Women, Gender and Oil Exploitation (Gender, Development and Social Change) 3030818020, 9783030818029

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Women, Gender and Oil Exploitation

Maryse Helbert

Gender, Development and Social Change

Series Editor Wendy Harcourt, The International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University, The Hague, The Netherlands

The Gender, Development and Social Change series brings together pathbreaking writing from gender scholars and activist researchers who are engaged in development as a process of transformation and change. The series pinpoints where gender and development analysis and practice are creating major ‘change moments’. Multidisciplinary in scope, it features some of the most important and innovative gender perspectives on development knowledge, policy and social change. The distinctive feature of the series is its dual nature: to publish both scholarly research on key issues informing the gender and development agenda as well as featuring young scholars and activists’ accounts of how gender analysis and practice is shaping political and social development processes. The authors aim to capture innovative thinking on a range of hot spot gender and development debates from women’s lives on the margins to high level global politics. Each book pivots around a key ‘social change’ moment or process conceptually envisaged from an intersectional, gender and rights based approach to development.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14999

Maryse Helbert

Women, Gender and Oil Exploitation

Maryse Helbert Faculty of Arts University of Groningen Groningen, The Netherlands

ISSN 2730-7328 ISSN 2730-7336 (electronic) Gender, Development and Social Change ISBN 978-3-030-81802-9 ISBN 978-3-030-81803-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81803-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Pivot imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

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Introduction

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Towards a Critical Ecofeminist Theory

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Women in Nigeria: Mired in the Middle

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Venezuela—The Pink Tide Experiment

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The World Bank: Bringing Women to the Fore?

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The Chad–Cameroon Pipeline: A Model Project?

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Conclusion

Index

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About the Author

Dr. Maryse Helbert is Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Groningen, Faculty of Arts in The Netherlands. Prior to that she held two post-doctoral positions: a Writing Fellowship at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich, Germany, and a LEaDing Fellowship at the International Institute for Social Studies in the University of Erasmus Rotterdam, The Netherlands. For the latter, she completed research on gender, lithium extraction and the just transition, funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Maryse completed her Ph.D. at the University of Melbourne, Australia, where she also taught International Relations and Political Science for over a decade. Maryse’s main research is on socio-ecological transformations for a just and sustainable transition with a particular focus on gender, energy and the environment. Her recent publications include ‘The Challenges of the Energy Transition: Gender and Nature in a Just Transition’, chapter in the edited book Engendering the Energy Transition: Policy and Practice, Palgrave Macmillan; and ‘Transitions in the Niger Delta: Oil. Poverty and Environmental Degradation’, article in the online journal, Rachel Carson Center Perspectives.

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Abbreviations and Acronyms

ASM BDP CIPE CONAIE CRP EIA EMP FAO IMF IML ITT initiative OPEC ORMP PDVAS TOCs UNESCO WBG

Artisanal and Small-Scale Mining Barrels of Oil per Day Critical International Political Economy Confederación De Nacionalidades Indígenas del Ecuador Compensation and Resettlement Plan Environmental Impact Assessment Environmental Management Plan Food and Agriculture Organisation International Monetary Fund Imperial Mode of Living Ispingo-Tiputini-Timbochacha initiative Organisations of the Petroleum Exporting Countries OIL Revenue and Manegement Program Petroleos De Venezuela, S.A. Transnational Oil Companies United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation World Bank Group

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Abstract This chapter provides a general introduction to the components of this book and their justification. Keywords Women · Oil project · Unequal distribution

‘We told Shell to go. Hundreds of women came and put out the gas flare’, Ozoro Town. ‘And what we want is no to shell and shell should be forever out of Ogoni and our lives’, Alice Douglas (Centre for Democracy and Development 2001, pp. 43, 47). Patricia Gualinga (a warrior) is the most visible leader of the Sarayaku, a Kichwa community in the Amazon. In 2013, she addressed the assembly at the International Women’s Earth and Climate Summit, where she said, ‘We, as women, are disproportionately affected by the oil exploration. We don’t want oil expansion. We have a proposal called “Living Forest” to develop alternative energy plans’ … ‘a zone of life that should exclude oil activity’ (AmazonWatch 2013). These first-hand accounts of women’s resistance to oil extraction in the oil zones of Nigeria and Ecuador are not isolated incidents but common stories with local/national specificities. In countries that are confronted with oil extraction, such as Tanzania, Uganda, Ghana, Chad, Azerbaijan, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Helbert, Women, Gender and Oil Exploitation, Gender, Development and Social Change, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81803-6_1

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Kazakhstan, South Sudan, Peru, Canada and Venezuela to name but a few, women have resisted the processes and practices of oil extraction. In most of these oil zones, women want oil exploitation to stop, as ‘evidence suggests that a gender bias exists in the distribution of risks and benefits in extractive industries projects’ (WBG 2007, p. 1). Despite this unequal distribution, analysis of the impacts of oil exploitation on women in the Global South is sparse (Jenkins 2014). This research study goes some way towards filling this gap. The book has two main purposes. The first is to rectify the admitted absence of analysis and debates about the unequal distribution of risks and benefits of oil projects along gender lines (Jenkins 2014). While there is research on women and informal mining, as well as women and artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) (Lahiri-Dutt 2018), studies on women in the oil industry are scant. Second, this book aims to fulfil an urgent need for further studies on ‘how different principles of domination – particularly those of class, gender and ethnicity – intersect in particular conjunctures and social positions’ (Koch and Buch-Hansen 2020, p. 5). The study will inform the design of social and environmental conditions that guarantee a fair and sustainable society beyond carbon dependency (Koch and Buch-Hansen 2020). To do so, it will examine and conceptualise the gendered implications of oil extraction in developing countries by addressing the following key questions: (1) What are the impacts of oil projects on women in oil-rich countries? (2) How can these impacts be theoretically explained? (3) How can these negative impacts be reduced? These questions will be addressed by articulating two main conceptual frameworks: the Imperial Mode of Living (IML) and ecofeminism. The IML conceptualises the hegemonic way of life of the Global North that has unevenly spread to the emerging countries of the Global South. The IML is based on unsustainable practices that lead to crisis. To cope and avoid the crisis, the IML externalises its unsustainable practices through persistent global asymmetric interdependencies to other world regions. Such unsustainable practices are the unlimited appropriation of resources—oil—spaces and territories and the unlimited access to

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ecological sink capacities1 that favour the Global North. The externalisation of the unsustainable practices is maintained by power relations and domination (Brand and Wissen 2018). Ecofeminism builds on the strength of the concept of the IML. While the strength of the IML lies in conceptualising burden-shifting practices and processes of globalised capitalism, the strength of ecofeminism lies in conceptualising and connecting different forms of domination. The term ‘ecofeminist’ was first introduced by Françoise d’Eaubonne in her book Le Féminisme ou la Mort (D’Eaubonne 1974), published in 1974. Thereafter, ecofeminism emerged as a new, ecologically inspired body of feminist theory and practice. Ecofeminism is an umbrella term for a variety of different positions concerned with the connection between different forms of oppression, such as the unjustified domination of women, children, people of colour, indigenous people, poor people, as well as nature. These different structures of oppression and their intersection typically coalesce into a matrix. As the different oppressive structures of the matrix are interwoven, they can only be addressed in their totality. I use the term ‘zones of sacrifice’ to refer to the geographical, economic, security and environmental spaces that are directly or indirectly impacted by oil projects (McNeil 2000). They encompass oil projects such as onshore and offshore exploration, drilling and extraction sites, oil fields, boomtowns, areas around pipelines and surrounding areas of oil terminals. While the use of the word ‘sacrifice’ might appear overdramatic, this work seeks to show how an ecofeminist framework can highlight and unpack the complex matrix of oppressive structures that systematically discriminate against women, indigenous people and ecosystems in these zones. In effect, the well-being of this particular constituency in the oil zones is sacrificed, to keep the oil flowing and thus for the IML to thrive. Ecofeminism is a multi-dimensional and multi-located approach. It provides a framework that requires analysis of not only the matrix in its totality but also the particular historical, material and socioeconomic experiences of oppressed groups. These experiences vary culturally, temporally and geographically. Ecofeminism, therefore, challenges patriarchy from different angles depending on its different local manifestations. Indeed, the multi-dimensional and multi-located approach 1 Ecological sink capacities in this book are the capacity of the environment to absorb unwanted by-products of oil production, that are for instance gas, chemicals and drill bits.

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can highlight both commonalities and differences in terms of negative impacts between different zones of sacrifice. The zones of sacrifice are characterised by differences linked to different histories, different time scales for the oil projects’ implementation and different types of oil projects in different geographical locations with specific ecosystems. Finally, ecofeminism provides the conceptual resources to seek out sources of emancipation for women in the zones of sacrifice. Indeed, ecofeminism has an agenda that includes the transformation of social and political institutions. As noted above, while there are numerous streams of ecofeminism, they are nonetheless united by their concern to ‘disrupt those women– nature connections that are oppressive’ (Warren 1996, p. 6). Socialist ecofeminism is the conceptual framework I use to explain the negative impacts of oil projects on women. This specific branch of ecofeminism seeks to interrogate how capitalist, socialist and patriarchal structures prioritise men and marginalise women and/or nature. Socialist ecofeminism links women, nature and labour and argues that any transformative process cannot be achieved fully if the nexus between women, nature and labour is not unravelled (Salleh 2005). It is a transformative theory that seeks to move towards a more embodied materialism. It is materialistic insofar as it is grounded in Marxist sociology theory. It is embodied in the sense that it aims to give ‘equal weight to the organically interrelated entities – man, women, nature’ (Salleh 2001, p. 3). The research contained in this work is exploratory and descriptive where men and women in oil-rich countries are not characterised as unique models of analysis. Rather, it recognises that, in oil-rich countries, there is a wide diversity of production and reproduction systems with ethnic and cultural elements forming a complex mosaic. The core project is to build a theoretical framework that is better equipped to understand the marginalisation of women in the zones of sacrifice. The major burden of the study is mostly on critical engagement with scholarly literature and meta-theoretical discussion of the impact of oil projects on women from a critical and ecofeminist perspective. The framework is developed not only through a critical engagement with the scholarly literature but also an empirical examination of the practical experience of women in the oil zones. The strength of this multi-level approach is to account for and connect the different layers of the matrix of oppressive structures. However, the nature of the methodology necessarily limits the possibility of fine grain analysis at any given level of analysis. The book

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therefore does not engage in primary empirical research or grounded research and instead draws on a wide and rich array of secondary material for illustrative purposes. Additionally, the methodology used for this purpose is based on secondary sources as it was impossible to do fieldwork. At the time of the research, a fieldtrip to the Niger Delta was not possible for security reasons. A fieldwork grant was sourced to visit an oil zone in Venezuela (Maracaibo lake) but had to be cancelled for also security reasons. Riots erupted in the capital of Caracas and the government of Venezuela banned travels and visits to the extractive fields. While there were too many obstacles in a way of gaining safe access for fieldwork in the oil extractive sites, this did not present a problem given that there was more than enough secondary literature, from a wide variety of different sources, from which to construct three illustrative case studies. The three illustrative cases serve a number of methodological purposes. First, these three cases help to demonstrate the common features and common challenges among oil-rich developing countries. The governments of these countries have developed oil projects as the primary path to achieving economic development, producing a significantly high dependence on oil exports. Ironically, all of them have suffered economically from this dependence. A large part of the population in Nigeria and Venezuela lives under the poverty line despite substantial oil rents. The Chad and Cameroon pipeline has failed to bring the economic boom promised by its main fundraiser, the World Bank. Despite the oil revenues, these countries have encountered massive unemployment, political and social tensions, high levels of corruption and extensive environmental degradation. Women in these oil zones have suffered the main brunt of these impacts. Second, the three cases also exhibit different features that enable a comparison of outcomes. The different outcomes are linked to the different approaches taken to developing the oil economy. Nigeria, since the colonial era, has had oil-fuelled economic development mostly inspired by the prevailing dominant approach to development—exploitation of oil by the private sector. It, therefore, provides a ‘textbook illustration’ for analysis of the impacts of oil exploitation on women. Venezuela, in contrast, has taken a more critical approach to its development since the start of the century call neo-extractivism. This political turn, which involved the re-nationalisation and collective ownership of the assets and proceeds of the oil industry for better redistribution, came into being after more than 60 years of mainstream development policies. These

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differences enable a critical examination of the extent to which it is the oil economy in general, or merely the oil economy in its capitalist form, that is most responsible for creating zones of sacrifice. In particular, these two cases enable an examination of the different outcomes with regard to the oppression of women and the exploitation of nature. It will be shown that, in the first years of its socialist model, Venezuela’s approach to oil development improved the overall situation of women as compared with Nigeria. However, this improvement was limited, as it failed to question the role of women in the economy outside their reproductive/caring role. Venezuela’s socialist policies have also perpetuated an urban/rural divide whereby women in urban areas have benefited from the oil wealth, while women in the zones of sacrifice continue to suffer the impacts of the increased production of oil to finance the government’s redistributive justice policies. While Nigeria and Venezuela’s political and economic paths differ somewhat, they do not differ at all with regard to the exploitation of nature. That is, both the capitalist and socialist economic paths to development rely heavily on the exploitation of nature. There is not much difference in levels of corruption either (Lopez Maya 2014; Onapajo et al. 2015). Nigeria and Venezuela serve as important illustrative cases in the development of a response to the first two questions of this thesis: (1) What are the impacts of the oil projects on women in oil-rich countries? (2) How can these impacts be theoretically explained in the context of a capitalist and socialist state? The third and final illustrative case, which focuses on the Chad– Cameroon oil pipeline, also sheds light on these first two questions. However, it is selected because it also enables an examination of governance reforms and provides important insights regarding the third research question: How can these negative impacts be reduced? The Chad–Cameroon oil pipeline has benefited from the latest problemsolving approach to extractive industries and development by international organisations such as the World Bank. Moreover, the illustrative case of the Chad–Cameroon oil pipeline sheds empirical light on the merits and shortcomings of the expertise developed by the World Bank on the governance of extractive industries, which is intended to ameliorate the distribution of risks and benefits of oil extraction and improve the situation of women, indigenous people and nature. However, it will be shown that while Chad and Cameroon have benefited from the latest policies in matters of accountability and transparency, they have hardly

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tamed the burden-shifting practices of the IML. This failure impedes their economic development as it has for Nigeria and Venezuela. The third reason why these three cases are crucial for this research is that they help shed light on the different potential for emancipatory changes in different zones in order to mitigate the negative impacts of oil projects on women. Each case explores the different strategies that the population themselves, especially women, in the zones of sacrifice have used to ease the negative impacts of the oil projects. The different opportunities for local agency in different zones have important implications for developing recommendations to mitigate the negative impacts of oil projects. There are many levels at which reforms may be implemented: at the local level in the oil zones and/or at the national, regional or international levels. Given that a comprehensive examination of reform possibilities at all of these levels is beyond the scope of any single inquiry, this research chooses to focus strategically on the role of the World Bank, especially its work on women and the oil sector. Utilising the critical methodology outlined above, along with the illustrative case studies, my argument proceeds in three broad steps. The first step, as illustrated in Chapter 2, is to review and assess theoretical approaches to mining and women, drawing particularly on IML and ecofeminist theory. This assessment sheds light on the merits and limits of such approaches. From this analysis, I then construct a critical ecofeminist theory of the global political economy to explain the negative impacts of the oil projects and to identify opportunities for emancipation. While the resulting critical ecofeminist theory sheds light on how oil projects impact more negatively on women than other groups, it also sheds light on the sources of agency from which transformative processes can emerge. The second step of the research is to show how this new theoretical framework enables the analysis of gaps in the distribution of risks and benefits between men and women, through two illustrative cases: Nigeria (Chapter 3) and Venezuela (Chapter 4). An examination of transformative possibilities constitutes the core of the third step of the research, which is concerned with practical changes that might ease the negative impacts of oil projects on women. I first show how the World Bank (Chapter 5) has developed policies for the extractive industries aimed at reducing the negative impacts of oil projects on the whole economy, and on women specifically. This has been achieved

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through better integration of women’s needs into its policy agenda. However, while these policies have merits, they also have many shortcomings. Chapter 6 discusses the Chad–Cameroon oil pipeline and provides an empirical illustration of the gap between the principles of the good governance framework developed by the World Bank and the realities of the implementation of oil projects. Drawing on the sources of transformation identified through the first two steps and resulting framework, I offer my own recommendations to ease the negative impacts of oil projects on women. Chapter 7 provides these recommended pathways for emancipatory change and offers some concluding thoughts.

References AmazonWatch. 2013. “Indigenous Women Received in National Assembly.” Edited by Earth Village. Maloca. Fort Collins, CO: AmazonWatch. Brand, Ulrich, and Markus Wissen. 2018. The Limits to Capitalist Nature: Theorizing and Overcoming the Imperial Mode of Living. London: Rowman and Littlefield. Centre for Democracy and Development. 2001. “Blood and Oil: Testimonies of Violence from Women of the Niger Delta.” Edited by Sokari Ekine. Vol. 47. London: Center for Democracy and Development. D’Eaubonne, Francoise. 1974. Le Féminisme ou La mort. Paris: Pierre Horay. Jenkins, Katy. 2014. “Women, Mining and Development: An Emerging Research Agenda.” Extractive Industries and Society 1 (2): 329–39. Koch, Max, and Hubert Buch-Hansen. 2020. “In Search of a Political Economy of the Postgrowth Era.” Globalizations. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 14747731.2020.1807837. Lahiri-Dutt, Kuntala. 2018. Between the Plough and the Pick: Informal, Artisanal and Small-Scale Mining in the Contemporary World. Acton: Australian National University Press. Lopez Maya, Margarita. 2014. “Venezuela: The Political Crisis of PostChavismo.” Social Justice 40 (4): 68–87. McNeil, John R. 2000. Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth Century. London: Penguin. Onapajo, Hakeem, Suzanne Francis, and Ufo Okeke-Uzodike. 2015. “Oil Corrupts Elections: The Political Economy of Vote-Buying in Nigeria.” African Studies Quarterly 15 (2): 1–21. Salleh, Ariel. 2001. “The Capitalist Division of Power and its Meta-industrial Class.” The Australian Sociological 2001 Conference.

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———. 2005. “Moving to an Embodied Materialism.” Capitalism Nature Socialism. The World Bank Group. 2007. “Women and the Extractive Industries.” New York: The World Bank Group. Warren, Karen. 1996. “Ecological Feminist Ecologies.” Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

CHAPTER 2

Towards a Critical Ecofeminist Theory

Abstract This chapter provides an overview of the literature on oil projects and women and introduces a new critical ecofeminist framework to conceptualise a gap in the literature and analysis regarding the gendered distribution of benefits and risks of oil projects. Keywords Ecofeminism · Dualistic thinking · Oppressive structures

Introduction This chapter brings together the scattered and dispersed literature across disciplines to trace pathways through which gender and the oil industry at the point of production can be analysed. Important theories are critically examined to identify their merits and shortcomings under such an analysis. I then introduce my own critical ecofeminist framework by building on the strengths of a critical political economy approach—the Imperial Mode of Living (IML)—to construct my larger theory and overall argument. Using the concept of IML coupled with an ecofeminist approach, I show how the heightened vulnerability of women in the zones of sacrifice is over-determined by a matrix of oppressive structures running along the axes of class, gender, ethnicity and nature. I explore the historical © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Helbert, Women, Gender and Oil Exploitation, Gender, Development and Social Change, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81803-6_2

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foundations of these oppressive structures and show how they are institutionalised in the sphere of economic production, as well in the social, political and cultural spheres, the ways the interactions of these spheres play out in oil projects.

Women and the Oil Industry: A Literature Review An early collection of writings on women and mining Gendering the field, edited by Lahiri-Dutt (2011), highlighted the role of women in the mining industry using historical, feminist and contemporary participatory approaches. As Lahiri-Dutt states, women are an integral part of the mining world ‘for their reproductive work as mineworkers, in their home and in their resistance to the exploitation of mining’. These roles, she adds, provide ‘enormous evidence of women’s agency’ (Lahiri-Dutt 2011 p. 2). While Lahiri-Dutt’s collection has without doubt made women in the mining industry more visible, the focus of her research lies mostly on artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM). The collection includes few cases on the large-scale mining industry and none on the oil industry. A more recent collection, also edited by Lahiri-Dutt, Between the Plough and the Pick: Informal, Artisanal and Small-Scale Mining in the Contemporary World (2018), continues the focus on ASM at the micro-level (LahiriDutt 2011; O’Faircheallaigh and Corbett 2016; Hinton et al. 2003). While immensely valuable, a focus limited to ASM overlooks the impact of oil dynamics on women at the macro-level. While Lahiri-Dutt rightly emphasises the emancipation of women through ASM, she fails to conceptualise the causes behind women’s demand in the zones of sacrifice to stop oil exploitation. Although there are some similarities between ASM and large-scale formal mining, these are dwarfed by the differences. The biggest similarity is the overall invisibility of women in the mining industry, historically. Differences include the fact that ASM requires little capital, jobs are low-paid and low-skilled: it has been characterised as ‘dirty work’ that sometimes necessitates just a ‘shovel and a strong back’ (Verbrugge et al. 2014, p. 1). The formal oil industry, on the other hand, is a large-scale industry, requiring a large amount of capital and a high level of technicity. Building an oil complex to extract oil and transport is very costly. Oil-rich countries alone do not have the financial capacities to invest in such large-scale enterprises and need capital from the international market. For instance, the drilling of over 500 wells in the Kingfisher

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and Tilega oilfields in the Lake Albert region of Uganda is estimated to cost US$ 5 billion by 2022 to produce an estimated 260,000 barrels of oil per day (bpd)1 (NS Energy 2020). An additional US$ 3.5 billion will be required to build a 1,443-kilometre-long pipeline between Uganda’s oil fields and the Port of Tanga in Tanzania, and a consortium of investors comprising the oil companies, France’s Total, China’s National Offshore Oil Corporation and Britain’s Tullow Oil, have financially engaged in the project (Reuters 2019). Furthermore, extracting oil is technically very challenging, requiring scarce but highly skilled workers to operate the industry, usually not found in the local workforce. Last, while mining industries and ASM can exist at the same time, the oil extraction site is an enclave industry that lacks backward or forward linkages to the local economy (Basedau 2005). These differences justify a specific research on the impacts of the formal oil industry on women. The heavy reliance of the formal oil industry on foreign capital and international oil companies demands an analysis of the micro-level impact induced by the macro-level dynamics of oil. Indeed, contrary to any other natural resource, oil has a particular place in our societies due to its ‘size of use, its mythos, its contribution to the hydrocarbon society and its deep environmental consequences’ (Watts 1999, p. 1). Oil is one of the most fundamental building blocks of twentieth-century industrial capitalism. Various scholars have attempted to explicate the crucial role played by oil in the development of the capitalist world economy. The Prize, for instance, recounts the ‘epic quest’ (Yergin 2008), for oil, money and power in the US. McNeill and Engelke (2014) use a world-system approach to analyse the role of oil in The Great Acceleration in the twentieth century. Angus in Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Fuel Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System (2016) uses a Marxist approach to analyse fossil fuel’s contribution to the earth system crisis dubbed the Anthropocene. Malm in Fossil Capital (2016) argues that the transition from traditional sources of power, commonly water mills, to engines fired by coal and then oil, was not due to the abundance or the low cost of the latter sources of energy, but rather aimed to control the subordinate labour. The fate of oil-rich countries, then, cannot be analysed without taking into consideration the role of oil in the global economy.

1 Bpd—1 barrel = 158.987 litres.

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A group of scholars who do so have, in many cases, concluded that an abundance of oil is, at best, a double-edged sword, and at worst a ‘curse’ for countries possessing large amounts of oil (especially developing ones) (Ross 2012). Some of these scholars have tried to understand the deficit of women in the oil industry and attribute it to the economic causal mechanisms of what they term ‘the oil curse’ (Ross 2012): it is explained at the relationship between the oil revenues that oil-rich countries generate and weak economic growth and long-lasting poverty that their population suffers. This relationship is counter-intuitive as traditionally, natural resources have been understood as economic assets for a country’s development (Auty 2006; Ross 2012). The resource curse concept is inspired by the neoliberal school in their market-based analysis (Humphreys et al. 2007). Ross, an oil curse scholar, claims that ‘petroleum perpetuates patriarchy’ (2012) in two ways. First, there are few to no job opportunities for women in oil-rich countries, as sources of job creation are absent for multiple reasons: weak economic growth, limited to that from the oil industry and a lack of backward or forward linkages between the oil industries and local economy. Second, the few jobs the oil industry does create are difficult to fill as they need highly skilled labour, generally unavailable in the local job market. According to the oil curse scholars, the combination of these two factors explains the lack of women’s market participation in oil-rich countries. The good governance framework of the World Bank is grounded in oil curse theory and sees adequate quality state institutions as the best way of mitigating the ‘curse’ (Mehlum et al. 2006). The concept of ‘petroleum perpetuates patriarchy’, however, offers a very limited view of the integral part that women do play—if invisibly—in the oil industry. It fails to capture, for instance, women’s reproductive work (including raising, feeding and caring for mineworkers), unpaid labour in the home or indeed their resistance to the exploitation of oil itself. It also fails to account for power relationships that are articulated around axes of class, gender, race and ethnicity. The analysis is also ahistorical and fails to address the impact of the exploitation of oil as a global commodity, both at the state level and at the micro-community level. Critical International Political Economy (CIPE) theorists provide a conceptual first step towards a macro-analysis of global oil dynamics and their impacts on oil-rich countries. According to this school, the economic difficulties that oil-rich countries are currently suffering from are not due to a deficiency of good governance mechanisms but rather

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due to entanglements with the burden-shifting practices, structures and processes of the IML. The everyday practices of the IML are unsustainable, as they heavily rely on ‘unlimited appropriation of resources, space and territories’, and on a ‘disproportionate claim to global and cheap ecosystems and sinks’ (Brand and Wissen 2018, p. 13). These unsustainable practices lead to a socioecological crisis, ‘tamed’ or mitigated in the Global North through the externalisation of environmental and social costs (Brand and Wissen 2017a). This burden-shifting is maintained through a process of accumulation by dispossession and ‘through manifold of hierarchies and forms of inclusion and exclusion’ (Brand and Wissen 2018, p. 3). The IML heavily relies on the appropriation of oil: there is barely a product consumed in the IML that does not require oil to be made or oil to be transported. At the time of writing, the world consumes 93 million bpd, an increase in consumption compared to 2017 (International Energy Agency 2019). In the third quarter of 2019, global oil demand grew by 1.1 million bpd compared to the previous quarter. The International Energy Agency expects a steep increase in oil demand by 2030 (International Energy Agency 2019). While there are historic big consumers in the Global North, such as the US which still consumes around 18.5 million bpd, there are also new big players in the form of emerging countries such as China, Brazil and Indonesia. China is the second-largest oil consumer in the world, with an average consumption rate of 14 million bpd. Brazil is the seventh largest oil consumer in the world, with a consumption rate of three million bpd. Indonesia consumes 1.7 million bpd. The IML thrives on oil; and the oil industry thrives on the IML. Having a substantial level of oil, then, embroils oil-rich countries into its burden-shifting unsustainable practices and processes, under the guise of the discourse of development. There have been several phases of burdenshifting processes and practices through the years. After twentieth-century decolonisation processes, the appropriation of oil, space, territories and ecological sinks was reconfigured through a porous and unstable alliance between the forces of international capital—international financial institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and international oil companies (IOCs)—and the elites and state officials of oil-rich countries. The foundational belief of this alliance was that exploiting oil would be a path to industrialisation for developing countries (Evans 1978; Frank 1970; Turner 1980).

