Håvard Haarstad

Carbonscapes and beyond Conceptualizing the instability of oil landscapes

Geographers tend to see energy systems as intricately interwoven with society and relatively resistant to change. We argue that there is a danger of exaggerating the permanence and stability of the energy–society relationship. Therefore we propose a framework that is more open to instability and transformation. Using assemblage theory, we frame the social and material landscapes of oil – carbonscapes – as having emergent capacities for change built into their relations of exteriority. We illustrate this by discussing instabilities at particular points within the global oil production network: extractive hot zones, energy distribution infrastructures, and urban spaces of consumption and practice.

Collective political subjectivity and the problem of scale

The contemporary political climate presents significant challenges for attempts to conceptualize and practise collective action. New forms of socio-spatial organization have challenged the centrality of the category of class, and opened for the proliferation of new political categories. Emancipation politics seem fragmented to the point where it is hard to discern a broad, common project. This has led both to efforts to rethink class in Marxist theory and to imagine collective political subjectivities at a relative distance from Marxism. Collective political subjectivity can be understood as the theory and practice of constructing a project around the interests of a broad range of actors who can negotiate the fundamental power relations in contemporary capitalism. Here theory and practice are mutually constitutive, since theory is derived from observation of practice, which in turn receives much of its imagination from theory. Leftist discourse presents several competing, or complementary, approaches for theorizing the possibilities for concerted action towards common goals outside the category of class. The aim of this article is to discuss some of the concepts currently used to imagine political collective subjectivity and to show that a central challenge for these efforts is to negotiate, on one hand, sensitivity towards difference, and on the other, organizing broad political collectives that can radically challenge structures in contemporary capitalism. This is a problem of scale, a problem of how sensitivity towards local specificity can be maintained within co-operative strategies with national or global aspirations. I argue that the concepts in question are still unable to account satisfactorily for the problem of extension and reach (globalization/universalism) on the one hand, and intensity and sensitivity towards difference (localization/particularism) on the other. These are materialized and temporarily fixed by political structures at a range of scales between the local and the global in ways that enable and constrain attempts to construct collective subjectivities. The tension between the local/particular and the global/universal will always have to be temporarily resolved at scales along the long frontier between the particulars and the universal. These problems have been confronted in debates on politics of scale within human geography. Conceptualizations of collective political subjectivity would benefit from an engagement with perspectives that see both the local and the global as multi-scalar and reciprocally produced. To promote an engagement with the problem of scale, I finally outline five concerns that attempts to imagine collective political subjectivity should accommodate.

Globalization and the New Spaces for Social Movement Politics: The Marginalization of Labor Unions in Bolivian Gas Nationalization

This article aims for a critical engagement with the new spaces for social movement politics. Recent literature focusing on the relationship between globalization and these spaces foregrounds the new opportunity structures for political practices. Yet amid talk of ‘grassroots globalization’ and ‘globalization from below’, it is important to remain sensitive to how certain forms of practice and organization, particularly those of labor unions, are marginalized within the political spaces of globalization. This paper investigates how the political spaces of globalization shaped the nationalization of gas resources in Bolivia. Nationalization was achieved by new social movements partly negotiating within political spaces opened by globalization. Yet the interests and demands of labor unions were significantly marginalized in implementation. ‘Actually existing’ nationalization can best be described as a pragmatic renegotiation of contracts, in response to a dual pressure from new social movements and from economic globalization. Bolivian nationalization of gas illustrates how union politics around issues of work are constrained within the political spaces of globalization. Este artículo intenta conseguir un compromiso crítico con los nuevos espacios para la política de movimientos sociales. Una literatura reciente con un enfoque en la relación entre la globalización y estos espacios, destaca las nuevas oportunidades de estructuras para las prácticas políticas. No obstante, al hablar de “la globalización de base popular” y “la globalización desde abajo”, es importante mantenerse sensible ante la manera como ciertas formas de práctica y organización, particularmente aquellas de los sindicatos laborales, se han marginado dentro de los espacios políticos de la globalización. Este trabajo investiga cómo los espacios políticos de la globalización dieron forma a la nacionalización de los recursos de gas en Bolivia. La nacionalización se logró mediante nuevos movimientos sociales, en parte negociando dentro de los espacios políticos abiertos por la globalización. Aún así, en la implementación, los intereses y las demandas de los sindicatos laborales fueron marginadas considerablemente. “De hecho, la nacionalización existente” se puede describir mejor como una renegociación pragmática de contratos, en respuesta a la doble presión de los movimientos sociales y a la globalización económica. La nacionalización boliviana del gas ilustra cómo la política de los sindicatos alrededor de los asuntos de trabajo, están restringidos dentro de los espacios políticos de la globalización.

Constructing the sustainable city: examining the role of sustainability in the ‘smart city’ discourse

ABSTRACT The idea of the ‘smart city’ is increasingly central to debates on urban development and sustainability, and a host of cities are now pursuing ‘smartness’ as a way to improve energy efficiency, transport, and public services. However, existing research does not provide a clear picture of how this smart city agenda actually contributes to sustainability. The social science literature has been critical toward urban smartness, with most of the empirical research focusing on the politics of data-driven and entrepreneurial urbanism. This article seeks to contribute to this debate by empirically examining the role that sustainability plays in the smart city discourse. Its distinctive approach is to investigate how urban smartness and sustainability are framed by an authoritative institution (the European Union) and then to trace these framings down to a particular city (Stavanger, Norway). The data show that the smartness approach is strongly tied to innovation, technology, and economic entrepreneurialism, and sustainability does not appear to be a very important motivating driver. Nevertheless, the ‘sustainability component’ of the smart city agenda becomes clearer the closer we come to the city level.

