have often deforested such lands and ‘made them productive’ by animal grazing or crop cultivation with the aim of gaining titles over such lands. Second, Indigenous and traditional communities as well as settlements of peasants and family farmers in Brazil’s Amazon and Cerrado regions often do not possess formal titles over lands they inhabit and use. Hence, such vulnerable populations have often been negatively affected in their access to land, food and water due to land grabbing activities, which have usually been accompanied by deforestation, land use change and violence (CPT 2021). Scholarly research has shown that displaced people in many instances have been at the settlement frontier, entering remaining forests, the land of Indigenous peoples or protected areas (Steward 2007). Against this background, scholars have convincingly argued that the effectiveness of non-deforestation policies in Brazil will remain limited if they do not tackle land speculation and land grabbing (Bowman et al. 2012). There have also been many land conflicts in southern Brazil related to the expansion of large soy farms, which has negatively affected smallholders and family farmers. Smaller producers have often been dispossessed of their lands and/or suffered from the negative impacts of the massive use of agrochemicals on their agricultural productions and health. Interviewees from the state of Paraná shared their experiences with the ongoing process of land concentration in the area: The family farmers can often only survive because their lands are not apt for soy production. These lands tend to be irregular, too small or with infertile soils. Most of the families who lived on land that could be used for soy production already left. They sold their land, in many cases due to a lot of pressure. (Interview with representative from a local NGO, 30 July 2018)

While land tenure has been less contested in southern Brazil than in the Amazon or Cerrado biomes, many interviewees from this region have emphasized the negative impacts associated with the massive use of pesticides. For instance, an organic producer narrated: We live only a few meters away from this soy and maize producer. A few years ago, we informed the Agricultural Protection Agency of Paraná that the pesticides our neighbor sprays enter directly into our house. This agency released a protective measure prohibiting the producer to spray his poison in a distance of 50 meters from our house and organic cultivation. But he did not comply with the measure. So, we built a natural barrier by planting trees. But the producer keeps destroying the trees. Actually, I think that he plans to take over our land. (Interview, 26 July 2018)

Brazil currently consumes approximately 20% of global agrochemicals, over half of them in the production of soy (Bombardi 2017). Agrochemical use has risen steadily, from 41,291 tons in 1990, to 291,849 tons in 2015 and over 30% of the agrochemicals used in Brazil are prohibited in the European Union, as is the practice of aerial spraying (ibid.). The massive use of agrochemicals in Brazil has contributed to the contamination of water, soils, food and to negative health impacts on Brazilian citizens, especially those living close to cultivation areas (Carneiro et al. 2015). Under

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Bolsonaro’s presidency, problems related to pesticide use have further worsened, as the Ministry of Agriculture has approved the use of hundreds of new agrochemicals, many of which are classified as ‘extremely toxic.’ Notably, the maximum level of glyphosate permitted in drinking water in Brazil is 5,000 times higher than in the EU (500 μg/l in Brazil vs. 0.1 μg/l in the EU).

5.

BRAZILIAN LOCAL INITIATIVES AND DEMANDS TO REGULATE AND GOVERN SOY

Brazil’s civil society has been very active in demanding a transformation of the regulation and governance of Brazil’s soy sector, embedded within broader demands to enable sustainable development. Already in 2004, the Fundação Centro Brasileiro de Referência e Apoio Cultural (CEBRAC) together with the Brazilian Forum of NGOs for the Environment (FBOMS), the Rios Vivos Coalition, the Amazon Working Group (GTA) and the Southern Brazil Family Farmworkers’ Federation (FETRAF-Sul), together with 61 environmental and social NGOs, organized a Soy Platform, which resulted in the drafting of a document entitled ‘social responsibility criteria for companies that purchase soy and soy products’ (Rios Vivos Coalition et al. 2004). This platform expressed the objective that its criteria should form the basis for negotiations between the organizations it represents and soy traders, consumers and the private financing sector. Among the demands of the Soy Platform was to establish a group of organizations that represent the platform in the dialogue process. It proposed that only conventional or organic soy should be produced and purchased from areas legally deforested before 2003, and in the case of the Amazon region even before 1999. To avoid processes of land concentration and the dispossession of family farmers from their lands, soy-producing properties should not be constituted by the aggregation of plots of land that have been part of settlements according to the Agrarian Reform. The property titles of the farmers should be verified and it should be prohibited to purchase soy from properties that resulted from the occupation of public lands or from areas with ongoing land conflicts. For monitoring land tenure issues and land conflicts, satellite images should be used and NGOs, trade unions and local governments involved. The platform further demanded that there should be total transparency of the business transactions in the entire soy supply chain. Each company should buy at least 20% of the total annual purchase of soy from family agriculture. To protect biodiversity, every 200 hectares a strip of land should be set aside on soy farms to form biodiversity corridors and bordering riverine forests should be enlarged. Civil society organizations have also been active in numerous other ways to challenge the negative externalities of the soy business. For instance, Brazilian citizens and social organizations repeatedly protested against the depletion of water sources due to irrigation purposes and against the massive use of agrochemicals (e.g., through the Permanent Campaign against Agro-toxics). At a regional level, diverse organizations have jointly articulated alternative development agendas for the Amazon and

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Cerrado regions (e.g., the Working Group on the Amazon and the Cerrado Network ‘Rede Cerrado’). The demands presented by the Soy Platform and other civil society initiatives have the potential to contribute to sustainability transformations, which integrate environmental and social concerns and pay attention to the voices of rightsholders and diverse groups of stakeholders. However, as I will outline below, existing transnational governance initiatives have not yet taken such comprehensive demands into account and instead have defined sustainability in a much narrower sense, detached from broader local agendas for sustainable development.

6.

SOY MORATORIUM AND WORKING GROUP ON THE CERRADO

The Soy Moratorium was initiated in 2006 in response to Greenpeace’s campaign ‘Eating up the Amazon,’ which exposed the links between European consumption of soy and deforestation and ‘land grabbing’ in the Amazon (Greenpeace 2006). The Brazilian Association of Vegetable Oil Industries (ABIOVE) and the National Association of Grain Exporters (ANEC) led the Soy Moratorium together with environmental NGOs such as the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and Greenpeace and it has since become a public–private partnership. The Moratorium established a cut-off date after which deforestation in the Amazon was to be prohibited. This date was switched from 2006 to 2008, in order to harmonize it with the revised Forest Code of 2012. Any producer planting soy on a recently deforested area is added to a blacklist and embargoed by the Brazilian environmental ministry. Farmers on this list are no longer able to access credit, and retailers are prohibited from buying from them. While the Soy Moratorium has often been praised by scholars and policy-makers for its contribution to curb deforestation in the Amazon, local grassroots organizations have usually expressed a more critical position. The Pastoral Land Commission (CPT) from the region of Santarém, which originally participated in the Soy Moratorium and unsuccessfully aimed to include the demands of local communities and family farmers in the design of the instrument, explained their withdrawal from the initiative: [In this region] several communities have disappeared, giving way to endless soybean fields. The expulsion, in many cases indirect, takes place gradually and today there are few families who still resist the process of intimidation, harassment, threats and other forms used to force families to leave their lands. … Therefore, the most prejudiced in all this process are the families that live in rural communities, because, besides living in fear of losing their lands, they see the forest, which is part of their life and work, being substituted by grain monoculture. The media and several environmental NGOs have been leading the discussion about soy in the Amazon from an environmental point of view, leaving the social aspect in second place. (CPT 2006)

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Among the demands that the CPT defended in the drafting process of this governance instrument was the inclusion of a monitoring system of land tenure issues, land conflicts and human rights violations as well as the prohibition of genetically modified soy (interviews with public prosecutor office and rural workers’ union in Santarém, 22 and 23 August 2018). However, the Soy Moratorium sidelined all of these demands and has exclusively focused on illegal deforestation. According to staff from civil society organizations involved in the negotiations of the Moratorium, the reasons for excluding the demands of local communities were the lack of robust data for monitoring social issues and the reluctance of companies to expand their non-deforestation commitments to other issues (interviews, 16 July 2018 and 1 April 2022). In 2009, the national CPT, the Landless Workers’ Movement, Via Campesina and the human rights and environmental NGO FASE all opted out of the Moratorium, stating in a public letter that the moratorium would ‘only serve to legalize soy in the region’ (cit. after Baletti 2014, p. 20). More recently, in 2018, traders, soy producers and Brazilian business associations have established the Working Group on the Cerrado to discuss the adoption of a similar instrument like the Soy Moratorium for the Cerrado. The dozens of local organizations, which articulate in the Cerrado Network (Rede Cerrado) since 1992, have decided to abstain from this multi-stakeholder initiative coordinated by the WWF, due to its perceived business-friendly nature, its exclusive focus on deforestation and the discussion of payments for ecosystem services (PES) only for soy farmers and not for traditional communities and family farmers (interviews with local organizations in western Bahia, August and September 2018; interview with CPT representative, March 2022). Bastos Lima and Persson (2020, p. 1) carried out an in-depth case study on this process and concluded that the ‘sustainable development agenda for the Cerrado has been substantially narrowed to become mostly one of conversion-free soy supply, serving more the interests of that agroindustry and its consumers than those of the landscape’s most vulnerable stakeholders, such as local communities.’ This initiative eventually failed due to the resistance of soy producers and some traders to commit to environmental standards that go beyond the requirements of Brazilian domestic legislation (interview with member of the Cerrado Working Group, 12 March 2020).

7.

SOY CERTIFICATION

The world leading soy certification standards are ProTerra and the Round Table on Responsible Soy (RTRS), which were both created in 2006 in Switzerland by collaborations between the Swiss retailer COOP, the WWF and in the case of RTRS the Brazilian soy producer Amaggi and the food manufacturer Unilever. After Greenpeace published the report Eating up the Amazon, companies from the demand-side feared negative reputational effects and aimed to dissociate their supply chains from Amazonian deforestation and other negative externalities of soy production. Key differences between these standards are that ProTerra only

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certifies non-GM soy and uses more rigorous traceability systems. However, almost no grassroots organizations and local communities have been present at the annual meetings of ProTerra and its audit system has been non-transparent, which is why it is difficult to know which farms are ProTerra certified and to verify these producers’ compliance with the standard. In March 2005, RTRS organized a multi-stakeholder meeting in Brazil, wherein only very few representatives of local communities affected by soy production participated and that strongly focused on deforestation and land use change (Steward 2007).2 In response to the business-friendly nature of the RTRS drafting process and its design, Via Campesina Brazil organized a counter conference to formulate ‘a response to the industrial agriculture model based on monocultures and genetic engineering’ (cit. after Steward 2007, p. 115). A few months later, the Federation of Family Agricultural Workers in the Southern Region (Fetraf-Sul), the only organization representing small farmers in the RTRS initiative, stepped down from the Organizing Committee, because it didn’t feel it could influence the agenda (Schouten et al. 2012). In 2009, 80 organizations signed a letter wherein they criticized the RTRS standard for its lack of stringency, calling for the international NGOs to abandon the RTRS (ibid., p. 47). Despite the fact that local communities and grassroots organizations from Brazil have been largely absent from the regular meetings of the RTRS and ProTerra standards, both standards contain provisions that could contribute to protect the rights of communities affected by soy production. These standards stipulate that farms should not be certified in the case of ongoing land conflicts, that certified soy production should not harm the access of local communities to water and they contain mechanisms to file complaints. However, a closer look at audit practices on the ground reveals that onsite visits on certified farms have been very short and inappropriate to detect the existence of conflicts with surrounding communities over land or the access to water (Schilling-Vacaflor et al. 2021). Indeed, my interviews reveal that in the state of Bahia, auditors have not visited the places where land conflicts have been most severe, and they only organize very short and selective consultations with local organizations in the vicinity of the farms to be certified (interview with auditors, 18 July 2018). In turn, family farmers and traditional communities from different soy-producing regions argued that they would not file complaints against certified soy farms in their neighborhood. First, they explained that they do not trust business-led systems to settle conflicts, especially because they would not profit from the absence of a certification label of a close-by soy farm, and second, they would not like to provoke open conflicts with their powerful neighbors (interviews with grassroots organizations and rural producers in the states of Paraná and Bahia, July to September 2018). Taken together, sustainability certification has contributed little to address the diverse grievances of local communities and smallholders that have been negatively affected by large-scale soy production.

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8.

PUBLIC REGULATIONS OF GLOBAL SUPPLY CHAINS

Against the background of ever clearer evidence of the shortcomings of purely private and voluntary measures to address the negative externalities of global supply chains, we see a trend in the Global North to increasingly adopt public regulations to hold companies accountable for the environmental and social impacts throughout their supply chains. Since the adoption of the UNGPs on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) in 2011, particularly European states and the European Union (EU) assumed a pioneering role by drafting new laws. The United Kingdom (UK) adopted a Modern Slavery Act (2015), the EU a Conflict Minerals Regulation (2017), France a Duty of Vigilance law (2017), the Netherlands a Child Labor Due Diligence law (2019), Germany a Supply Chain Due Diligence law (2021) and Norway a Transparency act (2021). The EU has announced its objective to adopt a regulation on deforestation-free products and a directive on corporate sustainability due diligence in the near future (see Schilling-Vacaflor and Lenschow 2021). In what follows, I will focus on the more comprehensive regulations that go beyond selected issues (e.g., child labor, modern slavery, conflict minerals), as these laws might be better equipped to address the grievances of local populations in relation to Brazil’s soy sector. The laws discussed below are based on a due diligence approach, which means that they require companies to assess and address the environmental and human rights risks in their supply chains, to adopt measures to prevent and mitigate identified risks and to track the progress of adopted measures. The implementation of the French Duty of Vigilance law is particularly interesting as it has a broad focus on avoiding environmental damages and human rights violations and it already entered into force in 2017. Companies involved with soy trade from Brazil have been obligated to comply with this law for several years now. However, an analysis of the compliance of companies with this law reveals that they have prioritized the issue of deforestation and to a lesser extent labor rights protection, while de-prioritizing issues that are of particular concern for local communities at the sites of production such as land rights, pesticide pollution or access to water. Indeed, Schilling-Vacaflor and Gustafsson (2021) showed that none of the companies covered by the law that import soy from Brazil have discussed such risks in their yearly ‘vigilance plans.’ Companies have mainly focused on issues that are of importance for consumers, policy-makers and shareholders in the Global North, such as tropical deforestation and the mitigation of climate change. In addition, companies involved with the soy trade from Brazil often argue that they have not been able to pay close attention to human rights impacts, because they do not have access to reliable data (see Schilling-Vacaflor and Gustafsson 2021). Relatedly, civil society organizations have criticized the lack of meaningful consultations with stakeholders from the Global South in the due diligence systems of French companies, which could contribute to gain insights into human rights issues on the ground. In response to such shortcomings, diverse human rights organizations and stakeholders from the

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Global South have argued that when designing, implementing and enforcing MDD, much more importance shall be given to rightsholders and measures are needed to protect environmental defenders (e.g., Centro de Información sobre Empresas y Derechos Humanos et al. 2021). In November 2021, the European Commission (EC) published its proposal for a regulation on deforestation-free products, which also covers soybeans. However, while the ‘Report with Recommendations to the Commission on an EU Legal Framework to Halt and Reverse EU-driven Global Deforestation,’ adopted by the European Parliament in April 2021, strongly emphasized the importance of including human rights issues and in particular land tenure in the future regulation, the EC decided to focus exclusively on deforestation. Members of the Commission argued that a regulation that focuses on one specific policy problem would be more feasible and better enforceable (see, for instance, Webinar 2021). The EC also announced its plan to establish an EU Observatory to collect data in order to better implement and monitor the compliance of companies with the regulation. It is still unclear whether this Observatory will just focus on data concerning deforestation and forest degradation or whether it can also be used to monitor other environmental and social problems associated with the trade of forest risk commodities. Indeed, the collection of data on the use of pesticides, on land conflicts and on the access of local communities to water and livelihoods would be extremely important, as robust data on these topics have been missing. NGOs and organized civil society from the Global South have called on the EU to include the protection of land rights in its regulation on deforestation-free products and to include data on human rights and land tenure in the EU’s Observatory to be established (see, for instance, Human Rights Watch 2022).

9.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION: EXCLUDED ACTORS AND ISSUES IN TRANSNATIONAL SUSTAINABILITY GOVERNANCE

This chapter shows that transnational governance initiatives to address the negative impacts related to the global soy supply chain from Brazil have had a narrow focus on specific salient issues that are high on the global agenda (especially deforestation), while excluding the voices and concerns of local populations that have been negatively affected by the expanding agribusiness. The study finds that the de-prioritization of local human rights issues has also been related to a lack of robust data on issues such as land rights, pesticide contamination or access to water, which could be used for monitoring distant impacts in global supply chains. Such exclusionary approaches can, however, lead to unintended effects for local communities by legitimizing the production of commodities in ways that undermine human rights. Furthermore, to foster integrated forms of sustainable development, human rights concerns should be included in transnational governance approaches.

