Slavery and the Making of Early American Libraries: British Literature, Political Thought, and the Transatlantic Book Trade, 1731-1814 1st Edition Sean D. Moore
The Contentious Political Economy of Biofuels and Fracking
KATE J. NEVILLE
3
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Neville, Kate J., author.
Title: Fueling resistance : the contentious political economy of biofuels and fracking / Kate J. Neville.
Description: New York, NY, United States of America : Oxford University Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020030195 (print) | LCCN 2020030196 (ebook) | ISBN 9780197535585 (hardback) | ISBN 9780197535608 (epub) | ISBN 9780197535592 (updf) | ISBN 9780197535615 (online)
Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America
For my godkids Poppy, Willow, Gulliver, Archibald, and Aldo, and for my nephew, William—
Never forget what you already know: The world is filled with wonder and is always worth fighting for.
Acknowledgments ix
Abbreviations xv
1. Introduction: The Changing Politics of Global Energy 1
2. Triple Wins? The Rise and Fall of Biofuels and Fracking 18
3. Catalyzing Local Contention: The Political Economy Drivers 48
4. Biofuels in Kenya’s Tana Delta 76
5. Fracking in the Yukon
6. Conclusions: Political
Acknowledgments
This book is focused on two very different regions: coastal east Africa and the Yukon—places geographically divergent yet embedded in many of the same global economic pressures, each with colonial histories and ongoing contested land claims. I am grateful for the guidance, mentorship, and encouragement extended so generously to me in both places, and beyond, by so many over the course of writing this book, which began out of my doctoral dissertation on biofuels and expanded from there. I have written much of this book in Taku River Tlingit territory at the British Columbia-Yukon border and in Dish with One Spoon treaty lands on the shores of Lake Ontario. To those whose lands and homes I have come to, I am grateful—asante sana to my friends and teachers in eastern Africa, and gunalchéesh, mahsi cho, and miigwech to those on Turtle Island.
While this book’s discussion of biofuels politics focuses on Kenya, my understanding of these conflicts was informed by my work in both Kenya and Tanzania. I owe a great debt to the people of the Tana and Rufiji deltas and surrounding villages—all the farmers, herders, ecologists, and conservationists—who shared their experiences, ideas, and concerns and who offered generous hospitality. My work in eastern Africa was possible thanks to experienced, knowledgeable, and inspiring field research partners and teachers. Thank you, first, to Wanja Nyingi, for inviting me to join her team, for sharing her expertise and intellectual insights, and, with her daughter Malaika, for warm hospitality and close friendship. I extend many thanks to the National Museums of Kenya, Stéphanie Duvail and the Institute of Research for Development, and Amos Majule and the University of Dar es Salaam. Their long-term engagement in community-based participatory research and deep ties to the land and people have shaped my understanding of how to conduct meaningful, ethical research. In the field, Francis Semwaza, Elibariki Mjema, Camille Bouchez, Crystèle Léauthaud-Harnett, Delphine Lebrun, Kennedy Otoi, Siad Bakero, and Martina Locher were open and enthusiastic collaborators, colleagues, assistants, translators, and guides. From afar, Emmanuel Sulle was generous with his knowledge and insights. And my
time in Kenya and Tanzania was made more joyful thanks to dear friends, among them the Nyingi, Kantai, and Rebelo families.
My research in the Yukon coincided with my introduction to life in the North, as I navigated both fracking politics and off-grid cabin life. My understanding of the importance of energy in small northern communities was intensified by my own efforts to install solar panels and reduce reliance on a generator at the cabin. To follow the debates over fracking, liquefied natural gas (LNG) backup power, and Peel land use planning, I relied on the generosity and openness of many Yukoners. I thank the members of the Select Committee on the Risks and Benefits of Hydraulic Fracturing for their patience as I followed them to all (but one) of the hearings and peppered them with questions. A special thanks to Harreson Tanner and Pat Fortier for hosting me in Old Crow. My gratitude, too, to the many environmental and community organizers who spent time with me sharing their perspectives and explaining their positions, including the members of Yukoners Concerned about Oil and Gas Development, especially Don Roberts, Sally Wright, and JP Pinard, as well as staff at the Yukon chapter of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society and the Yukon Conservation Society, especially Amber Church, Christina Macdonald, and Anne Middler. I am grateful for the generous intellectual engagement and thoughtful stories of the late David Neufeld; his mentorship was expansive and inclusive, and his presence will be sorely missed by so many.
