"Following a wave of oil discoveries in Africa, Oil-Age Africa offers new perspectives and critical reflections on the prevalent academic discourses on oil in Africa. This collection brings together researchers from the social sciences to challenge simplified readings of the complex realities of oil politics, economies and societies through theoretical critique and 'on the ground' ethnographic methods. Climate change highlights the need to understand the intricate ways societies are built on and for oil energy. Oil-Age Africa analyses the effects of oil production and the global energy structure, offering relevant insights and avenues for future research on oil"--
"New initiatives recognize that resource wealth can provide a means, when properly used, for poorer nations to decisively break with poverty by diversifying economies and funding development spending. Extractive Industries: The Management of Resources as a Driver of Sustainable Development explores the challenges and opportunities facing developing countries in using oil, gas, and mining to achieve inclusive change. While resource wealth can yield prosperity it can also, when mismanaged, cause acute social inequality, deep poverty, environmental damage, and political instability. There is a new determination to improve the benefits of extractive industries to their host countries, and to strengthen the sector's governance. Extractive Industries provides a comprehensive contribution to what must be done in this sector to deliver development, protect often fragile environments from damage, enhance the rights of affected communities, and support climate change action. It brings together international experts to offer ideas and recommendations in the main policy areas. With a breadth of collective insight and experience, it argues that more attention must be given to the development role of extractive industries, and looks to the future to explain how action on climate change will profoundly shape the sector's prospects."
AbstractThis paper analyzes the transformations induced by Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in the extractive sector, through an ethnographic study of villages neighboring an oil-drilling site in the Peruvian Amazon. It examines the materialization of a specific CSR device—the communal enterprise—which involves the majority of village members in the extractive industry as workers, owners, and managers of a subcontractor that provides services to the oil company. The paper highlights the importance of work and socialization to assess the transformative power of this original CSR device. After an opening section on how to study extractive governmentality "at work," the paper presents a genealogy of the communal enterprise. It then examines how communal enterprises tend to transform indigenous inhabitants into workers and entrepreneurs and thereby impact the everyday organization of the entire community. By examining the ways residents adopt these social technologies, the paper shows how the partial normalization of individual bodies and collective organization induced by CSR technologies is an ambivalent mix resulting from a process of mutual appropriation between the industrial milieu and the villages. In doing so, it contributes to governmentality studies related to extractive capitalism, corporate strategies for disciplining dissent, and the social transformations they generate locally.Cet article analyse les transformations induites par la Responsabilité sociétale des entreprises (RSE) dans le secteur de l'extraction par le biais d'une étude ethnographique des villages voisins d'un site de forage pétrolier d'Amazonie péruvienne. Il examine la matérialisation d'un dispositif de RSE spécifique : une entreprise communautaire qui implique la majorité des villageois dans l'industrie de l'extraction en tant que travailleurs, propriétaires et gérants d'un sous-traitant fournissant des services à la compagnie pétrolière. Cet article souligne l'importance du travail et de la socialisation pour évaluer le pouvoir de transformation de ce dispositif de RSE original. Après une section introductive portant sur la façon d'étudier la gouvernementalité de l'extraction « au travail », cet article présente une généalogie de l'entreprise communautaire. Il examine ensuite la manière dont les entreprises communautaires tendent à transformer les habitants indigènes en travailleurs et en entrepreneurs et ainsi à impacter l'organisation quotidienne de l'ensemble de la communauté. Cet article montre en quoi la normalisation partielle des corps individuels et de l'organisation collective induite par les techniques de RSE est un mélange ambivalent résultant d'un processus d'appropriation mutuelle entre le milieu industriel et les villages en examinant la façon dont les habitants adoptent ces techniques sociales. Ce faisant, il contribue aux études de gouvernementalité liées au capitalisme de l'extraction, aux stratégies mises en œuvre par les entreprises pour discipliner la dissidence et aux transformations sociales qu'elles génèrent localement.En este artículo se analizan las transformaciones impulsadas por la responsabilidad social corporativa (RSC) en el sector de la extracción mediante un estudio etnográfico de las aldeas que se encuentran cerca de un sitio de extracción de petróleo en la Amazonía peruana. También se examina la materialización de un método específico de RSC, la empresa comunal, en la que la mayoría de los miembros de la aldea participan en la industria como trabajadores, propietarios y administradores de un subcontratista que presta servicios a la compañía petrolera. Además, se destaca la importancia del trabajo y la socialización para evaluar el poder de transformación de este método original de RSC. Después de la primera sección, donde se explica cómo estudiar la gobernabilidad extractiva ``en el trabajo'', en el artículo se presenta una genealogía de la empresa comunal. En esta se explora la forma en la que las empresas comunales suelen transformar a los habitantes autóctonos en trabajadores y emprendedores y, por lo tanto, modifican la organización establecida de toda la comunidad. Al analizar las formas en las que los residentes adoptan estas tecnologías sociales, en el artículo se muestra cómo la normalización parcial de los cuerpos individuales y de la organización colectiva producida por las tecnologías de RSC es una mezcla ambivalente que se produce como consecuencia de un proceso de apropiación mutua entre el entorno industrial y las aldeas. Este análisis contribuye a los estudios de gobernabilidad relacionados con el capitalismo extractivo, las estrategias corporativas para disciplinar la disidencia y las transformaciones sociales que generan a nivel local.
