Carol Hunsberger

The politics of Jatropha-based biofuels in Kenya: convergence and divergence among NGOs, donors, government officials and farmers

This study explores the spread of Jatropha in Kenya and some implications of its trajectory. Proponents of biodiesel in Kenya have adopted a near-singular focus on Jatropha but attach it to a wide variety of goals, including climate change mitigation, poverty reduction, and clean development. The priorities of actors who promote the crop often differ from those of smallholder farmers who grow it. The persistence of multiple discourses of development linked to Jatropha creates tensions between competing perspectives, manifested through allegations of exclusion and shady business, but it also allows actors to deploy strategic flexibility by invoking Jatropha to pursue different ends. A case study of an internationally funded project in Mpeketoni, Coast Province highlights disconnects between the initial objectives of donors, coordinators, and farmers and explores the projects potential to produce outcomes that are satisfactory to all three. The paper contributes to wider debates about biofuels and discourses of development: Jatropha shares many features with past agricultural development interventions, but as a biofuel it exhibits additional layers of contested meaning because of the politics of energy and the environment that are involved.

Integrating place-specific livelihood and equity outcomes into global assessments of bioenergy deployment

Integrated assessment models suggest that the large-scale deployment of bioenergy could contribute to ambitious climate change mitigation efforts. However, such a shift would intensify the global competition for land, with possible consequences for 1.5 billion smallholder livelihoods that these models do not consider. Maintaining and enhancing robust livelihoods upon bioenergy deployment is an equally important sustainability goal that warrants greater attention. The social implications of biofuel production are complex, varied and place-specific, difficult to model, operationalize and quantify. However, a rapidly developing body of social science literature is advancing the understanding of these interactions. In this letter we link human geography research on the interaction between biofuel crops and livelihoods in developing countries to integrated assessments on biofuels. We review case-study research focused on first-generation biofuel crops to demonstrate that food, income, land and other assets such as health are key livelihood dimensions that can be impacted by such crops and we highlight how place-specific and global dynamics influence both aggregate and distributional outcomes across these livelihood dimensions. We argue that place-specific production models and land tenure regimes mediate livelihood outcomes, which are also in turn affected by global and regional markets and their resulting equilibrium dynamics. The place-specific perspective suggests that distributional consequences are a crucial complement to aggregate outcomes; this has not been given enough weight in comprehensive assessments to date. By narrowing the gap between place-specific case studies and global models, our discussion offers a route towards integrating livelihood and equity considerations into scenarios of future bioenergy deployment, thus contributing to a key challenge in sustainability sciences.

Bioenergy production and sustainable development: science base for policy-making remains limited

The possibility of using bioenergy as a climate change mitigation measure has sparked a discussion of whether and how bioenergy production contributes to sustainable development. We undertook a systematic review of the scientific literature to illuminate this relationship and found a limited scientific basis for policymaking. Our results indicate that knowledge on the sustainable development impacts of bioenergy production is concentrated in a few well‐studied countries, focuses on environmental and economic impacts, and mostly relates to dedicated agricultural biomass plantations. The scope and methodological approaches in studies differ widely and only a small share of the studies sufficiently reports on context and/or baseline conditions, which makes it difficult to get a general understanding of the attribution of impacts. Nevertheless, we identified regional patterns of positive or negative impacts for all categories – environmental, economic, institutional, social and technological. In general, economic and technological impacts were more frequently reported as positive, while social and environmental impacts were more frequently reported as negative (with the exception of impacts on direct substitution of GHG emission from fossil fuel). More focused and transparent research is needed to validate these patterns and develop a strong science underpinning for establishing policies and governance agreements that prevent/mitigate negative and promote positive impacts from bioenergy production.

Climate change mitigation, land grabbing and conflict: towards a landscape-based and collaborative action research agenda

ABSTRACT Recent research has highlighted the conflict potential of both land deals and climate change mitigation projects, but generally the two phenomena are studied separately and the focus is limited to discrete cases of displacement or contested claims. We argue that research with a broader “landscape” perspective is needed to better understand the complex social, ecological and institutional interactions taking place in sites of land-based climate change projects (such as biofuel production or forest conservation) and large-scale investments (plantations or mines). Research that co-produces knowledge and capacity with local actors, and informs advocacy at multiple policy scales, will contribute better to preventing, resolving or transforming conflicts.