Academic writing is never solitary, and I am fortunate to be surrounded by a community of scholars who see the academic realm as a place not for personal gain but for questioning the status quo, making hidden assumptions visible, and upending structures of oppression. This has been true throughout my graduate and postdoctoral work at Yale, UBC, and Duke, as well as now at the University of Toronto in both the Department of Political Science and the School of the Environment. I thank my colleagues now and along the way for collaboration, a critical lens on research in progress, and galvanizing conversations about the possibilities embedded in our work. For unwavering guidance and encouragement at every step, as well as for his model of generosity and intellectual bravery, I am forever indebted to Peter Dauvergne, my PhD advisor, coauthor, and mentor. For her crackling intellect and fierce commitment to meaningful, rigorous scholarship, I thank Erika Weinthal, my postdoctoral fellowship advisor and continuing collaborator. I am grateful to them as well for the communities of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows they supported, who have also shaped my life and work,
among them Jane Lister, Jen Allan, Deborah Barros Leal Farias, Hamish van der Ven, Genevieve LeBaron, Justin Alger, Chris Paul, McKenzie Johnson, Kim Marion Suiseeya, and Shana Starobin. For unstinting guidance and inspiring scholarship (as well as encouragement at crucial moments—on this book and on academic pursuits in general), I thank Matt Hoffmann, Stephen McCaffrey, Jennifer Clapp, Sheila Olmstead, Yves Tiberghien, Brian Job, Raleigh Robertson, and Rachel Vallender.
On this manuscript I have been fortunate to have advice and constructive feedback from many readers—both known and anonymous—whose astute insights and incisive critiques of book drafts and related articles along the way have prompted me each time to return to these ideas with new inspiration. I owe particular thanks to my dissertation committee: Peter, Jennifer, and Yves; my PhD examiners: Lisa Sundstrom, Matthew Evenden, and Robert Falkner; related article collaborators: Peter and Erika; participants in a book workshop: Matt, Jennifer, Grace Skogstad, Steven Bernstein, and Amy Janzwood; manuscript readers: Erika, Andrea Olive, and Sarah Martin—all of whom I’ve also been fortunate to have as collaborators for other projects; journal editors: Kate O’Neill and Jun Borras; and several anonymous peer reviewers. I owe so much to Angela Chnapko, who took a chance on the transformation of a book about biofuels into one on the global politics of energy. Her guidance and advice throughout the writing and revising have been invaluable.
As cited throughout the book, many of the theoretical ideas and empirical findings on biofuels and fracking that inform this project were undertaken as co-authored projects with Peter during my PhD and with Erika during my post-doctoral fellowship, and I owe an intellectual debt to both for more than just the formal cited material. I draw substantially on our shared work for the foundations of this analysis. From a practical perspective, I conducted primary research for these projects under shared institutional ethics approvals (from the UBC Behavioural Research Ethics Board and the Duke University Institutional Review Board, respectively). Thanks to support from the National Museums of Kenya, the University of Dar es Salaam, and the Institute of Research for Development, I obtained research permits and official affiliations for field research in Tanzania and Kenya on biofuels from each respective government; in the Yukon, I obtained a Scientists and Explorers Act license through the Heritage Resources Unit of Tourism and Culture. Funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada made this work possible, first through a SSHRC Canadian Graduate
Scholarship and associated Michael Smith travel scholarship for my work in eastern Africa, and then a postdoctoral fellowship, which supported my research in the Yukon. The University of Toronto’s Department of Political Science and School of the Environment have supported this book in many ways, financial and otherwise. I owe much to the administrative staff in both units—in particular Sari Sherman, Julie Guzzo, Michael Li, Mary-Alice Bailey, and Liz Jagdeo; their work makes my own possible. Thanks to the team at Oxford University Press, and to Celia Braves for the index. Many of the images in this book were drawn, redrawn, or photographed by exceptional and generous friends and family: Kate Harris, Emily Darling, James Harris, and Piia Kortsalo.