Extracting Justice? Critical Themes and Challenges in Latin American Natural Resource Governance

Natural resources have traditionally been considered a curse on Latin American societies, from the plundering of the colonial era to the ills of commodity dependency in later years. At the present juncture there seems to be widespread optimism due to the belief that natural resource extraction can engender social development and improve livelihoods in the region. Many of the governments have been influenced in a variety of ways by popular demands for more equitable models of development and more participatory politics. Some have characterized this as a departure from the widely unpopular neoliberal governance regimes that failed to satisfy people’s development aspirations and the emergence of a “post-neoliberal” era in which different types of alternative models are constructed (Rodriguez-Garavito, Barrett & Chavez, 2008; Sader, 2008). This is particularly the case in Andean societies, where indigenous and “new” social movements have over the past two decades successfully mobilized and campaigned for substantive rights, territory, and inclusion, as well as a greater share of extraction revenues.

Global economic imperatives, crisis generation and local spaces of engagement in the Chilean aquaculture industry

The authors use the 2007 ISA virus outbreak in Chilean salmon aquaculture, coupled with insights from post-structural political ecology, as an opportunity to examine the institutional architecture and discursive hegemony of particular production strategies that silenced local experiences with the industry in favour of continuing exploitation. The authors argue that the case makes visible some of the generally relevant processes in which the generation of the crisis takes place within governance structures that involve few spaces of engagement for local actors to influence and participate in decision-making. Municipalities have few opportunities to shape the development of an industry with significant socio-economic impacts on their jurisdictions. Finally, the authors show how the crisis opens spaces of engagement for local actors and argue that sustainable governance of aquaculture depends on such spaces through which critical perspectives and warning signs can be communicated and negotiated, and through which local entrepreneurs can enter the value chain.

Cross-scalar Dynamics of the Resource Curse: Constraints on Local Participation in the Bolivian Gas Sector

Abstract Contributing to debate on the contextual underpinnings and varieties of the resource curse, this article points to how political and economic dynamics of resource endowments operate in interrelated but potentially contradictory ways across spatial scales. Resource endowments insert a complex set of incentives and interests into the political arena in ways that both enable and constrain actors at different scales. Using a case study of gas governance in Bolivia, the article illustrates the interrelation of these dynamics across local, national and international scales, and in particular how they circumscribe the space for local participation.

Who Is Driving the ‘Smart City’ Agenda? Assessing Smartness as a Governance Strategy for Cities in Europe

Smart cities are now widely acclaimed as a key policy approach to achieve the greening of the economy, and in particular, to address urban energy challenges. ‘Smartness’ has long been primarily about information and communications technologies (ICTs). More recently however, strong claims have been made for the usefulness of thinking through smartness for the purposes of creating low-carbon and energy-efficient cities. Series of energy-related smart city initiatives exist in Europe, the USA and elsewhere, along with an emerging discourse about the potential of new forms of mobility in cities that integrate renewable energies, public modes of transportation and Internet communication.

From ‘Good Governance’ to the Contextual Politics of Extractive Regime Change

The notion of the ‘resource curse’ now provides the predominating framework for understanding the persistence of poverty in many resource-rich developing countries. Over the past decades, it has been juxtaposed onto the development discourse of good governance, whereby the so-called curse is typically attributed to ‘governance’ of the natural resource exploitation process and the management of the resource rents (Leite & Weidmann, 1999; Mehlum et al., 2006; Robinson et al., 2006; Ross, 2012), thus leading to the axiom that certain types of institutional reforms are necessary to escape the curse. The notion of the resource curse is considered to be inextricably linked to issues of good governance and, taken in tandem, these have propelled a popular way of understanding the complex relation between resource extraction and development, centred on the concept that certain technocratic reforms of governance institutions, and most importantly revenue management, can unlock the development potential of even the most spectacularly failing states.

The challenges of greening energy: policy/industry dissonance at the Mongstad refinery, Norway

The interaction between policy making and industry is a key to understanding the conditions for ‘greening’ contemporary energy systems. This article uses efforts toward greening the Mongstad oil refinery in Norway as a case to analyse the challenges involved in politically stimulated shifts towards increased sustainability in the energy sector. A technology test centre and a full-scale carbon capture and storage (CCS) project at Mongstad were the centrepiece of the Stoltenberg governments (2005–2013) climate strategy. However, the project suffered delays and cost overruns until the full-scale carbon capture and storage project was eventually stopped. It is argued that interactions between the policy-making and industrial innovation arenas involved in this case are challenging because they operate according to different internal logics. We conceptualize this divergence as ‘policy/industry dissonance’ and suggest that this concept is a useful complement to literatures on regional innovation systems (RIS) and the multilevel perspective on sustainability transitions (MLP).