This new sourcebook admirably illuminates the spectrum of integrated policy interventions necessary to transform natural resource wealth into sustainable development, ranging from the allocation of resource extraction rights to the use and distribution of revenues. It recognizes and emphasizes the importance of the political and institutional context. The sourcebook ably breaks down the implications of the type of natural resource, describes the organization of the industry, and provides illustrative examples and useful citations from the literature. How individual governments, companies, and the world as a whole approach the management and governance of mineral and energy resources will be important in determining the success or failure of the sustainable development goals (SDGs). Given the breadth of the SDGs and the targets therein, as well as the myriad challenges of natural resource governance, the new sourcebook and the community of researchers and practitioners that continues to grow around it will help to shed light on the path ahead
AbstractOil and natural gas activity has grown dramatically over the last decade around the United States because, in part, of increased use of unconventional technologies like hydraulic fracturing. Social scientists have examined the broad array of impacts of this growth to communities disproportionately impacted by activity. This paper contributes to that work by using survey and qualitative interviews to examine the experiences of Coloradans with harm created by oil and gas activity when they live adjacent to production or extraction sites. Using a green criminological and critical criminological framing, our findings illuminate that Coloradans in these samples experienced persistent and patterned harm from oil and gas activity to which they lived proximate. Additionally—paralleling criminological literature on street crime—our findings indicate that official state records on harm prevalence is likely inaccurate and that, instead, a "dark figure" of harm exists. This results because of underreporting of harm by those who experience it which occurs in part, at least for those in our sample, because of a lack of trust or sense of fairness in the regulatory process.
Natural resources can become a catalyst for growth and development in resource-abundant developing countries if they are governed in a transparent and accountable manner. Despite the popularization of transparency and accountability in academic and public policy discussions, we know little about how they become part of daily interactions. This article critically analyses how and what kind of transparency and accountability is discursively enacted by community actors in politically unstable settings with weak institutions such as Kyrgyzstan. The case study shows the extension of the transparency and accountability agenda from right-to-know and environmental-financial reporting to direct engagement and livelihood improvement. The analysis suggests that politicaleconomic opportunities and youth-led community activism define the local approach to transparency and accountability. This article calls for studying transparency and accountability beyond formal institutionalism and top-down (elite) politics.
Following the recent call to 'put the ocean's agitation and historicity back onto our mental maps and into the study of literature' (Yaeger 2010), this article addresses the histories and cultures of marine energy extraction in modern Scottish literature. The burgeoning discipline of the Energy Humanities has recently turned its attentions towards Scottish literature as a valuable area of study when contemplating the relationships between energy and cultural production. Most recently, scholars have focused their analysis on the histories of North Sea oil and gas production and have worked to juxtapose the long histories of land clearance in the Highlands and islands alongside contemporary narratives of exile and exploitation experienced by Scotland's coastal oil communities. The forms of spatial injustice incurred through the recent histories of what Derek Gladwin terms 'Oil Clearance' (Gladwin 2017) or Graeme Macdonald identifies as 'petro-marginalisation' (Macdonald 2015), is often solely registered through terrestrial environments. This article urges the adoption of an oceanic perspective, one which registers how the extractive politics of modern petroculture in Scotland not only presents major challenges for terrestrial environments and communities, but holds specific ramifications for the ways in which we currently imagine and interact with oceanic space. Indeed, as Macdonald has noted, the North Sea is in many ways 'wholly regarded as a productive environment of marine capitalism synonymous with oil' (2015). What does it mean to read the ocean through oil? By adopting an oceanic perspective, this article considers the ways in which the exploitative dynamics of offshore petroculture in the 1970s coincides with an incredibly damaging and problematic cultural construction of the ocean. But as Scotland moves towards a new era of low-carbon energy production, how might this construction of the ocean change? The closing half of this article considers the ways in which the extractivist histories and spatial injustices of petroculture are resisted through contemporary poetic engagements with new marine-based energy technologies, namely, wave and tidal power. In examining a range of work from artists and poets such as Alec Finlay, Laura Watts, Lila Matsumoto and Hannah Imlach, this article further argues that the recent turn towards marine renewables not only signals a new future for a low-carbon Scotland, but that the advent of renewable technologies provides contemporary poets with new materials through which to imagine alternative models of community, power, and relation in an era of environmental change.