Within and beyond the scholarly community, I have learned so much from friends—writers, activists, ecologists, artists, farmers, scholars, and more— who work for and inspire compassion, integrity, equity, and beauty, and in so doing, catalyze transformation and hope in countless ways. My first foray into biofuel politics was thanks to the Earth Negotiations Bulletin team: thanks to Pam Chasek and Kimo Goree for their vision of a more transparent international system, and to the incredible colleagues and friends from those reporting teams, among them Wanja, Tanya Rosen, Melanie Ashton, Tallash Kantai, Resson Kantai, Peter Wood, Sikina Jinnah, Nancy Williams, Joanna Dafoe, Nienke Beintema, Graeme Auld, and Pia Kohler. Along with more formal research, I have learned so much about Yukon politics, history, energy systems, and the joy of northern living from many friends on both sides of the Yukon-BC border, including Oliver Barker and Piia Kortsalo, Cathie Archbould and Jacqueline Bedard, Miche Genest and Hector MacKenzie, Amy Nihls and Ali Criscitiello, Philippe, Leandra, and Justin Brient, Manu and Sascha Keggenhoff, Ben Sanders, Anna Schmidt, Dick Fast and Maggie Darcy, Peter Steele, Judy Currelly and Stephan Torre, and Cindy and Wayne Merry. I wish that Wayne could see this final book: beyond his friendship, encouragement, and kindness, Wayne offered astute comments, at just the right moment, about the parallels between northern Canada and coastal Kenya. Thanks to Shauna Yeomans and Jerry Jack for welcoming me to the Taku River and, with Mark Connor and Angela Milani, teaching me about bears. My trips to the Peel Watershed were made possible—and joyful—first in the mountains with Kieran O’Donovan, and subsequently on the water with Emily Darling, Rebecca Haspel, Devin Farkas, and Marielle Matthews. Beyond the North I am grateful to friends around the world for their encouragement and support for this project, including Laura and PJ Lee, Kim
Rutherford and Kate Smolina, Hana Boye, Zibba Leonardis, Erika Mundel and Andrew Rushmere, Erin Barnes, Lorelei Ormrod, and Cassie Flynn.
In my academic career and far beyond it, my family and extended family— especially Pat and Jan Neville, Lukas Neville and Indra Kalinovich, and the Harris and Wells families—have been attentive listeners, insightful critics, and steadfast supporters. And there are not enough words to thank Kate Harris, my partner in all things. For persuading me to move off-grid and to confront questions of energy and technology directly and tangibly—rather than only academically and abstractly—I am ever grateful. Along with reading so many iterations of this manuscript (oh so many!), it is through her own writing that she has most shaped my work and thinking: her reeling questions, the paradox of beauty and heartbreak, and, always, rewriting all the maps in search of deeper connection.