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The case study in this chapter focuses on a specific commodity from one producing country, but the findings are likely to be of a more general nature, as communities affected by products such as palm oil, beef or timber have raised similar points of critique (e.g., Bartley 2018; Silva-Castañeda 2012). Transnational governance arrangements tend to address negative impacts in a selective and rather business-friendly way, which does not challenge systemic problems associated with the nature of many complex global supply chains. In consequence, there have not only been contestations and conflicts about globalized economic sectors and their impacts in diverse contexts, often located in the Global South, but also fierce struggles about potential solutions to address environmental and social problems. The comparison of private and public transnational governance initiatives in this contribution reveals different kinds of barriers for addressing local grievances in relation to the soy business in a meaningful way. In fact, some initiatives such as the Soy Moratorium or the EU regulation on deforestation-free products that is currently under debate exclude broader human rights concerns such as land tenure from their scope and exclusively cover deforestation and forest degradation. Such a narrow focus on selected salient issues is problematic, as ‘[i]t is highly unlikely that increased transparency of one phenomenon will not, in some way, diminish the amount of attention that is given to other, less transparent phenomena; the act of making some things more visible invariably makes other things less visible, and therefore less well understood and ultimately less relevant’ (Gardner et al. 2019, p. 173). In comparison, soy certification standards such as RTRS and ProTerra and laws on MDD (e.g., from France and Germany) also promise to address human rights concerns, but the analysis of their implementation sheds light on related shortcomings. Due to a de-prioritization of the concerns of affected communities, the absence of meaningful participation processes and the lack of robust data on issues such as land tenure and land conflicts, pesticide contamination and access to water and livelihoods in Brazil, these important issues have largely been overlooked in existing governance arrangements. The findings of this study point to shortcomings to integrate human rights and to take local voices seriously in transnational sustainability governance for contributing to sustainable development in an integrated manner, which has been an important objective of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The exclusion of local actors and concerns in transnational governance arrangements reflects existing constellations of power, which have not only shaped global trade relations, but also the way these relations have been governed. The flipside of the exclusionary dynamics discussed above is not just that rightsholders remain unprotected and without effective access to remedy for environmental damages and human rights violations. Moreover, the study also argues that taking local development agendas seriously could help to combat deforestation more effectively and to foster just sustainability transformation.

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NOTES 1. Observatório do Clima (11 January 2022). Deforestation hits new record high, a triumph of Bolsonaro’s ecocide. Accessed 14 May 2023 at www​.oc​.eco​.br/​en/​desmatamento​-bate​ -novo​-recorde​-e​-mostra​-triunfo​-de​-projeto​-ecocida​-de​-bolsonaro/​. 2. At that time, the standard still used the name ‘Round Table on Sustainable Soy’ (RSS), but due to strong critique from civil society organizations challenging whether large-scale soy production could be ‘sustainable,’ the name Round Table on Responsible Soy (RTRS) was adopted.

REFERENCES Baletti, B. (2014) Saving the Amazon? Sustainable soy and the new extractivism. Environmental Planning A 46, 5–25. Bartley, T. (2018) Rules Without Rights: Land, Labor, and Private Authority in the Global Economy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bastos Lima, M. and U.M. Persson (2020) Commodity-centric landscape governance as a double-edged sword: the case of soy and the Cerrado Working Group in Brazil. Frontiers in Forests and Global Change 3(27), 1‒17. Bombardi, L.M. (2017) Geografia do Uso de Agrotóxicos no Brasil e Conexões com a União Europeia. São Paulo: Universidade de São Paulo. Bowman, M.S., Soares-Filho, B.S., Merry, F.D., Nepstad, D.C., Rodrigues, H. and O.T. Almeida (2012) Persistence of cattle ranching in the Brazilian Amazon: A spatial analysis of the rationale for beef production. Land Use Policy 29(3), 558‒568. Boyle A. (2012) Human rights and the environment: Where next? European Journal of International Law 23(3), 613‒642. Brand, U. and M. Wissen (2013) Crisis and continuity of capitalist society–nature relationships: The imperial mode of living and the limits to environmental governance. Review of International Political Economy 20(4), 687‒711. Carneiro, F.F., Silva Augusto, L.G., Rigotto, R.M., Friedrich, K. and A. Campos Búrigo (2015) Dossiê ABRASCO: um alerta sobre os impactos dos agrotóxicos na saúde. Rio de Janeiro/São Paulo: EPSJV and Expressão Popular. Centro de Información sobre Empresas y Derechos Humanos (CIDH), Front Line Defenders, Derechos de los Pueblos Indígenas Internacional (IPRI), ProDESC (2021) Centrarse en lo humano. Garantizar que la legislación sobre diligencia debidaamplíe efectivamente las voces de personas afectadas por la irresponsabilidad de las empresas. Accessed 14 May 2023 at https://​media​.business​-humanrights​.org/​media/​documents/​2021​_Hearing​_the​ _Human​_Briefing​_v5​_ES​_V2vvLgJ​.pdf. Clapp J. (2005) Global environmental governance for corporate responsibility and accountability. Global Environmental Politics 5(3), 23‒34. Clapp, J. (2017) The trade-ification of the food sustainability agenda. The Journal of Peasant Studies 44(2), 335‒353. Comissão Pastoral da Terra (CPT) (2006) CPT Santarém e Moratória da Soja. Public statement from 24 August 2006. Comissão Pastoral da Terra (CPT) (2021) Conflitos no Campo Brasil 2020. Goiania: CPT Goiania. Dauvergne, P. (2010) The Shadows of Consumption: Consequences for the Global Environment. Cambridge: MIT Press.

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Gardner, T.A., Benzie, M., Börner, J., Dawkins, E., Fick, S., Garrett, R., Godar, J., Grimard, A., Lake, S., Larsen, R.K. and N. Mardas (2019) Transparency and sustainability in global commodity supply chains. World Development 121, 163‒177. Greenpeace (2006) Eating up the Amazon. Amsterdam: Greenpeace International. Human Rights Watch (2022) EU: To end deforestation, protect land rights. Accessed 14 May 2023 at www​.hrw​.org/​news/​2022/​01/​27/​eu​-end​-deforestation​-protect​-land​-rights. LeBaron, G., Lister, J. and P. Dauvergne (2017) Governing global supply chain sustainability through the ethical audit regime. Globalizations 14(6), 958‒975. Marques, J.C. and B. Eberlein (2021) Grounding transnational business governance: A political‐strategic perspective on government responses in the Global South. Regulation & Governance 15(4), 1209‒1229. Mason, M. (2020) Transparency, accountability and empowerment in sustainability governance: A conceptual review. Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning 22(1), 98‒111. McMichael, P. (2009) A food regime genealogy. The Journal of Peasant Studies 36(1), 139‒169. Mempel, F. and E. Corbera (2021) Framing the frontier: Tracing issues related to soybean expansion in transnational public spheres. Global Environmental Change 69, 102308. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) (2018) Multinational Enterprises in the Global Economy. Heavily Debated but Hardly Measured. Paris: OECD. www​.oecd​.org/​industry/​ind/​MNEs​-in​-theglobal​-economy​-policy​-note​.pdf (accessed 15 July 2021). Pendrill, F., Persson, U.M., Godar, J. and T. Kastner (2019) Deforestation displaced: Trade in forest-risk commodities and the prospects for a global forest transition. Environmental Research Letters 14, 55003. Pereira, J.C. and E. Viola (2018) Catastrophic climate change and forest tipping points: Blind spots in international politics and policy. Global Policy 9(4), 513‒524. Ponte, S. (2020) The hidden costs of environmental upgrading in global value chains. Review of International Political Economy 29(3), 1‒26. Rios Vivos Coalition, FBOMS, GTA, FETRAF-Sul and CEBRAC (2004) Criteria for Corporate Responsibility of Soy Buyer Enterprises. Accessed 14 May 2023 at www​.obser​ vatoriodoa​gronegocio​.com​.br/​page41/​files/​SoyCriteriaMar05​.pdf. Ruggie, J.G. (2018) Multinationals as global institution: Power, authority and relative autonomy. Regulation & Governance 12(3), 317‒333. Schilling-Vacaflor, A. and M.T. Gustafsson (2021) Do new due diligence policies matter? The French duty of vigilance law and soy and beef from Brazil. Paper presented at the 5th International Conference on Public Policy (ICPP5), Barcelona, Spain. Schilling-Vacaflor, A. and A. Lenschow (2021) Hardening foreign corporate accountability through mandatory due diligence in the European Union? New trends and persisting challenges. Regulation & Governance. doi:101111/rego.12402. Schilling-Vacaflor, A., Lenschow, A., Challies, E., Cotta, B. and J. Newig (2021) Contextualizing certification and auditing: Soy certification and access of local communities to land and water in Brazil. World Development 140, 105281. Schleifer, P., Fiorini, M. and L. Fransen (2019) Missing the bigger picture: A population-level analysis of transnational private governance organizations active in the global south. Ecological Economics 164, 106362. Schouten, G., Leroy, P. and P. Glasbergen (2012) On the deliberative capacity of private multi-stakeholder governance: The roundtables on responsible soy and sustainable palm oil. Ecological Economics 83, 42‒50. Sikor, T., Auld, G., Bebbington, A.J., Benjaminsen, T.A., Gentry, B.S., Hunsberger, C., Izac, A.M., Margulis, M.E., Plieninger, T., Schroeder, H. and C. Upton (2013) Global land governance: From territory to flow?. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 5(5), 522‒527.

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Silva-Castañeda, L. (2012) A forest of evidence: Third-party certification and multiple forms of proof – a case study of oil palm plantations in Indonesia. Agriculture and Human Values 29(3), 361–370. Simons, P. (2012) International law’s invisible hand and the future of corporate accountability for violations of human rights. Journal of Human Rights and the Environment 3(1), 5‒43. Sparovek, G., Reydon, B.P., Pinto Guedes, L.F., Faria, V., de Freitas, F.L., Azevedo-Ramos, C., Gardner, T., Hamamura, C., Rajão, R., Cerignoni, F., Siqueira Pansani, G., Carvalho, T., Alencar, A. and V. Ribeiro (2019) Who owns Brazilian lands? Land Use Policy 87, 1–3. Steward, C. (2007) From colonization to “environmental soy”: A case study of environmental and socio-economic valuation in the Amazon soy frontier. Agriculture and Human Values 24(1), 107–122. Webinar (2021). Enforcing a due diligence based regulation for forest risk commodities, organized by FERN. Accessed 14 May 2023 at www​.fern​.org/​publications​-insight/​ enforcing​-a​-due​-diligence​-basedregulation​-for​-forest​-risk​-commodities​-2294/​.

19. Ecosystem services in development: frontier of green colonialism or tool for social justice? Nicolena vonHedemann

1.

INTRODUCTION: PAYMENTS FOR ECOSYSTEM SERVICES AS DEVELOPMENT

The concept of Ecosystem Services has emerged in recent decades to highlight the utility of nature to human society, emphasizing the many specific services that ecosystems provide to humans. These services include regulating services that support ecosystem function such as water filtration, pollination, and carbon sequestration and storage; cultural services such as religious relationships and aesthetics; and supporting services that provide the foundation for all other services, such as nutrient cycling or soil formation. The developers of this framework intended to bring attention to the importance of the natural world and what it provides for humans in order to promote better stewardship and conservation. Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) programs have emerged from this ecosystem services framework and have become an increasingly common form of environmental governance, often linked with development interventions. PES programs offer landowners or land managers some form of payment or incentive to provide or enhance key ecosystem services. Muradian et al. provide a broad definition of PES: “a transfer of resources between social actors, which aims to create incentives to align individual and/or collective land use decisions with the social interest in the management of natural resources” (Muradian et al. 2010, 1205). Wunder (2015, 241) notes that the transactions are “conditional on agreed rules of natural resource management” to generate services. In practice, PES programs vary widely. They range from programs that quantify a chosen service (such as carbon sequestration and storage in a forest) and offer payment commensurate to the measured service, to programs that offer government subsidies for land management practices assumed to enhance a variety of ecosystem services (vonHedemann and Osborne 2016). Compensation ranges from direct payment to in-kind contributions to land managers. Intermediaries include private corporations, governments, or non-profits. Overall, all these programs offer conditional compensation for completing land management practices assumed or verified to provide or enhance ecosystem services. 296

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Since the creation of PES programs, there have been debates on their ethics and utility. In one camp are advocates who see potential for PES programs to promote conservation and, in some cases, development. Because many ecosystem services are generated in rural areas utilized and managed by low-income populations around the world, proponents see PES programs as a win–win environment-development solution. Low-income land managers and owners would be able to receive payments for land management that enhances key ecosystem services, providing them with needed income and incentivizing retaining habitats rather than converting land to other uses, such as intensive agricultural expansion. Many critical scholars on the other side of the debate have argued, however, that PES programs are neoliberal and promote inequality and a new form of conservation-driven dispossession (McAfee 2012; Fletcher and Büscher 2017). Yet another, more recent body of literature has noted that some rural participants in PES programs, including Indigenous Peoples, have joined, shaped, and rewritten PES programs to fit their values and needs (Shapiro-Garza 2013a; Shapiro-Garza 2013b; Van Hecken et al. 2018; Shapiro-Garza et al. 2020; vonHedemann 2020). This chapter illustrates how PES can be a double-edged sword by advancing the frontier of green colonialism but also be appropriated as a tool for striving for social justice. I bring together preexisting PES debates by critiquing the optimism of advocates who see PES as primarily a “win–win” intervention for conservation and development. At the same time, I nuance the contributions of critical scholars who see these interventions as inherently neoliberal and dispossessive, as I draw on empirical case studies of PES programs in economically developing nations and note that the neoliberalization of nature has not advanced to the extent previously expected. In this vein, I aim to build on previous critiques to move toward a middle ground, seeing both the danger and utility of PES programs that vary by local context. The chapter continues as follows: I first delve into the rationale behind the creation and promotion of PES. I then address the active debate on how PES programs are labeled as neoliberal, how this label is contested, and major critiques of PES approaches. I argue for the need to continue to examine PES programs through empirical research, illustrating how PES can be embedded into local contexts and showing that PES programs’ impacts can be mixed. Lastly, I demonstrate how PES can be a “surface of engagement” for marginalized groups to demand recognition for conservation efforts using a case study of national forestry incentives in Guatemala.

2.

PRO-PES ARGUMENTS

Scholars have been framing ecosystems in terms of the services they provide to humans in order to promote environmental protection since the 1970s and 1980s (Dempsey 2016; Muradian and Gómez-Baggethun 2021). The ecosystem services framework became more widespread in the late 1990s with key publications (Costanza et al. 1997; Daily 1997) and adoption into the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment in the early 2000s (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 2005; Dempsey

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2016). Attaching a monetary value to those highlighted ecosystem services is a logical extension of the ecosystem services framework, with promoters arguing that this broadens acceptance of the environmental agenda through appealing to “utilitarian motives” (Muradian and Gómez-Baggethun 2021, 2). Making explicit ecosystems’ “services” through economic valuation makes them more competitive with lucrative but destructive land uses because “without economic valuation, decision-makers and governments implicitly assign ecosystem processes a value of zero” (Costanza et al. 1997; Tallis and Kareiva 2005, R746; Dempsey 2016). Ecosystem services function as “a renewed attempt to bring ecosystems to the political table through the production of an interest – a state, firm, community, or personal interest – in it” (Dempsey 2016, 102). Proponents argue that “intrinsic values” for conservation, and other values of nature have so far failed to prevent degradation (Dempsey 2016; Muradian and Gómez-Baggethun 2021). This is not to say that promoters of an ecosystem services framework argued for the necessity of full commodification and development of ecosystem service markets, but rather that they saw bringing services’ utilitarian value to the forefront as a useful conservation tactic (Dempsey 2016). Importantly, promoters of PES also saw these mechanisms as methods to generate much-needed funds for conservation. There are common complaints in conservation circles that states are not providing enough funding to “save nature” at the rate and scale needed, regulation budgets have been reduced worldwide, and regulation and expanded area protection regulation and expanded area protection are not providing conservation at the needed scale (Dempsey 2016; Chapron et al. 2017; Bigger and Dempsey 2018). This command-and-control approach has been successful in some areas but is also increasingly seen as insufficient in scope to address continued loss of habitats and has engendered local violent conflicts with excluded resource users and stewards (Neumann 2001; West 2006; Agrawal and Redford 2009; Fletcher 2010; Holmes and Cavanagh 2016). Additionally, some ecological economists argue that PES programs could redistribute conservation funds more efficiently, where, for example, land managers could be paid for carbon storage in countries where the cost of land and labor are cheaper, providing global benefits (Engel et al. 2008; Pattanayak et al. 2010). Promoting PES programs in rural areas in economically developing nations could additionally provide needed income streams for poorer populations and provide both conservation and development. This belief that PES programs generate new and efficiently distributed funds is debated, however, as others note that setting up PES programs has required substantial efforts and the vast majority are paid for with state funds generated by taxes and fees, not spurring private financial investment in these ecosystems (Vatn 2015). This initial movement towards PES programs as a method of environmental governance and rural development intervention became possible in the decades when governance approaches beyond the realm of conservation were shifting towards neoliberal frameworks, which included moving away from state direct control, increasing local and decentralized governance, and privatizing services once provided by the state. The result is that “in a matter of three decades the ES framework has become a very influential, or even hegemonic, discourse to frame human–nature relationships

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in environmental science and policy” (Muradian and Gómez-Baggethun 2021, 2). The paradox is, however, that despite the neoliberal discourse surrounding PES, most PES programs in practice are run by or supported by state governments and very few operate as markets (Gómez-Baggethun and Muradian 2015; Vatn 2015).