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The next phase, that is, to control the oil and capture the profit, was set into motion following the oil crisis in the 1970s, as part of the Washington Consensus. It comprised the tutelage of the U.S. imperial state, and a neoliberal development ideology implemented by the international financial institutions (such as the World Bank and the IMF), transnational oil companies and local elites (Spronk and Webber 2007). The appropriation of oil has been secured through different legal mechanisms such as ‘statutory monopoly over oil exploitation’ or a ‘nationalised oil company that operates through joint ventures with oil majors who are granted oil concessions’ (Watts 2005, p. 379). The security apparatus of the states is also used to protect costly investments and ensure the continual flow of oil (Watts 2001). In the neoliberal era then, the privatisation of hydrocarbons has extended the strategy of accumulation by dispossession (Harvey 2004), which has shaped oil-rich countries through complex histories, dimensions and transnational linkages interacting at the local level and with local elites for control of the resource. Accumulation by dispossession is the way by which the inner contradictions of capital accumulation, that is, the unlimited appropriation of non-renewable energy such as oil, are being fixed through time and space (Harvey 2004). The accumulation can also be achieved through predation, fraud and violence (Harvey 2004). Local oil communities then are entangled into the processes of accumulation by dispossession and, in the process, their natural and cultural assets get irreversibly destroyed (Acosta 2013). The concept of accumulation by dispossession has been echoed in many analyses of the resistance of communities in oil zones against the privatisation of hydrocarbons and its dispossession. Examples include the Ogonis’ fight against Shell Oil in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria (Douglas and Okonta 2006), the struggles against privatisation of hydrocarbons in Bolivia (Spronk and Webber 2011), Ecuador (Sawyer 2004), oil communities in Sakhalin Island (Ong 2011), a fishing community in Ghana (Attah 2018), local communities in the Albertine Graber region, Uganda (Kamonji 2020),the Chipewyan Prairie First Nation, and in the tar sand region in Canada (Huseman and Short 2012), as well as in communities along the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline (CEE Bankwatch Network and Gender Action 2006), to name but a few. Chase-Dunn et al. argue that the success of certain national leaders in gaining political power has to be understood against the backdrop of the negative impacts of the accumulation by dispossession processes and

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practices (Chase-Dunn et al. 2015). That is, the source of the rise of social movements demanding change is to be found in the neoliberalinspired ‘shock therapy’ adopted by Latin American countries to respond to the debt crisis of the 1980s. Indeed, the neoliberal policies were adopted as a condition to obtain credit lines from the IMF and the World Bank to reduce the debt. It encompassed structural adjustment measures, privatisation of public companies, particularly extractive industry and the accentuation of extractivism. It led, for instance, to the enclosure of the commons in Bolivia for private enterprise (Spronk and Webber 2007; Valenzuela 2020; Smart 2020) and pushed millions into poverty due to increased precarious work conditions and a lack of social welfare to cushion the impact of it (Chase-Dunn et al. 2015). The cumulative negative impacts of these policies led to demands for change which were captured by the new Left-wing political agenda, the leaders of which lambasted the neoliberal model (Burbach et al. 2013). These social movements contributed to the political success of the so-called ‘Pink Tide’ in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador. CIPE provides a comprehensive understanding of the roots and wider ramifications of the economic difficulties that oil-rich countries face by making connections to globalised class relations and capitalist accumulation by dispossession in which transnational and local elites appropriate resources that would otherwise have been devoted to the development of the local population in the host country. However, while this contextualisation is crucial, the approach is not without conceptual limits for the purpose of this research. What happens, for example, when states use their political mandates to practice extractivism in ways that attempt to disrupt the processes of accumulation by dispossession? Social ecologist Gudynas (2015) researched the extractivist policies of a number of Left-leaning, ‘Pink Tide’ governments and found that while neoliberal capitalism recommended minimal state involvement, these governments wanted a much more interventionist state that would act as a negotiation space and/or a mediator between the international forces of extractive capitalism and the population. In this way, these states aimed to capture a much larger portion of the extractive sector’s revenues and redistribute it to alleviate poverty and address inequality. This new way of practising extractivism outside the neoliberal model is called neo-extractivism (Burbach et al. 2013, p. 41). However, Gudynas’ optimism regarding Pink Tide governments was short-lived. He found that just as the accumulation by dispossession

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approach lacks an ecological dimension so, by extension, does the alternative model of development offered by Pink Tide governments. Just as he had earlier critiqued scholars such as Harvey for failing to question the problematic relationship between human and non-human nature, Gudynas extends this criticism to Left-wing governments in Latin America. There is, he contends, nothing ‘neo’ in these neo-extractive approaches as the states had not ‘substantially modified the extractive sector’, merely tinkered with the neoliberal development paradigm (Acosta and Martinez Abarca 2018, p. 132). Gudynas believes that this is partly due to the close conceptual relationship between the scholars of the Pink Tide’s model of development and Harvey’s concept (Gudynas 2015). Rather than reigning in extractivism, the Pink Tide governments have, in fact, accentuated extractivism. In the context of attractive high commodity prices, Murat Arsel et al. (2016) believe that these governments cannot think about a model of development that does not involve intensive extraction of natural resources. They call it the extractive imperative (Arsel et al. 2016). Engels and Dietz see it simply as a new way of capturing oil revenues (2017). Svampa describes this accentuation as a move away from the Washington consensus towards a commodities consensus, whereby Pink Tide governments agreed to break ties with the old neoliberal framework but maintained consensus on a development model based on exporting nature for the IML (2015). This, according to Svampa, would explain the support of international and national elites for Pink Tide governments (Anlauf 2014; Demonde 2014). To conclude, while the IML theory (and the CIPE school in which it is based) provides useful ways of unpacking the macro- and geopolitical dynamics of oil extraction and appropriation, it fails, however, to fully conceptualise the relationship between human and non-human nature, which lies at the heart of natural resource extraction and use. As a state-focussed approach, it is also quite timid in its conceptualisation of structures of power that are articulated around gender, race and ethnicity. While scholars of the IML conceptualise burden-shifting practices, structures and processes, the articulations of the structures are undertheorised (Brand and Wissen 2018). Furthermore, as per Harvey’s concept, the processes of accumulation by dispossession and the forms of resistance against it are understood from the conceptual lens of class struggle and the confrontation between work and capital. In this conceptualisation, the specificities of the dispossession of indigenous people and women

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are narrowed down to this confrontation (Acosta and Martinez Abarca 2018). The IML and to a greater extent CIPE fail then to pay due attention to the voices of indigenous people and women (Gudynas 2015). This is where a critical ecofeminist analysis can fill the conceptual gaps left open by the concept of the IML.

Critical Ecofeminist Framework The strength of the IML lies in positioning oil-rich countries within the hierarchies and power relationships of global capitalism. The strength of ecofeminism lies in theorising, historically contextualising and conceptually connecting these hierarchies, practices and processes, and positioning them at the core of the gender gap in the distribution of risks and benefits of the oil industry. According to ecofeminists, the evolution of state systems in early modern Europe sowed the seeds of the burden-shifting practices, hierarchies and processes of global capitalism. Early industrialisation triggers an increasing demand for non-renewable natural resources and labour. Scholars recall the long process of modernisation and industrialisation where a conceptual transition occurred to transform the view of the earth from a living organism to a machine (Capra 1982; Merchant 1983, p. 3; Keller 1985, p. 53). In this transitional process, normative constraints on how humans interacted with nature weakened or dissolved to leave room for a new worldview legitimising the domination and commodification of nature to fit the increasing demand for non-renewable natural resources (Merchant 1983, p. 2; Tickner 1993, p. 61). While there was a transition in how nature was viewed to justify its increasing exploitation, there was also a transition in the view of the role of women in society. The persecution of midwives, blamed for abortions, infertility or incidents of or sexual intercourse failing to result in conception were believed to be responsible for a shortage of workers during the fast-paced industrialisation of the Modern era (Federici 2004; Mies 1998). This was, as Federici states, a witch hunt aimed at destroying the control that midwives had exercised over their reproductive function, and paved the way for the development of a more oppressive patriarchal regime. Federici linked this, and other forms of persecution designed to subjugate and dominate women, to the rise of capitalism, capital accumulation and a proletarian worker class. The persecution and consequent criminalisation of women devaluated women’s labour and sowed the seeds

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for a contemporary sexual division of labour confining women to reproductive work (Federici 2004) and men to productive work. This control over the work of reproducing the working class was essential to capital accumulation, and its devaluation helped to shift the social costs of labour onto women. The expansion of capitalism put pressure on the ecological limits of Europe as a continent and pushed European states to expand beyond their borders to externalise their unsustainable practices. European powers then struggled for the control of resources and peoples in new geographical spaces for capital accumulation. The burden-shifting European forms of economic, social and ecological exploitation were transferred to communities largely based on hunter–gatherer or subsistence agriculture. This resulted in the domination and, in some cases, decimation of indigenous peoples and ecosystems (Grove 1995). It pushed colonised people to marginal lands to leave room for extractive cash crops and resources. Twentieth-century development projects, such as oil projects, sketch a more recent chapter in this long history and have further disrupted native ecologies and further marginalised local people and women in order to provide the natural resources needed to sustain the IML. Ecofeminism theorises that the structural similarities and connections between the domination of women, colonised people and nonhuman nature were sealed through hierarchically organised value dualisms. Plumwood provides the most sophisticated philosophical account of these similarities in her conceptual framework on dualistic thinking: the process by which knowledge is produced about one side of a binary construct in ‘a polarised way by the exclusion of qualities shared by the other’ (Plumwood 1993, p. 32). In this process, men’s qualities became associated with culture, production, order and civilisation, while other’s—women, indigenous people, nature—qualities were undervalued and associated with reproduction, disorder and lack of civilisation (Plumwood 2002). This hierarchical dualistic thinking was also based on value hierarchy, that is, the granting of greater value to one side of each dualism: thus culture, men and civilisation were deemed ‘superior’, subordinating the second half of the binaries—nature, women and indigenous people (Mellor 1997a, p. 129). These binary dissociations made exclusion and opposition possible, and by the same token made possible the exploitation of women, indigenous people and nature with impunity. Social relations with nonhuman nature, women and indigenous people were reconfigured with the rise of capitalism as a precondition of

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capitalism survival. These structures of domination are the material prerequisites of the never-ending process of capital accumulation. In this reconfiguration, productive work executed by men was valued and women’s productive and reproductive work was undermined to confine it to the category of ‘unpaid or low-paid reproductive work’ at home through the sexual division of labour. The androcentric and anthropocentric structures of capitalist patriarchy are aimed at shifting the economic, social and ecological costs of industrialisation’s constant growth to women, ‘others’ (such as indigenous people) and the environment. Moreover, hierarchical dualistic views legitimate these cost-shifting. The social costs of reproduction are shifted to women’s household labour through the patriarchal capitalist sexual division of labour, while the ecological costs of industrial production are inflicted on nature (Mies and Shiva 1993) and are represented by depleted resources, toxic waste dumps, dangerous production processes and polluted water and air (Mellor 1997b). Each of these ecological costs is diverted to the zones of sacrifice. To sum up, what is unique about the ecofeminist contribution to the contemporary debate on domination and emancipation is that it has highlighted the structural similarities and connections between various forms of social domination and the domination of nonhuman nature, in ways that have problematised both. As we shall see when we turn to the ethics of ecofeminism, a necessary first step in overcoming these mutually reinforcing modes of domination is to destabilise hierarchical dualisms and revalue the contribution and moral worth of both women and nonhuman nature. While it cannot be claimed that hierarchical dualisms have caused women’s oppression and the domination of nonhuman nature, they have certainly served to legitimise it by making it both thinkable and justifiable. Furthermore, in this sense, they serve as a symbolic prerequisite to the material practices that are the proximate causes of domination and exploitation of women and nonhuman nature, including those that bear upon the oil zones. As we shall see, the postcolonial models of development pursued in oil-rich developing countries have also been infused with the mindset of hierarchical dualisms. The androcentric, anthropocentric and ethnocentric configurations developed to enable capitalism’s burden-shifting practices were perpetuated in the so-called postcolonial era of the mid-late twentieth century, with colonial oppressive structures re-packaged under the myth of development. Escobar recalls how mass poverty was ‘discovered’ in Asia, Africa

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and Latin America by developed countries (Escobar 1999), paving the way for a dominant discourse on development through which rich countries set the economic, political and socio-ecological agenda (Escobar 1999). The discourse emphasised that developed countries’ economic modernisation path through industrialisation and urbanisation was the necessary and inevitable route to eliminate poverty in what was then called ‘the third world’ (Escobar 1995, 1999). In this development discourse, hierarchical dualistic thinking thrived on the premise that post-colonial states were backward states at the ‘traditional society stage’, and that they needed to ‘catch up’. Western knowledge, expertise and capital provided by international organisations such as the World Bank and the IMF were the tools used to supposedly help post-colonial countries do this; thus, development discourse provided developed countries with the means to (continue to) manage and control them. Overall, the main difference between the colonial era and the post-colonial era is that the end of colonialism reshaped the dynamics of the social struggle for control over natural resources with the emergence of newly created states and their elites. As Tucker (1999) states, the development discourse was a Eurocentric discourse, an imperial idea to advance in the interests of the imperial ruler, infused by the racist tropes of the modern era (1999). The post-colonial project was also both capitalist and patriarchal, as new relationships between the north and the south were based on the old colonial international division of labour, whereby labour in the south did not have the same value as labour in the north, and women’s labour did not have the same value as men’s. In these relations, oil-rich countries are part of and dependent on transnational commodity (oil) chains, particularly with class and spatial division of surplus value. The difference in the value of labour derives from the fact that cheap raw materials could be imported from the colonies and the ex-colonies (Mies 1998), and enabled much greater capital accumulation for the north through the exploitation and externalisation of costs to the south. This includes the exploitation and exclusion of women and the exploitation and destruction of nature and other cultures, supported by a hierarchal dualism promoting the socalled masculine values of individualism, rationalism, self-interest, greed and competition (Mies and Shiva 1993; Nhanenge 2011; Shiva 1990). The discourse of development thus remained (and remains) rooted in androcentric dualistic views of the modern world. Mainstream modernisation theorists assumed that the development would benefit women in the Third World, as they believed that the Western model of development had

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benefited Western women. However, the sexual division of labour, division in the private and public sphere and a particular understanding of the role of women in the household continued to underpin post-colonial paradigms (Scott 1995), resulting in the monopoly of men holding important positions in the socio-economic hierarchy, including the political and administrative offices of newly-created states (Rogers 1979). This gave rise to a situation where, for instance, women’s contribution to the household economy as primary subsistence farmers was ignored or devalued. The newly-created states appropriated state land for the ‘Green Revolution’ in agriculture and major extractive industry projects, creating what Shiva calls ‘internal colonies’ (Shiva 1989, p. 2). Through this process—under which men were understood to be the sole breadwinners and owners of land—‘women were dispossessed of their land, and from their water and forest management roles of communal land, and consequently from their main means of subsistence’ (Mies and Shiva 1993, pp. 58–59). Although not all women were negatively impacted in the same way, and some headway towards a recognition of women’s work was made, for most women in the developing world, development in the form of modernisation deepened the process of underdevelopment which had started with colonisation (Shiva 1990). Lastly, the discourse of development remained rooted in the anthropocentric dualistic views of the modern world, and there is a tight link between development, industrialisation and Western science and technology based on the exploitation of nature. This discourse did not challenge the complex relationship between human and nonhuman nature. Early development policy and programs emphasised the production of cash crops and resource extraction. Transnational Oil Companies (TOCs) and international organisations such as the World Bank were often sought to provide the capital that led to the development of a resource extractive industry. The capital gained from this primary industry was then supposed to fund industrialisation (and by consequence, modernisation and development). The involvement of Shell Oil Company in the Nigerian oil industry in 1953 epitomises this industrialisation path (Omoweh 2005). The emphasis on industrial development through the oil industry prioritised global resource management while undercutting local concerns, such as social and environmental problems. Often, the unequal relationship between the TOCs and the state, and the need to deal with the debt crisis, pushed oil-rich countries to have lax or non-existent environmental regulations in order to attract funds (Sick 2009). It was also believed

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that given the overall economic benefits of the exploitation of nature for modernisation, the negative environmental impacts of such exploitation would be worth it (Mies and Shiva 1993; Nhanenge 2011). While the postcolonial era saw a reconfiguration of social and economic forces struggling to gain control over natural resources within newlycreated states, the hierarchical dualistic views that emerged in the early modern period, and were later consolidated, remained at the core of the development discourse. The material practices of these mindsets negatively distributed the benefits and risks of development. Consequently, the negative consequences of development disproportionately fell on women.

Proximate Causes: ‘Petroleum Perpetuates Patriarchy’ The foregoing section presented the key historical developments and contemporary transnational social structures common to most oil-rich developing countries, which have set up a situation in these countries’ oil zones that is ripe for the domination of women and nature. However, while these social structures have created the conditions for domination, the particular ways in which this domination has unfolded depend on local and national cultures and contexts. These more proximate causes of domination are dependent on variables such as the extent of employment discrimination in the oil industry, recognition of women’s work and land rights, distribution of environmental risks, social vulnerability and security risks. Employment Discrimination Historically, the reasons behind the exclusion of women (and indigenous people) in the oil industry are well chronicled. Women do not work in the oil industry because of discrimination, as the oil industry has displayed ‘traits of masculinity and dominance’ (Lozeva and Marinova 2010, p. 181). The processes of exclusion have been so effective that most women do not choose to enter this ‘male domain’ anymore (Ferber and Nelson 2003, p. 35). Scholars such as Lahiri-Dutt see several factors driving a growing feminisation of mining and reversing the androcentric trend. These factors are the locational shift of large-scale mining industry to the Global South, a radical transformation of the nature of mineral production through the

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rise of informal mining, and several initiatives—in civil society, policy and industry—mainstreaming gender in their work (Lahiri-Dutt 2015). However, these factors have few echoes in the oil industry specifically. Firstly, while the informal mining market may be including a growing number of women, according to Lahiri-Dutt, informal mining is inexistent in the oil industry. Secondly, rather than a locational shift to the Global South, oil exploration is based on a ‘race to what’s left’ (Klare 2012; Killoran-McKibbin and Zalik 2016), as the ‘era of easy oil is over’ and a new period of ‘tough oil2 ’ is arising (Klare 2008, p. 13; McCarthy 2015). In this new era, ‘each new barrel added to global reserves will prove harder and more costly to extract than before as it will be buried deeper underground, farther off-shore, in more hazardous environments, and in more conflict-prone, hostile regions of the planet’ (Klare 2008, p. 12). These new global reserves can be found not only in the Global South, such as in Uganda, but also in the Global North, with the development of fracking or the exploitation of tar sand in Canada (McCarthy 2015, p. 2486). Finally, while there have indeed been policy initiatives to mainstream gender in the industry, led by the World Bank (WBG 2013) (see Chapter 5), these tend to be undermined by the trend—heightened by the extraction challenges above—towards more highly technical jobs (rather than the informal ones to which Lahiri-Dutt refers). The hope that such initiatives will contribute to a feminisation of the oil industry is, to date, simply not confirmed by the data. A report written by the World Petroleum Council and the Boston Consulting Group in 2017 shows that just 22% of the oil and gas industry’s entire workforce is made up of women, and while women are 50% of the workforce at entry level for business positions, at the executive level, this falls to 24%. The figures are worse for jobs in technical fields. Here, at entry level, women make up only 15% of the workforce, falling to 13% at the executive level (World Petroleum Council and The Boston Consulting Group 2017). According to a 2020 survey, there were actually fewer women in the industry in 2020 than in 2019 (AusIMM 2020).

2 There are two types of oil that are exploitable: conventional oil, that is liquid oil in a well and unconventional oil such as tar sand oil which is a mixture of oil and sand. Unconventional oil is called tough as its exploitation is difficult and its environmental impacts are high.

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The government of Abu Dhabi has implemented a program through its National Petroleum Institute to increase women’s participation in oilrelated careers, based on the assumption that the lack of women was due to insufficient numbers of qualified candidates (WBG 2013). This, however, does not explain fully the low participation of women in the oil industry. In Azerbaijan, despite a longer tradition than Abu Dhabi’s initiatives to educate women as engineers, low representation in the oil industry is still prevalent (WBG 2013). The same trend is observed in the underrepresentation of indigenous people in the industry. According to a survey by the Australian Bureau of Agriculture and Resource Economics and Sciences in 2003, 39% of mine sites in Australia do not employ any Indigenous people. Full-time Indigenous employees at mine sites near Indigenous communities represent just 6% of the workforce (Hogan and Tedesco 2003, p. 523). In Ecuador, though 40% of the overall population is indigenous, only 14% can be found in the official mining workforce (Minkova 2008, p. 5). Taking into account the data and initiatives outlined above, the deficit of women and indigenous people in the oil industry can be distilled to a culture and structures of discrimination in the industry itself. For many women, the oil industry is a male-dominated terrain where they face major hurdles in career advancement (Gyan 2013, p. 99). The traditional cultural values of the oil industry are based on power, toughness, competitiveness, self-interest, self-reliance and aggressiveness (Miller 2004, p. 59). The discourse of the oil industry is embedded in dualistic value hierarchies, as seen earlier, and arguably does not hire women because it believes that the set of cultural values it promotes is in contradiction to those values attributed to women, such as empathy, support, kindness and care (Miller 2004, p. 59). A clear example of this value-based discrimination is when the Chairman of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Energy and Mines in Ghana described oil jobs as ‘very masculine’ following a question from a women’s group asking for more jobs for women in the oil industry (ModernGhana 2010). The ecofeminist framework’s conceptual ability to connect multiple oppressive structures can track the construction of the work of the oil industry in masculine terms— the always-implicitly male figure of the oil worker plumbing the depths of the always-implicitly female figure of the natural world. Jobs for women outside the oil economy are also difficult to find as there are many caveats. First, it has been shown that the oil economy has, at best, no impact on the non-oil economy, as oil extraction sites

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are enclave industries that lack backward or forward linkages to the local economy (Basedau 2005). Rather, many oil-rich countries have trouble developing or maintaining economic sectors outside the oil economy. These difficulties are linked to the financial attractiveness of the oil economy, as economic actors tend to focus on the oil economy to benefit from its profitability. Additionally, having a substantial level of exploitable oil leads to an appreciation of the exchange rate. This appreciation decreases the competitiveness of local goods, making foreign goods more attractive (Usui 1997, p. 154; Matsen and Torvik 2005). This economic trend makes it particularly difficult for women to thrive economically, especially where they are over-represented in informal sectors in direct competition with cheaper foreign goods (such as producing food). Economic over-dependence on oil activities at national and local levels therefore makes it more difficult for women to find and maintain jobs at all —sectors outside the oil economy have trouble surviving, while the oil industry discriminates against them. Lack of Recognition of Women’s Work and Land Rights While there have been initiatives to overcome some of the industry employment issues above, the broader context within which women can economically thrive is a neoliberal space, subject to its gendered processes. The neoliberal development project, as supported by the World Bank, aims at including more women in the formal economy. It is based on women’s ‘market integration’, a growth-driven model of economic development, underpinned by a discourse on individual freedom of choice. However, as it has been shown, the discourse, practices and processes of flexibilisation to empower women as market actors are gendered and recognise only formal work (Wichterich 2015). In these processes and practices, women must adjust to masculine market norms while the burden-shifting practices of capital accumulation continue to occur both within and outside the job market. In other words, care and informal work activities are not recognised as ‘work’, and even when they are, there are undervalued to facilitate accumulation by appropriation. Furthermore, at the local level, the ways in which oil projects are implemented prevent women from gaining equal access to their benefits. Due to patriarchal structures and cultures (traditional or colonial), women are less likely to possess formal documentation on, or to be aware of, their land rights, meaning they are less likely to share the benefit streams

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emanating from land compensation or royalties from the TOCs and/or government. For instance, with Uganda’s emerging oil industry, land grabbing in the form of forceful take-over, eviction, dubious dealings and compulsory acquisitions have been endemic and women’s access to land has become more precarious as they are less likely to be able to provide official land titles to retain their land (Muriisa 2018). Additionally, as women have low representation in decision-making processes, TOCs are less likely to consult them, and instead prioritise local men—understood to be the breadwinners—when negotiating access to land, compensation and royalties (Lozeva and Marinova 2010; Macintyre 2002). Ugandan women were not involved in the distribution of compensation for loss of land, for example, while men were, and money sent to men’s bank accounts (Muriisa 2018). These difficulties are particularly acute for women responsible for ensuring household food security through subsistence farming. It has also been shown that, even when entitled to compensation, they are less likely to receive the same amount as their male counterparts since their activities are undervalued by the formal capitalist economy (see Chapter 6) (Lozeva and Marinova 2010; Nelson 2001). Unequal Distribution of Environmental Risks At the local level, the unequal distribution of environmental risks exacerbates women’s economic vulnerability. IML theory posits that the international division of economic labour, coupled with the anthropocentric view of nature, enables powerful social forces to stabilise the IML itself, by securing favourable terms of trade that facilitate disproportionate access to resources, space and territories as well as ecological sink capacities in the zones of sacrifice. An ecofeminist framework, as shown earlier in this chapter, allows us to track this unequal ecological load displacement down to the local level and highlight the specific ways in which women suffer this more than men. The illustrative cases that follow highlight the different ways in which disproportionate local access plays out. In Nigeria (Chapter 3), Venezuela (Chapter 4) and along the ChadCameroon pipeline (Chapter 5), this happens through restriction of access to oil zones and the impossibility of cultivating land and other territories due to environmental degradation from gas flaring, spills or destruction during construction. In Venezuela (Chapter 4), access to natural resources benefits the population in urban areas to the detriment of indigenous communities in remote oil-rich rural areas, despite neo-extractive policies

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and a collective ownership structure (Huseman and Short 2012). Other examples abound. In the offshore oil extractive industry in Ghana, for instance, the local population is restricted from fishing near where oil rigs have now been built, limiting access to a vital source of subsistence (Center on Crisis Reporting 2011). In Canada, indigenous communities have been displaced so oil can be produced from tar sand (Parson and Ray 2018). Meanwhile, benefits accrue to private owners, the state and/or the national security apparatus. Environmental degradation linked to oil exploitation overwhelmingly affects those living in oil zones. In these sacrificed zones, ‘from the time when exploration of oil commences till the time it is pumped into huge ships’, oil extractive industries lead to ‘large scale and permanent land-use land-cover changes’ resulting in the ‘destruction of the environmental conditions and humans on a massive scale’ (Baynard 2011; Haller et al. 2007). The environmental impacts of oil extractive industry activities vary with the ecosystem and can include habitat fragmentation, land degradation, soil erosion, loss of wildlife, the introduction of invasive species, river siltation, large water drawdowns and water contamination (Baynard 2011). The extent of the damage increases with time; the longer oil activities go on, the more serious and irreversible the environmental degradation (Haller et al. 2007, p. 551). The social consequences of environmental destruction can be grouped into two main types: the loss of livelihood and health risks. The loss of livelihood occurs either due to land dispossession (creating room for oil exploitation) or land contamination (from oil exploitation itself) (Hymel 2007, p. 131). The loss of livelihood is particularly acute in the case of women, as many are food providers and hence more dependent on a healthy environment. Pisciculture, for example, becomes impossible after oil contamination (Slaten 2010, p. 1320), while acid rain from gas flaring can make crop farming impossible, and oil spills overload crop fields with petroleum waste. This loss of livelihood not only pushes women off their land towards securing other means of living, but marks a rapid transition for the whole local population from a condition of relative welfare to one of poverty and destitution (Ohlsson 2000, p. 3). Environmental degradation and contamination due to oil exploitation has an impact on the health of the local population as well. The food contamination issues above can lead directly to malnutrition. Crude oils are themselves ‘mixtures of 100 or more hydrocarbons, sulphur compounds, and a range of other chemicals, metals, and salts.