Abbreviations
ABCDs Archer Daniels Midland, Bunce, Cargill, and Louis Dreyfus
BC British Columbia
CAP Common Agricultural Policy of the EU
CNOOC China National Offshore Oil Corporation
CPAWS Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society
CYFN Council of Yukon First Nations
EPA US Environmental Protection Agency
EU European Union
FAO Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations
IPCC Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
IUCN International Union for Conservation of Nature
LNG liquefied natural gas
NEMA National Environmental Management Agency of Kenya
NGO nongovernmental organization
NIMBY not in my backyard
NRDC Natural Resources Defense Council
OECD Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
RFS Renewable Fuels Standard
RSB Roundtable on Sustainable Biomaterials
RSPB Royal Society for the Protection of Birds
TADECO Tana Delta Conservation Organisation
TARDA Tana and Athi River Development Authority
TISP Tana Integrated Sugar Project
UFA Umbrella Final Agreement
UN United Nations
UNFCCC United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
WTO World Trade Organization
YCS Yukon Conservation Society
YEC Yukon Energy Corporation
YESAB Yukon Environmental and Socio-economic Assessment Board
YTG Yukon Territorial Government
1 Introduction
The Changing Politics of Global Energy
Imagine standing on a dusty, sun-baked road on the coast of east Africa in the dry season. The rutted track winds between tangled thickets. From deep in the branches comes the short, squeaky song of a little yellow flycatcher or, if you are lucky, the tsseer of a Sokoke pipit. The clanking progress of a truck on the uneven road interrupts the birds, as does the tired creak of bicycles pedaled by young men hauling twine-tied burlap sacks of charcoal (photo 1.1). Somewhere in the mix of forest, woodland, and thicket roam African elephants, red colobus monkeys, and, if you gaze skyward at dusk, little collared fruit bats. Further north, along a river delta in Kenya, there are villages with wide-horned cows standing amid chickens and ducks, beside homes with thatched palm leaf or woven grass roofs. The “environment is [a] human being,” a leader in one such village told me during a visit one November. “If you destroy the environment, you destroy yourself.”1 The connection between land and livelihood is direct here. “If your land goes, it is terrible,” he continued. He spoke against new proposed agricultural projects in the region that would change local land uses, suggesting these would negatively affect the environment. Yet for others in the delta, the same developments represented much-needed opportunities. “We’ll be less poor with these projects,” said one villager in a nearby community.2
Spin the globe and travel north past the 60th parallel on a dusty gravel highway, lit by long days of light in the northern hemisphere summer. This is one of the few roads that isn’t made of ice snaking north into the Canadian sub-Arctic. The Dempster Highway starts in the southern Yukon and continues to its northeast edge in the Mackenzie Valley (photo 1.2). Spruce and aspen forests give way to low willow and dwarf birch as latitudes and altitudes rise through a succession of mountain ranges. A century of mining has left more tracks than the previous millennia of human habitation, and vast expanses of land remain that are dominated by forces other than human. Smoke rises from a fishing camp somewhere on a twisted river; nearby, a
Photo 1.1 Man pedaling bicycle laden with charcoal on road in coastal Tanzania. Photo by author.
Photo 1.2 The Dempster Highway in winter. Photo by Kate Harris.
grizzly bear waits near the river bank for its own finned meal. Head west, by river or air, to a community beyond the road network, where in a public hearing one late June day, a Gwich’in First Nations member underscored the community’s commitment to the land: “Any gathering we have, we fight for our environment, we fight for the fish, caribou, the air and water.”3 Similar views were expressed by a resident of a southern Yukon community, who, opposing proposals for new extractive activity in the region that might affect water resources and caribou habitat, explained, “Our relationship with this land is not simply as a resource. Our relationship with this land is sacred.”4 Still, others in the Yukon viewed resource development as essential for the autonomy and well-being of those in the territory, where one local industry association leader wrote that, if responsibly undertaken, such projects “provide numerous benefits for communities, citizens and the environment alike.”5
In response to a series of intersecting global and regional challenges that intensified in the early 2000s, countries around the world—including Kenya and Canada—ramped up efforts to find diversified energy sources and new economic opportunities. Climbing oil prices catalyzed new interest in alternative energy options. With fossil fuels identified as a major source of both greenhouse gas emissions and economic growth, and with geopolitical unrest altering access to fossil fuel supplies, changes in the energy sector became both problematic and promising. Three sets of pressure shaped the reception of several new, or at least newly refined and reconsidered, energy technologies: the environment (climate change), security (changing geopolitics and the “war on terror”), and the economy (a drive for economic growth). Energy sources were pursued that promised to deliver “triple wins” (understood in global arenas as benefiting trade, development, and the environment)6 in response to these climate, security, and economic challenges. Biofuels— that is, liquid fuels derived from plant sugars and oils—hit the global stage with force around 2005. Hydraulic fracturing—or “fracking,” involving the extraction of oil and gas from shale and tight rock formations—followed a few years later, transforming the natural gas sector by 2008. Both technologies expanded the geographic possibilities for production, implicating new landscapes and communities in the energy sector. And both fuel sources resulted in contestation over the transformation, or anticipated and potential transformation, of local economies, ecologies, and social relationships. But why would these different energy technologies—for surface production of renewable crop-based fuel and for subsurface extraction of nonrenewable
fossil fuel—produce similar grievances and responses from such different communities in the Global North and South? By examining contested energy projects, I explain the ways in which similar patterns of social contestation arise over different resources in disparate places by examining the organizing, protest, and resistance efforts of those concerned about the burdens of increased development activity, while also considering those seeking the benefits of new economic opportunities.