3.

PES AS NEOLIBERAL ENVIRONMENT AND DEVELOPMENT GOVERNANCE?

In this section I illustrate how PES programs as a form of environment and development governance draw on foundational capitalist and utilitarian logics at a global scale, and how a prominent narrative used by both proponents and critics frame PES as a neoliberal market intervention. The subsequent section then demonstrates how at the same time PES programs are integrated into social contexts that offer the opportunity for reworking at a local scale, largely not functioning as markets. This responds to recent calls by Asiyanbi to address the question of scale of neoliberal environments because the outcomes differ across scales (Asiyanbi 2018). Many have argued that the rise of an ecosystem services framework and PES programs may reflect a broader trend towards neoliberal governance in many spheres. While neoliberalism is a political and economic philosophy that can take on many meanings, in this chapter I draw on the following definition: neoliberalism is a philosophy and policy program (Castree 2010; Asiyanbi 2018) that moves towards expanding “market mechanisms, relations, discipline, and ethos to an ever-expanding spectrum of spheres of social activities” and that decentralizes governance by shifting “critical regulatory functions from the state to non/quasi-state actors” (Pinson and Morel Journel 2016, 137; Bigger and Dempsey 2018, 28). These shifts in governance have led to state roll back in interventions in some spheres, but often require state facilitation of new markets or market-based logics in new realms (Fletcher and Büscher 2017). This movement towards neoliberal environmental governance not only reflects a trend towards neoliberalism in many spheres, but also, as noted above, the perception that previous command and control policies have failed or are insufficient for the scale of conservation needed (Bigger and Dempsey 2018). Many have argued that PES programs are a form of neoliberal governance, but, as I demonstrate below, they can become locally embedded in social contexts, occur in many forms, and are overwhelmingly not operating as markets. Critical scholars argue that the discursive underpinnings of PES programs are built upon Western capitalist values with a narrow view of the human–nature relationship. Muradian and Gómez-Baggethun maintain that framing nature as providing services for humans draws on Western cultural conceptions of nature: (1) a clearcut human–nature divide, (2) anthropocentrism, where nature’s importance lies in its service to humanity, and (3) a primarily utilitarian view of nature (Muradian and Gómez-Baggethun 2021). These traits, they argue, take agency away from the natural world, “dehumanize” it, and “reduce empathy towards it,” and are the root causes of environmental destruction that led to the need for PES for conservation in the first

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place (Muradian and Gómez-Baggethun 2021, 5). Similarly, Dempsey comments that the ecosystem services framework is a “very narrow way to conceive of humans’ diverse connections with the nonhuman world” and criticizes the universal promotion of the framework in diverse contexts where it may be “incommensurate with many local world views” (Dempsey 2016, 103; Sullivan in McElwee 2017). The framework “risks reducing complex ecosystems to market logic,” particularly in PES programs where specific ecosystem services are quantified and monetized – although full quantification and market-based valuation occurs within a small minority of PES programs (Dempsey 2016, 92; Vatn 2015). Yet, many PES programs are operating in non-Western contexts and have Indigenous participants; while PES frameworks may have Western and utilitarian roots, many programs have been locally situated and repurposed. There are “multiple rationalities and logics at play” in utilizing the ecosystem services framework (Dempsey 2016, 103), and PES projects “variegate as they unfold” (Asiyanbi 2018, 46). Thus, I take an approach described by Asiyanbi of emphasizing overarching PES origins and philosophy while at the same time recognizing that these projects are locally embedded and vary greatly in their framing, operation, and impacts (Asiyanbi 2018). PES programs thus may, but do not necessarily, lead to commodification and marketization of ecosystem services, although much of the literature on PES (both in support and against PES programs) portray them as markets (Gómez-Baggethun and Muradian 2015). Many ecosystem service advocates emphasize that markets are not a necessary extension of this framework (Dempsey 2016). In practice, most PES programs are not full market exchanges; services are not well-defined, payments are not conditional on providing additional ecosystem services (payments are usually instead based on the completion of proxy activities assumed to enhance services), most programs are run directly by states, and payments are often based on “opportunity costs and negotiations with the concerned stakeholders” rather than competitive market rates for exchanged ecosystem service units (Gómez-Baggethun and Muradian 2015). The vast majority of programs, including Guatemala’s, raise payment funds through state-collected taxes or fees (90% of PES financing in 2009) (Vatn 2015). Some critical scholars argue that even when services are not commodified, the inherent nature of ecosystem services frameworks leads them to have limited utility in achieving desired development and conservation outcomes and precludes a search for other socially just, transformative solutions (Fletcher and Büscher 2017). There is evidence that economic incentives like PES can “crowd out” intrinsic motivations for biodiversity and ecosystem conservation, diminishing non-economic and internal drivers to action, although there is a need for more systematic research to better understand conditions that lead to this “crowding out” (Rode et al. 2015). PES programs provide funds to landowners to complete what are deemed environmentally beneficial land practices, and thus frame funding as the solution, which presumes that only the lack of capital on the part of the land manager or owner is the primary cause of environmental degradation – a simple, apolitical cause that ignores many other drivers (Dempsey and Suarez 2016). Interventions such as PES are a technological

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fix that fail to fundamentally address the foundational drivers of deforestation and widespread land inequalities tied to colonialism and racism (Dempsey and Suarez 2016; Aguilar-Støen 2018; Bigger and Dempsey 2018; Osborne 2018; vonHedemann 2020). A focus on the technical fix of PES can preclude a true examination of alternative solutions, as policymakers are seen as taking action but more transformational possibilities are not truly considered (Dempsey and Suarez 2016). The promotion of an ecosystem services framework can also be seen as a colonial practice, where intellectual projects largely developed in the Global North are assumed to have universal applicability and are exported to a variety of societies and ecosystems across the globe (Dempsey 2016). Some PES programs, such as those paid for by the Global North seeking to offset carbon emissions in the Global South, illustrate a classic example of carbon colonialism, the use of climate policies to continue domination of the Global South by the Global North (Bachram 2004). Carbon colonialism in PES occurs where those most responsible for climate change are dictating land use for those least responsible in an “international, racialized division of labor for climate mitigation” (Bumpus and Liverman 2011; Bigger and Dempsey 2018, 29; Osborne 2018). Indigenous territories are often used for subsistence and thus have little market value due to the devaluing of Indigenous labor and means of production; PES schemes like Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) target these Indigenous lands as ideal for forest offset projects because there is not competition with financially lucrative services (Osborne 2018). An ecosystem services framework supporting PES programs has “the potential for all kinds of injustices,” yet, as I illustrate below, is also “an internally conflicted and polyvalent project” (Dempsey 2016, 92).

4.

PES IN PRACTICE: EMBEDDED AND VARIEGATED

While it is important to recognize these foundational roots of PES, it is equally necessary to attend to the empirical realities of PES in practice. Participants and creators of PES programs in the Global South have agency and reshape programs based on local constraints, objectives, and social norms and have created possibilities for transformative change, including “divergent PES ontologies” (Van Hecken et al. 2018, 317; vonHedemann 2020). Van Hecken et al. (2018) argue, that too much focus on PES’ theoretical roots leads to “armchair theorization” that fails to look at the lived realities of PES on the ground and thus obfuscates participants’ agency in program implementation (Shapiro-Garza et al. 2020). Multiple studies on PES programs around the world illustrate that while an ecosystem services framework lays the groundwork for markets, most PES programs do not create fully marketized and commodified services (Van Hecken et al. 2018). An ecosystem services framework draws on Western, utilitarian perceptions of human relationships with nature, but this is not the only conceptualization that affects the creation and implementation of PES programs in practice (Van Hecken et al. 2018; vonHedemann 2020). Empirical

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investigations of PES programs help us understand “the ways in which local processes articulate with and mutually rework wider neoliberal structures” (Asiyanbi 2018, 44–45). Crucial to more fully understanding PES is to investigate the processes of their creation and implementation to break down assumptions of objective, scientific approaches and examine who benefits and who does not. Every program creation involves political negotiations that include ecological research into how selected management practices enhance preferred ecosystem services, setting criteria for payment and feasible verification methods, deciding on who are desired potential participants and conducting outreach to recruit them, creating new institutions or staffing new positions with desired expertise, and proliferating narratives of PES as the best means for achieving desirable objectives (McAfee 1999; Robertson 2000; Bumpus and Liverman 2008). Each of these steps involve discretionary decisions, and many potential participants have shaped these processes. In programs that quantify ecosystem services, researchers must delve into what services are prioritized, how they are measured and calculated, and how this measurement is translated into payment (vonHedemann 2023). These scientific processes are often framed as technical and naturalized, with discretionary choices in measurement, calculation, and valuation made invisible and thus not subject to debate or improvement (McElwee 2017; vonHedemann 2023). Services that are more efficiently measurable are thus more legible and privileged over the “invisible and unknown” aspects of these landscapes (Gómez-Baggethun and Muradian 2015). These assumed-to-be-objective processes in fact have meaningful impact on payment amounts received or which management strategies are incentivized (such as planting fast-growing carbon-capturing trees vs. native species) (McElwee 2017). There have long been debates on if, despite the colonial and reductionist logics of an ecosystem services framework, PES programs can empower historically marginalized participants (Mansfield 2007; Dempsey and Robertson 2012; Dempsey 2016). Close examination of the processes of PES creation and implementation reveals that in some cases these programs can be a “surface of engagement” for participants to interact with and make demands upon program developers. Shapiro-Garza first used this term in reference to PES, borrowed from Escobar (Escobar 1999, 13), to describe using these programs as a tool to engage with the state to demand recognition for Mexican landowners’ conservation stewardship and change neoliberal narratives of economically efficient PES to focus instead on valuing stewardship labor and undervalued rural spaces (Shapiro-Garza 2013a; Shapiro-Garza 2013b). PES programs across the world are reshaped by participants to meet their cultural values, shifting compensated land management practices (Shapiro-Garza 2013a; Shapiro-Garza 2013b), or changing payment systems to align with local norms more closely (i.e., regular and/or equally distributed payments) (McElwee et al. 2014; Pascual et al. 2014; Osborne and Shapiro-Garza 2018). Others such as groups in Mexico and Australia have shifted narratives supporting PES programs to emphasize a culture of reciprocity and reward for existing land stewardship, moving emphasis away from the need for payments to push landowners from degradation to conservation (Jackson

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et al. 2017). Even the UN’s REDD+ policy, originally conceived as a market-based PES program to offset emissions in tropical countries, has been radically reshaped by participant groups. Indigenous Peoples’ engagement with REDD+ varies from complete rejection to “negotiated participation” to completely reworking REDD+ to become “a more radical project of de-commodifying nature in line with Indigenous sovereignty and cosmovision” that reclaims forests from states (Osborne 2018, 64). Using PES as a “surface of engagement” can thus lead to program modifications or even radical reimagining from a decolonial space. It is also important to note that participation in PES programs that may not have been shaped by participants does not mean full endorsement of foundational PES narratives, as participants pick and choose to use programs for their own needs (McElwee et al. 2014). PES programs are embedded into “preexisting social relations, institutions, and social and cultural values,” and the programs aim to meet a variety of goals beyond conservation, with multiple discourses at play (Osborne and Shapiro-Garza 2018, 88). Goals for PES program creators, administrators, and participants vary, but include poverty alleviation, increased state control of or influence over rural spaces, or political recognition for conservation practices of marginalized land managers (de Koning et al. 2011; Osborne 2013; Shapiro-Garza 2013b; Shapiro-Garza 2013a; vonHedemann 2020). A relational values approach to PES sees these programs as supporting positive relationships with nature not based on quantification of services but rather through rewarding sustained stewardship (McAfee and Shapiro 2010; Chan et al. 2011; Chan et al. 2017). In the end, this leaves many of the world’s PES programs to not operate as a market or even with an exclusive focus on ecosystem services, integrating concerns such as rural development into the programs (McElwee et al. 2014). While PES programs have the potential to perpetuate reductionist, colonial logics and negative outcomes, I argue that they also hold possibility to be one of many tools used in a movement toward social justice, and it is worth examining when and how this is possible. Moreover, recent studies have also indicated that the overall movement towards the neoliberalization of nature has not come to fruition to the extent that promoters hoped and critical scholars feared. Few PES programs in practice operate as markets (Gómez-Baggethun and Muradian 2015; Dempsey and Suarez 2016; Vatn 2015). Many are run by national governments and offer landowners state funds for the provision of ecosystem services, including in such countries as Guatemala, Costa Rica, Ecuador, and Mexico (Bremer et al. 2014; Lansing 2014; Osborne and Shapiro-Garza 2018; vonHedemann 2020). Even REDD+, largely anticipated to be “the world’s largest ecosystem services market,” has 90% of its funding currently coming directly from “bilateral and multilateral public sources” and an unclear path to increased marketization (Dempsey and Suarez 2016, 661; Osborne 2018, 63). The LEAF Coalition (Lowering Emissions by Accelerating Forest finance) launched in 2021 as a public–private partnership between governments (Norway, the United States, and the United Kingdom) and major corporations in order to mobilize $1 billion in financing to reduce carbon emissions from forests in tropical and subtropical countries; this effort represents another solution that does not rely on the markets

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that have failed to manifest in REDD+ programs (LEAF Coalition 2021). Ecosystem service markets have not grown to the anticipated scale due in part to the difficulties of creating fungible ecosystem service units and the lack of profit in markets that did emerge (Bigger and Dempsey 2018). Carbon markets have not sustained a high price of carbon to entice and provide benefits to participants (Osborne 2018). The money moving through market-based conversation is particularly small considering estimates of the total value that ecosystem services provide and the comparatively larger traditional flows of funding for conservation through philanthropy and, primarily, state funding (domestic, bilateral, or multilateral) (Dempsey and Suarez 2016; Lave 2018). The way PES programs function in practice contradicts rhetoric on the inevitable necessity of conservation markets among mainstream environmental groups and the fear of “rapacious commodification” of nature and “an epochal transformation of socioecological relations” among critical scholars (Dempsey and Suarez 2016, 654–655). There are debates on the impact that PES’ discursive framework still holds even if there is a limited flow of capital towards actual PES markets and other forms of neoliberal conservation. Dempsey and Suarez (among others) argue that the “market-environment discourse can have enormous cultural and political disciplining effects on the conservation movement and on environmental governance” (Dempsey and Suarez 2016, 666). This market-focused conservation rhetoric, they argue, leads policymakers, NGOs, conservationists, scientists, and other stakeholders to prioritize the logics of markets and business in their approaches to conservation, assume that eventually more markets will develop, and preclude more alternative, radical, and progressive solutions as unimaginable or untenable, even those that had been previously considered in the past (Dempsey and Suarez 2016). Gómez-Baggethun and Muradian (2015) likewise argue that even though PES programs are rarely operating as markets, they do “extend market-oriented values, logic, and language into novel environmental domains” and can “erode the conceptions, norms, and taboos that act as cultural barriers to the extension of markets and market values to domains traditionally governed by non-market norms” (p. 222). For example, while the LEAF Coalition provides funds outside of market transactions, the money from governments and corporations is still used to pay for fungible units of emission reductions verified by a third party (LEAF Coalition 2021). MacDonald and Corson (2012) argue that this market-influenced impact has combined with the professionalization of the environmental field to shift the environmental movement to be more accepting of the rules and logics of capital in shaping environmental interventions. Lave, on the other hand, argues that neoliberal ideals have not fully pervaded environmental institutions and NGOs, but rather that environmental professionals are catering to current funding trends which will change in time (Lave 2018). Focusing on this pervasiveness of neoliberal ideals among creators and proponents of PES programs, I argue, overlooks the multiple ontologies of participants who create, shape, enroll, and use programs to their own benefit. Teasing out PES program impacts can help us understand the variegated, partial, and contested implementation of neoliberal conservation. A large body of literature

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exists on PES outcomes, with both positive and negative impacts. Focusing on forest-based programs, PES can increase rural incomes and forest management technical skills, promote community organization, solidify land tenure claims, improve forest health, and consolidate political power of land stewards (Smith and Scherr 2002; Bailis 2006; Corbera et al. 2007; Osborne 2011; Osborne 2013; Shapiro-Garza 2013b; Shapiro-Garza 2013a). These same PES programs can lead to financial burdens for participants investing in forest management, reduce access to the benefits of participants’ own land and labor, increase gender and socioeconomic inequality, centralize forest governance, and increase surveillance leading to reducing participants’ autonomy (Nelson and de Jong 2003; Grieg-Gran et al. 2005; Bailis 2006; Corbera et al. 2007; Osborne 2011; Beymer-Farris and Bassett 2012; Osborne 2013; Asiyanbi 2018; Osborne and Shapiro-Garza 2018). Many PES studies struggle to demonstrate that ecosystem services or development benefits would not have been enhanced without the program intervention (Pattanayak et al. 2010; Ferraro 2011). Because PES programs are so often tied to land ownership and/or direct control over land managing, they often fail to reach “the poorest of the poor” who do not own land, and thus can exacerbate local inequality (Wunder 2005, 17). In other cases, clarifying property rights in order to participate in PES can lead to increased exclusion of informal users (Osborne 2013). These challenges are seen in a variety of PES programs, even when not commodifying and marketizing ecosystem services.