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Radioactive substances, hydrogen sulphide and other toxic substances are usually present in sour crudes. In addition, a variety of other toxic pollutants are typically generated during oil drilling and production operations, including drilling fluids, drilling cuts, and chemical treatment that contains heavy metals, strong acids, and concentrated salts’ (Center for Social and Economic Rights 1994, p. 12). Exposure to such substances has a health impact which is particularly acute for women. They can transmit contaminants through breastfeeding to their babies. A study of Ecuador’s oil zones revealed that the risk of miscarriage is 2.34 times higher among both peasant and indigenous women living in communities exposed to oil pollutants, even if they don’t use local water much, aware that it’s contaminated (Hurtig and San Sebastian 2002). Further empirical research in the oil zones in Ecuador shows that, compared with communities free from oil exploitation, communities in oil-producing areas had elevated morbidity rates, with a higher occurrence of miscarriage, dermatitis, skin mycosis and malnutrition, as well as higher mortality rates (San Sebastian et al. 2001; Instituto de Epidemiologia y Salud Cumunitaria “Manuel Amunarriz” 2004; Vargas et al. 2020). Other research found that women in the oil zones showed symptoms such as skin mycosis, tiredness, itchy nose, sore throat, headache, red eyes, ear pain, diarrhoea and gastritis. Additionally, in oil zones older than 20 years, there was a ‘significant higher overall incidence of cancer in both men and women and significantly elevated levels were observed for cancers of the stomach, rectum, skin melanoma, soft tissue and kidney for men and cancers of the cervix and lymph nodes in women’ (San Sebastian and Hurtig 2004; Instituto de Epidemiologia y Salud Cumunitaria “Manuel Amunarriz” 2004; San Sebastian and Hurtig 2002). There was also an increase in hematopoietic cancers in children (San Sebastian and Hurtig 2004, p. 208). Unequal Distribution of Social Vulnerability Women’s social vulnerability and poverty is increased around oil projects by the cumulative negative impact of their side-lining from decisionmaking and compensatory processes, and of their exclusion from economic benefits of the projects. This subsequent economic vulnerability pushes them towards unsafe environments such as boomtowns. Boomtowns are areas that spring up around the extractive activities, and are characterised by a non-local, well-paid and overwhelmingly male oil

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industry workforce living in luxurious compounds alongside the communities that the oil project has displaced, resettled and deprived. The exclusionary dynamics of the boomtowns have been likened to apartheid (Epstein and Selber 2002; Watts 2004; Langton 2010). Research around boomtowns and along pipelines and oil fields highlights how oil industry activities, combined with the imposition of Western patriarchal structures of development and the subsequent weakening of traditional mechanisms of social control, exacerbate existing social problems such as alcoholism, gambling, trafficking and forced labour (Anderson 1998; Watts 2004; Haller et al. 2007). The disruptive effects of oil extraction itself, combined with the specific effects of boomtowns, increase social risks for women in manifold ways. Any increased social or economic vulnerability makes women more likely to be sexually abused and harassed (Orta-Martínez and Finer 2010). Women’s economic vulnerability increases their financial dependence within marital partnerships, thereby increasing their vulnerability to domestic violence. Financial vulnerability may also push women towards survival strategies such as prostitution in order to make ends meet, with further risks to their health (e.g. through sexually transmitted diseases) and safety (entailing a higher risk of physical and sexual violence) (Deering et al. 2014). Unequal Distribution of Security Risks The control over oil is frequently secured through military means and/or heavy security forces (Klare 2004; Omeje 2006), and these have been shown to increase women’s insecurity disproportionately (Cockburn 2013). Ecofeminism and international relations feminism see military systems as patriarchal institutions of domination that glorify masculinecoded values of aggression and force. Women are not only particularly vulnerable to increased militarism, conflicts and war, but also invisibilised or seriously under-represented in military affairs and policymaking linked to security (Peterson and Runyan 2010). The consequence of this invisibility and under-representation is that the negative impacts of insecurity on women are largely ignored even though women suffer most from the economic, social and ecological consequences of war outside the battlefield. Women constitute the vast majority of the civilian casualties during conflicts. During conflicts, they suffer from sexual abuse, violence and domestic violence. Additionally, according to Turpin and Lorentzen,

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examining the links between women, the environment and militarism (1996) shows that the military apparatus is particularly destructive for the environment, and that in those circumstances where women are especially dependent on the environment, they are the ones who suffer the most. In sum, the causes of women’s oppression in the zones of sacrifice are over-determined. There are many proximate causes of women’s suffering that vary according to how oil projects are pursued, and their effects play out, at the national and local levels. There are also multiple, reinforcing social structures that have created the structural conditions for this suffering. This problem of over-determination creates major challenges to identifying how best to alleviate women’s suffering under oil projects since it is clear that tackling one proximate cause or structural condition will not be sufficient. An ecofeminist approach, while beginning with women’s lived experience and agency, also provides a conceptual umbrella for challenging multiple unjustified hierarchies and so offers potential for building a transformative post-carbon agenda viable for a just and sustainable society.

Ethics and Emancipation Patricia Gualinga is human rights defender and indigenous rights defender of the Pueblo Kichwa de Sarayaku. The pueblo is a zone of sacrifice. Patricia Gualinga addressed the National Assembly of Ecuador in 2013, asking for ‘a zone of life [that] should exclude oil activity’, which in many ways encapsulates an ecofeminist ethical orientation towards the life-world3 and a political strategy to protect the life-world (AmazonWatch 2013). The strength of the ecofeminist approach lies in its power to examine and tackle all oppressive structures. The first step is to break down the process of dualistic thinking that has located women and indigenous people with nature, which has been constructed as the ‘less than human world’ (Plumwood 2002, p. 168). Deconstructing this dualistic thinking opens new opportunities to create a different, non-hierarchical and integrative way of viewing the world. Deconstructing also means moving beyond the ‘master identity’ and revaluing the contribution and moral worth of both women and nonhuman nature. Breaking down the

3 The world as immediately or directly experienced in the subjectivity of everyday life.

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process of dualist thinking is a better option than expanding the category of privilege to take in a few of the more human-like nonhumans (Plumwood 2002). While it is very difficult to tackle all oppressive structures simultaneously, there are a plethora of initiatives that try to break out of neoliberal processes and their androcentric, anthropocentric and ethnocentric tropes. In other words, although the dire situation of women in the oil zones is over-determined by multiple structural conditions and proximate causes, these are not totalising or completely overwhelming. The IML is not a static monolithic and totalising system. Rather, it is in constant movement with time and space to cope with its ecological and social contradictions (Brand and Wissen 2018). This is in this constant movement where spaces for counter-hegemonic alternatives open. Women are a part of these alternatives, and their engagement is based on their acute concerns about the impact of environmental degradation on their livelihood. The three illustrative cases in this study show how, in different ways, women have resisted or reshaped the agenda of oil projects. This resistance has worked on many fronts: local, national and international. Again, some particular national and local contexts can present particular opportunities to reshape the economic, political and social agenda in order to ease the negative impacts of oil projects. In these processes of resistance, more often than not, indigenous people conceptualise the environmental degradation caused by oil projects as nothing less than a threat to their survival (Turner and Benjamin 1993), and use a wide range of actions and strategies. These strategies vary from ‘sabotage and armed confrontation through lobbying efforts on the national and international states’ (Turner and Benjamin 1993). At the national level, the most advanced attempt to reshuffle burden-shifting practices and processes comes from Latin America’s neo-extractivism turn called the Pink Tide. Venezuela is an example (Chapter 4). Women have been at the forefront of this post-neoliberal tide and have pushed to reconfigure the socio-economic and ecological articulations that had been imposed by neoliberal extractivism and threatened their way of life. In this push, the ‘collective agency’ of indigenous women in particular has been demonstrated as they ‘develop new organisations and spaces to claim their rights and perspectives’ (Rousseau 2011, p. 5). As we will see in Chapter 4, Venezuela has made significant changes aiming to improve the lives of women, particularly the basic

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living conditions of poor women and their families. Women’s representation in political office has also improved (Friedman and Tabbush 2019) and offered optimism for further gender equality gains. As the post-neoliberal model has reversed to a more oppressive regime, its legacy is now being questioned. While some Left-leaning scholars and activists believe that the Pink Tide has ‘sufficiently overturned traditional structures of domination’ for long-lasting transformations in the Latin American political landscape, others are concerned about the lack of deeper structural gendered transformations that break down dualistic thinking (Gold and Zagato 2020, p. 1). Indeed, the more challenging elements of gender inequalities in these countries have arguably not been addressed. As we will see in the case of Venezuela, for instance, salary allocations for women performing care activities have contributed to lifting women out of poverty, but this policy has further entrenched the sexual division of labour confining women to the household. Even as they promote gender equality policies, Pink Tide governments continue to rely on heteropatriarchal relations of power and to privilege heterosexual men (Friedman and Tabbush 2019, p. 2). Overall, Blofield et al. find that gender equality issues were not on the original Pink Tide agenda, and attribute the slow improvement in this are to women’s political mobilisation that pushed reform (Blofield et al. 2017, p. 349). At the local level, there are a number of initiatives aiming to reshape the economic, political and social agenda of oil projects. In Nigeria for instance, community groups in the zones of sacrifice have directly negotiated with TOCs to push for more jobs for local people and to require TOCs to provide more schools and health care, or establish community welfare programs (Ezeokoli 2013, p. 5610). Women have pushed TOCs to clean up and stop the environmental pollution resulting from their activities. Similarly, in Ecuador, there have been initiatives to push governments and TOCs to clean up oil spills (Centre de Ressources sur les Entreprises et les Droits de l’Homme 2019). However, these initiatives, while helpful, are short term and bogged down by mismanagement and also only partially challenge the structural conditions and proximate causes of negative impacts of oil projects. The international level emerges as a more promising level of focus to reshape the economic, social and political agenda of oil projects. Transnational–local intersections are a source of transformative changes, as connected actions between NGOs, international organisations, civil

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society and national governments can provide the catalyst for alternative forms of development. The government of Ecuador’s attempt to halt further exploration and exploitation of its natural resources illustrates the dynamics of these transnational–local linkages. The Ispingo-TiputiniTimbochacha (ITT) initiative, introduced by new president Rafael Correa in 2007, was one of the world’s most innovative global environmental governance mechanisms that a government had implemented. The initiative was to leave nearly 900 million barrels of oil underground in an effort of co-responsibility with the world to combat climate change (Finer et al. 2010). Although the initiative itself was short-lived, several earlier steps provided the momentum for it: first, the creation of the Yasuni National Park in 1979; second, UNESCO’s role in defining and designating the park and surrounding areas as a ‘Man and Biosphere Reserve’ in 1989 (ELLA: Evidence and Lessons from Latin America 2012, p. 2; Harcourt 2014); and third, since the mid-1990s, the role of NGOs and local organisations such as Accion Ecologica, CONAIE, Bien Vivir or OilWatch calling for a moratorium on oil drilling (Martin 2015). Finally, when the ITT initiative was initiated, UNDP played a role in establishing the international environmental Trust Fund board that coordinates the action. The initiative also received international support from the German Parliament and the European Union (Haddad 2012). There are other important international avenues for tackling the challenges that oil-rich countries face in matters of oil revenue management, environmental degradation and closing the gap in the unequal gender distribution of risks and benefits. Transparency International, RevenueWatch, OilWatch and Oil Change International all provide policy recommendations for national-level management of oil revenues. The World Bank has developed frameworks and plans—an oil revenues management plan (ORMP), gender mainstreaming strategy framework, environmental management plan (EMP)and a ‘free, prior, informed consultation’ plan (FPICP)—all aiming (among other goals) to correct the unequal distribution of assets and benefits between men and women in oil-rich countries. These plans have become part of the World Bank’s strict conditions that—since 2000—have had to be implemented to obtain the financial involvement of the Bank for oil projects. Chapter 5 on the World Bank highlights the institution’s progress and limits in defining and addressing the structural conditions at the origin of the burden-shifting practices and processes of the IML, and Chapter 6 on the Chad– Cameroon Oil Pipeline provides a first-hand assessment of the capability

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of these frameworks and plans to correct the externalisation of the social and ecological costs of the IML. While they are found to be conducive in closing some gaps in the gendered distribution of risks and benefits of oil projects, they are too timid to challenge the structural conditions at the heart of the burden-shifting practices of the IML.

Conclusion To summarise, as we have seen, the aim of using an ecofeminist approach in this study is to provide the most comprehensive framework to analyse the negative impacts of oil projects on women. As an encompassing conceptual umbrella, the framework provides tools to understand the different layers of reinforcing structural conditions, and the proximate causes, that bear upon women in the zones of sacrifice. It conceptually traces back these structural conditions to the modern era where a new conceptualisation of nature was needed to facilitate the emergence of a new state and economic system. The re-conceptualisation of nature as a machine led to its exploitation, which was further extended to include women and indigenous people, legitimised through hierarchical dualistic thinking and aimed at externalising social and environmental costs for capital accumulation. Nowadays, models of development—as well as the neo-extractive model in Venezuela (see Chapter 4)—are infused with ideas and material practices developed in the modern era. Structural conditions bear upon both women and nature in the zones of sacrifice around oil extraction sites, where exploitative relations over women are represented by androcentric relations such as gender roles, the gender division of labour and the division between the private and public sphere, and exploitative relations over nature are represented by environmental degradation. The ecofeminist framework conceptually provides the tools to highlight how the zones of sacrifice are in fact produced by a set of oppressive structures that over-determine the fate of women, ranging from the local proximate causes of environmental degradation and violence against women to larger structural determinants at the national and international levels. According to an ecofeminist ethical framework, the multiplicity and connections between the causes of oppression of women in the zones of sacrifice suggest tackling all oppressive structures at once and rooting out dualistic thinking. In reality, this is admittedly very difficult to achieve. Nonetheless, as the structural conditions are over-determining but not

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totalising, spaces are being opened for transformative change. While at the national level, the paralysing effect of corruption and accumulation impedes any possibility of gaining traction for change, at the international level, transnational intersectionality between local social forces and sympathetic international organisations and non-government organisations can be sources of emancipation and agency for women. The next two chapters illustrate the different ways in which the zones of sacrifice of Nigeria and Venezuela have been produced through the structural conditions of the burden-shifting practices and processes of the IML and how women have tried to open spaces for emancipation.

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Valenzuela, Janine Romero. 2020. Natural Resource Governance, Grievances and Conflict. Frankfurt: Springer. Vargas, Gabriela Coronel, William W. Au, and Alberto Izzoti. 2020. “Public Health Issues from Crude-Oil Production in the Ecuadorian Amazon Territories.” Science of the Total Environment 719. Verbrugge, Boris, Beverly Besmanos, and Abbi Buxton. 2014. “Artisanal and Small-Scale Mining Protecting Those ‘Doing the Dirty Work’.” International Institute of Environment and Development. Watts, Michael. 1999. “Petro-Violence: Some Thoughts on Community, Extraction, and Political Ecology.” Berkeley Workshop on Environmental Politics, Working Paper 1. ———. 2001. “Petro-Violence: Community, Extraction, and Political Ecology of a Mythic Commodity.” In Violent Environments, edited by Nancy Lee Peluso and Michael Watts, 189–212. New York: Cornell University Press. ———. 2004. “Human Rights, Violence and the Oil Complex.” Economies of Violence Working Paper 2. ———. 2005. “Righteous Oil? Human Rights, the Oil Complex, and Corporate Social Responsibility.” Annual Review of Environment and Resources 30: 373– 407. Wichterich, Christa. 2015. “Contesting Green Growth, Connecting Care, Commons and enough.” In Practising Feminist Political Ecologies: Moving Beyond the “Green Economy”, edited by Wendy Hardcourt and Ingrid L. Nelson. London: Zed Books. World Petroleum Council and the Boston Consulting Group. 2017. “Untapped Reserves: Promoting Gender in Oil and Gas.” Boston. Yergin, Daniel. 2008. “The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power.” Simon & Schuster.

CHAPTER 3

Women in Nigeria: Mired in the Middle

Abstract This chapter highlights the negative impacts of the oil project on women’s lives in the Niger Delta in Nigeria and women’s resistance to it. Keywords Dispossession · Colonialism · Neoliberal development · Environmental degradation

In Nigeria, women are attempting to reshape the development agenda, as decades of oil exploitation have dispossessed them of their means of living and compromised their prospects for emancipation. The difficulties women face can be traced to the way the oil project was implemented, as oil zones are always at the receiving end of the burden-shifting practices and processes of the IML. Four closely intertwined dimensions contribute to women’s dispossession and vulnerability in the Niger Delta and explain women’s demand to halt oil exploitation: the political, economic, social and ecological dimensions. First, let’s explore how decades of oil wealth have not translated into well-being for all.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Helbert, Women, Gender and Oil Exploitation, Gender, Development and Social Change, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81803-6_3

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Oil Wealth, Abject Poverty Women have not benefited from the revenue streams of the oil industry. The Niger Delta has the largest oil reserves in the African continent and the eleventh largest in the world. It is at the heart of the Nigerian economy for its oil exportation complex, comprising the Port of Lagos and Port Harcourt. While in the 1960s Nigeria produced around 20,000 bpd, by the second quarter of 2020 average daily oil production had increased to 1.81 million barrels (Frynas and Paulo 2007; OPEC 2020), bringing an estimated US$5 billion a week of government revenue (Research and Markets 2020). However, there is a disconnect between the wealth generated by the Niger Delta region over decades and the local population’s standard of living. In 2018, nationwide, at least half of the population was found to live below the international poverty line of US$1.90. The Niger Delta has the highest poverty rate in Nigeria (Market Development and Partnership Initiatives in the Niger Delta 2018). In 2006, 70% of the Niger Delta population was found to be unemployed or underemployed. Poverty is unequally distributed between race, ethnicity, class and gender. Poverty among indigenous women in the Niger Delta is so abject that there are accounts of women doing ‘miniature jobs such as picking palm kernel shell for selling as a means of gas for cooking’ (Snapps 2011, p. 38). Indeed, while women actively participate in economic activities, the earnings from these activities are not enough for their domestic consumption requirements; this is not only due to their exclusion from decision-making on matters relating to their welfare (United Nations Development Programme 2006) but also gendered discriminative structures that impede their ability to fully participate in the economy. It has been shown that, for instance, while women participate in economic sectors such as cassava, palm oil, poultry production, the requirement of men’s approval for travel to markets, or for investing money in developing a business, impedes women from fully benefiting from these sectors (Market Development and the Partnership Initiatives in the Niger Delta Eluemunor 2018).

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Resource Plunder The oil industry in Nigeria emerged from a colonial–capitalist dynamic. When Britain, as the colonial power, needed more oil to fuel its industrialisation, it opened the door for British oil companies to prospect in Nigerian territories (Umejesi and Akpan 2013). Colonial authorities granted Shell D’Arcy, an alliance between Royal Dutch Shell and the British company William Knox D’Arcy, a prospecting licence to mainland Nigeria (Raji and Abejide 2013). The oil company then operated with little constraint; concerns of populations in oil zones were neglected and resistance was violently repressed (Asante 1979). In the post-colonial era, the colonial dynamics of resource extraction, dispossession, violence and resistance were perpetuated (Umejesi and Akpan 2013, p. 117). Post-colonial Nigeria inherited the colonial era’s centralised, undemocratic and authoritarian rules, which exacerbated ethnic tensions. Decades after independence, Nigeria was still unstable, in turmoil and riddled by military coups, dictatorships and resistance to oil exploitation, as different international, national and local forces used the state to control and secure access to oil zones (Zalik 2004). The state police were particularly violent and brutal, a legacy of the repressive and corrupt police presence that British colonial rule established, in repressing any resistance to the oil activities (Alemika 1993). Women were the first victims of these conflicts. Indeed, in Nigeria, women have been the ‘battleground’ of the violent struggle to gain access to and control over natural resources (Onyejekwe 2008). Various forms of sexual violence have been used as instruments of intimidation, a ‘tactic intended to strike fear’ into citizens and to ‘assert the state’s power over rebel forces and their communities’ (Amnesty International 2006; Lenning and Brightman 2009). Sexual violence particularly occurs when the ‘conflict between local communities, youth gangs, local and federal governments and multinational oil corporations is most concentrated’ (Lenning and Brightman 2009, p. 36). Assault, murder and rape by military forces have also been observed primarily in the Niger Delta, and police and security forces, both on duty and off duty, have been accused of raping the local women (Amnesty International 2006). Women thus become key targets of violence in the zones of sacrifice.