The work for this book began as part of my doctoral dissertation research in 2010, when I traveled to Kenya and Tanzania to learn more about local responses to proposed biofuels projects in rural villages along river deltas. When I set out for coastal east Africa, my initial questions focused on why some community resistance halted biofuels projects while other communities seemed unable to mobilize effectively. In short, drawing on theories of social movements, I sought to determine why some protests were successful and others were not. However, closer investigation of the cases revealed that such a comparative question overlooked three dynamic elements of the interactions. First, biofuels projects rarely continued smoothly or stopped entirely. Instead they were altered, adapted, and shifted in response to changing political, financial, and social events and conditions. Second, communities were rarely unified entities that mobilized or failed to do so. Within even small communities, interests were articulated differently, and different sets of identities were claimed and used to justify positions. Further, people did not always take consistent stances on biofuels, supporting some projects but not others. And third, I found that different sets of historical grievances at different periods in time gained traction both locally and internationally. This made the questions of protest, resistance, activism, and response relevant at multiple geographic and temporal scales. I shifted my focus from outcomes to processes and began looking for explanations for the dynamics I was observing.7
In 2012, while I was finishing my dissertation on these contested politics of biofuels, I moved to the border of British Columbia (BC) and the Yukon, in northwestern Canada. My move coincided with local newspapers reporting on that year’s request for proposals for oil and gas dispositions in the territory. Focused on areas in the Yukon underlain by shale, the proposals sparked intense local interest and concern about the potential for fracking. As fracking became a high-profile topic in the territory, I began to follow the social, political, and scientific controversies around this energy technology, both locally and around the world. In 2013 the debates grew more heated
across Canada, especially on the east coast, where conflicts over seismic testing and fracking in New Brunswick led to a standoff near the Elsipogtog First Nation.8 As these debates took hold in the Yukon, I turned my attention to the community mobilization that arose. My research focused on public debates over fracking in the territory and what they revealed about relationships of citizen trust, processes of deliberation and public participation, and histories of other environmental controversies.
At first, I saw my research on fracking in the Yukon as separate from my dissertation work on biofuels. Biofuels and fracking are markedly different in their production, processing, and politics. Biofuels are renewable energy sources, tightly connected to agricultural systems. These crop-based technologies for ethanol and diesel promise to decouple energy from subsurface extraction, turning to surface land and even laboratories for fuel. They offer a replacement for fossil fuels and engage farmers and food systems in energy production. In contrast, fracking enables the expansion of nonrenewable energy resources, increasing access to oil and gas supplies. They fit snugly into existing fossil fuel production, expanding subsurface access through the horizontal reach of new wells. The distribution of sites of production, the infrastructure required for processing and transport, and other aspects of the commodity chain differ substantively between these sources of energy. Energy interacts with and shapes social and political arrangements (Mitchell 2011);9 consequently, arising from their different forms of production, we might expect vastly different politics from energy proposals for biofuels than for fracked gas.