5.

GUATEMALA’S PES PROGRAMS: NATIONAL FORESTRY INCENTIVES

Guatemala’s national forestry incentive programs illustrate the contradictions, variability, successes, and challenges of PES programs in practice. These programs are payments by the national government of Guatemala, collected from the general tax revenue, to landowners and managers who complete certain actions assumed to provide ecosystem services. While no ecosystem services are quantified, payments are contingent on completing practices that are thought to provide these services, such as limiting tree mortality and building a firebreak. The programs do not currently have market ties, but do illustrate a growing example of government-funded PES programs that provide landowners with money for forest conservation actions that are thought to enhance needed ecosystem services. Guatemala’s programs, from their foundation to their most recent iteration, however, have multiple objectives for all stakeholders involved and combined the goal of enhancing ecosystem services with other desired outcomes, such as enhancing rural development and improving livelihoods, increasing the productivity of forests for economic development, adapting to climate change, and (among many participants) gaining recognition for conservation in rural landscapes. Guatemala’s first forestry incentive program, PINFOR (Programa de Incentivos Forestales, Forestry Incentive Program) was created by their national forest service, the INAB (Instituto Nacional de Bosques, National Forestry Institute) in 1996. This

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first-generation program offered landowners with 2 or more hectares of land annual payments for reforestation or existing forest protection. The program had several stated goals, including the enhancement of ecosystem services and production of timber to develop Guatemala’s forest industry (vonHedemann 2020). The program excluded the vast majority of Guatemalan landowners, however, as it required land titles registered in the national cadaster (Registro Nacional de Propiedad), and 45% of Guatemalan landowners own less than the minimum 2 hectares required (INE 2004; Aguilar-Støen 2018; vonHedemann 2020). Due to the exclusionary nature of this first-generation PES, local activists successfully agitated for a second-generation program focused on smallholders and communal lands. Communal forests in Guatemala are often managed by Indigenous Maya communities, who have used and stewarded these lands for generations but may not hold land titles registered in the national cadaster. Communal forest managers and smallholders used innovative practices to participate in first-generation incentives by enrolling the lands that they used under titles registered in the cadaster in the name of the local municipio (township) government or by combining small parcels together, arrangements that had varying degrees of success and required molding Indigenous lands into a legal system intelligible to the state (vonHedemann 2020). Communal forest advocates and smallholders (some of whom were also communal forest users) began to organize, with international NGO support, around the idea of creating a second program that focused on those who were excluded from or faced challenges in enrolling in the first incentives (Aguilar-Støen 2018; vonHedemann 2020). In 2006, PINPEP1 was piloted in select municipios, with funding provided by the Dutch development cooperation agency, who had an interest in funding conservation-development programs (Aguilar Umaña 2012; Aguilar-Støen 2018; vonHedemann 2020). This new program had a minimum land requirement of just 0.1 hectares and no longer required national cadaster titles, instead permitting entry with certification of land ownership by the local mayor. The broadening of land ownership was significant, with this PES program being “one of the few [laws] in the country acknowledging the existence of communal land tenure regimes and recognizing property rights that are not formalized in the National Property Register” (Aguilar-Støen 2018, 20). The program funded not only reforestation and existing forest preservation, but also agroforestry projects. The stated objectives included those of the first program, producing both ecosystem services and timber, but also incorporated a more explicit focus on rural development and adaptation to climate change. The program was very popular among potential participants, and, with their lobbying, became a national program indefinitely funded by the Guatemala government in 2010 (Aguilar-Støen 2018; vonHedemann 2020). The first program, however, was set to expire in 2016, so various stakeholders moved to make a replacement program, PROBOSQUE2 (“pro-forest”), which shifted the incentive program’s focus more explicitly on the generation of ecosystem services. The National Forestry Institute worked with stakeholders from universities, the communal forest and smallholder sector, the private sector, local government representatives, and both local and international NGOs to draft the new law. The final

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law and regulations incorporated some demands by communal forest and smallholder sectors to increase accessibility and more equitably distribute payments. Since the second program (PINPEP) continues to exist, this new incentive program focused on those who had registered property titles in the national cadaster but reduced minimum enrollment size to 0.5 ha. Language within the law also stated that ancestral land titles held by Indigenous communities could be recognized, although in practice this depends on the discretion of local Forestry Institute lawyers. PROBOSQUE’s stated objectives shifted to focus on ecosystem services more explicitly, while still including rural development, timber production, and climate adaptation. While still not quantifying ecosystem services, PROBOSQUE moves towards more reporting of ecosystem characteristics and leaves open the possibility of more payment for quantified ecosystem services in its legislation (vonHedemann 2020). The trajectory of Guatemala’s PES programs reflects both Western conservation roots and the shaping of PES programs by Indigenous and smallholder stakeholders to embed them into local contexts. These programs do draw on utilitarian conservation principles by stating in their founding legislation the goal of enhancing general ecosystem services and offering incentives for behavioral changes. Since their beginning the incentives have been mixed with multiple state objectives and the goals of stakeholders involved in shaping the programs: promoting timber production, enhancing rural development, recognizing Indigenous territorial claims, rewarding stewardship for existing conservation, and adapting to climate change. The smallholder and communal forest sector has forced the incorporation of their values by demanding the state recognize land tenure regimes it had long ignored, make the distribution of PES benefits more equitable, and reward rural land stewards for work they have been completing long before incentives, utilizing PES programs as a surface of engagement for interacting with a government long linked to state-sponsored violence. While the reshaping of these programs has been significant, they still cannot address factors that contribute to rural poverty such as unequal land distribution and marginalization in spaces of power, which are both linked to racism and colonialism. The communal and smallholder forest sector, for example, has long advocated for more influence in the operation of the National Forestry Institute by asking for a specific seat on its board, but this has not yet been realized (vonHedemann 2020).

6. CONCLUSION This chapter illustrates the importance of both acknowledging the theoretical underpinnings of PES as a development and conservation governance approach, but also emphasizes how we must investigate the lived realities of PES creation and implementation. It is critical to listen to the voices of the actual PES participants, while retaining an analytical lens on political economic architecture in which programs are developed and implemented. In doing so, I respond to calls to attend to this scalar tension: to examine both the macro structures of neoliberalism as well as the specifics of local agency (Asiyanbi 2018). PES programs do have limitations in their ability

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to lead to widespread structural changes in inequality, but also offer possibilities for demanding recognition for conservation stewardship and development needs. While, on paper, policies can have a neoliberal connotation and appear to privilege utilitarian goals of efficiency or high returns on investment, it is important to see how they are translated and enacted in practice, as they are always refracted through local politics. Global or national programs do not “roll-out” in seamless, repetitive ways, but are always contested, accepted, and reworked through formal and informal politics on multiple scales. Attending to these dynamics is key for both better understanding PES programs as they actually exist and working to refine policies to better reflect the needs of land managers and stewards.

NOTES 1. 2.

Programa de Incentivos Forestales para Poseedores de Pequeñas Extensiones de Tierra de Vocación Forestal o Agroforestal – Forestry Incentive Program for Owners of Small Landholdings Used for Forestry or Agroforestry. Programa de Incentivos para el Establecimiento, Recuperación, Restauración, Manejo, Producción y Protección de Bosques – Incentive Program for the Establishment, Recuperation, Restoration, Management, Production and Protection of Forests.

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Grieg-Gran, M., I. Porras, and S. Wunder. 2005. How can market mechanisms for forest environmental services help the poor? Preliminary lessons from Latin America. World Development 33(9): 1511–1527. Holmes, G., and C. J. Cavanagh. 2016. A review of the social impacts of neoliberal conservation: Formations, inequalities, contestations. Geoforum 75: 199–209. doi:10.1016/j. geoforum.2016.07.014. INE. 2004. Características Generales de las Fincas Censales y de Productoras y Productores Agropecuarios. Cuidad de Guatemala. Jackson, S., L. Palmer, F. McDonald, and A. Bumpus. 2017. Cultures of carbon and the logic of care: The possibilities for carbon enrichment and its cultural signature. Annals of the American Association of Geographers 107(4): 867–882. doi:10.1080/24694452.2016.12 70187. Lansing, D. M. 2014. Unequal access to payments for ecosystem services: The case of Costa Rica. Development and Change 45(6): 1310–1331. doi:10.1111/dech.12134. Lave, R. 2018. Not so neo. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 1(1–2): 54–57. doi:10.1177/2514848618776864. LEAF Coalition. 2021. https://​leafcoalition​.org/​Accessed 27 March 2022. MacDonald, K. I., and C. Corson. 2012. ‘TEEB Begins Now’: A virtual moment in the production of natural capital. Development and Change 43(1): 159–184. doi:10.1111/j.1467-7660.2012.01753.x. Mansfield, B. 2007. Privatization: Property and the remaking of nature–society relations. Antipode 39(3): 393‒405. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8330.2007.00532.x. McAfee, K. 1999. Selling nature to save it? Biodiversity and green developmentalism. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 17(2): 133–154. McAfee, K. 2012. Nature in the market-world: Ecosystem services and inequality. Development 55(1): 25–33. doi:10.1057/dev.2011.105. McAfee, K., and E. Shapiro. 2010. Payments for ecosystem services in Mexico: Nature, neoliberalism, social movements, and the state. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 100(3): 37–41. McElwee, P. 2017. The metrics of making ecosystem services. Environment and Society 8(1): 96–124. doi:10.3167/ares.2017.080105. McElwee, P., T. Nghiem, H. Le, H. Vu, and N. Tran. 2014. Payments for environmental services and contested neoliberalisation in developing countries: A case study from Vietnam. Journal of Rural Studies 36: 423–440. doi: 10.1016/j.jrurstud.2014.08.003. Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. 2005. Ecosystems and Human Well-being: Synthesis. Washington, DC: Island Press. doi:10.1196/annals.1439.003. Muradian, R., E. Corbera, U. Pascual, N. Kosoy, and P. H. May. 2010. Reconciling theory and practice: An alternative conceptual framework for understanding payments for environmental services. Ecological Economics 69(6): 1202–1208. doi:10.1016/j.ecolecon.2009.11.006. Muradian, R., and E. Gómez-Baggethun. 2021. Beyond ecosystem services and nature’s contributions: Is it time to leave utilitarian environmentalism behind? Ecological Economics 185, 1–9. doi:10.1016/j.ecolecon.2021.107038. Nelson, K. C., and B. H. J. de Jong. 2003. Making global initiatives local realities: Carbon mitigation projects in Chiapas, Mexico. Global Environmental Change 13(1): 19–30. Neumann, R. P. 2001. Disciplining peasants in Tanzania: From state violence to self surveillance in wildlife conservation. In N.L. Peluso and M. Watts (eds.) Violent Environments, pp. 305–327. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Osborne, T. 2011. Carbon forestry and agrarian change: Access and land control in a Mexican rainforest. Journal of Peasant Studies 38(4): 859–883. Osborne, T. 2013. Fixing carbon, losing ground: payments for environmental services and land (in)security in Mexico. Human Geography 6(1): 119–133.

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Osborne, T. 2018. The de-commodification of nature: Indigenous territorial claims as a challenge to carbon capitalism. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 1(1–2): 62–66. doi:10.1177/2514848618776864. Osborne, T., and E. Shapiro-Garza. 2018. Embedding carbon markets: Complicating commodification of ecosystem services in Mexico’s forests. Annals of the American Association of Geographers 101(1): 88–105. doi:10.1080/24694452.2017.1343657. Pascual, U., J. Phelps, E. Garmendia, K. Brown, E. Corbera, A. Martin, E. Gómez-Baggethun, and R. Muradian. 2014. Social equity matters in payments for ecosystem services. BioScience 64(11): 1027–1036. doi:10.1093/biosci/biu146. Pattanayak, S., S. Wunder, and P. Ferraro. 2010. Show me the money: Do payments supply environmental services in developing countries? Review of Environmental Economics and Policy 4(2): 254–274. Pinson, G., and C. Morel Journel. 2016. The neoliberal city – theory, evidence, debates. Territory, Politics, Governance 4(2): 137–153. doi:10.1080/21622671.2016.1166982. Robertson, M. 2000. No net loss: Wetland restoration and the incomplete capitalization of nature. Antipode 32(4): 463–493. Rode, J., E. Gómez-Baggethun, and T. Krause. 2015. Motivation crowding by economic incentives in conservation policy: A review of the empirical evidence. Ecological Economics 117: 270‒282. doi:10.1016/j.ecolecon.2014.09.029. Shapiro-Garza, E. 2013a. Contesting market-based conservation: Payments for ecosystem services as a surface of engagement for rural social movements in Mexico. Human Geography 6(1): 134–150. Shapiro-Garza, E. 2013b. Contesting the market-based nature of Mexico’s national payments for ecosystem services programs: Four sites of articulation and hybridization. Geoforum 46: 5–15. doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2012.11.018. Shapiro-Garza, E., P. McElwee, G. Van Hecken, and E. Corbera. 2020. Beyond market logics: Payments for ecosystem services as alternative development practices in the global south. Development and Change 51(1): 3‒25. doi:10.111/dech.12546. Smith, J., and S. J. Scherr. 2002. Forest Carbon and Local Livelihoods: Assessment of Opportunities and Policy Recommendations. Occasional Paper No. 37. Development. Bogor. Bogor Bara, Indonesia: Center for International Forestry Research. Tallis, H., and P. M. Kareiva. 2005. Ecosystem services – essay. Current Biology 15(18): R746‒748. Van Hecken, G., V. Kolinjivadi, C. Windey, P. McElwee, E. Shapiro-Garza, F. Huybrechs, and J. Bastiaensen. 2018. Silencing agency in payments for ecosystem services (PES) by essentializing a neoliberal ‘monster’ into being: A response to Fletcher & Büscher’s ‘PES Conceit.’ Ecological Economics 144: 314–318. doi:10.1016/j.ecolecon.2017.10.023. Vatn, A. 2015. Markets in environmental governance: From theory to practice. Ecological Economics 117: 225–233. doi:10.1016/j.ecolecon.2014.07.017 vonHedemann, N. 2020. Transitions in payments for ecosystem services in Guatemala: Embedding forestry incentives into rural development value systems. Development and Change 51(1): 117–143. doi:10.1111/dech.12547. vonHedemann, N. 2023. The importance of communal forests in carbon storage: Using and destabilizing carbon measurement in understanding Guatemala’s payments for ecosystem services. The Canadian Geographer 67(1): 106–123. doi:10.1111/cag.12810. vonHedemann, N., and T. Osborne. 2016. State forestry incentives and community stewardship: A political ecology of payments and compensation for ecosystem services in Guatemala’s Highlands. Journal of Latin American Geography 15(1): 83–110. doi:10.1353/ lag.2016.0002. West, P. 2006. Conservation is Our Government Now: The Politics of Ecology in Papua New Guinea. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

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Wunder, S. 2005. Payments for environmental services: Some nuts and bolts. CIFOR Occasional Paper 42(42): 1–24. doi:10.1111/j.1523-1739.2006.00559.x. Wunder, S. 2015. Revisiting the concept of payments for environmental services. Ecological Economics 117: 234–243. doi:10.1016/j.ecolecon.2014.08.016.