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An alliance was formed between the newly created Nigerian state and transnational companies, and the local bourgeoisie that organised a postcolonial economic development plan to increase oil production and secure the flow of natural resources out of the zones of sacrifice. Large-scale, capital-intensive investment programmes to intensify the exploitation of natural resources were believed to be the way forward to modernisation (Penrose 1976). The state, with the support of international organisations such as the World Bank and the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), was convinced that the adoption of Western political and economic institutions would place the country on the path to economic development, progress and modernity (Dibua 2006). This Western model of development was also believed to contribute to women’s emancipation, as it was thought that it had done so in European countries. Modernity, progress and development were thought to facilitate women’s entrance into the workforce (Scott 1995). However, the Western model of development imposed on women in the Niger Delta in the post-colonial era perpetuated the patriarchal, ethnocentric and anthropocentric habits of the colonial era that stymied their full access to the benefits of industrialisation (Dibua 2006). The economic pathway based on oil extraction instead perpetuated women’s dispossession from their land to leave room for oil exploitation, thwarting their possibility to benefit from oil wealth and emancipate (Snapps 2011). With the neoliberal turn in the 1980s, this economic path dependent on extractive industries and political turmoil continued unabated (Wengraf 2018). General Babangida, who came to power through a coup, decided to implement a structural adjustment programme (SAP), supported by the World Bank and the IMF. Economic austerity measures were believed to be the economic tools to fence off the deterioration in the general standard of living of the Nigerian population (Ihonvbere 1991). Part of this programme was the acceleration of deregulation, further privatisation and a consequent decrease in the state’s health and education services. The neoliberal SAP intensified the exploitation of natural resources by opening the oil sector even more to international markets while protecting private investment. It also led to the extension of concessions for oil exploration to other companies such as Exxon and Chevron Texaco. Currently, all TOCs operating in Nigeria are in joint venture partnerships with the Nigerian federal government, and in exchange for these close partnerships, the Nigerian government and military has cooperated

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with the oil companies to secure oil industry installations (Omeje 2011). This close relationship between the oil companies and the federal state has remained even under the rule of dictators. The programme had dire consequences for the population; women were impacted the most, as it led to increased poverty and vulnerability (Obasi 1997). Despite their major role on farms, women were not able to react to SAP reforms, as they did not have access to basic inputs of production. Male farmers were the main targets, as they were considered to be the breadwinners by the development planners (Dibua 2006), and because women generally grew food crops, they could not benefit from the SAP emphasis on support for cash crops and thus suffered a decrease in income. Research shows that the impact of adjustment on informal incomes was highly uneven and widened the gap between low-income and high-income activities and between male and female incomes (Meagher and Yunusa 1996). The neoliberal programme’s impacts based on intensive extractivism therefore increased women’s poverty and thwarted their possibilities of emancipation. After independence, land rights from colonial times were transferred to federal and state governments, whose unrestricted access to the land was sealed by the 1978 Land Use Act, the Petroleum Act 1969 and the Oil Pipelines Act 1956 (Ebeku 2002). In these acts, the federal government secured exclusive extractive rights over all minerals and particularly over the oil resources found in the Niger Delta region. This also ensured the federal government’s exclusive right to farm out oil mining rights to oil companies and receive rent and royalties in exchange (Ebeku 2002, p. 203). Land dispossession put pressure on land availability and hence on women’s ability to enjoy economic opportunities associated with farming. With the decolonial process, oil wealth continued to be siphoned out of the Niger Delta. Between 2005 and 2015, illicit financial flows of around US$8.6 billion were siphoned from Nigeria. General Abacha, the head of the Abacha military regime between 1993 and 1998, was accused of looting US$3–5 billion in public money (Enweremadu 2013). According to Transparency International, out of 180 countries, Nigeria is currently the 34th most corrupt state in the world (Corruption Perception Index 2019). The appropriation of oil wealth has led to a loss of revenue that could have been used to improve the Nigerian populations’ well-being by connecting households to the energy grid and enabling better education and health.

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The shortcomings of the neoliberal reforms led the freshly democratically elected Obasanjo in 1999 to try to correct the burden-shifting practices and processes of the hegemonic economic agenda and better redistribute the oil revenue. The correction—a set of policies inspired by World Bank’s good governance paradigm—comprised three areas: first, it re-oriented oil revenues toward the states of the Niger Delta; second, it enhanced environmental protection by putting in place more stringent guidelines (Okpanachi 2011); third, it implemented policies and initiatives to improve accountability and governance. The Obasanjo government also established a monitoring system to ensure that savings to the country of $1 billion a year would be earmarked for health, education, agriculture, power and water supplies, and submitted a ‘Fiscal Responsibility Bill’ to the National Assembly, requiring greater accountability in the management of government finances (Nanda 2006). However, while these good governance policies to improve rent distribution can only be welcome, they did little to improve the distribution of oil revenue, as they did not address the structural hierarchies or genderbased discriminatory practices of the economic order (Ezeokoli 2013). That is, the World Bank’s good governance-inspired package did not bring the promised outcomes.

Ecological Collapse Decades of oil exploitation to fuel the global market have brought the Niger Delta’s ecosystems to a point of ‘near collapse’, thwarting women’s ability to secure their basic human needs (Okonta and Douglas 2001, p. 2). Environmental degradation has a multiplier effect (Eregha and Irughe 2009), that is, in a context where most women in the Niger Delta are dependent on farming and fishing, the marginalisation of nature has further entrenched the marginalisation of women. From the colonial era to even now, little regulation, and especially scant environmental regulation, has been implemented to guarantee environmental safety and avoid pollution. TOCs use their overwhelming bargaining power to reduce transaction costs, water down environmental laws and ‘ride roughshod over the environmental rights of the peoples of the delta’ (Obi 2001, p. 178). The construction of pipelines did not improve access for people in these communities but rather ‘constrain[ed] their interaction with other communities’ (Ogwu 2011, p. 43). The communities were violently dispossessed of their land.

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While successive governments have designed some environmental laws that seek to conserve, guide, control and manage the exploitation of oil, they lack systematic monitoring and enforcement. In 2010, there were no government agencies responsible for overseeing the oil industry activities with regard to their environmental impacts (Ibaba 2010). Moreover, little has been done to restrict the TOCs’ externalisation of environmental costs. In 2012 it was estimated that, over the last five decades, approximately 9–13 million barrels of oil had been spilled within the Niger Delta region (Kadafa 2012), and according to Audrey Gaughran, the head of Business and Human Rights at Amnesty International, the level of pollution in the Niger Delta is under-reported (Obiakor 2013). Constantly, oil, gas from gas flaring and oil waste are dumped into the surrounding landscape. The effect is aggravated by a decaying infrastructure due to decades of neglect to cut down costs. For instance, natural gas flaring is an unavoidable by-product of the petroleum industry. It is the combustion of unwanted or excess gases and liquids released during normal or unplanned over-pressuring operations. Many industrial processes result in natural gas flaring, such as oil–gas extraction, and processes associated with refineries, chemical plants, the coal industry and landfills (Yunusa et al. 2016, pp. 617–620). While gas flaring was made illegal in Nigeria in 2005, the TOCs in the Niger Delta still burn 76% of the natural gas they extract with petroleum (Elvidge et al. 2009). Globally, Nigeria is one of the countries with the highest percentage of gas flaring per barrel of oil production (Yunusa et al. 2016). A healthier alternative would be to partially process the gas for domestic purposes, but Shell d’Arcy oil has declared that too expensive. Ironically, even though Nigeria has one of the largest natural gas reserves on the planet, it is still untapped for use but rather wasted in flaring, and local households still do not have access to energy from the grid. Gas flaring also has long-term environmental impacts on the surrounding area for at least one square kilometre radius (Omoweh 2005). Oil-induced environmental degradation has a multiplier effect on poverty (Opukri and Ibaba 2008). Environmental degradation leads to voluntary or involuntary migration (Opukri and Ibaba 2008). Those who decide to stay back face a shortage of land, appropriated by the oil industry, with the remainder destroyed by its environmental externalities (Opukri and Ibaba 2008). This pushes the population in the Niger Delta to farm on contaminated land and/or on land containing pipelines

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where leaks and spills are frequent. The pollution is particularly harsh on women because, for most, their main activity is subsistence farming. In 1995, around 70% of Ogoni farmers were women relying largely on the ecosystem in the mangrove forests as they fished, gathered seafood, used wood for fuel and planted vegetables for subsistence. Even today, women are the main food providers for families in rural areas, and agricultural practices still constitute the main source of livelihood and income in the Niger Delta (Olawepo and Fatulu 2012). Although farmers and landowners are paid compensation for loss of land due to pollution, as women are less likely to own any piece of land, they are less likely to get compensation and are more likely to farm on contaminated land due to poverty (Gabriel 2004). Pollution thereby impacts the health of the whole population and women in particular. Pollution due to oil is extremely harmful. The people living in the Niger Delta today must drink, cook and wash in polluted water. They eat contaminated fish. The land they use is destroyed by acid rain, as it contains highly toxic heavy metals. Acid rain destroys crops, farmlands, fauna and flora. The Nigerian government has shown a profound disregard for the safety of its population, and oil companies deliberately do not mitigate and prevent pollution and environmental damage there (Obiakor 2013). Extensive research on contamination and the Ogoni people has shown the potential hazards for people living close to oil exploitation sites. Pollution, acid rain and contamination are risk factors for rising cancer rates, as oil contains heavy metals (Ordinioha and Brisibe 2013; Gabriel 2004; United Nations Environmental Programme 2011) and have negative impacts on the health of the population (Gabriel 2004; United Nations Environmental Programme 2011). A correlation has also been found between unsafe drinking water and waterborne illnesses such as cholera, typhoid and diarrhoeal diseases (San Sebastian et al. 2002; Ordinioha and Brisibe 2013). Long periods of exposure to the heat of the flares can cause health problems such as bronchitis, chest pain, rheumatics and eye damage (Omoweh 2005). The extent of environmental degradation and a highly violent social environment has affected the mental health of the population. It has been shown that years of conflict, human rights abuses and longstanding violence, especially human-initiated disasters such as widespread environmental degradation, have intensified the suffering of those living in the oil zones. Indeed, a study comparing the living conditions of two villages in Nigeria was conducted by Beiser et al. (2010). The first village,

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which Beiser et al. call A, was heavily impacted by oil exploitation and has experienced oil spills, gas flaring and human rights abuses by the government, such as rape. The other village, which Beiser et al. call NA, was not affected by oil exploitation and associated human rights abuses and environmental degradation. The study showed a higher prevalence of post-traumatic stress disorder (PSTD) in Village A than in Village NA. The traumatic experiences are relived in the form of nightmares, flashbacks and intrusive thoughts (Beiser et al. 2010). The effects of environmental degradation, violence and human rights abuses, including assaults on mental health, can last for decades. The lack of public healthcare facilities in the region; low quality of public health services; high user fees; and shortage of drugs, equipment and personnel, all combined with persistently high unemployment and poverty rates have increased the vulnerability of the population, especially women in the Niger Delta zones of sacrifice (Olujuwom 2008). These health problems are exacerbated by years of policies prioritising international capital to the detriment of social services and have impeded the well-being of the local population. The multiplier effects of the negative impact of land dispossession, exclusion from the economic benefits of the oil project and the impact of environmental degradation have pushed women into unsafe environments, or trapped them there, to make ends meet. For instance, ‘women remain in abusive relationships because of the fear of surviving without income or a place to go’ (Johnson 2012). Poverty is so abject that family members, especially girls, have ‘to assume the role of breadwinner of the house through prostitution’ (Johnson 2012). Lack of education and opportunities, poverty and discrimination have allowed human trafficking to thrive in Nigeria, and women and children remain the most vulnerable. The oil industry fuels trafficking, as employees from oil companies and oil-related service companies patronise ill-regulated prostitution with few protections for women (Olujuwom 2008). Owing to this dire situation, women have consistently resisted oil activities in Nigeria.

Resistance The extent of domination of the local population, especially women, has not obliterated their agency. In other words, while the impact of oil exploitation has had multiple negative effects in the oil zones of the Niger Delta, it has not been totally disempowering. Rather, there has been a

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wide range of efforts to resist, push for a readjustment, reshape or challenge the hegemonic order altogether through violence and non-violent means. Women have been at the forefront of the resistance against pollution. In 1999 they began a global movement aiming to halt gas flaring. They issued the Abuja Declaration on Energy Sovereignty with 51 countries. The declaration proposed an alternative approach of corporations to the wider system of capital accumulation and to control environmental degradation (Brownhill and Turner 2009). This initiative was launched after several weeks of protests in the oil zones and was called ‘Operation Climate Change’. It was at first a 10-day programme of non-violent civil disobedience but ended up lasting several weeks, continuing despite ‘gross repression’ (Norman Wokoma 2005, p. 168). However, so far, gas flaring has not been interrupted. After a ground-breaking report by the UN Environmental Programme on oil pollution in Ogoniland in the Niger Delta, the UN recommended clean-up measures for the region. In 2016, women from the Niger Delta communities debated and discussed the implementation of the UNEP report and published a declaration sharing their stories and experiences of the devastating impacts of decades of oil pollution. There have also been many lawsuits to push the TOCs to either clean up the pollution or compensate for the damages caused. In 2012, the Bodo community filed a lawsuit against Shell in a London High Court, where they sought compensation for two oil spills and a pollution clean-up drive (Reuter 2012). In 2015, Shell agreed to a £55 million settlement for the cleanup. In 2008, three Nigerian villages sued Shell, as a Dutch company in a Dutch court of law, to compensate for and clean up the 2004 oil spill (Milieudefensie/Friends of the Earth Netherlands 2008). In 2016, the Nigerian government committed US$1 billion to clean up the pollution in the Niger Delta. However, these initiatives, pay-outs and funding have so far failed to deliver any result. It has been estimated that cleaning up the Niger Delta would cost at least US$520 billion and would take the next three decades (Sahara Reporters 2016). So far, Shell claims to have invested US$50 million to clean up, and the government of Nigeria has funded a US$10-million project. Amnesty International reports that Shell’s first steps into cleaning up have failed (Amnesty International UK 2020). The task of cleaning up is simply massive, way beyond the efforts made to date.

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Women have also negotiated with the TOCs for increasing economic opportunities. For instance, after the 2002 protests, the oil companies pledged to build schools, clinics, town halls and electricity and water systems (United Nations Foundation 2005, p. 27). The women also demanded that the oil companies ‘provide jobs for their husbands and sons, to provide clean water, electricity, healthcare and free education, to respect local customs and traditions by first of all negotiating with traditional leaders and elders, and to assist the people in setting up microeconomic enterprises’ (Norman Wokoma 2005, p. 176). The increasing awareness of the disproportionate impact of the oil projects on women and the obvious failure of the ‘trickle-down effect’ promised by neoliberal reforms have pushed oil companies such as Shell to promote capacitybuilding programmes for women (Ikelegbe 2005). For instance, the TOCs have tried to negotiate with the local community to ease tensions. In the first years of oil exploitation, the TOCs believed that they had no ‘legal or social obligation to provide development projects’ to the Niger Delta communities (Ezeokoli 2013). However, given the level of resistance against oil exploitation, the TOCs have tried to gain ‘a social license’ to operate through financing community welfare programmes (Ushie et al. 2011, p. 11). As such, the TOCs have spent around US$56 million sponsoring scholarships, funding micro-credit schemes for smallscale entrepreneurs, and on education and training programmes (Ushie et al.). However, the financial contribution of the TOCs has been considered ‘negligible’ compared to the profits that these companies have accumulated (Ushie et al. 2011). According to the Wall Street Journal, Royal Dutch Shell’s profit in the third quarter of 2018 was US$5.6 billion. Moreover, the community welfare programmes that the TOCs implemented did not correct the unequal and gendered distribution of oil benefits and risks. The programmes were based on the TOCs’ perception of the community’s needs (Nzeadibe et al. 2015) and informed by little community consultation. The lack of consultation was particularly damaging for women, as the TOCs have a culture of gender discrimination. As such, women reported that they were ignored during meetings that promoted the TOCs’ programmes and instead asked to prepare tea (Ezeokoli 2013). Additionally, women also complained that while the TOCs promised to invest in programmes, they never delivered on these promises (Ezeokoli 2013). These are patterns of neglecting the demands of the local population, particularly women.

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In 1999, the Niger Delta Women for Justice body marched to Government House at Port Harcourt, all dressed in black, with placards advocating dialogue. Following this non-violent march, the women were invited to participate in official conflict transformation meetings and conferences (United Nations Foundation 2005). In 2009, an amnesty programme was established by the Nigerian government as an attempt to ease decades of tensions and violence against the oil industry. It offered an amnesty for repentant militants if they freely surrendered their arms within 60 days. However, the programme failed as it did not address ‘the multilayered causes of peacelessness in the region’ (Agbiboa 2015, p. 390) and failed to include women and girls in its delivery. This failure was due to the masculine approach to the militancy of the amnesty programme and the denial of women’s activism in fighting against the oil industry (Amusan 2014, p. 5925).

Conclusion Women in the Niger Delta have consistently and actively tried to renegotiate their encounter with the burden-shifting practices and processes of the oil industry. Decades of oil exploitation to feed an energy-thirsty Western world has brought dispossession, poverty, violence and environmental degradation to the population of the Niger Delta. Despite their fierce resistance, women in the Niger Delta have been negatively impacted, as these practices and processes are underpinned by patriarchal, ethnocentric and anthropocentric views.

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Johnson, Lola. 2012. “Interview with Elsie Ijorogu-Reed: Niger Delta: Tackling Patriarchy, Poverty and Pollution.” Safe World for Women. https://www.asa feworldforwomen.org/global-news/africa/nigeria/3002-delta-women.html. Accessed 17 March 2021. Kadafa, Adati Ayuba. 2012. “Oil Exploration and Spillage in the Niger Delta of Nigeria.” Civil and Environmental Research 2 (2): 38–51. www.science.ira nk.org. Lenning, Emily, and Sara Brightman. 2009. “Oil, Rape and State Crime in Nigeria.” Critical Criminology 17 (1): 35–48. Meagher, Kate, and Mohammed-Bello Yunusa. 1996. “Passing the Buck: Structural Adjustment and the Nigerian Urban Informal Sector.” United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, Discussion Paper 75. Milieudefensie. 2008. “Milieudefensie’s Lawsuit Against Shell in Nigeria.” Amsterdam. Nanda, Ved P. 2006. “The ‘Good Governance’ Concept Revisited.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 603: 269–283. Norman Wokoma, Iyenemi. 2005. “Assessing Accomplishments of Women’s Nonviolent Direct Action in the Niger Delta.” In Gender and Peace Building in African, edited by Edith Natukunda-Togboa and Dina Rodriguez Montero. San Jose: University for Peace. Nzeadibe, T., C. Ajaero, and Mary B. Nwoke. 2015. “Rethinking CorporateCommunity Engagement in the Petro-Economy of the Niger Delta.” Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 36 (3): 376–93. Obasi, Emma. 1997. “Structural Adjustment and Gender Access to Education in Nigeria.” Gender & Education 9 (2): 161–78. Obi, Cyril I. 2001. The Changing Forms of Identity Politics in Nigeria Under Economic Adjustment: The Case of the Oil Minorities Movement of the Niger Delta. Goteborg: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet. Obiakor, Maximilian O. 2013. “Niger Delta Pollution—A Tragedy of the Commons.” Journal of Environmental Conservation Research 1 (2): 37. Ogwu, Friday Adejoh. 2011. “Challenges of Oil and Gas Pipeline Network and the Role of Physical Planners in Nigeria.” FORUM Ejournal 10: 41–51. Okonta, Ike, and Oronto Douglas. 2001. Where Vultures Feast: Shell, Human Rights, and Oil in the Niger Delta. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books. Okpanachi, Eyene. 2011. “Confronting the Governance Challenges of Developing Nigeria’s Extractive Industry: Policy and Performance in the Oil and Gas Sector.” Review of Policy Research 28 (1): 25–47. Olawepo, R. A., and Bola Fatulu. 2012. “Rural Women Farmers and Food Productivity in Nigeria: An Example from Ekiti Kwara, Nigeria.” Asian Social Science 8 (10): 108–17. Olujuwom, Tola. 2008. “Combating Trafficking in Person: A Case Study of Nigeria.” European Journal of Scientific Research 24 (1): 23–32.

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Omeje, Kenneth C. 2011. “Oil Conflict and Accumulation Politics in Nigeria.” Washington, DC: Environmental Change and Security Program. Omoweh, Daniel A. 2005. Shell: Petroleum Development Company, the State and Underdevelopment of Nigeris’s Niger Delta: A Study in Environmental Degradation. Trenton: Africa World Press, Inc. Onyejekwe, Chinese J. 2008. “Nigeria: The Dominance of Rape.” Journal of International Women’s Studies 10 (1): 48–63. OPEC. 2020. “World Oil Outlook.” Vienna: Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. Opukri, C. O., and Ibaba Samuel Ibaba. 2008. “Oil Induced Environmental Degradation and Internal Population Displacement in the Nigeria’s Niger Delta.” Journal of Sustainable Development in Africa 10 (1): 173–93. Ordinioha, Best, and Seiyefa Brisibe. 2013. “The Human Health Implications of Crude Oil Spills in the Niger Delta, Nigeria: An Interpretation of Published Studies.” Nigerian Medical Journal 54 (1): 10–16. Penrose, Edith. 1976. “Africa and the Oil Revolution: An Introduction.” African Affairs 75 (300): 277–83. Raji, Y., and S. Abejide. 2013. “Shell D’Arcy Exploration & the Discovery of Oil as Important Foreign Exchange Earnings in Ijawland of Niger Delta, C. 1940–1970.” Arabian Journal of Business and Management Review 2 (11): 22–33. Reporters, Sahara. 2016. “Ogoniland Is Not the Most Polluted Land in the Niger Delta Region.” Sahara Reporters. Research and Markets. 2020. “Nigeria Oil and Gas Report Q3 2015.” Dublin: Research and Markets. San Sebastian, M., B. Armstrong, and C. Stephens. 2002. “Outcomes of Pregnancy Among Women Living in the Proximity of Oil Fields in the Amazon Basin of Ecuador.” International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Health 8 (4): 312–19. Scott, Catherine V. 1995. Gender and Development: Rethinking Modernization and Dependency Theory. London: Lynne Rienner Publishers. Shirbon, Estelle. 2012. “Nigerians Sue Shell in London over Delta Pollution.” Reuter. Shoemaker, Jolynn, and Camille Pampell Conaway. 2005. “Conflict Prevention and Transformation: Women’s Vital Contributions.” Washington, DC: United Nations Foundation. Snapps, Obereh J. 2011. “Dynamics of Poverty Among Niger Delta Women: An Empirical Assessment.” American Review of Political Economy 9 (1): 33–44. Transparency International. 2019. “Corruption Perceptions Index 2019.” Berlin: Transparency International.

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CHAPTER 4

Venezuela—The Pink Tide Experiment

Abstract This chapter investigates how a collective approach to oil extraction has corrected—and where it has failed to correct—the gendered unequal distribution of its risks and benefits of the oil project. Keywords Collective ownership · Neo-extractivism · Gender inequalities · Corruption

Introduction The election of Hugo Chávez as president of Venezuela in 1998 marked the start of what became known as the ‘Pink Tide’ in Latin America. It was followed by the election of Lula da Silva in Brazil (2003), Evo Morales in Bolivia (2006) and Raphael Correa in Ecuador (2006). These governments shared a Left-wing agenda that aimed at easing the burdenshifting processes and practices of the IML that they believed were at the crux of rising inequalities and poverty in their respective countries. These leaders ran on platforms to re-shuffle the economic, social, political and ecological relationships of natural resource extraction and better redistribute the resulting wealth away from the processes of accumulation by dispossession and for the well-being of all. This new approach © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Helbert, Women, Gender and Oil Exploitation, Gender, Development and Social Change, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81803-6_4

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was called neo-extractivism. In Venezuela, women were at the forefront of shaping it, in the context of feminist and ‘post-development’ activism through which they had actively pushed for the implementation of new progressive policies to address gender inequalities by the newly elected government. The clear, point-in-time shift to a neo-extractivist, post-development model in Venezuela makes it possible to measure the impact of the approach, comparing ‘before’ and ‘after’ in ways that shed light on the various forces that shape the lives of women, indigenous peoples and local environments in the oil zones. Venezuela’s experiment provides an opportunity to examine two interrelated questions linked to the status of women in oil-rich developing countries: First, to what extent does the neo-extractive model adopted by Venezuela make a difference to the dynamics of oil dependence? Second, does a greater preoccupation with collective ownership and distributive justice make an appreciable difference to the lives of women, particularly those living around points of oil extraction? It will be shown that in the first 10 years of the broader socialist experiment in Venezuela, major improvements in matters of poverty and inequality were made, particularly for women. However, the attachment to commodity consensus and the failure to root out oppressive structures and corruption attached to the burden-shifting practices and processes of the IML ultimately jeopardised the success of the experiment and severely truncated positive outcomes in the oil zones.

The Transition to the Pink Tide Hugo Chávez was elected president of Venezuela in 1998 on the promise of making radical changes to the political, social and economic course of the country. The new model was believed to be able to reverse decades of economic independence from serving foreign interests—colonialism, peripheral status and Washington consensus—that had thwarted emancipation opportunities and brought poverty and inequality to the country. More specifically, the movement that emerged to put Chavez in power was motivated by resentment towards the austere measures of ‘la Apertura’ (Faria 2008, p. 525), implemented by President Perez in 1988 and the Caldera presidency in 1996. Inspired by the IMF-dictated austerity measures, La Apertura led to the increasing opening of new oil extractive

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zones to market forces, thereby causing an accentuation of oil exploitation—especially in the heavy oil belt of the Orinoco River Basin—the privatisation of the national oil company, Petroleos De Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA) (James Baker II Institute for Public Policy 2002) and the lifting of price control on basic commodities. It led to a profound crisis. The price of gasoline increased fivefold. The price of other basic commodities, including food staples, increased by 600% (Ellner 1996). This led to a massive increase in poverty. Between 1984 and 1995, poverty increased from 36 to 66%, while the proportion of those living in extreme poverty increased from 11 to 36% (Cummings 2003). La Apertura was the source of huge discontent and led to a decade of popular protests, unrest and insurrection. Along with the deteriorating political order came greater instability and legitimacy crises characterised by increasingly frequent coup attempts, an alarming increase in voter absenteeism, a growing use of corruption scandals as an instrument of political competition and the virtual disappearance of traditional political parties (Di John 2009). This is against the backdrop of the economic and political crises that demand for change emerged.