In many ways, the communities in near-equatorial east Africa and the Canadian sub-Arctic could not be further apart—in ecologies, climates, histories, communities, national contexts, and the energy resources being debated. Yet I saw surprising similarities between the dynamics unfolding in coastal Kenya and the Yukon. As the quotes from community members reveal, local people around the world share concerns for their land and environment, face challenging trade-offs between economic development paths, and have tensions between different livelihoods and conservation visions. The parallels between these distant communities came to light for me when sitting with my neighbors at their kitchen table in a small town on the YukonBC border, talking about my research in Kenya. As I explained the claims to insider status and local legitimacy made by villagers in conflicts over biofuels, one of them exclaimed, “That sounds just like here!”10 The global controversies over these energy sources also had parallel trajectories, where early
enthusiasm turned to skepticism and resistance as emerging research cast doubt on environmental, social, and economic benefits and revealed spillover and shadow costs of their production. When local organizers developed campaigns against shale gas, and as global debates over these extractive technologies intensified with bans and moratoria announced in countries around the world, I discerned similar patterns in the emerging fracking debates in the North as those I had observed in eastern Africa over biofuels.11 This book is the result of these unexpectedly convergent projects.12
Energy controversies at the margins
A reorientation of energy systems is taking place in response to changing geopolitics, technology, environmental pressures, supply-chain organization, and the demands of urban spaces. New energy frontiers are emerging, that is, novel energy sources or technologies in regions far from the usual sites of industrial dominance or political decision-making and economic power.13 Across disciplines, scholars have argued for attention to places outside the centers of economic and political power, whether through attention to frontier regions or to “resource peripheries” (Hayter, Barnes, and Bradshaw 2003).14 These contested peripheries, or margins, are central to the debates over energy transitions and futures, especially in the context of global energy trade, patterns of resource distribution, and just transitions. While divergent views on new technologies and commodities also exist in centers of industrial power, the dynamics of resistance are often heightened in places at the margins. Biofuels and fracking provoked much public controversy in places that arrived later to the scene for these fuels. In part, for first movers, much of the development and promotion of these energy technologies took place before natural and social scientific research had examined their environmental, political, and social consequences. For later proponents of biofuels or fracking projects, though, the fuels were already subject to heightened scrutiny and critique, making the dynamics of their development markedly different.15 The production of energy always transforms local landscapes, but perhaps most visibly in places that did not already have extensive experience with these specific forms of production and extraction. Both biofuels and fracking have long histories. With biofuels, Brazil began experiments with bioethanol in the 1920s, ramping up government support in the 1970s (Hochstetler and Keck 2007). For fracking, early efforts
to fracture rock for fossil fuels date back to the 1940s in the US (Davis 2012). However, widespread global, commercial interest in both biofuels and fracking did not develop until the 2000s (as will be further detailed in chapter 2). At that time, these fuels generated interest around the world, but any expectations that their production would take off smoothly were quickly shattered. As regions without much experience with energy production looked at their farmland and subsurface geologies in new ways, they found themselves thrust into heated public debate as the promised triple wins of biofuels and fracking came apart. Global attention is often focused on the major producers of energy commodities: for biofuels, Brazil, the US, the EU, and China; for fracking, the US stands alone in the field, although there is emerging production in China and Canada. Yet other regions, too, have arable land and shale basins, and governments and companies pursued their development in many countries in the 2000s. These more marginal players in global energy markets are crucial to understanding energy politics.
By 2008 contestation over biofuels was well underway around the world. Still, in some places—such as Kenya—interest in this form of energy was just emerging. Kenya was developing biodiesel and bioethanol strategies to support the introduction of a biofuel industry in the country. In a strategy report, the permanent secretary of the Ministry of Energy described “the various steps necessary for developing a vibrant biodiesel industry,” expressing hope that these plans would enable the “transformation of the country from an importer of liquid petroleum fuels to local self sufficiency and an exporter to the wider market abroad” (Kenya Ministry of Energy 2008). In rural communities along the Kenyan coast, including in the Tana River delta region, the promise of new markets and labor opportunities for agricultural products held much appeal. As community members in one village told me, they were “happy to get [biofuel] projects” as the projects would “bring jobs.”16 Villages facing food insecurity and limited economic options were open to new possibilities for cash crops and local energy production. But with long histories of boom-and-bust commodity markets and many projects promised but never realized, they were skeptical about the plans of companies and governments alike. Communities responded in complex ways to proposed biofuels projects. The same group who indicated they wanted biofuels projects to begin immediately also shared that they had received no answers when they asked one of the companies about the effects of agricultural chemicals on nearby water sources and food chains. Further, while expressing uncertainty about the companies based on their unresponsiveness, they also highlighted
doubts about groups with anti-biofuels conservation agendas, suggesting some were “doing politics for their own cause.”17 Some local leaders strategically leveraged existing community divisions over land use and access along with transnational discourses to oppose biofuels.