20. Reclaiming state capacity in the politics of energy transitions: the cautionary tale of Venezuela’s predatory transition Antulio Rosales

1. INTRODUCTION Keeping fossil fuels in the ground is a growing demand from environmental movements whose call has been to embark not only on a speedy but also a just transition (Newell et al., 2022; Newell & Simms, 2021). The challenge is not minor: it requires not only rapid technological and productive transformations, but also policies of massive redistribution to compensate the marginalized, the losing sectors and populations, and those who are most affected by the already existing effects of climate change. What these social forces are calling for, ultimately, is a planned and organized transition that considers the social and environmental conditions of different societies and where justice is an important principle. For that reason, discussions around a just transition place special focus on the social fabric required to demand and later sustain such a process. Often lacking is the role of a functioning state, capable of negotiating the interests of diverse constituencies and arbitering productive transitions, safeguarding protections for marginalized populations, and limiting the special interests of those who resist change. Environment and political economy scholars have begun to question this absence, and some have elaborated on the need to resurrect debates about state capacity in the context of climate change. That is the case of Kathryn Hochstetler (2021), who highlights the interlinkages between developmental states, state capacity, and renewable energy development. Her work brings the state back into the comparative political economy of climate change in emerging economies such as Brazil and South Africa (Hochstetler, 2021, p. 34). China’s environmental policies and state capacity have also garnered attention (Meckling & Nahm, 2018, 2021). In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, calls for green recovery plans, especially a Green New Deal in the United States, gained some momentum, with important stimulus packages and infrastructure projects proposed with the intention of tilting the boat in terms of new energy infrastructures toward a fossil fuel phase-out (Galvin & Healy, 2020). While capable and democratic states may be pressured by different constituencies to enact policies of technological transformation, promote new industries through 313

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tax incentives, and regulate old and decaying industries into extinction, states with weaker capacity may engage in unplanned transitions. In the midst of weak state capacity and unplanned transitions, forms of predation can surface and worsen environmental and social conditions. That is, beyond just transitions there can also be predatory ones. Expanding on Peter Evans’ framework from developmental state theory to climate discussions, a predatory transition is assumed in this context as a kind of fossil fuel dismantling that is unplanned, and where replacement sources of energy are equally or more environmentally destructive and are carried out at the expense of marginal groups in society. Venezuela has been one of the world’s largest oil producers and has the largest crude reserves, especially of unconventional heavy crude (Garavini, 2019). Yet, the country recently experienced a dramatic political and economic crisis that impacted its oil industry. Venezuela’s production shrunk sharply (Monaldi et al., 2021). Global market conditions suggest that this collapse may be irreversible due to the costs involved in recovering a decaying infrastructure in the context of a dying industry. Realistically, even if the Venezuelan oil industry were to recover modestly in the medium term, the prospects of Venezuela becoming again a major oil provider or simply returning to extraction quantities similar to pre-crisis levels are dismal. The vast majority of Venezuela’s crude reserves will in fact remain underground. This unplanned transition has taken place amid a process of autocratic consolidation and the establishment of a predatory state (Marsteintredet, 2020; Clark & Rosales, 2022). The question that remains is whether an unplanned transition can render environmental and social results desired by both climate and development advocates. Drawing on this case, the chapter argues that state capacity is fundamental for sustainable transitions to take place. The goal is not simply to describe a dystopian and exceptional case that is so unique that it runs counter to most national trajectories, but to warn about the risks that unplanned fossil fuel phase-outs may entail. Indeed, a fossil fuel phase-out must be a piece of a broader puzzle where state capacity is also an important part. I will invoke a case where an unintended transition has occurred: Venezuela, a traditional hydrocarbon powerhouse whose oil industry has declined amid increasing authoritarianism, international hostility, and mismanagement. By focusing on an “actually existing transition,” this chapter interrogates how state capacity is a fundamental piece of a just transition puzzle. The chapter will first explain the unique Venezuelan crisis with special emphasis on its oil industry. It will explore the continued attempts at recovering oil production despite adverse global market conditions and unfavorable economic and governance circumstances. It will narrow down on how the collapse of the oil industry has had rippled environmental and social consequences. Finally, the chapter will bring this case into conversation with the larger discussion of state capacity through enhanced linkages between social organizations and state institutions. The chapter draws on both primary research, through interviews with oil workers and policy experts in the oil industry, and on extensive secondary research on the intersection of climate change and state capacity.

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2.

THE VENEZUELAN CRISIS AND AN UNPLANNED TRANSITION

For much of the twentieth century, Venezuela was a major crude oil producer, an important supplier in world markets, and a policy innovator regarding international cooperation among producers (Garavini, 2019). Due to a combination of mismanagement, incompetence, and international hostility characterized by tough sanctions, the country’s oil production collapsed (see Monaldi et al., 2021; Puente & Rodríguez, 2020; Rodríguez, 2021). The formation and remarkable resilience of petro-states have long been discussed in political economy literatures (Karl, 1997; Ross, 1999). Indeed, the Venezuelan petro-state outlived different attempts at diversification and moments of popular disruption seeking deep transformations to the distribution of rents and the very nature of state–society relations (Kramarz & Kingsbury, 2021). After decades of debate about the need to transcend oil dependence in the country’s economy, Venezuela is unintendedly moving away from its status of a petro-state. This painful transition away from oil is already taking place, albeit in a contradictory manner due to its unintentional quality, with costly humanitarian and increasingly damaging environmental consequences. State capacity has been at the core of the political economy of development literature for decades but has not been sufficiently present in the question of energy transitions in the Global South, due to the disproportionate attention paid to market-inspired proposals. In his classical work, Evans explained that embedded autonomy was rooted in a competent Weberian state with autonomous but not isolated agencies (see also Bull’s chapter in this volume). This kind of autonomous state necessitated to develop connections to society, a form of “embeddedness,” through linkages with actors in the private sector and civil society to help evaluate goals, reassess priorities, and change course in development policies (Evans, 1995). According to Evans’ theory, predatory states stand in contrast to developmental states. A predatory state is weak regarding state capacity for developmental purposes. But unlike the common discourses around “failed states” that became popular in the 1990s, predatory elites are remarkably successful at appropriating revenues, and they can foster a large military or bureaucracy. The defining quality of predatory states is that in them, societies have little capacity to limit incumbents’ desires to plunder the revenues of the public and use its coercive power to consolidate political power. For Evans “some states may extract such large amounts of otherwise investable surplus and provide so little in the way of ‘collective goods’ in return that they do indeed impede economic transformation.” Elites in this kind of state are preoccupied with their survival at the expense of others in society and “those who control the state apparatus seem to plunder without any more regard for the welfare of the citizenry than a predator has for the welfare of its prey” (Evans, 1995, p. 52).

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Roots of Weakening Capacity During the revolutionary government of Hugo Chávez (1999–2013), the government increased state control over the national oil company (NOC), Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA). Ever since its creation, PDVSA was insulated from state intervention to the point that PDVSA was considered a “state within the state” and developed financial and technical policies often at odds with the interests of the Venezuelan state (Mommer, 2002). From the perspective of Peter Evans’ theory of embedded autonomy, PDVSA was an autonomous institution, capable in terms of a corporate governance, but it was not embedded in the fabric of the country’s political and economic institutions in a way that it would respond to broader developmental agendas. Instead, it sought to privilege the company’s own expansion and profit, even if at the expense of the state. Chávez embraced foreign investment in the oil industry, not only to increase technical capacity but also to contain PDVSA’s power (Rosales, 2018). In fact, this form of hybrid resource nationalism relied on foreign investment, as much as on high oil prices, while it secured administrative and financial control over PDVSA. Chávez’s resource nationalism meant that foreign alliances were encouraged while the government executed control over its NOC domestically. The political control over PDVSA was considered a priority for the so-called Bolivarian Revolution. Doing away with the NOC’s autonomy was considered a matter of survival to both Chávez and, later, his successor, Nicolás Maduro. Controlling PDVSA translated into a crucial source of financing for the state to carry out social policies and wealth redistribution without traditional mechanisms of checks and balances and oversight (Corrales & Penfold, 2011; Urbaneja, 2013). It was through controlling PDVSA that the government was able to undermine the institutional constraints of the state’s traditional sources of income and spending (Corrales & Penfold, 2011; Perez S., 2011). Both Chávez and Maduro carried out purges in PDVSA and appointed loyal managers in the company regardless of their knowledge of the oil industry. In the case of Chávez, changes in the company’s leadership and payroll came after a devastating strike in 2002–2003. High oil prices and foreign investment allowed the company to recover relatively quickly while the government managed to extract rents via taxes, royalties, and extraordinary social investment from the company. Yet, the industry remained vulnerable and highly dependent on incoming foreign capital and investment. Meanwhile, Maduro’s takeover of PDVSA took place in very different circumstances, with a steep decline in prices after 2014 and dwindling support from foreign partners. In addition, a deep economic crisis pushed lower-skilled workers out of the fields, leaving the industry in a further precarious position. Further decline in technical capacity within the Venezuelan state-owned company and government institutions in charge of the oil policy became commonplace in recent years. The government chose to achieve its short-term political goals to remain in power, even if at the expense of technical capacity that has put its long-term stability at risk. Interestingly, while petro-states are characterized by their technocratic and exclusionary nature (Kramarz and Kingsbury, 2021), in Venezuela, the establishment

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of a predatory elite has successfully undermined the technocratic nature of its own oil industry. Oil workers explain their concern and disillusion as the governance structure of PDVSA has been dismantled, because of lack of knowledge in the higher ranks of the company and its inability to carry out basic technical decisions to maintain rigs and fields operating. While many experts and company workers have long complained about the sacrifice of the “meritocracy” of the top managerial elite of PDVSA and technical capacity of its personnel, this technical loss has been particularly acute since the administration of Nicolás Maduro gave the reins of the company to officials in the armed forces. During the Maduro administration the areas of procurement and service contracts have sparked most interest for the managerial elites because they are potential areas to obtain illegal rents out of inflated state contracts, while other key areas of exploration and production have been abandoned. PDVSA’s unions report a massive outflow of technical workers that have been absorbed by oil companies abroad, and many low-skilled workers have simply migrated for survival. Despite the evident interest that Venezuela’s oil fields generate in foreign investors for its massive reserves, corruption, mismanagement, and lack of technical capacity have driven away some of the most committed investors, including the Chinese. Sanctions imposed by the United States in 2017 and 2019 meant a significant blow to an already suffering industry. First, financial sanctions limited the company’s capacity to acquire new loans and renegotiate its existing bonds, pending government recognition of the democratically elected parliament. Without access to traditional financial markets both the national treasury and the company were unable to invest in the fields while non-Western partners grew skeptical of the country’s capacity to repay its debts. Russia provided some initial support but the long-standing support coming from China dwindled. In 2019, amid the United States’ recognition of the president of the National Assembly, Juan Guaidó, as interim president, oil trade sanctions impeded the sale of around 400,000 barrels per day (bpd) to the US (Rodríguez, 2021). Sanctions impacted the oil industry in other ways too, including via the overcompliance of third-country companies that feared retaliations from the US if they engaged with Venezuela’s oil industry (Interviews 3, 6). Venezuela remained marginally present in the global market but sold its oil with huge discounts to evade sanctions and through off-the-radar mechanisms, usually with the help of intermediaries in the Middle East and Asia. With the increase in prices in 2021, the oil industry managed to stabilize its output at around 800 000 bpd, less than a third of its best output since the start of the twenty-first century. An Elusive Recovery: Social, Material, and Ideational Obstacles to a Sustainable Transition The Maduro regime has stabilized its position as an autocracy and a divided opposition has lost direction and strategy to recover the path to democracy (Alfaro Pareja, 2020; Jiménez, 2021; Marsteintredet, 2020). From 2015 onward, the government chose to curtail electoral avenues to carry out peaceful transformations, first by nullifying the actions of the Venezuelan parliament and, later by canceling a recall

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referendum that may have put an end to Maduro’s government through the ballot box (Bull & Rosales, 2020). In a context of autocratic consolidation and international hostility, the government strengthened existing alliances and fostered new ones with domestic and foreign actors connected through new rents stemming from mining and other shadow economy activities (Cardozo Uzcátegui & Mijares, 2020). Hence, oil production recovery represents an elusive programmatic narrative of various political leaders and social forces, despite the transition that is underway. Despite the multifaceted productive and economic crisis, there is little discussion about how to achieve a path of prosperity and sustainability in the country beyond oil. Path dependencies and vested interests in the country’s political circles contribute to a consensus both domestically and internationally on an attempt at increasing oil production as an imperative to Venezuela’s economic vows. From diplomatic and expert voices from the United States to local and foreign investors and companies, these actors see in Venezuela’s vast reserves a sense of opportunity for an economy that seems to be part of the past (Ochoa, 2020). A look at the tendencies of the global energy market and global environmental politics suggests that this seems unrealistic. Recently, the International Energy Agency (IEA), the largest state-based interest group of oil consumers, has called for a stop in new oil projects if a 2050 net-zero carbon emissions future is to be achieved. Scholars and experts linked to the Venezuelan opposition estimate requirements for up to 10 billion US dollars in investments annually for a decade to return the industry back to a production level of 2.5 million bpd (Paredes, 2021). Other estimates can be as high as 200 billion US dollars in 10 years (Ochoa, 2020). On the other hand, PDVSA released a report estimating some 58 billion US dollars (Cohen, 2021), while a more optimistic view from the Venezuelan chamber of petroleum calls for 30 billion US dollars (Cámara Petrolera de Venezuela, 2019). Regardless of the amount, these investments cannot currently be met by the Venezuelan state and its oil company alone. They require massive investments coming from oil companies whose strategic horizon seems to be shrinking due to climate change pressures. Venezuela has offered little in terms of confidence and a legal framework to attract those investments in the short term (Monaldi et al., 2021). Instead, the government of Nicolás Maduro has attempted to lure investors into the oil industry through a deep but stealth transformation in the oil regulatory framework, which has produced mixed results. The government approved a law via its supra-constitutional Constituent Assembly that allows the Executive the power to unilaterally – and in secrecy – change the composition of joint-ventures’ assets, opening the door for a quasi-oil industry privatization (ANC, 2020). This “anti-blockade law” contradicts the Law of Hydrocarbons, which only allows joint-ventures with majority shares for the state. Service contracts and production-sharing agreements have been agreed upon without parliamentary approval against the terms of the country’s laws and constitution (Petroguía, 2021a; Interviews 1–5). These contracts provide full ownership to private capital of investments in the fields but have important limitations because of the fragility of Venezuela’s economic and social context. Changes like this, with little to no democratic accountability, have not generated enthusiasm in small and medium

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investors, many of which have local capital and have little to no previous experience in the oil industry, but in other areas of engineering or construction (Interviews 2–4). A potential recovery of the Venezuelan oil industry requires not only political will, changes to the domestic legal framework, and massive investments but also the lifting of sanctions imposed by the US. Several rounds of negotiations have been brokered by Norway between government and opposition since 2019 and they have so far failed to produce significant results, although there are important and cumulative lessons learned from these and previous talks (Smilde & Ramsey, 2020). The easing of sanctions is at the core of the government’s interests in negotiations and while it seems unfeasible that they would be lifted without drastic changes in government behavior, potential exogenous factors can play a role in forcing an ease of restrictions. One is the interests of oil companies with stranded assets in Venezuela, most noticeably Chevron, which has sought extended licenses to continue to operate in the country, albeit at minimum capacity. Another is the desire of foreign creditors and companies who have won arbitration cases against Venezuela and are seeking to liquidate Venezuelan state-owned assets in the US, such as CITGO, to receive their settlement. And finally, the Russian invasion in Ukraine may propel the US administration to speed up a negotiation with Maduro to allow US companies to pump much-desired oil to the US market (Smilde, 2022). The consequences of fast changes done outside substantive public discussion about the present and future of the oil industry both nationally and globally are far-reaching. First, demands for increasing oil production in a context like Venezuela’s not only miss changes that are occurring at the global level, with increasing demands and needs to move away from oil and other hydrocarbons, but they gloss over the environmental and social reality of the country. Nationalist advocates suggest returning to the Maracaibo Lake basin, the oldest fields in the country with over a century of extraction, to recover some of the mature light crude fields (Interview 4). This proposal lacks any environmental analysis of the state of the lake’s basin as well as the social disruption of over one century of extractive activities, fuel smuggling, as well as the poor state of the electric infrastructure in the region. Similarly, the Venezuelan petroleum chamber, a conglomerate of private oil business interests, proposes a strategy that includes not only the Maracaibo basin, but also the conventional crudes of the northern Monagas state as well as the heavy and extra-heavy crude deposits of the Orinoco belt. A comprehensive proposal like this entails a thorough impact assessment in terms of the environmental costs as well as the existing decaying infrastructure of the industry which may render higher costs than the USD 30 billion estimated (Cámara Petrolera de Venezuela, 2019). There is a glaring deficit of state capacity in the sense that state agencies lack embeddedness in the productive sector and in social organizations to carry out a policy of investment expansion with some level of social and productive support. The possibilities of building a sustainable transition are out of the purview of a predatory elite that has no meaningful channels of social and political feedback from independent groups in society, non-governmental organizations, and the private sector. Even the possibility to engage in discussions about a sustainable transition