Progressive Policies for Women Decades of women’s leadership and activism in clandestine political movements, particularly the work of Marelis Perez Marcano and Maria Leon, were instrumental in designing the post-development project and in convincing Chávez to integrate women’s distinct needs into the constitution (Kampwirth 2010, p. 181). Three major reforms were implemented: articles in the new constitution were dedicated to addressing gender inequality, resulting in the creation of BanMujer. Article 88 in the new constitution recognises women’s caring activities in the house as a contribution to the economy, as it creates added value and produces social welfare and wealth. It also states that ‘the state guarantees equality and equity between men and women in the exercise of their right to work’ (Fischer-Hoffman 2006, p. 1). The recognition and treatment of women’s caring activities like any other economic activity triggered the demand for further rights available to other workers, such as access to social security. The implementation of Article 88 began in 1999 in the form of payment from the state through a programme called Misión Madres del Barrio (Mission Mothers of the Shanty-Town) (Fischer-Hoffman

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2008, p. 79). 100,000 Venezuelan female heads of household started to receive US$185 per month, about 80% of the Venezuelan minimum wage, followed by a second set of female heads of household six months later. They also have the right to a pre- and post-natal subsidy. As Selma James—coordinator of the Global Women’s Strike, a grassroots network with national coordination in a number of countries like Venezuela—stated following the implementation of this Article, ‘caring for others is accomplished by a dazzling array of skills in an endless variety of circumstances. As well as cooking, shopping, cleaning, laundering, planting, tending, harvesting for others, women comfort and guide, nurse and teach, arrange and advise, discipline and encourage, fight for and pacify’(Fischer-Hoffman 2006, p. 1). Other progressive policies, specific to women’s issues were implemented: Article 91 gives women the right to equal pay for equal work, and Article 21 gives them the right to a life without violence or discrimination. Moreover, land reform established that women farm producers who suffer poverty have the right to own their land. In 2001, the Women’s Development Bank—BanMujer—was created, headed by Nora Castaneda, who was instrumental in its development. The origin of BanMujer can be traced back to a parallel forum at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, focussing on a new economic framework for women’s development. The forum wanted to tackle poverty in order ‘to transform power relations subordinating women’ and which impede them from enjoying their fundamental rights (Munoz Cabrera 2012, p. 64). The subsequent framework called for a special bank for women that would give grants and small loans. This special bank would have a different approach to the poverty alleviation programmes of the World Bank and its ‘one size fits all’ programmes, instead allocating loans and small grants based on women’s own priorities and culture of production (Munoz Cabrera 2012, p. 75). BanMujer was established based on these principles and—importantly—is not seen as an instrument of market demand but rather a solidarity tool to satisfy individual and collective needs. Women also have ownership of the activities that they carry out and decide on the types of projects they want to engage in (Munoz Cabrera 2012, p. 75). Castaneda claimed that when the bank was established, it triggers the creation of jobs that decreased the unemployment rate among women by approximately 20% in February 2003 (Foreign Affairs 2006, p. 24). By December 2003, the unemployment rate had fallen to 15.5%. BanMujer had benefited more than

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100,000 families by 2011, and 70% of the beneficiaries were women (Correo del Orinoco 2011). The recognition of women’s caring activities as being fully part of the overall economy is major progressive policy attempts to address some of the oppressive structures that bear upon women in Venezuela. However, the extent to which the policy challenges the sexual division of labour, and the risk they pose of reproducing and reinforcing gender roles, has meant its overall impact has been limited.

Missions Another major part of the Chavez government’s post-development plan was to implement ‘missions’—participatory, community-led initiatives— that encompassed a wide range of social justice programmes such as social welfare, anti-poverty, educational and health programmes. The missions aimed at rectifying accumulation by dispossession processes for a better redistribution of oil revenues. The organisational framework of these missions was based on the local participatory budgeting process in Porto Alegre, Brazil, which was organised by committees of up to 10 people chosen from an assembly of citizens (200–400 families in urban areas and 20 families in rural areas). In Venezuela, the Mission efforts concentrated on satisfying urgent social needs, increasing community participation and getting around certain bureaucratic obstacles (Armada et al. 2009). At first, they ran parallel to the existing structures with newer, more efficient mechanisms, but aimed at eventually replacing the old structures (Mahmood et al. 2013). ‘Thanks to the mission’, as one participant, Cecilia, testified, ‘Well, now that I can read and write, I can go out and I know where I’m going. I can see which bus to get on. I’m really happy because I knew very little. What we were taught when I was young was almost nothing. I never reckoned I would learn more. And now I’ve really got on. But I never imagined we’d get a president who was so much better than all the previous ones’ (Bruce 2008, p. 21). One of the most successful missions was the Misión Barrio Adentro (Mission Within the Neighbourhood): a new healthcare programme (Armada et al. 2009). It aimed at improving the health of all Venezuelans, especially the marginalised, providing publicly funded health care, dental care and sports training (Muntaner et al. 2006). An ‘oil-for-doctor’ exchange programme—Medicina Integral Comunitaria (MIC—‘comprehensive community medicine’)—established by the government as part of

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their South–South Aid model also allowed doctors from Cuba help with the Misión Barrio Adentro (Feinsilver 2008).

Indigenous Rights The Venezuelan post-development project aimed to reshape relationships with indigenous people by breaking out of the patterns of appropriation, forced displacement, violation, violence and discrimination that were previously used to get access to their natural resources, particularly oil. There was an endless list of infringements on indigenous lands and territories, with a deeply wounded indigenous community, dating back to the colonial era (Blanchet-Cohen and Fernandez 2003). The new 1999 constitution established reparations for the atrocities and injustices that had been committed against indigenous Venezuelans. It recognised the existence of indigenous peoples and communities, their social, political and economic organisation, their cultures, practices and customs, languages and religions, as well as their habitat and original rights to the lands they ancestrally and traditionally occupied and which are necessary to develop and guarantee their way of life (Domingo Sánchez 2002). It also recognised the right of indigenous peoples to ‘maintain and promote their own economic practices based on reciprocity, solidarity and exchange, their traditional productive activities and their participation in the national economy’ (Domingo Sánchez 2002, p. 7), and protected collective intellectual property, the right to lands and to benefit from the exploitation of natural resources (Blanchet-Cohen and Fernandez 2003). Indigenous rights to their own autonomous education was granted, which led to the creation of the Indigenous University of Venezuela. As Wadajaniyu, a rector and one of the founders of the University, says, ‘We are teaching in the jungle here. In the jungle, we learn how to sing the traditional songs and to tell our stories’ (Martinez et al. 2010, p. 194). Another aspect of the new relationship between Venezuela and its indigenous communities was the indigenous women’s advocacy. The Wayuu women’s network and the Yukpa women’s association pre-dated the Chavez government and sought to the mission to reclaim the traditional leadership of their matriarchal society. Women participating in these two different movements lobbied the new government for specific mention of the rights of indigenous children in the constitution, and played an active role in ‘indigenising’ child rights, building bridges

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between the UNICEF Convention of the Rights of the Child (CRC) and the reality of the indigenous communities in Venezuela. They claimed that children participated actively in the cultural life of the community and, as such, their presence in meetings, on boards and at conferences should be recognised. An indigenous adaptation of Article 12 of the CRC, which states that a child has the right to express his or her view in all decisions that affect him or her, was also adopted in the constitution (Blanchet-Cohen and Fernandez 2003).

Re-weaving Global Relations The 1998 vote for Chavez was also, in large part, a vote to end Venezuela’s unequal relationships with the IML and reweave new, equal ones. Venezuela’s economic dependence on oil export was believed to be at the source of these unbalanced relationships. There was a desire to reframe existing relationships based on exploitative extraction of primary commodities towards non-exploitative trading relationships among independent countries. A number of entities sealed these new relationships: the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), the Bank of the South and a range of South–South partnerships. These entities aimed to replace the role of the Washington-based institutions responsible for promoting the Washington consensus (namely the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank and United States Department of the Treasury), and to develop alternative international relations outside the North–South relations in order to end the peripheral status of Venezuela.

The Initial Successes of the Post-development Project One of the primary objectives of the alternative model was to recapture Venezuela’s oil revenue to better redistribute it. The first step towards this goal was to re-nationalise the oil PDVSA to better control its revenue. The result, over the first 10 years, was very positive. Between 2003 and 2012, the percentage of households living in poverty declined by more than half, from 54 to 30% (WBG 2015). Between 2003 and 2008, extreme poverty decreased to 7%, a decline of 72% (Center for Economic and Policy Research 2009). A focus of the social, political and economic attention on the needs and specific situations of the marginalised resulted in significant improvements to literacy, education and child and infant

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mortality. Around three million Venezuelans enrolled in one of the three, free educational missions—basic adult literacy, primary school equivalency and university. One beneficiary of the Misión Ribas free education programme, Greydaris Motta, said, ‘I didn’t finish school because my parents didn’t have much money and then I got pregnant’. She was able to work towards her law degree while caring for three boys: ‘If I study, maybe my boys will follow my example’ (cited in Bruce 2008, p. 18). The first ten years of the new model also saw improvements in job quality and a decrease in unemployment (Center for Economic and Policy Research 2009). The post-development progressive policies were fuelled by oil revenues for better redistributive justice.

The Collapse of the Venezuelan Socialist Revolution While the post-development model was successful in capturing more oil revenues for a better redistribution through the nationalisation of its oil industry, this was done at the detriment of its dependence on the world economic order. Rather than ceasing its oil dependence, Venezuela under its alternative model actually increased its dependence on the world economic order and its processes and practices as the whole redistributive structure relied on increased oil production for the international market. For instance, the Orinoco Belt was open for exploitation of extra heavy oil to fence of the depletion of the conventional oil in the Maracaibo Lake (Resistance Bulletin, Oil Watch 2006; Montilva et al. 2002). Thus, despite advocating for a different approach to its oil industry, Venezuela, like Nigeria, saw heavy and increasing dependence on oil production as its way out of economic and political trouble. To the further detriment of women, disadvantaged communities and the Venezuelan people, the ‘corruptocracia’ that Chávez promised to reign in worsened under his presidency and that of his successor. Rather than offering corrupt-proof alternatives, mission structures have reproduced many of the corrupt and predatory behaviours of the old system, jeopardising the success of the model overall and in the long run. The increase in corruption has led to widespread violence (BricenoLeon 2006; Mahler 2009), and the increased violence has particularly impacted women, with domestic violence spiralling despite the government’s Organic Law on the Right of Women to a life free of violence (Stillman 2009).

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The increased addiction to oil has exacerbated environmental risks. Decaying infrastructure and the accentuation of oil extraction have increased environmental destruction and conflicts (Baynard 2011; TeranMantovani 2018; The Washington Post 2020). Neither Venezuela with its socialist approach nor Nigeria with its capitalist approach to oil extraction has been able to question their models of development’s exploitative relationship with nature and their consequences. Both systems see an increase in natural exploitation as the pathway to development and progress, with little regard to the environmental toll (Gabaldon 2013). Decades of oil exploitation in Lake Maracaibo (northeast of Venezuela) have led to enormous degradation, with visitors reporting: ‘During my trip, I saw the result of the long-standing neglect. I rode to an area known only as R10. There I spotted wells spewing oil into people’s backyards. Most of the houses were made of concrete or aluminium. In one house I spotted a pool of green toxic waste at the front of the door. Nearby, oil leaked onto the ground where children were playing. Meanwhile, flames spewed from a pipeline’ (Kozkoff 2007, p. 9). Journalist Alexis Lemoine noted a forest of derricks on a sea of oil, where dark oil slicks spread from the middle of the lake towards the shore—wetlands, mangroves, beaches and docks (Le Monde Diplomatique 2007, p. 14). Oil spills have permeated fishing nets, coated garbage dumped into water and killed wildlife (Inter Press Service News Agency 2010). Environmental disasters have also occurred around the Orinoco area. In 2012, there was a huge oil spill in Monagas State in the northeast of Venezuela. An estimated 200,000–300,000 barrels of oil were spilled into the Guarapiche River, necessitating interruption of the water supply (Oil Spill Intelligence Report 2012). Another oil spill was reported on a strip of Venezuela’s western coastline in 2020 (Reuters 2020). The level of pollution has increased health risks for the whole population. Consequently, the post-development model’s unquestioned addiction to oil has created new zones of sacrifice and perpetuated the oppressive structures that bear upon them (Teran-Mantovani 2018). While the new 1999 constitution introduced indigenous land rights provisions that have seen significant territories formally returned to their indigenous owners, it also stipulates that any new exploration and exploitation of natural resources requires the consent of indigenous communities when on their territory (Le Monde Diplomatique 2007, p. 15). For community land claims on territories that are assumed to have substantial levels of extra heavy oil that the government plans to exploit, a comprehensive response

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to land claims remains elusive (Martinez et al. 2010, p. 196). For instance, the opening of land in the Orinoco Belt for the exploitation of unconventional oil did not adhere to government policies and necessary procedures for a consent-based relationship with the Warao indigenous community (Rosales 2017). Rather, local communities were pushed off their ancestral lands, forests were cleared and fish-bearing river flows were interrupted for the oil industry (Rosales 2017, p. 132). The expansion of the oil industry and the creation of new zones of sacrifice have further exacerbated the urban/rural divide, where indigenous communities in the oil zones bear the burden of the country’s addiction to oil revenues. While these communities may have benefited in some part from broader redistributive justice policies, they have been directly and negatively impacted by extractive activities that damage, pollute and restrain their access to their land, freshwater and firewood. Women are particularly affected: their survival as food providers depends on their surrounding environment, and oil exploitation means loss of livelihood. Community displacement, dispossession and loss of ancestral land and consequent culture perpetuate the damage (Martinez et al. 2010). While in the initial years of the alternative model, the entire population benefited from the redistributive justice policies, the mostly rural population in the zones of sacrifice continued to bear the burden of oil activities, exacerbating the divide with urban centres. Venezuela’s economic dependence on the international oil market and oil capital has not waned either. It has rather been rearticulated towards China (Yin-Hang To and Acuna 2019), keen to support Venezuela. China invested US$62 billion in development projects in Venezuela between 2007 and 2017, and oil exports to China increased from 14,000 bpd in 2004 to 700,000 bpd in 2015 (Petroleum Economist 2015). The dependence on China’s investment runs the risk of repeating past social and environmental practices of burden-shifting for accumulation (Moran et al. 2012), demanding ever-increasing oil production and exacerbating the negative impacts on the zones of sacrifice. The heavy dependence on oil extraction and revenue is also destabilised by the vagaries of the international oil price. In the initial years, the postdevelopment model was able to take advantage of an unusually high oil price to battle poverty. During the decade of the Chavez presidency, the price of oil went from US$16 a barrel in 1999 to US$101.06 in 2011 and a reached a peak of US$103 in 2012 (Parenti 2005, p. 17; Puente 2012). By the middle of 2020, the price had returned to that of the first year of

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Chávez presidency. For a country so dependent on oil revenues, any fall in price puts enormous pressure on government revenues and hence on its ability to fund progressive policies. Last, the socialist experiment has fallen into autocracy. At first, the model promoted participative democracy, particularly through the missions. But despite calls to open democratic debates, Chávez and his successor, Nicolás Maduro, seemed too often to have the last word. Chávez, for instance, claimed to ‘own the truth and used weekly radio programmes to address the Venezuelan population through television to spread his truth’ (Kampwirth 2010, p. 186). This obvious political populism was reinforced by Chávez setting himself up as the only one who could solve Venezuela’s problems (Kampwirth 2010, p. 189). But while Chávez and Maduro were keen to use the media to spread their truth, they were less keen to allow others to do so. The two leaders have systematically undermined the right to free expression, along with other rights such as freedom of association. Human Rights Watch has called Venezuela a ‘precarious democracy’, citing the government’s ruling against basic democratic norms, such as the principle of the separation of powers (Human Rights Watch 2012, p. 14; Corrales 2020). The survival of what is left of Venezuelan democracy is in the hands of the political opposition, who have been supportive of the US, which has, in turn, put harsh economic sanctions on the Venezuelan economy. The precarious state of democracy in Venezuela poses a serious challenge to the progress of women’s emancipation, as a suppressed democratic voice hinders any potential say in the distribution of the oil wealth.

Conclusion In the first 10 years of the post-development experiment, women in Venezuela were able to create spaces for their emancipation. Although these spaces have opened narrowly, women in Venezuela were much more likely to benefit from redistributive policies, especially if compared to how they fared under the private ownership model of Nigeria. However, in the long run, these limited social advances were thwarted by the failure of the alternative approach to overcome the pitfalls of the Washington consensus model. In other words, the Venezuelan model did address some of the oppressive structures bearing upon women, but did not address the totality of the oppressive structures of the burden-shifting practices and processes of the IML. The Venezuelan experiment—just

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like the neoliberal model in Nigeria—saw oil production as the pathway to development and progress. Both models remain reliant on extraction practices that fail to question the complex relationship between human and non-human nature, and the human consequences of this failure. Despite the Venezuelan model’s will to reshape local, national and international relationships, it remains bound to the practices and processes of capital accumulation through dispossession of its own natural resources. The cumulative effect of overdependence on oil, the collapse of oil prices, US economic sanctions, an authoritarian government and struggle to control oil revenues have led the Venezuelan model into profound crisis. The crisis is visible in food insecurity, malnutrition, violence and massive exodus (UNHCR 2019; The Guardian 2019; Doocy et al. 2019), along with a health system in free fall, and a resurgence of vaccine-preventable diseases, even pre-COVID-19 (Paniz-Mondolfi et al. 2019). For instance, the circulation of measles, interrupted by the Chávez government’s mass vaccination programme of 2007, re-emerged in 2017 (Paniz-Mondolfi et al. 2019). Women have suffered the brunt of the crisis; they are more vulnerable to poverty, to neglect by the state and, especially, to violence. As in Nigeria, many are turning to prostitution to make ends meet, and they are also more likely to be victims of human rights violations in the form of trafficking, exploitation and abuse. What was called a feminist revolution at the start of the experiment has now become a nightmare. The collective ownership structure of the Venezuelan experiment would have more force in altering the burden-shifting practices and processes of the IML if it were accompanied by a true, genuine democracy. This would enhance transparency and accountability over the use of oil wealth and hence improve the efficiency of redistributive justice policies. Women would be better off with a genuine participative democracy, as they would be more involved in decision-making processes not only on matters of gender relations but also on the use of oil wealth. Given the negative impacts of oil economic dependence, a truly democratic socialist state would also revisit the complex relationship between human and nonhuman nature. A genuine democracy would open conversation about land use. The next chapter will highlight some of the international avenues that can help to strengthen democratic structures for better transparency and accountability in the context of natural resource management.

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References Armada, Francisco, Carles Muntaner, Haejoo Chung, Leslie Williams-Brennan, and Joan Benach. 2009. “Barrio Adentro and the Reduction of Health Inequalities in Venezuela: An Appraisal of the First Years.” International Journal of Health Services 39 (1): 161–87. Baynard, Chris W. 2011. “The Landscape Infrastructure Footprint of Oil Development: Venezuela’s Heavy Oil Belt.” Ecological Indicators 11 (3): 789–810. Blanchet-Cohen, Natasha, and Ali Fernandez. 2003. “Women as Generators of Children’s Rights. The Story of Promoting Indigenous Children’s Rights in Venezuela.” The International Journal of Children’s Rights 11: 33–49. Briceno-Leon, Roberto. 2006. “Violence in Venezuela: Oil Rent and Political Crisis.” Ciencia & Saude Coletiva 11 (2): 315–25. Bruce, Iain. 2008. The Real Venezuela: Making Socialism in the Twenty-First Century. London: Pluto Press. Castaneda, J.G. 2006. “Latin America’s Left Turn.” Foreign Affairs 85 (3): 28– 43. Center for Economic and Policy Research. 2009. “The Chávez Administration at 10 Years: The Economy and Social Indicators.” Washington, DC: Center for Economic and Policy Research. Corrales, Javier. 2020. “Authoritarian Survival: Why Maduro Hasn’t Fallen.” Journal of Democracy 31 (3): 39–53. Cummings, Sally N. 2003. Oil, Transition and Security in Central Asia. London: Routledge. Di John, Jonathan. 2009. From Windfall to Curse? Oil and Industrialisation in Venezuela, 1920 to the Present. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Domingo Sánchez, P. 2002. “A New Reality for Venezuela’s Indigenous Peoples.” Issues in Indigenous Caribbean Studies IV (2): 18–29. Doocy, Shannon, Mija Tesse Ververs, Paul Spiegel, and Chris Beyrer. 2019. “The Food Security and Nutrition Crisis in Venezuela.” Social Science and Medicine 226 (April): 63–68. Ellner, Steve. 1996. “Venezuela Turns Toward Neoliberalism.” NACLA Report on the Americas 30 (1). Faria, Higo J. 2008. “Hugo Chavez Against the Backdrop of Venezuelan Economic and Political History.” The Independent Review XII (4): 519–35. Feinsilver, Julie M. 2008. “Médicos por petróleo: La diplomacia médica Cubana recibe una pequena ayuda de sus amigos.” Nueva Sociedad 216: 107–122. Fischer-Hoffman, Cory. 2006. “Venezuela Leads the Way: Welfare Mothers and Grassroots Women Are the Workers for Social Change.” Upside Down World.

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———. 2008. “Misión madres del barrio: A Bolivarian Social Program Recognizing Housework and Creating a Caring Economy in Venezuela.” Graduate Degree Program in Latin American Studies. Lawrence: University of Kansas. Gabaldon, Arnold J. 2013. “Environmental Challenges of an Oil-Rent Based Economy.” Politeja 2 (24): 327–38. Human Rights Watch. 2012. “Tightening the Grip: Concentration and Abuse of Power in Chavez’s Venezuela.” New York: Human Rights Watch. James A. Baker III Institute. 2002. “The Orinoco Heavy Oil Belt in Venezuela (or Heavy Oil to the Rescue?).” Edited by Manik Talwani. Houston: The James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy of Rice University. Kampwirth, Karen. 2010. Gender and Populism in Latin America: Passionate Politics. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Kozkoff, Nikolas. 2007. Hugo Chavez: Oil, Politics and the Challenge to the U.S. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Lemoine, Maurice, and Alexis Lemoine. 2007. “Au Venezuela, voyage en pays indien.” Le Monde Diplomatique. Lovera Calanche, Luis. 2011. “Banmujer ha beneficiado 2 millones 500 mil personas con entrega de 138 mil microcréditos.” Correo Del Orinoco. Mahler, Annegret. 2009. “Oil in Venezuela: Triggering Violence or Ensuring Stability? A Context-Sensitive Analysis of the Ambivalent Impact of Resource Abundance.” German Institute of Global and Area Studies Working Paper 112. Mahmood, Qamar, Carles Muntaner, Rosicar Del Valle Mata Leon, and Ramon E Perdomo. 2013. “Popular Participation in Venezuela’s Barrio Adentro Health Reform.” Globalizations 9 (6): 815–33. Márquez, Humberto. 2010. “Venezuela: Chronic Oil Leaks Sully Lake Maracaibo, Livelihoods.” Inter Press Service News Agency. Montevideo, Uruguay: Interpress Service News Agency. Martinez, Carlos, Michael Fox, and JoJo Arrell. 2010. Venezuela Speaks! Voices from the Grassroots. Oakland: PM Press. Montilva, Julio, Catalin D. Ivan, James Freidheim, and Rafael Bayter. 2002. “Aphron Drilling Fluid: Field Lessons from Successful Application in Drilling Depleted Reservoirs in Lake Maracaibo.” Offshore Technology Conference. Offshore Technology Conference, Houston, TX. Moran, Theodore, Barbara R. Kotschwar, and Julia Muir. 2012. “Chinese Investment in Latin American Resources: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.” Peterson Institute for International Economics Working Paper 12–3. Munoz Cabrera, Patricia. 2012. “Economic Alternatives for Gender and Social Justice: Voices and Visions from Latin America.” Policy & Practice: A Development Education Review 14: 64–84.

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Muntaner, Carles, René M. Guerra Salazar, Sergio Rueda, and Francisco Armada. 2006. “Challenging the Neoliberal Trend: The Venzuelan Health Care Reform Alternative.” Canadian Journal of Public Health 97 (6): 19–24. Oil Spill Intelligence Report and Aspen Publisher. 2012. “Water Disrupted by Venezuelan Spill.” Vol. 35, 9. Caracas: Oil Spill Intelligence Report. Oil Watch. 2006. “Politics Linked to Climate Change.” Resistance Bulletin. Port Harcourt, Nigeria: Oil Watch. Paniz-Mondolfi, Alberto E., Adriana Tami, Maria E. Grillet, Marilianna Márquez, Juan Hernández-Villena, María A. Escalona-Rodríguez, Gabriela M. Blohm, et al. 2019. “Resurgence of Vaccine-Preventable Diseases in Venezuela as a Regional Public Health Threat in the Americas.” Emerging Infectious Diseases 25 (4): 625–32. Parenti, Christian. 2005. “Hugo Chávez and Petro Populism.” The Nation 280 (14): 15–21. Petroleum Economist. 2015. “Venezuela Borrows $5bn More.” Petroleum Economist. Phillips, Tom. 2019. “Venezuela’s ‘Staggering’ Exodus Reaches 4 Million, UN refugees Agency Says.” The Guardian. Puente, Jose M. 2012. “Rente et révolution. L’économie politique Vénézuélienne pendant les présidences d’Hugo Chávez.” Problèmes d’Amérique Latine 87: 115–23. Reuters. 2020. “Venezuela Coast Could Take Half a Century to Recover from Oil Spill, Researcher Says.” Reuters. Rosales, Antulio. 2017. “Venezuela’s Deepening Logic of Extraction.” NACLA Report on the Americas 49 (2). Stillman, Amy. 2009. “Chávez Is Failing Women.” New Statesman 138 (4964): 12–13. Teran-Mantovani, Emiliano. 2018. “Inside and Beyond the Petro-State Frontiers: Geography of Environmental Conflicts in Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution.” Sustainable Science 13: 677–91. The World Bank Group. 2015. “Poverty and Equity Database.” Washington, DC: The World Bank UNHCR. 2019. “Refugees and Migrants from Venezuela Top 4 Million.” New York. Yin-Hang To, Emma, and Rodrigo Acuna. 2019. “China and Venezuela: South-South Cooperation or Rearticulated Dependency.” Latin American Perspectives 46 (2): 126–40. Zuniga, Mariana, and Anthony Faiola. 2020. “Venezuela’s Broken Oil Industry Is Spewing Crude into the Caribbean Sea.” The Washington Post.

CHAPTER 5

The World Bank: Bringing Women to the Fore?