Jatropha as a biofuel crop and the economy of appearances: experiences from Kenya

Jatropha curcas, an oilseed shrub, raised hopes that it could produce biofuel in a ‘sustainable’ manner, though early results fell short of these expectations. Drawing on field research from 2009, this paper examines the political economy of jatropha in Kenya using Tsings ‘economy of appearances’ concept. Tsings observation that start-up enterprises perpetuate ‘myth’ and ‘spectacle’ to build momentum fits patterns observed in this case. Jatrophas promoters reinforced an optimistic discourse, defended it against dissent and linked jatropha to global, national and local goals. However, the emergence of stronger critiques raises questions about how long its positive appearances can be maintained.

The discursive flexibility of ‘flex crops’: comparing oil palm and jatropha

‘Flex crops’ such as corn, oil palm and soy are understood to have multiple, interchangeable uses; they have material flexibility. We propose that discursive flexibility – the ability to strategically switch between discourses to promote an objective – equally shapes the political economy of flex crops, and thereby patterns of agrarian and environmental change. Comparing oil palm and Jatropha curcas, we find that actors who cast oil palm as a multi-scale solution to food and energy insecurity, climate change and (rural) poverty successfully reinforce its high material flexibility. Jatrophas proponents compensate for low material flexibility by positioning the crop as a ‘sustainable’ energy source that achieves both global and local goals. While this paper focuses on discourses that reinforce the oil palm and jatropha projects, understanding the power of discursive maneuvering can also inform efforts to contest them.

Explaining bioenergy: representations of jatropha in Kenya before and after disappointing results

Proponents of Jatropha curcas portrayed the crop as a ‘sustainable biofuel’ that was less threatening to food security and forests than other energy crops, creating a reputation that helped jatropha projects to multiply quickly throughout the global South. However, many jatropha initiatives failed to thrive and ultimately collapsed. This paper investigates how actors involved with jatropha in Kenya explained their visions of bioenergy at two points in time. In 2009, when many activities were beginning, I interviewed small-scale farmers, NGO staff, researchers, donors, government officials and members of the private sector about their expectations of jatropha as an energy crop. In late 2013, after jatropha activities in the country had dwindled, I re-interviewed many of the same individuals about their current views and their explanations of the events that had transpired since the initial fieldwork. Synthesizing these two sets of representations provides insight into how biofuel projects have been constructed, negotiated and renegotiated. Early hopes for jatropha rested on the belief that it could achieve many goals simultaneously, but when it failed to meet expectations proponents chose between two strategies: (1) ‘unbundling’ these goals to pursue separately the various aspirations they had initially attached to jatropha; and (2) seeking a new means of achieving the same bundle of goals. Understanding the choices made by jatropha actors in Kenya contributes to knowledge on the political ecology of biofuels and responsible innovation, and may signal patterns to come as even greater expectations are attached to multi-use feedstocks in pursuit of the bioeconomy.

Climate change policies, land grabbing and conflict: perspectives from Southeast Asia

Since the late 1990s, and particularly over the past decade, we have witnessed a proliferation of land-related initiatives being globally promoted in response to the climate change “problem”. Some ...

The palm oil controversy in Southeast Asia: a transnational perspective

a line of analysis would raise questions of social power, distribution and differentiation which Woertz only hesitantly opens up in this book. Indeed, he could and should have stated much more clearly that food security is a discourse which is mobilized in the region and elsewhere for ends having little to do with securing food: namely, the distribution of state rents to social elites in ways which would otherwise be difficult to publicly justify. Still, it is to Woertz’s credit that he has done such a skilled job of amassing and synthesizing a tremendous pile of historical and contemporary evidence – even if, upon surveying it, the reader comes to far less ambivalent conclusions about the real interests behind notions of ‘food security’ in the Gulf than the author does himself.

Wars of plunder: conflicts, profits and the politics of resources

__Abstract__ In Wars of Plunder, Philippe Le Billon investigates relationships between resources and conflict. The book’s main argument is “that resource sectors influence the likelihood and course of armed conflicts. In short, some resources make wars more likely, nasty, and lengthy” – but this straightforward statement belies the complexity of the analysis that follows (4). Le Billon uses the rare combination of econometric and political ecology approaches to explore conflicts involving oil, diamonds and timber, and draws on an equally diverse professional background to consider strategic responses. In doing so he advocates a hybrid understanding of resources that emphasises both their social and material character, and an expanded definition of violence that includes structural, social, physical, and environmental forms.