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necessitates a form of “negative capacity,” where the state is able to constrain vested interests in society, including most notably its own oil industry interests but also more deeply held extractivist tendencies among other social and economic actors. In each scenario, one of increasing oil production through inflow of foreign investments and one of a steady state production with sustainable energy transformations, a broadened state capacity is necessary. This means the functioning of some form of independent state agencies that can feed from social demands, and at the same time, limit vested interests carrying out productive, developmental, and environmental policies. The Environmental Effects of an Unplanned and Predatory Transition The different oil industry recovery proposals and estimates reveal the desire of the Venezuelan elites to re-enact the traditional petro-state in a global and national context that suggests its exhaustion. It is in this context of an unplanned transition that a broader social discussion is needed the most. As Eaton (2021) and Carter and McKenzie (2020) argue, a sustainable transition necessitates a social fabric to sustain the processes of energy transformation to counter the path dependencies and entrenched vested interests of petro-cultures. In addition to social forces that can support a sustainable transition, state capacity to channel large investments and to curtail special interests is required. Yet, forging a sustainable social narrative, with organized movements and organizations behind it, requires minimal democratic guarantees that are currently absent in Venezuela (Rosales & Jiménez, 2021). In a context of autocratic consolidation and a deep crisis of infrastructure and social reproduction, a predatory transition has meant that the environmental costs of moving away from oil are extremely high. Venezuelans have turned to artisanal and medium-scale mining in sensitive ecosystems with governmental connivance, but they are also subject to criminal organizations and armed syndicates (Ebus, 2019; Ebus & Martinelli, 2021). The environmental effects of this uncontrolled growth of illegal mining are significant. In recent years, deforestation in Venezuela’s Amazonas region has grown at a faster pace than in any other country of the basin. Some 42 clandestine landing strips have been built in the Bolivar and Amazonas states, the largest in the country and where gold mines are located (Poliszuk et al., 2022). Approximately 380,000 hectares have been lost to deforestation in the Venezuelan Amazon basin in the past two decades, much of it lost to mining activities but also agriculture and other survival strategies (Poliszuk et al., 2022). While the government only recognizes the OMA as the designated area for mining activities (the northernmost part of Bolivar state), countless reports from communities and miners indicate that irregular mining takes places throughout the Amazonas basin. These reports are corroborated by satellite images that demonstrate irreparable damage done to the rainforest as well as water basins. Nonetheless, environmental degradation goes beyond irregular mining. Many in rural and marginalized urban areas have been deprived of electricity and other sources of energy, including natural gas for cooking. In Venezuela, households rely on natural gas for their stoves and the drastic decline in natural gas production in the

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country has translated into scarcity, forcing many to cut down local forests seeking cooking fuel (Mayora, 2019; Nava, 2019; Sequera, 2019; A. Torres, 2019). The destruction of local ecosystems has spread in more sophisticated ways than the initial deforestation carried out by rural and impoverished individuals. Urban dwellers have increasingly denounced the massive felling of trees in larger cities, including in Caracas. Most of the felling is done by networks of private actors with the acquiescence of the authorities and later sold relatively cheaply to replace cooking gas in local markets (Singer, 2021; J. G. Torres, 2021). According to a study by researchers from different non-governmental organizations, in more than 90 percent of the municipalities where the study was conducted, wood has been used in lieu of cooking gas due to scarcity of fuel (Lui et al., 2020). While a cylinder of cooking gas’ market value is US$ 30, a bag of chopped wood can be bought for US$ 1 to 3. The high costs and difficulty to reactivate gas production and distribution in the country continues to be an incentive for deforestation. These issues of deep environmental destruction and social precarization have not been addressed by the political elite, despite calls from social movements, multilateral institutions, and human rights organizations to safeguard vulnerable populations’ basic rights (OHCHR, 2019). More importantly, they reveal the need to unveil the damaging consequences of an unplanned and predatory transition in the case of peripheral hydrocarbon-intensive economies. While a traditionally carbon-intensive economy such as Venezuela’s hinders emissions reduction, a predatory transition away from fossil fuel may be equally damning for climate efforts through rapid deforestation. In addition, the health, social, and political effects of an increasingly deteriorated environment will continue to have regional and global implications, due to a growing number of climate refugees and of communities affected by armed violence associated with the mining business. The disconnection between the material transition of a decaying industry, which is currently occurring, and the lack of social fabric to push for and maintain a sustainable transition is relevant beyond the case of Venezuela. As Hanieh (2021) explains, poorer oil producers are bound to suffer more drastic consequences from market transformations generated by demands for a carbon-neutral economy. While the focus of climate scholars and energy researchers seems to be centered around the Global North and emerging economies, due to their capacity to generate regulatory and industrial policies that can fuel a transition, poorer and less democratic societies face contradictory and regressive transformations beyond their potential contribution to the inevitable decline in the global hydrocarbon supply. Precisely because of the variety in state capacity among different actors, it is important to explore cases of predatory transition to avert increasingly uneven and unequal forms of fossil fuel phase-out.

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3.

ENERGY TRANSITIONS AND STATE CAPACITY

What the Venezuelan case emphasizes is the need to take state capacity seriously in discussions of sustainable transitions and especially just transitions. Similar discussions have begun to emerge in the African region about the risks of a “traumatic decarbonization,” which could undermine peace processes due to conflicts over resources (Aidi, 2021). Just transitions require considerable capacity, both from states, deliberative institutions, and social groups ideally working together or at least through productive tensions and deliberation (Hochstetler, 2021; Meckling & Nahm, 2018). These necessary components have been missing in the Venezuelan case I just discussed and need not be overlooked. As Hochstetler (2021) argues, state capacity must be understood in both a positive and a negative sense. In a positive sense, it is conceived as “the ability to plan and execute policy that provides public goods,” and in a negative sense, as the “ability to confront powerful societal interests” that resist sustainable transitions or that seek to extract rents from it (Hochstetler, 2021, p. 32). The idea of state capacity and the seminal work of Evans (1995) on embedded autonomy is crucial in the context of climate change because states are required to act in favor of broader and ultimately global public goods, such as creating conditions for the expansion of clean energy technology, while at the same time balancing, promoting, and often containing the interests of private actors both in the fossil fuel and the renewable energy industries. Another important aspect of state capacity in the context of climate change comes from the multilateral efforts that have stressed the common but differentiated responsibilities and capabilities to take on climate action (Hochstetler, 2021; Carter & McKenzie, 2020). Policies to reduce carbon emissions require strong capabilities not only because of the resources needed to carry them out but also because of the kinds of political decisions required to compensate communities who suffer the consequences of climate change and to those who will most patently lose from a transition. The issue of democratic governance remains an important piece of debate. As Newell and Simms explain, state power can be key in accelerating a transition to sustainability through different means. In a state capacity sense, “this role can include supporting research, development and innovation in its entrepreneurial form” while employing tools to “tax, support, protect and regulate industries” for the purpose of sustainability. But unlike the traditional view of developmental states that diminished the role of democratic governance, they further highlight the role of “using the machinery of democratic government to promote and safeguard spaces of deliberation over competing futures” (Newell & Simms, 2021, p. 913). Considering a managed decline in oil supply, emerging calls for an oil-supply curtailment speak of more than just mere decarbonization. As Eaton (2021, p. 6) points out, “advocates of climate policy as social and economic justice focus on aspects of democratization and decolonization, with an emphasis on the redistribution of land, wealth, and jurisdiction; delivering universal social programs; and decommodifying energy and transportation infrastructure.” In short, just transitions and sustainable decarbonization

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require the enhancement of public goods and democratization of access to energy, transport, and infrastructure. In the case of Venezuela, the lack of social and institutional constraints on the political elite allowed the predation of the productive bases of the country, including the erosion of the capacity of its own oil industry. For this reason, there has been an unplanned dismantling of oil reliance, which is difficult to recover under current global market conditions and economic as well as national governance junctures. These processes exemplify what I have coined in this chapter a predatory transition. The study of predatory transitions is important for other Global South contexts in regard to both the debates about the material and productive prerequisites to mitigate climate change effects and the importance of democratic governance. In both cases, an unplanned and predatory transition proves to be damaging. The Venezuelan crisis has long been depicted as a “complex humanitarian emergency” or a protracted conflict between apparently irreconcilable political actors (PROVEA, 2018; FIDH & PROVEA, 2022; Smilde & Ramsey, 2020; Bull & Rosales, 2020). There has been little to no discussion, however, on how this crisis fits into the broader climate and environmental emergency. A weakening state and increasing authoritarian elite through different actions such as mismanagement led to the dismantling of the oil industry, with the worsening effects of paralysis imposed by foreign hostility via sanctions. As the case shows, the effects of an unplanned transition on the social and environmental conditions of countries in the Global South can be disastrous if there is no social fabric and capable state institutions to propel a sustainable path forward.

4. CONCLUSIONS The social and productive conditions required for sustainable and just transitions have been the subject of intense debate. The recent literature and activism on sustainable transitions away from fossil fuels have increasingly focused on the need to restrict fossil fuel supply (Eaton, 2021). This shift comes after a long emphasis on demand-side efforts that focused primarily on market-dominated solutions such as carbon taxes and trading and globally coordinated agreements that have been noted as “dangerously incremental” (Allan, 2019). A push to achieve a peak in oil demand requires realizing efforts to keep oil in the ground, including divesting from oil and fossil fuel infrastructures and planning a phase-out of fossil fuel consumption with strong commitments and enforcement from governments. Nevertheless, these demands and increasing activism also accentuate the paradox that while these pressures mount, fossil fuel lobbies and interests also seek to extract resources more rapidly to avoid losing stranded assets in the future (Carter, 2020; Colgan et al., 2021). Most oil-producing countries face this paradox, but some are better equipped than others to engage in a sustainable oil phase-out. The debates about the differences in capacity between oil-producing countries are tainted by global coordination problems and permeated by competition and industrial policies (Colgan et al., 2021; Lachapelle et al., 2017). There has nevertheless been

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a gradual shift to incorporate questions about social fabric demands and the social conditions necessary to propel those policies (Carter & McKenzie, 2020; Hochstetler, 2021). In this chapter, I explored this question based on the issue of state capacity, an increasing area of debate in the environmental politics literature on climate change, drawing on Venezuela’s unplanned and predatory transition. Venezuela’s story offers important lessons for future transitions in oil-producing economies. The first one relates to the importance of democracy and need for accountability both vertically and horizontally between different actors locally and at the international level (Kramarz & Kingsbury, 2021). The decline in democracy and erosion of accountability in Venezuela has meant that the collapse in Venezuela’s oil industry has been followed by increasing environmentally destructive practices and social protection failures that contribute to deforestation and precarity. The second one refers to the need to address discourses, values, and interests of petro-states’ cultures, not only focusing on the vested interests of the hydrocarbon industry but also of workers and marginalized populations who may be closely linked to oil-related rents. These interests can help promote a return to hydrocarbon extraction while downplaying the economic and socio-environmental costs of an oil industry recovery. Lastly, it warns about the effects of global economy interests in perpetuating enclave economies and encouraging unplanned transitions through existing financial and trade links as well as coercive tools such as sanctions. By looking at “actually existing transitions” such as Venezuela’s unplanned and predatory dismantling of the oil industry, it is possible to explain the complexity and non-linearity of climate change struggles. The analytical contribution here stresses the importance of state capacity as the ability to constrain powerful interests and to carry out transformative productive and environmental policies. In this case, while democratic accountability and institutions appear to be paramount to encouraging sustainable transitions, the ability of autonomous action from social actors, both productive and grassroots organizations, is the backbone of capacity-enhancing mechanisms. As the political economy literature has long argued, the structures of petro-states are broadly counter to these accountability and capacity mechanisms. However, the risks of predatory transitions can lead petro-states to further environmental destruction. The connection between climate change and state capacity shows the need for further studies that can illuminate global economic trends and domestic social and productive linkages that favor more sustainable transitions.

REFERENCES Aidi, H. (2021). Climate Change and Ecological Pan-Africanism. Policy Centre for the New South. Alfaro Pareja, F. (2020). Archipiélagos politicos bajo la tormenta en Venezuela: Coaliciones, actores y autocratización. European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, 109, 21–40. https://​doi​.org/​10​.32992/​erlacs​.10568 Allan, J. I. (2019). Dangerous incrementalism of the Paris Agreement. Global Environmental Politics, 19(1), 4–11.

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Asamblea Nacional Constituyente (ANC). (2020). Ley Antibloqueo para el desarrollo nacional y la garantía de los derechos humanos. https://​albaciudad​.org/​wp​-con​-tent/​uploads/​2020/​ 10/​ley​-antibloqueo​-para​-el​-desarrollo​-nacional​-y​-la​-garan​- tia-de-los-derechos-humanos .-version-definitiva-fidel-ernesto-vasquez-07.10.2020. Accessed 20 May, 2022. Bull, B., & Rosales, A. (2020). The crisis in Venezuela: Drivers, transitions, and pathways. European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, 109, 1–20. https://​doi​.org/​10​ .32992/​erlacs​.10587 Cámara Petrolera de Venezuela. (2019). Construyendo la integración de la industria petrolera [Investment Plan]. CPV. Cardozo Uzcátegui, A., & Mijares, V. (2020). The versatile amalgam: Interests and corruption in Russia–Venezuela relations. European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, 109, 181–202. https://​doi​.org/​10​.32992/​erlacs​.10557 Carter, A. V. (2020). Fossilized: Environmental Policy in Canada’s Petro-provinces. UBC Press. Carter, A. V., & McKenzie, J. (2020). Amplifying “Keep It in the Ground” first-movers: Toward a comparative framework. Society & Natural Resources, 33(11), 1339–1358. Clark, P., & Rosales, A. (2023). Broadened embedded autonomy and Latin America’s Pink Tide: Towards the neo-developmental state. Globalizations, 20(1), 20–37. Cohen, L. (2021, May 12). Venezuela needs $58 bln to restore crude output to 1998 levels –document. Reuters. www​.reuters​.com/​business/​energy/​venezuela​-needs​-58​-bln​-restore​ -crude​-output​-1998​-levels​-document​-2021​-05​-10/​. Accessed 15 May, 2023. Colgan, J. D., Green, J. F., & Hale, T. N. (2021). Asset revaluation and the existential politics of climate change. International Organization, 75(2), 586–610. Corrales, J., & Penfold, M. (2011). Dragon in the Tropics: Hugo Chávez and the Political Economy of Revolution in Venezuela. Brookings Institution Press. Eaton, E. (2021). Approaches to energy transitions: Carbon pricing, managed decline, and/or Green New Deal? Geography Compass, 15(2), e12554. Ebus, B. (2019). Gold and Grief in Venezuela’s Violent South. International Crisis Group. https://​d2071andvip0wj​.cloudfront​.net/​073​-gold​-and​-grief​.pdf. Accessed 5 April, 2022. Ebus, B., & Martinelli, T. (2021). Venezuela’s gold heist: The symbiotic relationship between the state, criminal networks and resource extraction. Bulletin of Latin American Research, 41(1), 105–122. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1111/​blar​.13246 Evans, P. (1995). Embedded Autonomy: States and Industrial Transformation. Princeton University Press. FIDH & PROVEA. (2022). Informe—Derecho a la alimentación en Venezuela: Con la comida no se juega: Graves violaciones al derecho humano a la alimentación en Venezuela. (No 790e). FIDH/PROVEA. Galvin, R., & Healy, N. (2020). The Green New Deal in the United States: What it is and how to pay for it. Energy Research & Social Science, 67, 101529. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1016/​j​.erss​ .2020​.101529 Garavini, G. (2019). The Rise and Fall of OPEC in the Twentieth Century. Oxford University Press. Hanieh, A. (2021). COVID-19 and global oil markets. Canadian Journal of Development Studies/Revue canadienne d’études du développement, 42(1‒2), 101‒108. Hochstetler, K. (2021). Political Economies of Energy Transition: Wind and Solar Power in Brazil and South Africa. Cambridge University Press. Jiménez, M. (2021). Contesting autocracy: Repression and opposition coordination in Venezuela. Political Studies, 71(1), 47–68. 10.1177/0032321721999975. Karl, T. L. (1997). The Paradox of Plenty. University of California Press. Kramarz, T., & Kingsbury, D. (2021). Populist Moments and Extractivist States in Venezuela and Ecuador. Springer.