Abstract This chapter investigates the relationship between gender equality in oil projects and the World Bank. Keywords Gender mainstreaming · Good governance framework · Conceptual shortcomings

Introduction The World Bank is one of the most significant international avenues that exist to address oppressive structures bearing upon women in the zones of sacrifice. As local/global connections often transcend the national level, international organisations like the Bank may offer opportunities to promote policies for emancipatory change. This chapter will show that there have been efforts by the Bank at the policy level to mainstream gender in all aspects of development. However, these alterations have been circumscribed by the Bank’s commitment to neoliberalism and its conceptual shortcomings. These circumscriptions have hampered the ability of the Bank’s good governance package to fence off the burden-shifting practices and processes of the IML at the

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operational level. In this chapter, the following questions will be examined: How does the World Bank policy framework assess the unequal impacts of oil projects along gender lines? Is the good governance framework strong enough to correct the externalisation of economic, social and ecological costs to the benefit of the local population? Is mainstreaming gender into policy agendas sufficient to correct the unequal distribution of the risks and benefits of the oil projects?

The World Bank: A Strong Player The World Bank is a significant international avenue of change, as a key financial player for oil and gas projects. Although it decided to end financial support for oil and gas extractions projects in 2019 in order to comply with the Conferences of the Parties 21, prior to this date, it heavily financed a long list of such projects. In 2000, it committed US$3.7 billion to one of the largest private-sector investments in Africa: the Chad– Cameroon oil pipeline (Bray 2003). It also provided funds for oil and gas projects such as the Azeri-Chirag-Deepwater Gunashli oil field, the BakuTbilisi-Ceyhan Pipeline, the Lion Oilfield and Panthere gas field offshore of the Ivory Coast, the two oil fields offshore of Ghana. It also invested, in different capacities, in oil projects in Azerbaijan, Mozambique, Egypt, Indonesia, Uganda, Peru, Papua New Guinea and Niger (WBG 2013b). Moreover, the World Bank’s seal of approval and its unique type of risk mitigation provide powerful incentives for foreign direct investment in oil projects (Sinclair 1998). The World Bank is a key player in designing programmes to accompany oil projects. Under the leadership of James Wolfensohn (president from 1995 to 2005), the Bank began to present itself as a ‘Knowledge Bank’ (Kramarz and Momani 2013), with a view to harnessing its extensive expertise and experience in development programme design to mitigate the negative impacts of oil projects at the local and national levels. More recently, several strategic policy frameworks have been developed to improve women’s integration in all phases of oil project development and implementation, noting that ‘due to patriarchal social structures and traditional gendered divisions of labour, women often bear a greater proportion of the stress associated with oil-induced social and environmental changes than do men’ (WBG 2013a, p. 5). These frameworks confirm previous evidence of gender bias in the distribution of risks and benefits in extractive industry projects, whereby ‘benefits accrue to men

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in the form of employment and compensation, while the costs, such as family and social disruption, and environmental degradation, fall most heavily on women’ (WBG 2009, p. 1).

The Gender Mainstreaming Agenda The World Bank’s gender mainstreaming agenda arises from a long and tumultuous historical relationship between women and the Bank. In its early days, the Bank simply turned a blind eye to women plight in the development field (Boserup 1970), but then progressively taking heed of women’s needs and rights in their development programmes over the decades. The gender mainstreaming agenda emerged in 2002 with a strategic paper titled ‘Integrating Gender into the World Bank: A Strategy for Action’ (WBG 2002). It was part of a range of responses in the development community to the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women, and Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, which called for mainstreaming a gender perspective into all policies and programmes as a way tackling gendered structural oppression to alleviate poverty (Staudt 1997; Tiessen 2007). Guided by the Strategy, the Bank began unpacking the appropriate actions needed to foster country-led, country-specific strategies to ‘change gender patterns that are costly to growth, wealth creation and human wellbeing’ (WBG 2002, p. xii). At the national level, the Strategy recommended country gender assessments (CGAs) to be designed at an early stage of programme development to ‘broadly profile socio-economic gender roles and gender disparity’s, and subsequently inform recommendations to address the gender gap in those countries (Tzannatos 2006, p. 49). A gender dimension would then be introduced at the state level into relevant analytical work and lending instruments of the Bank, and integrated into the Bank’s country operations, that is, ‘training and services, hiring of gender specialists and the making of progress reports’ (Tzannatos 2006, p. 50). This approach is now at the heart of the Bank’s policies, frameworks and action plans regarding the oil and gas sector. A 2013 report, ‘Extracting Lessons on Gender in the Oil and Gas Sector’, provided recommendations for the more equal gender distribution of the risks and benefits of extractive projects specifically. It recommends including

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a gender analysis at every stage: design, preparation, planning and implementation. Four main areas of action were identified: the gender asset1 gap, the gender information gap, the gender vulnerability gap and improved environmental safeguards (WBG 2013a). To mitigate the asset gap, the report recommends integrating women into the local economy through loans, education, local recruitment by oil companies, equal access to land titles and gender-sensitive infrastructure projects. Overall, it recommends aggressive policies to ease the gender barriers in the local economy with subsidised childcare, maternity and paternity leave to facilitate the integration of women into the workforce (WBG 2013a). It also suggests creating family bank accounts to mitigate the unequal distribution of benefit streams from oil projects, such as compensation. The latter suggestion follows the policy implemented in the Papua New Guinea mining community of OK Tedi. OK Tedi is an open-pit gold and copper mine, where a delegation of local women succeeded in ‘securing 10% of all project benefits, 50% of all scholarships and cash payments into family bank accounts (to which women are cosignatories)’ (WBG 2013a, pp. 38–39). The family bank accounts replaced the previous system of payments to male-controlled clan bank accounts and resulted in improvement in the distribution of benefit streams from the mining project. Although remote communities have difficulty accessing family bank accounts, and the context of oil projects is in some ways different to gold and copper mining, these policies are recommended to the oil sector as a method of correcting the gender asset gap (WBG 2013a, p. 39). With regard to the gender information gap, the 2013 report suggests integrating women into all aspects of the consultation process between companies and project-affected communities, with communications in nontechnical local language about, for instance, the reality of project benefit streams, and with their representation in these processes based on percentages or quotas. Special, separate consultations with women should be offered, as well as independent advisors for the community and continual negotiation of agreements with women’s participation. Finally, the report recommends the need for constant and independent avenues 1 By ‘asset’, the World Bank means economic assets, that is, to be able to access, defend, create, build and own income-generating assets through entrepreneurship (ability to start own business), waged employment, education, royalties and land tenure. The World Bank. 2013. “Extracting Lessons on Gender in the Oil and Gas Sector.” Washington, DC.

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to mediate grievances between oil companies and local communities from a gender-based perspective (WBG 2013a, pp. 60–63). The prior and informed consultation of indigenous people impacted by oil projects is also promoted by the Bank as part of closing the information gap, while not part of the 2013 report. Alongside its gender mainstreaming work, the Bank has developed specific actions to mainstream the indigenous population into its funded projects. The free, prior and informed consultation/participation of the indigenous population is part of the operational policy (OP) 4.10 (Errico 2006) and promoted in project design with a view to strengthening domestic legislation on indigenous people’s rights and customary land rights. The OP 4.10 aims to ensure that the ‘development process fully respects the dignity, human rights, economics and culture of indigenous people and aims at reducing poverty and promoting sustainable development’ (WBG 2005, para. 1). However, the OP is non-binding and requires only informed consultation, meaning that, under World Bank policy, while indigenous communities can negotiate the terms of implementation to some extent, they cannot refuse an oil project on their territory altogether (Errico 2006, p. 272). With regard to mitigating the gender vulnerability gap, the 2013 report notes that women are more vulnerable to the environmental risks and social costs associated with oil projects, especially in the zones of sacrifice. Moreover, the development of oil industries triggers the development of boomtowns, as seen in the case of Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, the Sakhalin pipeline, the Chad–Cameroon oil pipeline, Fort McMurray in Canada, oil communities in Papua New Guinea, Peru and Ghana’s seaport of Takoradi. It has been shown that the rapid influx of large numbers of male workers produces disruptions that exacerbate existing social problems such as alcoholism, gambling, trafficking and forced labour. Women are particularly vulnerable to these social disruptions, particularly when also jeopardised by the oil industry’s activities such as loss of land, and subsequent resettlement and income-generation difficulties (WBG 2013a; Obeng-Odoom 2014; Kemm 2013; CEE Bankwatch Network and Gender Action 2006; Watts 2005). The Bank suggests preparing for and mitigating boomtown impacts, specifically with the provision of public health information about gender-sensitive topics such as prostitution and domestic violence. Additionally, local authorities should regulate

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immigration in oil regions and the workforce should be trained to understand the gender dimensions of boomtown effects and the oil industry work environment (WBG 2013a). Finally, recommendations for safeguard policies to mitigate the negative impacts of environmental risks are part of a wider platform that aims to prevent undue harm to people and their environment in the development process of World Bank-funded projects. The Bank has a ‘do no harm’ principle that claims to protect people and the environment from adverse impacts of financed projects, and a ‘do good’ principle that refers to the development of ‘sound and sustainable’ projects (WBG 2008, p. 2).2 One such policy aims to monitor environmental quality through an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), completed prior to the commencement of any funded project and with the participation of men and women of the local community. An EMP based on the EIA must then be developed to guarantee strict enforcement of environmental compliance (Morgan 2012; Glasson et al. 2012). The above initiatives summarise the Bank’s efforts to close the gender asset gap, the gender information gap, the gender vulnerability gap and to implement environmental safeguard policies, with a view to correcting the gendered unequal distribution of risks and benefits of the World Bankfunded oil projects. This chapter will shortly examine how successful these initiatives have been, but first it is worth looking at broader policy development at the Bank to improve governance and accountability, as these too impact on the effectiveness of the above gender-focussed initiatives.

Policy Initiatives to Mitigate the Oil Curse While the World Bank has devised policies and frameworks to address the gender gaps identified above, it has also developed frameworks, action plans and policies for a better redistribution of the benefits of oil projects more broadly. The World Bank’s good governance framework postulates that in oil-rich countries, quality institutions would guarantee a fairer distribution of the oil wealth and enhance market efficiency for development (Chowdhury and Skarstedt 2005). Indeed, according to Krueger,

2 In this OD 4.20, sustainability means ‘economically and financially sustainable in terms of growth, capital maintenance, and efficiency of use of resources and investments’ (Haller et al. 2007, p. 490).

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the former chief economist of the World Bank, weak institutional arrangements contribute to the economic difficulties that oil-rich countries suffer. Many oil-rich countries have ‘grabber-friendly’ (Krueger 1974) institutions which facilitate corruption, particularly rent-seeking behaviour, and attempt to obtain oil rent by manipulating the social and political environment on many levels (Mehlum et al. 2006, p. 3). Weak institutional arrangements allow heads of state, for instance, to use their political power to siphon out oil revenue for private gain, and oil companies to use their overwhelming negotiated power to either curb environmental regulations or ignore them for capital accumulation. The latter has been seen in Nigeria where oil companies are still flaring oil to save money, despite a ban, and along the Chad–Cameroon Oil Pipeline, where oil companies have simply not installed the required number of security valves during construction, again to save money. The Bank’s Oil Revenue Management Plan (ORMP), the implementation of which was a precondition put forth before its financial involvement in the Chad–Cameroon oil pipeline project (as we will discuss in the next chapter), is part of the good governance package. The ORMP aims to improve transparency by requiring the full publication and verification of company payments and government revenues from oil, gas and mining projects. The Plan is based on the understanding that there needs to be careful management of natural resource wealth for sustainable economic growth3 and poverty reduction (Haufler 2010, p. 54) and aims to hold governments accountable for their use of oil revenue (Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative 2003). Another initiative of the World Bank has been to improve its own practices, particularly its accountability. An Inspection Panel was officially created by two resolutions in 1993 (Shihata 2000, p. xv). The Inspection Panel’s main role is to investigate complaints from groups of individuals who believe they have been directly or adversely affected by a Bank-supported project, in order to determine whether or not the Bank has abided by its own policies and procedures. This initiative aims at strengthening the links between the Bank and the people affected by the operations it finances (Fox 2000). To date, two groups—one in Cameroon and one in Chad—have raised issues before the Inspection Panel (McBeth 2010). The Cameroon group 3 ‘Sustainable’ here means ‘economically and financially sustainable in terms of growth, capital maintenance, and efficiency of use of resources and investments’ (ibid.).

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claimed that the rights and interests of people living in areas surrounding the pipeline, and the environment itself, had been seriously affected by the pipeline’s construction. They claimed that there was insufficient information during the preparatory phase of the project and its implementation, ‘inadequate consultation processes’ and ‘insufficient, non-existent, or inadequate compensation’ (Inspection Panel and WBG 2004, pp. 50– 52)—all in breach of the Bank’s own policies and procedures. In its investigation report, the Panel found that delay in producing and implementing an EMP for the Cameroon part of the pipeline was in breach of the Bank’s policy (Keenan 2005). The Bank accepted this, but claimed nothing could now be done as their contract with Cameroon had already been closed (Inspection Panel and WBG 2002). While the Inspection Panel is a major step by the World Bank in increasing its accountability to affected parties, the above example shows its limits. Further barriers in the process make it difficult for complainants to file grievances and/or secure redress (Fox 2000). First, while the Bank has a policy of disclosing information about its activities, this information is not available in all local languages, and any complaint can only be submitted in English or French. Potential complainants may not have the financial capacity to have either the original documents or their complaints translated (Nanwani 2008). Second, a complaint must be sent through registered and certified mail (or delivered by hand in a sealed envelope receipt—difficult since the World Bank office is in Washington, DC), and the costs of this can be prohibitive. Third, the requests must specifically cite the operational policies and procedures that the World Bank is suspected to have violated. Again, the complainant needs to have a thorough understanding of, and access to, every World Bank policy and procedure to be able to specifically name them (Nanwani 2008). Fourth, another challenge for claimants is the fear of reprisals and intimidation despite the names of the claimants being kept confidential and the Panel providing whistle-blower protection (Nanwani 2008). Fifth, the limited scope of action of the World Bank can also be a challenge for the claimants. As the Cameroon case shows, while the World Bank admitted to not abiding by its own policies, it also admitted that nothing could be done anymore as all Bank funds had been distributed and it had no further leverage to rectify its policies in Cameroon. In sum, the numerous challenges faced by claimants are significant deterrents to them bringing claims, and the Panel’s limited scope of action when claims are brought (and even found valid) is a failure to provide just redress. Taken together,

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these factors severely undermine the World Bank’s claim to accountability (Nanwani 2008).

The Conceptual Shortcomings of the Gender Mainstreaming Approach While there is a real engagement by the World Bank to devise policies to ease the oil curse and close gender gaps in the distribution of risks and benefits of Bank-funded oil projects, there are significant shortcomings, conceptually, and at the operational level. First, the gender mainstreaming agenda has been a mere integration into existing structures rather than a truly transformative mainstreaming venture. Mainstreaming is achieved through empowerment and requires changes in social and political structures. Empowerment means that ‘subjects may speak for themselves and alter existing institutional structures’ (Schoenpflug 2006, p. 156). Mainstreaming through empowerment would entail ‘challenging the formal and informal norms, rules, attitudes and behaviours that institutionalise inequalities within an organisation’ (Kabeer 2003, p. 228). The World Bank has not challenged the existing structures but has simply aimed to include women in them. For instance, the recommendations at the heart of the 2017 report on gender and the oil and gas sector suggest integrating women into the local economy through loans, education, local recruitment by oil companies, equal access to land titles and gender-sensitive infrastructure projects. The androcentric nature of existing structures is not challenged, and this is at the core of gender inequalities arising from and reinforced by oil projects. Furthermore, to boost the number of women in the oil industry, the Bank’s efforts emphasise economic efficiency rather than empowerment and rights (Long 2006) and do not ‘take into account the time burdens that such strategies place on women’ (Griffin 2009, p. 121), who continue to carry out reproductive work, caring work and work in the informal market. This in turn puts pressure on resource availability, as time pressure may push women to choose between formal and informal work, especially when the externalisation of environmental and social costs of oil projects has increased the overall work burden on women (such as when women dependent on subsistence farming have to make longer journeys to source food because their local environment is damaged by oil exploitation). The sole focus on the integration of women into the oil industry and formal economy also contributes to the homogenisation

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of women’s experiences as the World Bank promotes ‘one size fits all’ macro-economic policies (Wood 2005, p. 594). In order to close gender gaps in the oil sector, the androcentric structures of the economic model of development must be challenged. The initiative to educate Azeri women in the Azerbaijan oil region is another example illustrating the shortcomings of such a narrow economic focus to gender mainstreaming, albeit in the context of some positive outcomes too. Russia opened the first Muslim Boarding School for Girls at the beginning of the twentieth century, in the oil-rich region of Baku and at the height of the oil industry’s development in Azerbaijan. Since then, Azeri women educated at this school have contributed to oil production, refining and scientific research. Today, of ‘200 workers at the Geotechnological Problems of Oil, Gas and Chemistry Scientific Research Institute, 37% are women’ (WBG 2013a, p. 48). However, other areas in the oil workplace remain almost exclusively a male domain. Only 15 Azeri women are technicians working on oil rigs in the Caspian Sea, out of a total workforce of 600 employees. In Azerbaijan, other barriers such as ‘gender stereotypes around technical and non-technical employment’ are at play that impede women’s ability to enter the job market (WBG 2013a, p. 48). While a ‘lack of qualification’ argument is often used to explain low participation of women in the oil industry, the barriers faced by women in Azerbaijan contradict this. Azerbaijan’s women are not the only ones pointing out the lack of job opportunities in the oil industry despite their qualifications. In other zones of sacrifice such as El Alto in Peru, women complained about receiving only unqualified and temporary job offers despite their expectations, education levels and aspirations (WBG 2013a). In Ghana, in response to women’s requests for more jobs in the nascent oil industry in 2008, the government replied that the rigours of the work were unsuitable, as ‘when you look at it, it is very masculine’ (Modern Ghana 2010). While policies and strategic plans to break the discriminative barriers that women face within the oil industry job market may be needed, it is also clear that breaking social and normative barriers more broadly is also necessary. A second shortcoming of the Bank’s gender mainstreaming approach is the limited conceptualisation of equality that underlies it: it is understood as equality of opportunity and not equality of outcomes. This translates to offering (ostensibly) the conditions necessary to attain equality, rather than pursuing and achieving equality in itself. Special gender units and machinery such as the Country Gender Assessment have been given

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the task of developing and sustaining a ‘visible commitment’ to gender equality (Barriteau 2006, p. 223), which does not in itself ensure equality of outcomes. Finally, the limited impact of the Bank’s approach to gender is due to its refusal to consider political factors. The good governance framework, for instance, addresses the efficiency of the institutional structures without questioning the source of that inefficiency (Nega and Schneider 2011, p. 421). This blindness to political factors is linked to the World Bank articles of agreements that state that ‘the World Bank and its officers shall not interfere in the political affairs of any member; nor shall they be influenced in their decisions by the political character of the member or members concerned. Only economic considerations shall be relevant to their decisions, and these considerations shall be weighed impartially’ (Nega and Schneider 2011, p. 422). The blindness of the World Bank to political factors was raised by the Chad group who brought a complaint before the Inspection Panel. In a request for inspection of the Chad–Cameroon oil pipeline, they alleged a number of violations of World Bank policies, including its ‘directives on respect for human rights’ (McBeth 2010, pp. 224–225). Following an excerpt from 2001, Amnesty International report, the complainants noted that the opposition politician Ngarlejy Yorongar was arrested in 1998 for ‘defamatory statements against the President in opposing the petroleum pipeline and was detained and tortured’ (McBeth 2010, pp. 224–225). Ngarlejy Yorongar, a member of Chad’s parliament, who represented the region where the oil fields were located was arrested and detained again in 2001 when he himself filed a complaint with the Inspection Panel (Rich 2013, p. 90). While admitting that the Chad political situation and particularly the arrest of Yorongar was ‘far from being ideal’, the Panel found that the Bank did not step outside of the scope of its policies. Political factors such as the dictatorial nature of the government, and its documented human rights abuses, were not deemed to have significant direct economic impacts on the Bank-financed project (De Feyter 2005, p. 154). However, the Chairman of the Panel added that the ‘Bank had to be more forthcoming about articulating its promotional role in human rights’ (De Feyter 2005, p. 154).

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Limits and Constraints at the Policy and Operational Level The conceptual shortcomings of the gender mainstreaming approach described above were further reinforced by a superficial commitment on the part of the Bank to engage with the approach, along with the dominant neoliberal frame of the World Bank. First, while the mainstreaming agenda was intended to be organisationwide, implementation was reportedly half-hearted, dispersed and weak across the Bank’s bureaucracies (Tiessen 2007). The strategy relied heavily on technical solutions and operational procedures, such as hiring and appointing an expert to oversee a project, or consulting during the implementation. Such initiatives have little operational impact, while creating the illusion that equality is being taken seriously (Tiessen 2005). Perhaps more damaging still, adding technical solutions to regular practices constitutes a reductionist package, where complex problems are assumed to have a simple fix (Barriteau 2006), demonstrating—and reinforcing—a limited understanding of the depth of oppression and marginalisation. Second, the Bank is committed to a ‘revised’ version of neoliberalism in both rhetoric and practice (Griffin 2009, p. 87). By revised, it means that the Bank is committed to the free market but believes that strong institutions play a role in protecting it (Kiely 1998). The Bank’s economic agenda reflects that of its state members and its investors (Hafner-Burton and Pollack 2002; Griffin 2009). As the largest donor, the US has a larger say on the actual decision-making structure of the Bank (HafnerBurton and Pollack 2002; Griffin 2009). The private sector co-operates with the International Finance Corporation—the private branch of the World Bank—to seek funds to implement projects within the developing world. For instance, the Chad–Cameroon pipeline oil consortium, led by Exxon with Petronas and Chevron-Mobile, could not proceed without the support of the World Bank, and indeed, the Bank’s support would also open doors to other sources of funds (such as the European Investment Bank) (Horta 2012). The following chapter will further demonstrate how the Chad–Cameroon oil pipeline epitomised the neoliberal approach of the World Bank, prioritising profit over the gender vulnerability gap.

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Conclusion It is undeniable that, at the policy level, the World Bank has developed extensive knowledge, policies, frameworks and action plans that attempt to mitigate the unequal distribution of oil project risks and benefits between women and men. It has also developed transparency initiatives to ease the negative impacts of the oil curse. However, the Bank’s revised neoliberal economic approach still side-lines any possibilities of fully addressing the matrix of oppressive structures that bears upon women in the zones of sacrifice. Like earlier approaches, it remains underpinned by masculinist views of the gender division of labour, the separation between the public and the private sphere and the complex relationship between human and non-human nature. Furthermore, as the Bank’s policies on good governance are non-binding, they have limited impacts in easing, at the operational level, the burden-shifting practices and processes of the IML. The next chapter on the Chad–Cameroon oil pipeline will provide a unique opportunity to understand the gaps between the promise of the World Bank’s policies and the reality of their implementation in an oil project. Avenues for optimism are mixed. First, despite slow progress, there is an international trend to cut carbon emissions: 190 countries have signed the legally binding Paris Agreement to keep global warming in check, and G7 leaders agreed in June 2015 to phase out the use of fossil fuels by the end of the century (The Guardian 2015). For the zones of sacrifice though, it will be a slow process. There is a discrepancy between countries’ climate change commitments and their actions. While the world commits to cutting carbon emissions, countries are still planning and projecting an average annual increase in oil production of 2% by 2030. In response to the Paris Agreement, the World Bank decided to stop funding oil and gas projects in 2019, but this welcome commitment is not without impacts. The above oil production projections inevitably mean new oil projects will be financed—but not by the Bank. This means the progressive policies the Bank has developed won’t benefit communities in newly created oil zones, and a ‘return to form’ for oil companies (and national elites), in terms of the social and environmental damage they cause, is predictable. Furthermore, the longer-term social and environmental consequences of the oil industry on local ecosystems have only recently begun to be analysed (Enns and Sneyd 2020) and without international oversight or intervention from bodies like the World Bank, risks

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entrenching poverty, inequality and environmental damage in the zones of sacrifice, for generations to come. Last, once oil production has dried up in an oil zone, and the oil companies (and jobs and social services they paid for) have ceased their activities, local communities are left to deal alone with the consequences of the more-than-human infrastructural violence (Enns and Sneyd 2020), that are the long-term environmental risks associated with decades of oil production, without even the meagre economic and social benefits they previously received from it.

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CHAPTER 6

The Chad–Cameroon Pipeline: A Model Project?

Abstract This chapter analyses the strengths and the limits of the World Bank’s good governance and gender mainstreaming approaches to a specific oil project at the operational level: The Chad–Cameroon Oil Pipeline. Keywords Limits · Failure · Compensation · Information

Introduction In 2000, the governments of Chad and Cameroon, the World Bank and an oil consortium comprising Exxon, Royal Dutch Shell and Elf Aquitaine, agreed to build a pipeline that would transport oil from the Doba Basin reserve in Southern Chad to the port of Kribi in Cameroon. Exxon claimed that this project would not be ‘business as usual’, but rather it would use its technical expertise to extract and transport oil to improve the well-being of the population. The World Bank also promoted the project by staking its reputation on it and providing its largest ever loan—US$3.5 billion. Despite being aware of the difficulties that other oil-rich countries, such as Nigeria and Angola, were facing, the World Bank was confident that its good governance and gender mainstreaming © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Helbert, Women, Gender and Oil Exploitation, Gender, Development and Social Change, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81803-6_6

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approaches—described in the previous chapter—would have a knockon effect on other areas of development in the two countries, and that poverty would become a thing of the past. According to the Bank, Chad and Cameroon’s future prosperity and the emancipation of women would come hand-in-hand with increased exploitation and transportation of natural resources. At the time of the deal, there was fierce resistance to the project. Many observers, civil society members, women’s groups and NGOs appealed for a moratorium on the project (Leibold 2011). They pointed out that the political, social and economic settings of the two countries would facilitate the squandering of oil revenues rather than benefit all. Twenty years on, these fears have been realised. This chapter shows how the lack of anthropological, sociological and gender sensitivities during the construction and operative phases of the project failed to eliminate the burden-shifting practices and processes of the IML. Instead of achieving the promised knock-on effect, the project missed the mark in matters of poverty alleviation and imperilled the prospect of emancipatory change for women in the two countries.