With fracking, by 2012 France had banned the technology and other jurisdictions were following suit. By then, scientific studies in the US were raising questions about the environmental and public health consequences of fracking, although with conflicting evidence about the risks and pathways of contamination. These impacts included the subsurface movement of stray gas into drinking water supplies, surface and subsurface water contamination from spills and cement casing failures, increased seismic risks from fracking and from the deep-well injection of wastewater, and more (Jackson et al. 2014). But at the same time, shale exploration was just arriving in the Canadian North. Fracking proposals appeared at a time when energy production was already a topic of much political and public attention within the territory. There were concerns over the Yukon’s dependence on imported energy supplies. There were debates over the need for predictable backup energy for a system mainly fed by hydropower. And the dependence of some communities on diesel generators posed an urgent challenge—but also an opportunity. Many residents saw the Yukon’s isolation, small population, and wilderness identity creating the right conditions to lead the way in energy efficiency and renewable energy options rather than following the fossil fuel trajectory of the South. As one community member said during a public hearing, “There are so many alternative methods of power which are just waiting to be explored and set up in the Yukon that we should be ashamed to even consider hydraulic fracturing.”18 Fracking proposals, as a result, were received with skepticism.
The mechanisms of contention
Contentious politics literatures offer insight into the uneven uptake of biofuels and fracking projects by communities around the world and the campaigns that have formed to resist these developments.19 Communities identifying threats may or may not be successful at mobilizing resistance. A contentious politics lens turns attention to the dynamics within and across communities to explain these differences in moving from grievances to collective action. As articulated by McAdam (2017: 189), movements are “facilitated by
the confluence of three factors: the expansion of political opportunities, the availability of mobilizing structures, and cognitive and affective mobilization through framing processes.” In this assessment, mobilization is shaped by the ways in which existing political structures and dynamics affect the distribution of costs and benefits of new projects, influence access to resources, enable or constrain political opportunities, and condition social responses to different issues and symbols. Contentious politics and social movement studies offer analytic insight into the differences between communities that resist new energy projects and those that remain quiet.
In contentious politics, claim-makers engage in multiple strategies at multiple scales to disseminate information, shape public opinion, recruit supporters, and enlarge networks. Contentious politics often unfolds in cycles, where new events and proposals reignite long-standing grievances (McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001), and opponents draw on creative repertoires of contention to recruit support and voice claims (Tilly and Tarrow 2006). Many scholars of contentious politics pay close attention to transnational dynamics, whereby local communities broadcast their claims to global allies, and those distant from sites of industrialization participate in local cases of environmental and social disruption. Work on social movements, from transnational advocacy networks (Keck and Sikkink 1998; Fuentes-George 2016) to eventful protest (Della Porta 2008), movement societies (Tarrow 2011), and not-in-anyone’s-backyard campaigns (Boudet 2011), has examined the intersection of these two levels of analysis, considering the exchanges between local and global groups. Studies have found that external participation can be crucial to movement success (e.g., Rootes 1999), at least in some cases (for cases with divergent outcomes, see McAteer and Pulver 2009; Boudet 2011), but may lead to unintended consequences, including backlash against external interference (e.g., Matejova, Parker, and Dauvergne 2018). The multiscale attention of contentious politics, combined with a focus on the cyclical and episodic nature of protest, offers insights into the politics of resistance to new energy technologies and commodities.
For most social movement scholars, mobilization requires that affected communities identify grievances, amass resources, recognize political opportunity, and construct collective identities or articulate shared interests (Wolford 2004; Boudet and Ortolano 2010; McAdam and Boudet 2012). Core structural elements of social movements—involving resource mobilization and political opportunities—then intersect with community characteristics such as economic standing, histories of industrial activity, and