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Lachapelle, E., MacNeil, R., & Paterson, M. (2017). The political economy of decarbonisation: From green energy “race” to green “division of labour”. New Political Economy, 22(3), 311–327. Lui, A., Novo, I., Benitez, J., Álvarez Iragorry, A., De Lisio, A., Oliveira, T., & Pelaez, C. (2020, September 18). Uso de la leña en Venezuela: Una amenaza que se extiende. Desarrollo Sustentable. https://​des​arrollosus​tentableve​.com/​uso​-de​-la​-lena​-en​-venezuela​ -una​-amenaza​-que​-se​-extiende​-a​-luy​-i​-novo​-j​-benitez​-a​-alvarez​-iragorry​-a​-de​-lisio​-t​ -oliveira​-y​-c​-pelaez/​ Accessed 20 May, 2022. Marsteintredet, L. (2020). With the cards stacked against you. European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies/Revista Europea de Estudios Latinoamericanos y Del Caribe, 109, 87–106. Mayora, E. (2019, June 1). Venezolanos sufren sin gas mientras PDVSA asegura que el producto sobra. Crónica Uno. https://​cronica​.uno/​sin​-gas​-venezolanos​-sufren​-mientras​-pdvsa​ -asegura​-que​-el​-producto​-sobra/​ Accessed 5 April, 2022. Meckling, J., & Nahm, J. (2018). The power of process: State capacity and climate policy. Governance, 31(4), 741–757. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1111/​gove​.12338 Meckling, J., & Nahm, J. (2021). Strategic state capacity: How states counter opposition to climate policy. Comparative Political Studies, 55(3), 493–523. 10.1177/00104140211024308. Mommer, B. (2002). Global Oil and the Nation State. Oxford University Press. Monaldi, F., Hernández, I., & Reyes, J. L. R. (2021). The collapse of the Venezuelan oil industry: The role of above-ground risks limiting foreign investment. Resources Policy, 72, 102116. Accessed 5 April, 2022. Nava, M. (2019, June 17). Maracaibo sin gas doméstico (II): Leña por alimento, el trueque de San Benito para sobrevivir. Crónica Uno. https://​cronica​.uno/​maracaibo​-sin​-gas​-domestico​ -ii​-lena​-por​-alimento​-el​-trueque​-de​-san​-benito​-para​-sobrevivir/​ Newell, P., & Simms, A. (2021). How did we do that? Histories and political economies of rapid and just transitions. New Political Economy, 26(6), 907–922. Newell, P. J., Geels, F. W., & Sovacool, B. K. (2022). Navigating tensions between rapid and just low-carbon transitions. Environmental Research Letters, 17(4), 041006. Ochoa, O. (2020). El Rol del Petróleo. In Elementos de una transición integral e incluyente en Venezuela: Una visión desde lo local. Institute for an Integrated Transition (IFIT), 487‒530. OHCHR. (2019). Informe de la Alta Comisionada de las Naciones Unidas para los Derechos Humanos sobre la situación de los derechos humanos en la República Bolivariana de Venezuela. Consejo de Derechos Humanos, ONU. www​.ohchr​.org/​EN/​HRBodies/​HRC/​ RegularSessions/​Session41/​Documents/​A​_HRC​_41​_18​_SP​.docx Accessed 20 May, 2022. Paredes, N. (2021, March 22). Cuánto tiempo le llevaría a Venezuela reactivar su industria petrolera (y por qué es vital para salir de la crisis). BBC News Mundo. www​.bbc​.com/​ mundo/​noticias​-america​-latina​-56351173 Perez S., J. J. (2011). El modelo de reparto ejecutivo de la renta en Venezuela (2003–2009) (Report). Revista Geografica Venezolana, 52(1), 125‒140. Petroguía. (2021a, May 24). 20 consorcios firmaron acuerdo de confidencialidad para levantar producción petrolera de Venezuela. www​.petroguia​.com/​pet/​noticias/​petr​%C3​%B3leo/​ 20​-consorcios​-firmaron​-acuerdo​-de​-confidencialidad​-para​-levantar​-producci​%C3​%B3n Accessed 20 May, 2022. Poliszuk, J., Ramírez, M. de los Á., & Segovia, M. A. (2022, January 30). Oro y pistas clandestinas: Así se destruye la selva venezolana | Internacional. EL PAÍS. https://​elpais​.com/​ internacional/​2022​-01​-30/​las​-pistas​-clandestinas​-que​-bullen​-en​-la​-selva​-venezolana​.html Accessed 18 February, 2022. PROVEA. (2018). Reporte Nacional: Emergencia humanitaria compleja en Venezuela derecho a la salud [Reporte Nacional]. PROVEA. www​.derechos​.org​.ve/​actualidad/​reporte​ -nacional​-emergencia​-humanitaria​-compleja​-en​-venezuela​-derecho​-a​-la​-salud​-septiembre​ -2018. Accessed 15 May, 2023.

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Puente, J. M., & Rodríguez, J. A. (2020). Venezuela en etapa de colapso macroeconómico: Un análisis histórico y comparativo. América Latina Hoy, 85(1), 55–72. Rodríguez, F. (2021, March 26). Sanctions and oil production: Evidence from Venezuela’s Orinoco Basin. Francisco R. Rodríguez. https://​franciscorodriguez​.net/​2021/​03/​26/​ sanctions​-and​-oil​-production​-evidence​-from​-venezuelas​-orinoco​-basin/​ Accessed 20 May, 2022. Rosales, A. (2018). Pursuing foreign investment for nationalist goals: Venezuela’s hybrid resource nationalism. Business and Politics, 20(3), 438–464. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1017/​bap​ .2018​.6 Rosales, A., & Jiménez, M. (2021). Venezuela: Autocratic consolidation and splintered economic liberalization. Revista de Ciencia Política, 41(2), 425–447. Ross, M. L. (1999). The political economy of the resource curse. World Politics, 51(2), 297–322. Sequera, V. (2019, August 29). Venezuela’s trees suffer as firewood replaces scarce cooking gas. Reuters. www​.reuters​.com/​article/​us​-venezuela​-firewood​-idUSKCN1VJ1EJ Accessed 5 April, 2022. Singer, F. (2021, December 13). Una epidemia de talas amenaza los árboles de Caracas. El País. https://​elpais​.com/​internacional/​2021​-12​-13/​una​-epidemia​-de​-talas​-amenaza​-los​ -arboles​-de​-caracas​.html Accessed 20 May, 2022. Smilde, D. (2022, March 8). U.S.–Venezuelan oil deal should not forget democracy. https://​ foreignpolicy​.com/​2022/​03/​08/​venezuela​-maduro​-sanctions​-oil​-deal​-russia​-war​-ukraine​ -democracy​-geopolitics/​. Accessed 15 May, 2023. Smilde, D., & Ramsey, G. (2020). International peace-making in Venezuela’s intractable conflict. European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies/Revista Europea de Estudios Latinoamericanos y Del Caribe, 109, 157–179. Torres, A. (2019, August 14). Uso indiscriminado de leña para cocinar aumenta posibilidades de deforestación y deslaves. Crónica Uno. https://​cronica​.uno/​uso​-indiscriminado​-de​ -lena​-para​-cocinar​-aumenta​-posibilidades​-de​-deforestacion​-y​-deslaves/​. Accessed 15 May, 2023. Torres, J. G. (2021, September 23). Oro, comida y leña: En lo que se convierten los bosques de Venezuela. IPS Agencia de Noticias. https://​ipsnoticias​.net/​2021/​09/​oro​-comida​-y​-lena​-en​ -lo​-que​-se​-convierten​-los​-bosques​-de​-venezuela/​ Accessed 5 April, 2022. Urbaneja, D. (2013). La renta y el reclamo: Ensayo sobre petróleo y economía política en Venezuela. Alfa.

Index

8 ‘R’ 50 2021 Human Rights Action Plan 117 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development 48, 104 Acosta, A. 41 activist communities 53 Adas, Michael 66 Adorno, T.W. 44 African Development Bank (AfDB) 218 agrarian landscapes 187 agrarian populism 175 Aguilar-Støen, Mariel 11 alimentary xenophobia 195 Alonso, Carlos J. 76 alternatives to development 38 Anantharam, M. 223 Anthropocene 1, 4, 11, 57, 83 anthropocentrism 299 anthropologists 231 AOSIS 272 Arboleda, Martín 19, 191 Arctic, the 154, 156, 158 definition 155 development of 165 extractivism 159 green colonialism 159 Arctic Circle 155 Arctic Conferences 157 Arctic Council 155 Arctic Frontiers 157 Arctic White Paper 165 Asian meat complex 177 ‘Asian Tigres’ 90 Asiyanbi, A.P. 299, 300 Atrato River Basin 126, 128 Atrato ruling 128, 129, 130, 131 autonomy 72, 74 average wellbeing 2 backward areas 6 Bali Road Map 277 Baran, Paul 29 Barbersgaard, Mads 13 Bárcena, Alicia 26 Barents Sea South East (BSSE) 162 Bariloche report 2, 6

Barron, Gerrard 149 Bastos Lima, M. 288 Belesky, P. 178 Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) 15, 110, 179, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 211 Benjamin, Walter 79 45 Bernstein, Henry 171 Berry, Thomas 124 bio-cultural rights 132 Blaikie, Piers 12 Blaut, James M. 59, 60, 64 blue economy 11, 137 blue growth 148, 149 Bolsonaro, Jair 26, 27, 284, 286, 293 Boric, Gabriel 92, 93 Borlaug, Norman 10, 20 Borras, S.M. 177 Bos, K. 274, 275, 278 Bowles, Paul 87 Boyd, W. 139 Braudel, Fernand 62 Brazil 282, 283, 284, 285, 286, 289, 290, 291, 292 Brazilian Association of Vegetable Oil Industries (ABIOVE) 287 Brenner debate 60 Brenner, Robert 59, 60 Brewer, Anthony 60, 61 BRI see Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) BRICS 177 Brundtland report 8, 48 BUILD Act 205 Bunker, Stephen 61 Burmese Socialist Programme Party (BSPP) 146 Byrd–Hagel Resolution 269 Cagüeñas, D. 129, 130 Calliari, E. 272 Campbell, Kirsten 16 Campling, L. 138, 139, 150 Canada 156, 157 canals 204 Cancun Agreement 277 Candido, Antonio 79 capitalism 20, 58, 139 328

Index  329

history of 58 varieties of 27 capitalist ecologies 11 ‘Capitalocene’ 73 carbon capture and storage (CCS) 274 carbon markets 304 Carter, A.V. 320 Castoriadis, C. 45 Castro, P. 273 Catastrophe or New Society? A Latin American World Model 2 CBDR see common but differentiated responsibilities (CBDR) CCP see Chinese Communist Party (CCP) CCS technology see carbon capture and storage (CCS) Centro Brasileiro de Referência e Apoio Cultural (CEBRAC) 286 Chávez, Hugo 316 Chevalier, S. 220 China 100, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 172, 177, 178, 179, 187, 188, 189, 193 economy 204 Chinese Communist 113 Chinese Communist Party (CCP) 9, 100, 101, 103, 104 Chinese Socialism 102 civilization 103 civil society 286 Clarion-Clipperton Zone 149 climate agreements 267 climate change 124, 154, 155, 267, 268, 270, 271, 272, 273, 275, 276, 277, 283, 313, 314, 318, 322, 323, 324, 325 mitigation of 267, 268, 277, 290 climate impact 276 climate negotiations 267, 268, 271, 273, 276 climate-vulnerable assets 270 CO2 emissions 267, 276 coalition fragmentation 16 Coca-Codo Sinclair (CCS) Hydropower Plant 206 Cólas, A. 150 Colgan, J.D. 273 collective action 83 Colombia 126, 127 colonialist modernity 71 commercial capital 142 common but differentiated responsibilities

(CBDR) 269 Commoner, B. 45 Communist Party 112 Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) 204 Comte, A. 36 Conflict Minerals Regulation 290 consumption 188, 216 consumption patterns 220 contradictions 105 COOP 288 COP21 272 COP26 232 Copenhagen Accord 275, 277 Corbera, E. 283 core forest areas 234 coronavirus 37 corporate governance 316 corporate social responsibility (CSR) 246 corporation 138 Correa, Rafael 30 Corson, C. 304 cosmic people 74 cosmic race 74 COVID-19 pandemic 27, 190, 193, 194, 195 CPT see Pastoral Land Commission (CPT) Creemers, R. 108, 109 Crewe, Emma 238 critical development theory 57 criticism 31, 32 cultural domination critique 18 Cultural Revolution in China 12 culture of technology 66 Daly, Herman 45, 43 dams 204 Davvi project 164 decarbonization 268, 271, 273 decentralised systems 246 decolonial 9 decolonization of the imaginary 46 deforestation 282, 283, 284, 285, 287, 288, 289, 290, 291, 292, 293 degrowth 8, 9, 19, 32, 91, 41, 49, 50, 52, 53 challenges 49 politics of 51 society 50, 52 thinking 45 transition 50 Deloitte 220 democratic centralism 111

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democratic governance 322 democratic green states 83 democratic states 313 Dempsey, J. 300, 304 Deng Xiaoping 104, 106, 112, 113, 202 dependency 6 dependency theory 6, 7, 71 developing world 200 development 2, 3, 6, 17, 27, 57, 71, 73, 138, 154, 200, 209, 216 concept of 71 core of 3 critique of 26 ‘decouple’ 8 economic 28 economics 6, 7 empirical 3 environmental 100 epistemological 3 ethical 3 green 100, 102 ideas of 3, 18 international 9 manual 28 national 7 norms 125 obstacles to 29 of Ecological Civilization 104 ontological 3 political 3 progress and 35 reimagination of 72, 75, 208 roots of 33 social 28 state 85 sustainable 102 development agendas 234, 239 developmental environmentalism 87 developmentalism 30, 74, 50 developmental state 83, 86, 87 developmental state theory 314 Development Assistance Committee (DAC) 200 developments petroleum 163 development theory 68 diseases 185, 186, 187 diversification 30, 315 Dixon, M. 177 Doi Moi 220 drug traffickers 127 Durante, Francesco 166

Durban Platform 277 Dussel, Enrique 2 Dutch East-India Company 140 Earl, C. 223 Earth Rights International 147 East Asian Miracle 85, 94 Eaton, E. 320, 322 Eckersley, Robyn 88, 89 ecodevelopment 47 ecological civilization (EC) 9, 100, 102, 104, 107, 109, 118, 119, 120, 203 development of 104 ecological modernization 8, 88 ecological ramifications 174 ecological red lining 114 eco-narratives 102 economic and cultural growth 29 Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) 26 economic crisis 318 economic development 28 economic frontier 137, 138, 150 economic growth 26, 37, 219, 51 economic productivity 242 economic transformation 33 economic value 278 economism 49 Economist 151 ecosystem services 296, 297, 298, 299, 300, 301, 302, 303, 304, 305, 306, 307 commodification 298 concept of 296 development of 298 framework 302 in development 296 markets 304 payments for 296 Ecuador 12 EEZ see Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) electricity 231, 232, 233, 234, 235, 236, 237, 238, 239, 240, 241, 242, 243, 244, 245 demands for 240 micro-grid system 232, 239, 242 mini-grid 232 off-grid 232 off-grid electricity 237, 239 role of 242 electricity access 232 electricity systems components 233 electrification 231

Index  331

processes of 231, 233, 239, 244 social analysis 233 embeddedness 315 Emmanuel, Arghiri 60, 61 end-of-Fordism theory 172 energy 231 decision-making processes 233 environmental impacts of 231 off-grid electricity 237 social dynamics of 232 sociotechnical 233 solar micro-grids 234 energy justice 233, 244, 245 Energy Sector Management Assistance Program (ESMAP) 232 energy transformation 320 energy transitions 231, 322 energy transitions, politics 313 energy values 61 English East India Company 141 English Muscovy Company 141 environment 71, 72, 75, 138 green revolution 9 environmental authoritarianism 86, 87 environmental degradation 234, 320 environmental development 100 environmental geopolitics 71, 73 environmental governance 298 environmental human rights 109 environmental impact 2 environmental impact assessments (EIA) 114, 161 environmental issues 14 environmental law 114 environmental multilateralism 88 environmental narratives 116 environmental policies 14 environmental protection 8 environmental, social, and governance (ESG) 15, 283 environmental states 89 epicenters 187, 190, 195 Escobar, Arturo 45, 75 ESMAP see Energy Sector Management Assistance Program (ESMAP) Esteva, Gustavo 45 ethnic armed organisations (EAOs) 146 ethnographic fieldwork 237 EU–Japan Partnership on Connectivity and Quality Infrastructure 211 European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control 186