The Construction Phase The Free, Prior and Informed Consultation Plan The first objective of the World Bank in supporting the pipeline construction, under their new policy frameworks, was to consult with and inform the impacted population about its construction, and on plans for compensation. However, fieldwork research has shown that the local population felt the consultation process was inadequate (Endeley 2010; Hoinathy 2013; Leonard 2016; Lo 2010; Murrey 2015). During the consultation phase, women in particular felt they were not properly consulted about the project and the consequences of pipeline construction. In a descriptive qualitative survey of selected communities conducted over three years (2000–2003), Endeley found that women felt side-lined in decisionmaking processes and negotiations related to the pipeline, as the ‘de facto representation of the head of household’ was asked to go to meetings (2010). Accounts of women interviewed along the pipeline corridor said that ‘when the employees of the oil companies and representatives of the state came into the village they asked for our husbands. And when they were not there, they told us that it was not necessary for us to attend

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the meetings. It was a man’s affair’ (Lo 2010, p. 164). Women were also attributed a passive role in the preparatory process, where ‘agents simply asked women about their worries but no further information was given about the project’ (Endeley 2010, p. 140). Lacunae in the consultation phase include anthropological, social and gendered missteps, and these significantly impacted compensation assessments and processes. The territory of two main indigenous groups—the Bagyéli and the Bakola communities—was crossed by the pipeline. The World Bank implemented its operational policy (OP) 4.10 to proceed with a free, prior and informed consultation of the indigenous population. In its assessment under the policy, the Bank claimed that while on the short-term, the construction would have an impact, on the long term, land issue would not be a serious problem, as the pipeline—which was buried—would not take away any land from these communities. It added, ‘If anything, the quality of life of the Bagyélies is likely to be improved by the attention they will receive under the project’ (Center for Environment and Development and Friends of the Earth Cameroon 2002, p. 5). However, the communities’ experience of the consultation process was quite different from that which is outlined in OP 4.10. First, though the Bank was supposed to monitor implementation of the consultation process, the oil consortium took charge of it with little oversight. Second, under OP 4.10, detailed information about the risks of pipeline construction should have been provided to indigenous communities by the oil consortium or the Bank; instead communities claimed all such information came from civil society members. According to the oil consortium, consultations took place between November 1997 and February 1998. However, according to the Bagyéli community, while ExxonMobil did meet with them, the meetings were one-way information sessions, with little by way of relevant detail (e.g. on risks or alternative options) provided. Additionally, the sessions did not consider the Bagyélies’ oral tradition. Flyers in French were distributed but only 3% of the Bagyélies are literate and even fewer understand the language. According to the community, the meetings warned them to stay away from the construction sites rather than providing a forum for negotiating free, prior, informed consultation as the World Bank had promised. This trend was confirmed by a survey sent to 100 Bagyélies, in which 55 said they had no knowledge of the project and 20 say they knew little of it (Forest Peoples Programme and Bank Information Center 2000; Center for Environment and Development and Friends of the Earth Cameroon 2002).

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The deficiencies in the consultation process led to a misunderstanding of the scale of destruction that pipeline construction would entail and subsequent under-compensation of communities. In a testimony to Friends of the Earth International, Jeanne Noah, of the Bakola community in Cameroon, talks about the loss of land and the destruction of indigenous people’s hunting grounds and medicinal trees as a result of this construction (Friends of the Earth International 2004). She spoke of how construction itself scared away animals, and how the routes for the pipeline thereafter provided easy access for poachers in the forest, destroying even more wildlife and the Bakola’s source of subsistence. She also claimed her community was not compensated for these specific losses. The Bagyéli community, which derived its main source of income from the forest, similarly claimed that the three-year construction phase of the pipeline significantly destroyed assets in the forest (Endeley 2010, p. 168). The means of subsistence of these communities is entirely dependent on gaining access to their forest. The gap between the promises made to indigenous communities (that any impact of pipeline construction would be small), and the reality of significant destruction to their ancestral lands and means of subsistence led to a major undervaluation in compensation claims. The Chad–Cameroon Compensation and Resettlement Plan (CRP) The free, prior and informed consultation plan was intended to evaluate the impact of pipeline construction in order to inform a Compensation and Resettlement Plan (CRP) that would be fair and transparent. As shown above, the poorly managed consultation phase and poorly understood local specificities undermined the basis of that evaluation and hence led to inadequate compensations. First, the CRP reflected a narrow understanding of farming practices in the region, limited to a conceptual prism of private property and the free market. This approach failed to comprehend the space, time and cross-generational interconnections that other kinds of approaches to land management entail (Hoinathy 2013)—such as a community-based approach found in Chad—and this in a number of important ways. The CRP’s approach, for instance, could not fully encompass a reality where farming was for everyday subsistence and selling crops on the market was exceptional. It couldn’t reconcile the community practice of leaving land fallow for three years, where only one year was expected. The community

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forest essential to farming practice in the region was not recognised by the CRP as occupied land, and hence no compensation was planned for its loss during pipeline construction. Finally, the CRP compensated only for the financial loss of the current owners’ farming for market goods and not the financial consequences of loss of land for future generations in terms of everyday subsistence crops. The cumulative impact of this failure to understand farming in its anthropological complexity meant that financial compensation was considerably less than the real value loss (Uriz 2001; Vitalis Pemunta and Fonmboh 2010). The second way in which the CRP led to an undervaluation of compensation was due to gender discrimination. A study involving extensive fieldwork along the pipeline concluded that the process of land expropriation, and the scheme designed to compensate for such loss, exacerbated gender inequalities (Leonard 2016). While the designers of the CRP were convinced that women and men had equal access to compensation as they believed men and women were equally farming their own land, in reality, the compensation programme ‘severely compromised women’s access to land and transformed women who farmed their own fields into figures of suspicion and doubt at a time when women’s independent production had become increasingly vital to the household bottom line’ (Leonard 2016, p. 83). This transformation must be understood through the prism of gender discriminatory tropes. For example, the fact that the compensation scheme aimed at compensating for the loss of crops that were sold on the market, meant that, due to the gendered division of labour, women were less likely to receive as much compensation as they were more likely to produce subsistence crops. During a panel discussion on the pipeline organised by Gender Action, Inspection Panel member Eimi Watanabe was invited to advise on how women along the pipeline could raise their case against the World Bank for not complying with what they perceived as the World Bank’s safeguard policies, that is, equal treatment in compensation. Watanabe stated that women would not, in fact, be able to raise a case of discrimination in compensation allocation, as the Bank did not believe it was responsible for the difference in the value between cash crops and subsistence crops. However, it was the World Bank itself that had valued cash crops more highly than subsistence crops, even when the same type of crop was in question—in effect, a decision that women’s work was less valuable than men’s.

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The final way in which CRP compensation packages were unfair was in their failure to take into account the gender differences in vulnerabilities (Lo 2010). According to women along the pipeline corridor, the skewed compensation to ‘husbands and chiefs’ reflected entrenched gender-biased practices, not only in the crop valuation terms described above, but also in a broader failure to take into account the gendered division of labour and informal work that women perform in farming communities (Murrey 2015). One example is that the CRP did not take into account the destruction of nearby wells and boreholes in the process of burying the pipeline. These were accessed mostly by women for daily chores and meant they had to walk longer distances to collect water for household and community activities (Murrey 2015). Another example is how, in the Bagyeli indigenous community, the construction of the pipeline left a 30-meter scar through the forest, resulting in loss of land and access to resources, particularly medicinal plants tended by women. The compensation process failed to recognise the medicinal contributions of the women’s crops (Murrey 2015). While the compensation lacked anthropological, sociological and gendered sensitivities, it was also anthropocentric, that is, centred around human evaluation of loss of resources (Enns and Sneyd 2020). It aimed at compensating communities and individuals for loss of resources and/or ability to source subsistence from the local ecosystem at the time of the construction—with limited fairness, as we have seen. However, it did not at all take into account the long-term impact that pipeline construction imposed on non-human nature. Recent research positions the Chad– Cameroon Pipeline as the exemplification of ‘more-than-human infrastructural violence’ (Enns and Sneyd 2020, p. 1). For example, for the sub-sea and offshore segment of the project, dynamite was used to blast a reef to clear a trench along the ocean floor to hold the pipeline, destroying the habitat of certain species of fish relied upon by local communities. The habitat destruction was exacerbated by several small oil spills that occurred during construction. While efforts were made to compensate for the loss of fishing stock, no real initiative was taken to either understand or even restore the loss induced from the blasting at the ecosystem level (Enns and Sneyd 2020). Finally, in addition to the substantial underestimation of compensation entailed by the myriad of factors examined here, the kind of compensation offered also raised concerns. According to women in the Bagyéli communities, they had to choose items from a catalogue of overpriced goods

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(Endeley 2010; Badgley and Badgley 2003). They were particularly bitter about this choice of compensation, as they would have preferred farming tools instead (Endeley 2010).

The Operative Phase The Oil Revenue Management Program (ORMP) The Oil Revenue Management Program (ORMP) was designed to support the Chad and Cameroon governments to implement the strict conditionalities that the World Bank considered would guarantee a better distribution of oil revenue among the population. The ORMP Act was passed by the Chad and Cameroon parliaments in 1998 after five years of intense negotiations, and a push for a political compromise, between Chad, Cameroon, NGOs, civil society and the World Bank (Massey and May 2005; Uriz 2001). It had two priorities. The first was to build a legal framework to ensure that oil revenues would be used for national development and not syphoned off. Once submitted to a parliamentary vote, the ORMP became an independent body, with additional supervisory institutions aiming to further guarantee the transparency of oil wealth distribution (Delescluse 2004). The second priority was to channel oil revenues towards key social sectors for poverty alleviation: health, social services, education, infrastructure, rural development, environment and water (Delescluse 2004; Massey and May 2005). The ORMP Act also comprised the creation of an escrow account, under which a third party would supervised the allocation of revenue, again aiming to avoid corruption. Additionally, two pillars of good governance were identified as needed to mitigate the oil curse effect: (1) institutional arrangements for public resource management, service delivery and the rule of law, and (2) enhancing non-oil economic opportunities while reducing sources of vulnerability (WBG 2009, p. 9). These technical solutions were supported by funds from the escrow account that fiscal authorities could tap into gradually to maintain a steady, nondisruptive inflow of revenue. Additionally, it was planned that a certain amount of oil revenues should also be set aside to meet needs during times of low international prices. This would avoid revenue uncertainty in the context of international oil price instability (Winters and Gould 2011).

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However, despite these measures and the World Bank’s promise, the pipeline project had none of the promised ‘knock-on effect’ on the wellbeing of the population. In terms of the Human Development Indicator (HDI), over the course of the project’s implementation between 2000 and 2017, there was only a slight improvement, which, when compared to other similar non-oil countries, cannot solely be attributed to oil wealth. Chad’s HDI value for 2000 was 0.299; it peaked at 0.407 in 2015 and fell to 0.398 by 2020. Long-term progress against the HDI in Chad is slower than similar countries such as Sierra Leone and Mali, both of which are oil-poor, and even lower if inequality is accounted for. In 2020, Chad remained third from the bottom of the UN’s Human Development Index and achieved none of the Millennium Development Goals (United Nations Development Programme 2020b). Cameroon’s HDI value was 0.431 in 2000, which steadily increased to 0.563 in 2020, ranking 153 out of 187 countries and territories (United Nations Development Programme 2020b). The poverty rate has plateaued for the last five years at 40%, characterised by an urban/rural divide whereby 87% of Cameroonians live in poverty in rural areas. In 2017, the HDI long-term progress of Cameroon was slightly lower than that of Tanzania and Togo, two comparatively oil-poor countries (United Nations Development Programme 2018). Cameroon’s HDI adjusted to inequality falls to 0.366, indicating a highly unequal society. The similarity between the HDI long-term progress of Chad and Cameroon with the other oil-poor countries undermines the link between oil wealth and poverty reduction (United Nations Development Programme 2018). Neither country’s performance against the Gender Inequality Index (GII: a value that reflects gender-based inequalities in three dimensions—reproductive health, empowerment and economic activity) shows evidence of the ‘knock on effect’ of oil-led development promoted by the Bank and the pipeline project. In Chad, social indicators for women have made little progress since its implementation. For example, women’s labour participation rate was 64% in 2013, but has plateaued at 64.8% for women since then (WBG 2015). There has been a regression in maternal health, with the maternal mortality ratio rising from 327 to 856 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births between 2003 and 2017 (North-South Institute 2010). Currently, Chad has one of the highest rates of maternal mortality in the world (United Nations Development Programme 2020a). Overall, the GII for Chad peaked in 2015 at 0.789 (where 1 is perfect gender equality) and fell again by 2020 to 0.710. Chad

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is the second last country in this category after Yemen. One area of slight progress has been political participation, with women holding 14.9% of seats in parliament in 2020 compared to only 2% in 1997 (United Nations Development Programme 2020b). Cameroon has also seen an improvement in political participation: women held only 5.6% of seats in parliament in 2000, and this rose to 29% by 2020 (United Nations Development Programme 2020a). Maternal mortality here is more positive than in Chad: the maternal death rate for every 100,000 live births was down to 529 women in 2020, from 740 in 2000. And women’s labour force participation rose to 71% in 2019 from 63.6% in 2013 (United Nations Development Programme 2020a). But it lags in terms of overall progress in gender equality as measured by the GII, which fell from 0.666 in 2005 to 0.560 in 2020, reflecting a picture similar to non-oil countries such as Togo and Tanzania. Several explanations can be offered for why the project has failed to deliver upon its promised ‘knock on effects’ for the well-being of local populations. First, the ORMP has not been able to guarantee a fair distribution of the oil wealth between the oil consortium and the two countries. The royalty payments made by the consortium to Chad and Cameroon, negotiated by the World Bank, were much lower in comparison with other African oil exporters. This was despite the World Bank’s role in ‘assisting its client countries in deals involving major enterprises’ (Horta 2012, p. 214). Yet there is little information about the negotiation (Horta 2012). The royalty payments were so small that even the World Bank Inspection Panel raised concerns about them and stated that it was surprised at ‘the estimated returns to Chad over 28 years, having regard to the magnitude of the Project’ (Inspection Panel and WBG 2002, p. xvii). Since the Inspection Panel raised concerns, the Cameroon government was able to renegotiate the paltry transit fees from US$0.45 in 2003 to US$1.30 per barrel of oil currently (World Energy News and Mbendi Information Services 2013). Second, despite the World Bank’s promise, the ORMP has not been able to prevent oil revenue appropriation, leaving less money for the population. The President of Chad requested the oil consortium pay royalties directly to the government, bypassing the escrow account that had been created to avoid this kind of grabbing (Leibold 2011). This appropriation for private and quasi-private gain meant that only a small portion of oil revenue has been redistributed to the key social sectors selected by the ORMP. Most of Chad’s oil revenue has been used for

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military equipment and public projects, sectors particularly susceptible to corruption—such as the large, expensive, but not productive project to build a new Place de la Nation (Nation Square) opposite the presidential palace in Chad’s capital of N’Djamena, replete with a triumphal arch, fountains, statues and television screens (Leibold 2011). Indeed, since the construction of the pipeline, corruption in Chad and Cameroon has in no way improved, and if anything has been further ‘fed’ with oil money. In 2014, Transparency International reported that the availability of a large amount of oil wealth in Chad has fuelled endemic corruption and ‘a deeply entrenched patronage system’ (House Chatham 2015, p. 1; Osifo 2014). Both countries rate low on Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index—a 10-point scale where zero indicates a highly corrupt country and 10 indicates clean (e.g. Norway is at 9)—and their ratings have remained largely unchanged throughout the course of the project. Chad was rated 1.9 in 2014, rising only 0.1 point to 2.0 in 2019; Cameroon remained rated at 2.5 in both years (Transparency International 2014, 2019). This misuse of oil revenue thwarts any possibility of using the revenue to improve the well-being of the general population, to reduce poverty or for women’s emancipation. While Chad and Cameroon suffered economic and political problems prior to the pipeline project, the ORMP has not been able to rectify or overcome these in order to fulfil its objective of better distributing the benefits and wealth generated by the project. Despite the World Bank’s confidence, and the range of technical fixes it has proposed, it has simply not been able to ease the processes and practices of accumulation by dispossession entrenched at local and global levels. The Limits of the Environmental Management Plan (EMP) Another key element of the World Bank’s good governance package is an EMP. Such plans are a requirement of all Bank-financed projects, based on recommendations arising out of a prior Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA). This process and associated documents were elaborated in line with international regulations, that is, US standards, and aim to mitigate the negative environmental impacts arising from an infrastructure project. In the case of the Chad–Cameroon pipeline, the EIA and EMP effectively seek to correct the ecological burden-shifting practices and processes of

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the IML that arise from the construction and running of the pipeline (Keenan 2005). The project’s EMP required emergency shutdown valves to be placed along the pipeline in strategic locations and to protect the pipeline trench against erosion. These valves are particularly crucial on both sides of major river crossings ‘to protect drinking water resources from the threat of oil pollution’ (Keenan 2005, p. 400), as well as to prevent syphoning into the river in the event of a pipeline rupture or other accident. ExxonMobil, which was in charge of the construction, had stated that 48 of these emergency valves would be installed as the pipeline crossed 25 rivers, 17 of which were considered ‘major’ rivers—most of these in Cameroon (Esso Exploration and Production Chad Inc. 2002). However, a close examination of ExxonMobil’s documents shows that only 28 such valves were installed. Of the 17 major rivers, only five had emergency valves on both sides and five other non-emergency ‘check’ valves (Keenan 2005). Project engineers estimated the cost of a well-equipped emergency valve to be US$10–15 million. Installing an emergency valve requires not only the valve but also its installation and other equipment such as air conditioning, fibre optic cable connections, electronic systems and satellite communication. The cost saved by the oil consortium in not installing the total number of valves required was around US$180–320 million, close to Cameroon’s total revenue for the project over the next 25 years (Keenan 2005). Despite the enormous investment of human and financial resources in this US$4.2-billion project, and the World Bank’s close monitoring of the project, neither the Bank nor any other institution managed to detect the missing valves (Keenan 2005). And this was not the only way in which ExxonMobil prioritised cost-saving over environmental safeguarding: they also failed, for example, to protect the pipeline trench against erosion, despite their EMP commitments to do so (Keenan 2005, p. 402). In addition to these outright breaches of the EMP, the Plan itself grossly underestimated the environmental impacts of the pipeline. The ecological footprint of the project was much larger than anticipated, especially the impact of severe dust pollution that damaged crop fertility and human health (International Advisory Group and WBG 2006), as well as an accumulation of hazardous waste that was not properly managed. Another major underestimation was the volume of gas flaring. In the original EMP, the oil consortium declared that there would not be any

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permanent gas flaring at all, which ExxonMobil later admitted was underestimated (International Advisory Group and WBG 2006; Environmental Defense Fund 2007). Gas flaring, as we have seen in earlier chapters, has significant negative environmental impacts, including on crop yields of subsistence farmers, most of whom in this region are women; thus, the environmental damage impacted women more. The Social and Economic Disruption of Pipeline Construction Just as the World Bank’s frameworks and processes were not able to fence off the burden-shifting practices of the pipeline project, nor were they able to prevent or address the subsequent, and gendered, social and economic disruptions such practices induced. The project—like all extractive projects—attracted an influx of largely male job-seekers into pipeline construction zones, which led to surges in alcoholism, prostitution and drug use (Magrin and Mbayhoudel 2005). These surges, coupled with the impact of construction activities themselves, and the ‘overall brutality of economic globalisation on local cultures’, have had harsh consequences (Vitalis Pemunta and Tabenyang 2016, p. 136). According to the head of the rural community of Kome Ndolobe, it felt like being abused and violated (Sikod 2006; Hoinathy 2013). No compensation was provided or even planned for these disruptions. While the construction phase saw employment opportunities for local men—mainly in menial jobs such as bush cutters, and only for 2– 3 weeks—better-paid and longer-term jobs were given to highly qualified, mostly male, workers recruited from outside the local area. Job opportunities of any sort were even more scarce for women in the construction field due to the gender discrimination detailed previously. As we have seen in earlier chapters, the increased economic insecurity and vulnerability of women in oil zones can lead to exceptional hardship, whereby women take on feminised care responsibilities or income-generating activities such as prostitution—to access a share of the oil wealth or/and because there are no other opportunities to make ends meet (Vitalis Pemunta and Tabenyang 2016; Hofmann 2014; Walby 2011). Civil society had warned about the potential health risks associated with the project, but nothing was done to mitigate these risks. For instance, following a health impact assessment, the civil society members,

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women’s groups and NGOs asked for measures to mitigate health risks— HIV/AIDS and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs)—associated with the influx of workers for the construction of the pipeline. The World Health Organisation (WHO) stressed the need for a Health Impact Assessment (HIA) following years of expertise about the potential health risks of large-scale extractive industry projects, but it was not done. Women’s groups strongly defended a system of a relay—truck drivers drove the entire day, handed over the truck to another driver and came back home at night—along the pipeline. The consortium implemented a different system that allowed drivers to take breaks while driving—driving along the pipeline and stopping as they went—for days along the pipeline. Women’s groups believed that their relay system could have better mitigated health risk outcomes than the one proposed by the consortium, as with their system, men were more likely to go back and sleep at home every night. The women’s group also believed that the consortium’s system would lure truck drivers, many of whom were either single or away from their families. For the women’s groups, the consortium system increased the risk of human trafficking, prostitution and sexually transmitted diseases, particularly for women. The World Bank refused to accept the relay system, as it claimed it would be too costly for the TOC. Due to their reproductive roles, unequal access to health, gender-based violence and cultural factors, women were most vulnerable to HIV and other STDs (Gender Action and Friends of the Earth International 2011; Jobin 2003). Jobin provided evidence of an HIV epidemic in the boomtown settlement called Mnbainboum situated along the pipeline route at the frontier between Cameroon and Chad (Jobin 2003). The settlement was characterised by a market, truck stop and a conglomeration of brothels. The prevalence of HIV among prostitutes in this community was 55% (Jobin 2003). Another report showed how the boomtown encampment of Kome Satan quadrupled its population between mid-2001 to early 2002 and hence HIV prevalence (Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights 2004). Moreover, mitigation of social disruptions was not included in the World Bank framework. The unfulfilled promises of the World Bank’s good governance framework led to numerous grievances, as the population bore an unequal share of the risks associated with the pipeline instead of benefiting from it. A survey of 27 communities done between 2000 and 2003 reported growing discontent with the pipeline project, later leading to strikes. The lack of local recruitment for work on segments of the pipeline led women

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to take part in strikes, asking for more employment for themselves, their husbands and adult children. Another growing source of tension was the pollution of streams and water bodies, which led the women, men and children of the Mbikiliki community to protest (Endeley 2010), in turn leading the World Bank to admit that its framework had not achieved its promised outcomes. In a report on the Chad–Cameroon oil pipeline published in November 2005, the World Bank Group acknowledged these grievances stating that ‘The evaluation finds that the program’s fundamental development objective of reducing poverty and improving governance in Chad through the best possible use of oil revenues in an environmentally and socially sustainable manner was not achieved’ (WBG 2009, p. v). The Bank also failed to comply with its own safeguard policies, and its inertia in proposing any further reforms can be illustrated by two cases, one from Chad and one from Cameroon, brought to the Inspection Panel. As seen in the previous chapter, the Inspection Panel provides a forum for people who believe they may be adversely affected by World Bankfinanced operations. In this case, the Chad and Cameroon complainants claimed that the World Bank did not comply with its own safeguard policies when planning and implementing the pipeline. The Panel confirmed that Bank did not fully comply with its safeguard policies, and even raised concerns about the alleged positive impact on poverty, as royalties were so negligible (Inspection Panel and WBG 2002). Following these significant criticisms, the Bank made efforts to hasten and improve the implementation of a range of procedures designed to strengthen compliance with its own safeguard policies (Inspection Panel and WBG 2002). However, as the loans for the Chad–Cameroon pipeline had already been distributed, it had no further leverage over the two countries. Nor could any NGO or local group in Chad or Cameroon hold the World Bank to account: it was no longer possible to ask the Inspection Panel for a new investigation since the case had been closed and all the loans allocated. In the end, while the World Bank admitted that it failed to comply with its own principles, this was as far as its accountability stretched, based on the claim that it had become powerless to do anything about it.

Conclusion The World Bank’s engagement with the Chad–Cameroon pipeline aimed at better redistributing the benefits of an oil project. According to

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the Bank, its good governance framework and associated policies and processes aimed to help the project have a knock-on impact on economic development, and a trickle-down effect on the emancipation of women. Indeed, the Bank’s assessment of Chad and Cameroon’s economic problems was that by ensuring the implementation of stringent safeguards for transparency, a fair distribution of the oil revenue and a thorough environmental plan, the two countries’ populations would benefit from the oil wealth the project generated. However, 20 years on, despite delivering a number of benefits to both countries, the project’s envisaged knock-on effect simply never happened. The full and efficient implementation of the Bank’s good governance package was jeopardised, as its policies were not sufficient to disrupt the burden-shifting practices and processes of the IML, but rather reinforced or exacerbated preexisting, and often gendered, hierarchies. The package was embedded deep in the anthropological, sociological, gendered and anthropocentric tropes of global capitalism. Its associated policies were inadequate and misconceived, comprised of basic misunderstandings about local farming practices and inappropriate assumptions about property relations. They were also limited by the imposition of capitalist property relations, the existing gendered structure of the oil industry and the capital-intensive technologies used for extraction and transportation.

References Badgley, Christiane, and Christiane Badgley. 2003. Oil… A Pipeline to Prosperity? Washington, DC: PBS/Frontline World. Center for Environment and Development and Friends of the Earth Cameroon. 2002. “Traversing Peoples Lives: How the World Bank Finances Community Disruption in Cameroon.” Yaoundé. Delescluse, Aude. 2004. “Chad-Cameroon: A Model Pipeline?” Georgetown Journal of International Affairs 5 (1): 43–51. Endeley, Joyce B.M. 2010. “The Politics of Gender, Land and Compensation in Communities Traversed by the Chad-Cameroon Pipeline Project in Cameroon.” In Land Tenure, Gender and Globalisation: Research and Analysis from Africa, Asia and Latin America, edited by Dzodzi Tsikata and Pamela Golah. New Dehli: Zubaan. Enns, Charis, and Adam Sneyd. 2020. “More-Than-Human Infrastructural Violence and Infrastructural Justice: A Case Study of the Chad-Cameroon Pipeline Project.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 111 (2): 1–17.

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Environmental Defense Fund. 2007. “The Chad Cameroon Oil & Pipeline Project: A Project Non-completion Report.” Edited by Korinna Horta, Samuel Nguiffo, and Delphine Djiraibe. New York: Environmental Defense Fund. Esso Exploration and Production Chad Inc. 2002. “Chad/Cameroon Development Project, Report #8.” Houston: Esso Exploration and Production Chad Inc. Forest Peoples Programme and Bank Information Center. 2000. “Rapport de l’enquete d’implication des Peuples Autochtones dans le cycle du projet pipeline Tchad-Cameroun.” Washington, DC: Forest People Programme, Bank Information Center. Friends of the Earth International. 2004. “Cameroon—Women Affected by Oil Pipeline.” London: Friends of the Earth International. Gender Action and Friends of the Earth International. 2011. “Broken Promises: Gender Impacts of the World Bank-Financed West-African and ChadCameroon Pipelines.” Washington, DC: Gender Action and Friends of the Earth International. Hofmann, Susanne. 2014. “Tracing Contradictions of Neoliberal Governmentality in Tijuana’s Sex Industry.” Anthropology Matters 15 (1). Hoinathy, Remadji. 2013. Pétrole et changement social Au Tchad: Rente pétrolière et monétisation des relations économiques et sociales dans la zone pétrolière de Doba. Paris: Karthala. Horta, Korinna. 2012. “Public-Private Partnership and Institutional Capture: The State, International Institutions, and Indigenous Peoples in Chad and Cameroon.” In The Politics of Resources Extraction: Indignous Peoples, Multinational Corportions and the State, edited by Suzanna Sawyer and Edmund Terence Gomez. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. House Chatham. 2015. “Corruption and Poor Governance Impede Progress in the Fight Against Illegal Logging in Cameroon and Malaysia.” London: Chatham House. International Advisory Group and The World Bank Group. 2006. “Mission to Chad, Report of Mission 11 to Chad.” Montreal: International Advisory Group. Jobin, William. 2003. “Health and Equity Impacts of a Large Oil Project in Africa.” Bulletin of the World Health Organization 81 (6): 420–26. Keenan, Jeremy H. 2005. “Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline: World Bank & ExxonMobil in ‘Last Chance Saloon.’” Review of African Political Economy 32 (104/105): 395–405. Leibold, Annalisa M. 2011. “Aligning Incentives for Development: The World Bank and the Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline.” Student Prize Papers Paper 79. Leonard, Lori. 2016. Life in the Time Of oil: A Pipeline and Poverty in Chad. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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Lo, Marieme S. 2010. “Revisiting the Chad-Cameroon Pipeline Compensation Modality, Local Communities’ Discontent, and Accountability Mechanisms.” Canadian Journal of Development Studies 30 (1–2): 153–74. Magrin, Geraud, and Koumaro Mbayhoudel. 2005. “La bière à l’index? Enjeux et dynamiques de La consommation d’alcool au Sud du Tchad.” In Ressources vivrières et choix alimentaires dans le Bassin du Lac Tchad, edited by Christine Raimond, Garine Éric, and Olivier Langlois. Paris: Institut de Recherche pour le Development. Massey, Simon, and Roy May. 2005. “Dallas to Doba: Oil and Chad, External Controls and International Politics.” Journal of Contemporary African Studies 23 (2): 253–76. Murrey, Amber. 2015. “Narratives of Life and Violence Along the ChadCameroon Oil Pipeline.” Human Geography 8 (1): 15–39. Osifo, Omoregie Charles. 2014. “An Ethical Governance Perspective on Anticorruption Policies and Procedures: Agencies and Trust in Cameroon, Ghana, and Nigeria Evaluation.” International Journal of Public Administration 37 (5): 308–27. Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights. 2004. “Greasing the Wheels of Development? The World Bank, Human Rights & Chad’s Oil.” Washington, DC: Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights. Sikod, Fondo. 2006. “Globalization and Rural Development in Africa: The Case of the Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline.” CSGR Working Paper 203/06. The Inspection Panel and The World Bank Group. 2002. “Investigation Report: Chad-Cameroon Petroleum and Pipeline Project (Loan No. 4558-CD); Petroleum Sector Management Capacity Building Project (Credit No. 3373CD; and Management of the Petroleum Economy (Credit No. 3316-CD).” Washington, DC: The Inspection Panel and The World Bank. The North-South Institute. 2010. “Chad, the Challenge of Development: Policy Implications of the Chad-Cameroon Petroleum Project.” Edited by Jacques Gérin and Céline Houdin. Ottawa: The North-South Institute. The World Bank Group. 2009. “The World Bank Group Program of Support for the Chad-Cameroon Petroleum Development and Pipeline Construction.” Washington, DC: The World Bank Group. ———. 2015. “Poverty and Equity Database.” Washington DC: The World Bank. Transparency International. 2014. “Corruption Perceptions Index 2014.” Berlin: Transparency International. ———. 2019. “Corruption Perceptions Index 2019.” Berlin: Transparency International. United Nations Development Programme. 2018. “Human Development Report 2017: Cameroon.” New York: United Nations Development Programme ———. 2020a. “Gender Inequality Index.” New York.

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———. 2020b. “Human Development Report.” New York. Uriz, Genoveva H. 2001. “The Application of the World Bank Standards to the Oil Industry: Can the World Bank Promote Corporate Responsibility?” Brooklyn Journal of International Law 28 (1): 77–91. Vitalis Pemunta, Ngambouk, and Njiki Mildred Fonmboh. 2010. “Experiencing Neoliberalism from Below: The Bakweri Confrontation of the State of Cameroon over the Privatisation of the Cameroon Development Corporation.” Journal of Human Security 6 (1): 38–54. Vitalis Pemunta, Ngambouk, and Tabi Chama James Tabenyang. 2016. “Neoliberalism, Oil Wealth and Migrant Sex Work in the Chadian City of N’Djamena.” In Intimate Economies: Bodies, Emotions, and Sexualities on the Global Market, edited by Susanne Hofmann and Adi Moreno. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Walby, Sylvia. 2011. The Future of Feminism. Cambridge: Polity Press. Winters, Matthew S., and John A. Gould. 2011. “Betting on Oil: The World Bank’s Attempt to Promote Accountability in Chad.” Global Governance 17 (2): 229–45. World Energy News and Mbendi Information Services. 2013. “Cameroon Increases Transit Fee on Chad Oil Pipeline.” Cape Town: World Energy News.

CHAPTER 7

Conclusion

Abstract This chapter summarises the content and arguments of the overall book and provides recommendations to improve the unequal distribution of risks and benefits of oil projects between men and women. Keywords Emancipatory changes · Participative democracy · Decarbonisation

The research presented in this book set out to address three interrelated questions: First, what are the impacts of oil projects on women in oilrich countries? Second, how can these impacts be theoretically explained? Third, how can the negative impacts be reduced? The second question forms the core of this inquiry, which is to conceptualise and explain the gender implications of oil extraction in what are termed ‘zones of sacrifice’. Following the introduction, the second chapter of this book reviews the literature on women in the oil industry. The review finds that macroor global-level perspectives on research on women and the oil industry are inadequate to the task of responding to the questions above, but more exists on women in the mining industry more broadly, and at the local

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level. Much of the focus is on artisanal and small-scale mining (LahiriDutt 2018), which, while providing a valuable analysis, does not fully translate to the experiences of women in the formal oil industry or living around the sites of oil extraction. ASM, for instance, requires little capital and little skills, whereas the oil industry is large scale and requires a large amount of capital, and high technicity and skills, to operate, which has significant gender implications. At the national level, the introduction of a concept that ‘petroleum perpetuates patriarchy’ (Ross 2012) is part of a revisited neoliberal analysis of oil economy dynamics called the oil curse, and this has informed the World Bank in the design of its good governance framework. The ‘petroleum perpetuates patriarchy’ theory posits that the oil industry offers few jobs to locals, relying heavily on highly skilled, imported and mostly male labour. These factors alone, according to Ross, make employment possibilities for local women vanishingly small. Moreover, as the oil industry does not have significant backward and forward linkages to the local economy, it fails to create a significant number of new jobs outside the industry itself. This lack of opportunity for local populations, especially women, is reinforced by badly managed and distributed oil endowment at the national level. While providing useful insights, the ‘petroleum perpetuates patriarchy’ concept is limited by its focus on women in the job market and fails to address social reproduction and oppressive structures that bear upon women. It also fails to conceptualise the impact of oil as a crucial global commodity at the national level. The literature review’s examination of the above frameworks and analyses therefore found that they failed to address the larger matrix of oppressive structures that generate the unequal and gendered distribution of the assets and risks of oil projects. These deficiencies justify building a new conceptual framework. The latter part of Chapter 2 then turned to disentangling the elements of this larger matrix with a view to conceptualising such a framework, starting with an examination of how oil-rich countries are inserted into the global economy. This led to the insight that it is not simply bad management and distribution of oil revenue that results in the gender gap in the distribution of assets and benefits of the oil projects, but rather the role that oil itself plays as a key global commodity (Obi 2010). The concept of the Imperial Mode of Living (IML) provides a critical point of departure here, in conceptualising the larger forces at work in the global economy. Oil’s centrality to this economy cannot be underestimated: it is the largest internationally traded commodity in terms of both volume and

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value (Bridge 2008). According to this analysis, then, oil-rich countries become inevitably entangled with the burden-shifting practices, structures and processes of the IML. Everyday practices of those in the Global North (and emerging economies in the Global South) practising IML are unsustainable, as they rely heavily on the unlimited appropriation of resources (like oil) and a disproportionate claim to global and local ecosystems and sinks. This reliance on unsustainable practices makes the capitalist system prone to crises. The crises are temporarily fixed by externalising the unsustainable practices in time and space. Possessing a large amount of oil then entraps oil-rich countries into the processes and practices of these externalisations. The strength of IML theory, then, lies in its ability to connect oil-rich countries’ economic dependence to the wider processes and practices of globalised capitalism that accumulate by dispossession. However, this macro-level concept struggles to deal with structures of power articulated around gender, race and ethnicity that facilitate the burden-shifting of unsustainable practices. The development of a conceptual framework able to offer a comprehensive and nuanced analysis of the negative impacts of oil projects on women would therefore need to build on the IML concept, but also go further. Ecofeminist theory has the capability to link multiple, interconnected oppressive structures, useful for understanding the gender gap in the distribution of assets and risks of oil projects. The origin of these reinforcing structures can be traced back to the ideas such as dualistic thinking and material practices of exploitation associated with the rise of the modern state, scientific rationality and the development of mercantilism, colonialism and capitalism (Mies 1998; Plumwood 1993; Tickner 1993). During the modern era, for instance, the re-conceptualisation of nature as a machine allowed for its greater exploitation (Merchant 1983; Mies 1998), and a strengthening of the structures of patriarchy was also evident, as women, particularly midwives, were seen as being in control of reproduction and thus blamed for the shortage of workers needed for the expansion of industrialisation (Federici 2004). This re-conceptualisation and tightening of structure of patriarchy were sealed by hierarchical and dualistic thinking that helped to legitimate a mutually reinforcing set of social structures that have exploited both women and nature (Plumwood 1993; Mellor 1997). Broad social structures are then central to an ecofeminist analysis of the zones of sacrifice in oil-rich developing countries.

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Post-colonialist models of development, including Venezuela model, of which oil projects are a part, remain infused with the ideas and material practices of the modern era (Shiva 1990). This includes androcentric views of the modern world that still bear upon women and nature in the zones of sacrifice. These views take concrete and normative form in gender roles, the gendered division of labour and the division between private and public spheres (Scott 1995), as well as in the environmental degradation that signals an exploitative relationship with nature. The virtues of an ecofeminist framework are that it highlights the many ways in which women’s oppression in the zones of sacrifice are over-determined by a range of causes, from the local proximate causes of environmental degradation and violence against women, to the larger structural determinants at the national and international level that produce these local zones of exploitation. The way in which oil projects are implemented and managed at the national level, for instance, will result in different impacts on women, but remain linked to the gendered structure of the oil industry, the externalisation of the ecological burden of oil extraction, and the gender gap in the distribution of social vulnerability and security risks (Baynard 2011; Gyan 2013; Haller et al. 2007; Miller 2004; Orta-Martinez and Giner 2010; Ross 2012). All these factors contribute in multiple ways to women’s suffering in the oil zones. In Chapters 3 and 4, two illustrative cases—of Nigeria and Venezuela— allowed for the first research question (what are the impacts of oil projects on women in oil-rich countries?) to be examined in the light of the critical ecofeminist framework developed in the previous chapter. Each case study illustrates different aspects of the broader theoretical argument, albeit in different ways. Nigeria effectively provides a ‘textbook’ case of the impacts of oil projects on women living in oil zones. We saw how, over many decades, the struggle for the control of the oil wealth in Nigeria has had disastrous consequences for women in the Niger Delta. Women have suffered dispossession resulting from extraction, environmental degradation, poverty, violence and years of human rights abuse (United Nations Development Programme 2006). The country has suffered from poverty and lack of economic opportunity on a grand scale, and the government remains riddled with corruption. None, or very little, of the oil wealth has been devoted to improving the well-being of the local population (Osaghae 2015).

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The illustrative case of Venezuela allowed us to question the IML conceptualisation of oil projects, as the Venezuelan model aimed to break its dependence on the capitalist order. It provided an opportunity to examine what differences, if any, a collective ownership structure and distributive justice policies at the national level would make to the situation of women in oil zones. We saw that, overall, the Venezuelan model has reshaped social relations of class, gender and race in many positive ways. For example, in urban areas, women have benefited from distributive justice policies through initiatives such as Barrios, BanMujer and a salary recognising their contribution to the economy as carers (Fernandes 2007; Fischer-Hoffman 2006), although the latter initiative has arguably, in positioning (and rewarding) women as carers, also served to further entrench gender roles. Most significantly, oil extractive sites have remained zones of sacrifice as their populations, especially women, continue to bear the social, political and environmental costs of Venezuela’s increasing dependence on oil. The political economy of the oil industry, such as the geographic isolation of oil zones and issues in the redistribution of the oil revenue, contributes further to the disempowerment of women. The core problem is that Venezuela has become increasingly dependent on oil production to fuel its distributive justice policies, which has increased its economic dependence on the global hydrocarbon economy. This heavy reliance on oil production has, in turn, hindered the ability of the socialist model to ease the burden-shifting practices and processes of the IML. Nor has Venezuela, under this model, been able to solve the problem of corruption or enhance democracy (Kampwirth 2010). Corruption has expanded (Geyer 1999; PenfoldBecerra 2007) and the government in Venezuela, despite promoting participatory democracy, has fallen into deep chaos (Human Rights Watch 2012; Kampwirth 2010). Violence is also an endemic problem in Venezuela (Briceno-Leon 2006), and this has undermined attempts to introduce domestic violence policies (Stillman 2009). Finally, the increase in oil production has further increased environmental degradation in the oil zones (News Latin America 2013). In short, Venezuela’s model has only partially addressed some of the problems women face in the zones of sacrifice. Of course, the collective ownership structure of Venezuela’s model has the potential to produce more benefits for women, and for the local environment, but only if accompanied by a more genuine political and economic democracy. This would have given women more control

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over their fate and opened up an opportunity to revisit the relationship between human and non-human nature. What the cases of Nigeria and Venezuela illustrate is the complex and multi-layered nature of factors operating in zones of sacrifice; a complexity that belies any quick or technocratic ‘fix’, and challenges—in some ways surpasses—the role of governments. The ecofeminist conceptual umbrella has provided us with a tool to unpick this complexity and connect the range of unjustified hierarchies from which it arises. It is from these connections that ideas for emancipation may emerge. Applying the ecofeminist conceptual framework to the global reality of oil exploitation, and learning from the examples of Nigeria and Venezuela, the book then turned to the possibilities for transformation. Given that the causes of women’s oppression are multiple, an ecofeminist ethics framework suggests that they must be tackled ‘all at once’. For many women, this includes an end to oil exploitation. Patricia Gualinga, the Kichwa leader for Sarayaku, delivered a statement to the National Assembly of Ecuador in 2013 that encapsulates the spirit of ecofeminist ethics: she asked simply for ‘a zone of life that would exclude oil activity’ (AmazonWatch 2013). While political and economic realities might make it impossible to ‘tackle everything at once’, this does not mean that change cannot happen. The vortex of oppressive structures that an ecofeminist analysis has unveiled is over-determining, but not totalising: there is still room for transformative change based on a careful assessment of where efforts might be best directed. The paralysing effects of mismanaged oil revenue by governments (as seen in the illustrative cases) suggest that the national level may not the best place to start. In contrast, building fruitful linkages between local populations in the oil zones and sympathetic international and nongovernment organisations may be a more promising focus, especially in relation to international institutions that have leverage over national governments. The emancipatory task of identifying the most promising sites for political change was made possible by the methodology employed in the first two questions of the study, which sought to develop a critical and comprehensive understanding of the various forces at work at different levels of analysis—local, national and international—that combined to create the oppression experienced by women in the zones of sacrifice. This method began with a critical analysis of the approaches to women and the oil industry and the ‘petroleum perpetuates patriarchy’ claim and then zoomed out to a broader Critical Political Economy analysis

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of how oil-rich developing countries are inserted into the international economy. Finally, this analysis was also shown to be deficient, and that these deficiencies could only be remedied with a broader framework, that is, ecofeminism. As the methodology moves between different levels of analysis, so does the level of data analysis. The empirical component zooms out through national data analysis on the position of women in oil-producing societies to a lower level of data analysis, that is, women in the zones of sacrifice. The strength of this multi-level approach is that it can analyse and connect the different layers of the matrix of oppressive structures that bear upon women in the zones of sacrifice. In aiming for a comprehensive breadth of analysis, this methodology cannot provide a fine-grained analysis at any given level. However, the virtue of this analysis is that, in providing a comprehensive theory to explain women’s oppression, it also provides guidance regarding locating the most promising sites and levels for reform. Exploring sources of transformative change to close the gender gap in the distribution of risks and benefits of oil projects is the basis of Chapter 5. The World Bank is a crucial international organisation with the research capability, resources and financial leverage required to address some of the oppressive structures bearing upon women in the zones of sacrifice. It is a key international player, with an extensive history of designing programmes to accompany development projects (Griffin 2009; Bedford 2005, 2013), including a number of good practice policies on petroleum governance. The chapter on the World Bank provided a critical examination of the Bank’s new framework on gender and the oil sector. This framework emphasised petroleum governance, with a particular focus on accountability and transparent institutional mechanisms to ease the negative impacts of possessing large levels of oil (i.e. based on the neoliberal ‘resource curse’ analysis outlined in the literature review) (Chowdhury and Skarstedt 2005). The framework also sought to mainstream gender across all aspects of the extractive industry for better integration of women into oil projects (WBG 1994; Prugl and Lustgarten 2006). The gender mainstreaming effort covered each stage of an oil project—design, preparation, planning and implementation—and aimed to close three ‘gender gaps’: the gender asset gap, the gender information gap and the gender vulnerability gap (WBG 2013). However, a deep dive into these policies in Chapter 5 found a significant gap between promise and reality. We saw that the Bank’s gender policies are still side-lined by its central economic focus (Hafner-Burton

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and Pollack 2002). Despite some progress, the Bank’s market-based economic approach remains underpinned by masculinist—and hierarchical—views of a gendered division of labour, a separation between public and private spheres, and a division between human and non-human nature. The policies are also non-binding, which limits their impact at the operational level (Cordonier Segger and French 2011). Indeed, the Bank has been found, by its own accountability mechanisms, to have failed to adhere to its own principles (Tiessen 2005). Moreover, the organisational culture of the Bank remains a major hurdle to real gender mainstreaming of the Bank policies (Griffin 2009; Molyneux 2007). The cumulative impact of these factors limits the ability of the Bank to fully address the multiple gender gaps it has identified in the implementation of oil projects. The strengths and limitations of the Bank’s approach are highlighted in the Chad–Cameroon oil pipeline case provided in Chapter 6. In the implementation phase of the project, the petroleum governance framework facilitated the design of stringent safeguards for transparency, mechanisms for a fair distribution of oil revenue, as well as the development of an EMP (Delescluse 2004; Massey and May 2005). There were also mechanisms to better involve women in decision-making processes. However, the promise of the framework, and associated initiatives, was thwarted by its lack of gender, sociological and anthropological sensitivities, especially to local farming practices in the two countries. The overall result was that the Bank’s heavy involvement in the Chad–Cameroon oil pipeline hardly altered the project’s outcomes for local populations at all, and the greatest negative impacts were suffered by women (Gender Action and Friends of the Earth International 2011). Nor did the Bank’s efforts manage to address the burden-shifting practices of the IML. The ‘one size fits all’ free-market approach policies that the Bank had designed were also limited by the imposition of capitalist property relations, capital-intensive technologies and the perpetuation of the maledominated structure of the oil industry. The chapter details the many ways in which the above limitations led to ineffective action based on false assumptions and blind spots; the cumulative effect of which hindered the ability of the good governance package to close various gaps in the oil project’s distribution of risks and benefits. Often the project reinforced or exacerbated pre-existing, and often gendered, hierarchies. Despite these limitations, local/international linkages still offer the best opportunities for transformative change for women living in oil zones.

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The World Bank’s policy package for the Chad–Cameroon oil pipeline was, in its initial form, very promising, and the fact that an attempt was made to address the gender, anthropological and anthropocentric issues with the Bank’s work itself signals a growing realisation of the depth of the problem. The package could indeed have had more positive outcomes if the Bank had developed better mechanisms to maintain leverage on the Chad government to adopt its policies, such as by making the distribution of its loans conditional on the adoption of the good governance package. Likewise, the Bank could have placed greater emphasis on strong democratic mechanisms at all levels of government in the two countries, which could have eased the negative impacts of oil revenue mismanagement. It goes without saying that a better understanding of the gendered sociological and anthropological realities on the ground would have translated into better outcomes—this would have required at the very least more consultation, through a gender lens, prior to the construction of the pipeline. The Bank could also have served as a better ally to impacted communities by negotiating for meaningful royalties that allowed them to enjoy some of the benefits of the oil wealth they were helping create. In summary, a more systematic emphasis on transparency, accountability and local participation, the negotiation of much greater public redistribution of the oil wealth, and more culturally and gender-sensitive policies, all would have gone a long way towards a more equitable distribution of the project’s risks and benefits. Looking forward, there are further reasons for optimism at the global level that might bring relief for women living in oil zones. First, there is a global trend to cut carbon emissions and divest from fossil fuels. As this trend grows, especially in the wake of the Paris Agreement in December 2015, we can expect to see investment in oil production declining in the longer run. In a first step to curb carbon emissions from the international level, the World Bank has committed to stop funding oil projects from 2019 and has also followed the US government in placing sharp restrictions on financing for new coal-fired plants in developing countries. The decision of the G7 to ‘decarbonise the global economy’, taken in Germany in 2015, is another positive step (The Guardian 2015). It is, therefore, possible that Patricia Gualinga’s request for ‘a zone of life that would exclude oil activity’ will be realised. However, although this will certainly make some difference for those living in the zones of sacrifice, the ecofeminist framework makes clear that it will not necessarily see the end of women’s oppression. Furthermore, the toxic trail of decades of

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oil pollution and the long-term negative consequences of the emissions generated by oil exploitation will continue to be experienced, not just by local populations, but worldwide, and for generations to come.

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Index

A accountability, 6, 52, 74, 84–86, 110, 121–123 androcentric, 21, 22, 24, 33, 36, 87, 88, 118 anthropocentric, 21, 23, 28, 33, 50, 58, 102, 111, 123 Artisanal and Small-Scale Mining (ASM), 2, 12, 13, 116 B Bagyéli, 99, 100, 102 Bakola, 99, 100 boomtowns, 3, 30, 31, 83 C collective ownership, 5, 29, 64, 74, 119 contamination, 29, 54 critical ecofeminist theory, 7 Critical International Political Economy (CIPE), 14, 17–19

D dualistic thinking, 20, 22, 32, 34, 36, 117

E ecological sink capacities, 3, 28 ecological sinks, 15 emancipatory change, 7, 8, 79, 98 environmental degradation, 29 ethnocentric, 21, 33, 50, 58

G gender, sociological and anthropological sensitivities, 122 Gualinga, Patricia, 1, 120, 123

H hegemonic way of life, 2

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Helbert, Women, Gender and Oil Exploitation, Gender, Development and Social Change, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81803-6

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L large-scale industry, 12 M macro-level dynamics, 13 more-than-human infrastructural violence, 92, 102 O oil curse, 14, 87, 91, 103, 116 over-determined, 11, 32, 33, 118 P petroleum perpetuates patriarchy, 14, 116, 120 Pink Tide, 17, 18, 33, 34, 63 prior and informed consultation, 83 private ownership, 73

S subsistence farming, 28, 54, 87

T transformative agenda, 4 transparency, 6, 74, 85, 91, 103, 111, 122, 123

U unlimited appropriation of resources, 2, 15, 117 unsustainable practices, 2, 15, 20, 117 urban/rural, 6, 72, 104

Z zone of life, 1, 32, 120, 123