Evans, Peter 91, 314, 316, 322 Evans’ theory 315 Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) 144, 147 extractivism 166 Fearnley, Lyle 187 Ferguson, James 45 Fernández, Alberto 26 financialization 30 Five Spheres, The 110 Fjellheim, Eva Maria 159 Focault, Michel 17 Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) 187 food regime 170, 176 food regime analysis 172 food regime approach 171, 172, 174 foreign direct investment (FDI) 147 Foreign Investment Act 146 Forestry Incentive Program 305 fossil food 170 fossil fuels 274, 313, 314, 323 fossil resources 273, 274 abundance of 275 Four Comprehensives 110 Framework Convention’s principle 268 Franco, Jean 79 Frank, Andre Gunder 60, 64 Frankfurt School 44 Free Trade Agreement 207 Freng Dale, Ragnhild 13 Friedmann, Harriet 172 Friedmann, John 6 frontiers 156, 157 Fundamental Environmental Rights 125 G77 269, 271, 272 G77 + China 268, 270 Galbraith, John K. 31 Gaud, William 10 GDP see Gross Domestic Product (GDP) gender 233, 234, 238, 245, 246 role of 232 gender-aware policies 237 gender dynamics 237 gendered outcomes 239 gender equality 232, 244 gender neutral 233 gender politics 232, 244 geoculture 72, 75, 77 geopolitics 71 critical 71 of autonomy 72

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of environment 72 of integration 72, 74, 77 Georgescu-Roegen, N. 45 Germani, Gino 6 Gerschenkron, Alexander 6 GHG emissions see greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions Gilley, Bruce 87 Gindin, S. 144 global capitalist system 6 global deforestation 194 global development agendas 234, 244 global food regime 180 global food system 170, 171, 180 global inequality 6 globalization 176 global meat industry 195 Global North 94, 216, 231, 233, 246, 282, 283, 290, 301, 321 Global South 16, 89, 176, 217, 231, 232, 233, 234, 237, 240, 281, 282, 283, 290, 291, 292, 301, 315, 323 global supply chains 281, 282, 283, 291 public regulations of 290 global trade 283 impacts of 282 Gómez-Baggethun, E. 299, 304 Gorz, André 45, 49 governance 14, 18, 83, 281, 282, 283, 284, 286, 287, 288, 291, 292 sustainability 283, 291 Gramscian state theory 85 Great Divergence, The 64 green colonialism 159 green development 100, 108 green developmental state 83, 86, 87 green economy 137 green growth narratives 116 greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions 16, 267, 269, 271, 276, 284 Green New Deal 19, 69 Green Revolution 9, 10, 11, 12, 174 green sacrifice zones 159 green shift 159, 160 green state 89 green state literature 89 green taxation 52 green transition 13, 87, 149 greenwashing 13 Gross, Lena 13 Gross Domestic Product (GDP) 43, 52 growth

ideas of 27 growth and economic empowerment 233 growth predicament 88 Guaidó, Juan 317 Gudynas, E. 8, 41, 43 Gupta, J. 275, 278 Gurol 15 Gustafsson, M.T. 290 Haggard, Stephan 74 Hairong, Yan 179 Hanieh, A. 321 Hansen, Arve 15 Havice, L. 139 Havstad, L. 222 Headrick, Daniel R. 65, 66 Hedemann, Niki von 14 hegemonic masculinities 241 Henderson, C. 177, 178 heterodox 29, 33 Hickel, Jason 91 High North, the 157 Hochstetler, Kathryn 313, 322 homo œconomicus 50 Horkheimer, M. 44 Hornborg, Alf 5, 7 Huang, Yi 111 Huber, Matthew T. 59 Hu Jintao 105 hydrocarbon 162, 314, 321, 324 hydropower 163 hydropower plant 207 Ianni, Octavio 36 ideology 105, 117 Illich, I. 45 INAB 305 India 231, 232, 234, 238, 244 solar micro-grids 234 Indigenous peoples 154, 157, 158, 159 individual turn 7 industrial agriculture 186, 190 industrial meat regime 189 Industrial Revolution 62, 63, 64 industrial technology development of 63 infrastructure 200 INGOs 232 integration 72 geopolitics of 74 Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) 29 Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity

Index  333

and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) 185 international community 269 international development of agriculture 170 of food 170 international development aid 28 International Energy Agency (IEA) 318 internationally funded agricultural research centers (IARCs) 10 International Organization for Animal Health 185 international political agenda 267 Jakobsen 11 Jiang Zemin 105 Johnsson, F.J. 274 just transition 245 Kapp, W. 45 Katsos, John E. 15 Keskitalo, Aili 159 Kharas, H. 218 Kirchner, Cristina Fernández de 30 Kirchner, Néstor 30 Kissinger, Henry 47 Klöck, C. 273 Koivisto, William 36 Koo, H. 217 Krige, D. 221 Kröger, Markus 166 Kusch, Rodolfo 77 Kyoto Protocol 269, 270, 277 LaFleur, William 166 Landes, David S. 59 land reform 10 Latin America 26, 71 Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) 201, 203 Latin American 32, 34 Latouche, Serge 45, 46 Lavinas, Lena 32 law of physics 117 Lawrence, G. 178 LDCs see least developed countries (LDCs) L&D issue 273 LEAF Coalition 303, 304 leapfrogging technologies 234 least developed countries (LDCs) 271, 272, 274 legal innovations 122, 123 legal subjects 122, 124, 131 legitimacy 84, 85, 86, 88, 89, 90, 91

Lewis, L.A. 28 Lewis, W. Arthur 29, 31 Limits to Growth 2, 6, 8, 47 Lin, Justin Yifu 31 Llin, Yusting Yifu 34 local development agendas 281, 292 Lund, Christian 156 MacDonald, K.I. 304 Macpherson, E. 132 Maduro, Nicolás 316, 317 Malthus, Thomas 72 Malthusian pessimism 73 mandatory due diligence (MDD) 283 Manley, D. 275 Mansholt, Sicco 47 Mao Zedong 104, 105, 112 Marakesh Accords 277 Marini, José Felipe 74 market-led modernization 7 markets 173 Marks, Robert 64 Martínez-Alier, J. 45 Marxism 105 Marxist 150 Marxist state theory 84 Marxist theorists 60 Marxist theory 58, 60 Marx, Karl 35, 59, 60, 65, 68, 140 Marx’s theories 20 Masiello, Francine 79 Maturana, Humberto 195 McEwan, C. 223 McKenzie, J. 320 McMichael, Philip 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 178, 179 McNeish, John 13 meat global consumption of 188 quantity of 187 virus supply chain 188, 191 meat production 185, 186, 187, 188, 192, 193 industrial 189 pork production 188 Melber, H. 217, 225 Mempel, F. 283 Mercure, J.-F. 275 Metals Company, The 148, 149 Mexican Agricultural Program (MAP) 10 micro-grid electricity benefits 240 micro-grid project 234, 244

334  Handbook on international development and the environment

micro-grid technology 241 middle class 216, 217, 224 middle-class geographies of 218 lifestyles 224 Miklian, Jason 15 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 297 Mill, John Stuart 72 mineral extraction 160 Mining Production Units 127 Mishan, E.J. 45 mitigation 267, 268, 269, 271, 272, 274, 275, 276, 277 benefits of 268 Modern Brazil 36 modern forms of energy 231, 245 modernity 73, 76, 78 modernization 4, 28, 68, 83, 87, 93, 200, 202 modernization theory 5, 6, 7, 9, 202 Modern Slavery Act 290 modern state 83, 84 Moore, J.W. 190 Muir, John 124 multicentricity 180 Muradian, R.E. 296, 299, 304 Myanmar 143 Myanmar Oil and Gas Enterprise (MOGE) 147 myths 15, 34 Naafs, S. 222 narratives 4, 17, 18, 19 Násávárre 161, 166 national accounting 28 National Association of Grain Exporters 287 national development 7 national interest 158 Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) 269 National Property Register 306 National Supervisory Commission (NSC) 110 nature 28, 29, 32, 34, 35, 123, 154 commodification of 12 problem of 138 rights of 123, 131 rights to 12 nature-facing industries 138 neoliberal 30 neoliberal governance 299 neoliberalism 7, 30, 71, 299, 307

neoliberalization 303 neomercantilism 179 neomercantilist 178, 179 neomercantilist thesis 179 new developmentalism 33 Newell, P. 322 new energy solar micro-grids 234, 236 Nobel Peace Prize 20 non-communist manifesto 28 Norman, Susanne 159 Norwegian Arctic 162 Nurkse, Ragnar 6 Nuttall, Mark 157 oceans 137 as environmental and developmental saviour 148 corporation 138 development 138 environment 138 new economic frontier 150 Odum, H.T. 45 OECD see Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) OECD Guidelines 283 off-grid energy 232, 242 oil industry 314, 316, 317, 318, 319, 320, 323, 324, 326 One-China policy 210 order and progress 36 Organic Thinking 111 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) 200, 281, 283 Ortiz, Fernando 77 Otero, Gerardo 173 ‘Our common future’ 1, 46 Panama 205 Panama Canal 205, 209 Panama-Colón Container Port (PCC) 206 Pandemic Era 185, 189, 194 pandemic–industrial meat nexus 192 pandemics 185, 186, 187 origin of 187 swine flu 192 Panitch, L. 144 Paris Agreement 267, 269, 274, 276, 277 Party-state 111, 115 Pastoral Land Commission (CPT) 287, 288 path dependencies 318 Payment for Environmental Services (PES)

Index  335

14 Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) 288, 296 PDVSA 316, 317, 318 Pechlaner, G. 175 Pelosi, Nancy 106 People’s Republic of China (PRC) 101, 112, 200, 203 permanence 31 Persson, U.M. 288 PES 298 as development 307 as neoliberal environment 299 in practice 301 programs 298, 299 PES programs 297, 300, 302, 304, 305, 306, 307 Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) 316 Pfaffenberger, Bryan 66 Piñera, Sebastián 26 PINFOR 305 Pinochet, Agosto 92 PINPEP 306, 307 planetary factory 11 Planning and Building Act 161 Point Four Program, The 4, 42, 43 Polar, Antonio Cornejo 79 policy 114 political ecology 123 political economy 315 Pomeranz, Kenneth 64, 67 Port of Chancay 207, 208 Ports 204 post-development 44 post-development theory 44, 45 post-development thinking 46 potential end-users 240 power 176 PRC see People’s Republic of China (PRC) PRC’s environmental laws 114 Prebisch, Raúl 29, 37, 38, 61 predatory transitions 323, 324 Principles and Problems of Modern Economy 36 Pritchard, Bill 175 PROBOSQUE 306, 307 productive forces 68 ProTerra 288, 289, 292 Prudham, S. 139 public goods 267, 268, 269, 270, 276 Puerto Chancay 210 Puig, Juan Carlos 75

quasi-oil industry privatization 318 Quiroga, Horacio 78 Raggovidda wind farm 164 Rahnema, Majid 45 Raitio, Kaisa 161 Rama, Angel 77, 79 Rasmussen, Mattias Borg 156 Ratzel, Fredrich 72 Ravallion, Martin 218 Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) 301, 303, 304 regional integration 79 regionalismo 76 regionalist literature 79 Reindeer Grazing Convention of 1919 161 relations of exchange 58 renewable energy 163 Ribeiro, Darcy 75 Richard, Nelly 79 rights-based approaches 7 Rio Earth Summit 137 Rios Vivos Coalition 286 Rist, Gilbert 34, 42, 43, 45 Rivarola 6, 17 River Atrato 126 rivers 122 rivers as legal subjects 124 Roberts, J.T. 276 Rodríguez, Fabricio 15, 17 Rodrik, Dani 30 Roegen, Nicholas Georgescu 49 Roman Republic 123 Rosales, Antulio 16 Rosenstein-Rodan, Paul 6 Ross, Corey 67 Rostow, Walter W. 5, 28 Round Table on Responsible Soy (RTRS) 288, 289, 292, 293 rural development 232, 237 Saami Council 158 Sachs, Wolfgang 42, 43, 45, 46 Sámi 159 sanctions 317 Sápmi 154, 157, 158, 159, 160 hydropower 163 Sara, Máret Ánne 159 Sarlo, Beatriz 79 SARS-CoV-2 virus 194 Scammel, G.V. 141 Schilling-Vacaflor, Almut 14, 15, 290

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Schlüpmann, K. 45 Schneider, Mindi 189 Schroeder, P. 223 Schumpeter, J.A 27 SDGs see Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) Second Law of Thermodynamics 63, 67 sectorial programs 34 security 73 Selgas, Gianfranco 6, 17 Sepulveda, Luis 78 Shortridge 187 Sikor, T. 282 Silva, Lula da 30 Silver, Jennifer J. 137 Simms, A. 322 Skodvin, Tora 16 Small Island Developing States (SIDS) 271 Snøhvit 162 social development 28 social development report 29 social distribution 233 social dynamics 234 social forces 313 socialism 100, 101 social justice 296 social precarization 321 social upliftment 236 sociometabolic asymmetry 63 socio-nature 200 sociotechnical electricity systems 233 sociotechnical systems perspective 233, 234 solar micro-grid project 232 solar PV systems 240 soybeans 284, 287 Brazilian local initiatives 286 certification 288 demands 286 environmental impacts 284 moratorium 287 social impacts 284 supply chain 291 working group 287, 288 Soy Moratorium 287, 288 space 202, 210 spillover 192 Sribman, Dr Ariel 79 Standal, Karina 233 state 83 democratic green 83 development 85 developmental 83

environmental 89 environmental to green 88 green 89 green developmental 83, 86 modern 83, 84 post-developmental 90 state agencies 319 state capacity 313, 322 states 175 state–society relations 315 Stiglitz, Joseph 30 Stockholm Conference 1, 2 Stone, Christopher 123, 124 stranded asset 278 stranded resources 278 structural analysis 234 structuralists 29, 74 structures of inequality 232 structures of marginalisation 232 Stuart-Harris 187 Stutzin, G. 124 Suarez, D.C. 304 Sunna, Anders 159 supplier–end-user relationship 239 Supply Chain Due Diligence law 290 supply chain governance 14 sustainability 83, 86, 88, 91, 94, 102, 216, 287, 318, 322 sustainability policy 48 sustainability standards 283 sustainable consumption 223 sustainable development 1, 8, 46, 47, 107, 116, 150, 282, 286, 287, 291, 292 agenda 288 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 1, 8, 14, 47, 48, 292 SDG 5 232 SDG 7 232, 234 sustainable energy transformations 320 sustainable transitions 317, 324 swine flu pandemic 192 Tanasescu, Mihnea 131, 132 Tang, Shuying 111 target groups 10 technical approach 74 technocratic model 244 technological fetishism 59 technological progress 57 technological transformation 313 technology culture of 66 role of 57, 58

Index  337

sociometabolic logic of 58 sociometabolic reconceptualization of 64 territory 154, 157, 160, 202, 205 theory of economic development 28 The Political Economy of Growth 29 ‘The stages of economic growth’ 28 ‘The theory of economic development’ 28 ‘The theory of economic growth’ 28 ‘third’ food regime 171, 174, 175 Third World countries 172 Third Worldist 144 Tiejun, Wen 100 Tonby, O. 218 transculturation 77 transformation 1, 3, 4, 9, 15, 17, 19 transformative change 122 transition 313, 315, 324 transition discourses (TDs) 17 transnational corporations (TNCs) 282 traumatic decarbonization 322 Trentmann, Frank 221 Truman, Harry S. 5, 9, 27, 28, 42, 143, 144, 148 Tyson Foods 189, 195 Tyson, John 189 ‘Tyson model’ 189 Unceta, Koldo 29 UNCLOS see United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) UN Conference on the Human Environment see United Nations Conference on the Human Environment UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) 271 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) 269, 275, 277 UN General Assembly (UNGA) 271 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment 1, 125 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) 144, 149 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) 155 United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America 73 United Nations Guiding Principles 283, 290 unplanned transition 320 UN’s Food and Agricultural Organisation 150 UN’s REDD+ 303 UN Sustainable Development Goals 231

UN World Food Systems Summit 170 urban dwellers 321 urbanization 192 US Agency for International Development (USAID) 10 Varela, Francisco 195 Varela, Juan Carlos 205 Venezuela 314, 318, 319, 320, 323, 324 Venezuelan crisis 315, 323 Venezuela’s predatory transition 313 Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC) 141, 142 victims of energy poverty 233 Virdin, J. 140 Wallace, R. 190, 191 Wallerstein, Immanuel 60, 61 Wang, Alex 115 Weber, Max 84 Weis, Tony 189 Western industrial civilization 41 Wethal, Ulrikke 15 WHO see World Health Organization (WHO) wind power 163, 164 Winther, Tanja 17 Wolf, Eric 63 World Bank 218, 219, 220, 222, 223, 232 world ecology 71 World Economic Forum 124 World Health Organization (WHO) 187, 194 World Ocean Summit 151 World Trade Organization (WTO) 175 World Wide Fund 287 Wunder, S. 296 WWF 148, 288 Xi Jinping 101, 104, 105, 107, 108, 109, 112, 113, 114, 115, 117 XJPT 117 Zimbabwean Environmental Law Association 110