In this article extraction economies in less developed countries are compared to extraction economies in developed countries—to the Houston, Texas, and Aberdeen, Scotland, petroleum regions. The following questions are addressed: (1) What are the differences in Houston's and Aberdeen's development as petroleum regions? (2) How has their extractive development differed from that in less developed countries? (3) What is the relationship of early layers of development to later extractive investments? (4) How have capital timing and scale shaped Houston's and Aberdeen's development as urban regions? The historical timing of oil discoveries greatly affects the way oil capital builds up and exfoliates relationally in urban regions.
Perhaps it should not be surprising that sex crimes, the sex trade and anti-woman violence, have become major and predictable by-products of oil, gas and mining extraction operations. After all, mining and drilling camps attract hundreds, even thousands of mostly male workers, typically housed in makeshift 'man camps'. It is a global epidemic. This article looks at the market trends among investors who look at social performance as well as financial performance. It includes a case study on the difference in financial performance between the oil, gas and mining companies that uphold Indigenous peoples' rights and those companies that do not. The results indicate that for the extractive industry and its investors, doing what is right and doing what pays are one and the same when it comes to Indigenous peoples' rights. This article proposes that it would be the same for women's rights and that as governments increasingly prove incapable or unwilling to protect women, we need to turn to the market and make our voices heard. What is needed are the metrics and analytical tools for assessing the impact and financial risks a company can incur, when it fails to recognize women's rights.
This study examines the relationship between political governance and extractive industry performance in Nigeria. It tends to know the contributions of political governance structures in the Nigerian extractive economy sector and whether the political sector has been able to achieve effective regulatory framework leading to revenue transparency which is the key factor in the attainment of sustainable development. In carrying out this research we made use of secondary data, mostly, the relevant literatures on the subject matter. Descriptive analytical approach was employed, while structural functionalism approach was adopted as the framework of analysis. The study revealed among other things that weak political institutions to undertake effective checks and balances and the virtual absence of regulatory framework created opportunistic gaps for predatory elites to institutionalized corruption in the oil extractive industry. The end result is loss of revenue, deep poverty and poor standard of living. Based on this, the paper recommended amongst others, the development of effective framework for transparency and accountability through strengthening of political governance, effective implementations of the Nigerian Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative (NEITI) Act of 2007, and fundamental restructuring of the Nigerian political and administrative structure and socialization of the social mode of production. DOI:10.5901/mjss.2015.v6n2s1p596
Following the recent call to 'put the ocean's agitation and historicity back onto our mental maps and into the study of literature' (Yaeger 2010), this article addresses the histories and cultures of marine energy extraction in modern Scottish literature. The burgeoning discipline of the Energy Humanities has recently turned its attentions towards Scottish literature as a valuable area of study when contemplating the relationships between energy and cultural production. Most recently, scholars have focused their analysis on the histories of North Sea oil and gas production and have worked to juxtapose the long histories of land clearance in the Highlands and islands alongside contemporary narratives of exile and exploitation experienced by Scotland's coastal oil communities. The forms of spatial injustice incurred through the recent histories of what Derek Gladwin terms 'Oil Clearance' (Gladwin 2017) or Graeme Macdonald identifies as 'petro-marginalisation' (Macdonald 2015), is often solely registered through terrestrial environments. This article urges the adoption of an oceanic perspective, one which registers how the extractive politics of modern petroculture in Scotland not only presents major challenges for terrestrial environments and communities, but holds specific ramifications for the ways in which we currently imagine and interact with oceanic space. Indeed, as Macdonald has noted, the North Sea is in many ways 'wholly regarded as a productive environment of marine capitalism synonymous with oil' (2015). What does it mean to read the ocean through oil? By adopting an oceanic perspective, this article considers the ways in which the exploitative dynamics of offshore petroculture in the 1970s coincides with an incredibly damaging and problematic cultural construction of the ocean. But as Scotland moves towards a new era of low-carbon energy production, how might this construction of the ocean change? The closing half of this article considers the ways in which the extractivist histories and spatial injustices of petroculture are resisted through contemporary poetic engagements with new marine-based energy technologies, namely, wave and tidal power. In examining a range of work from artists and poets such as Alec Finlay, Laura Watts, Lila Matsumoto and Hannah Imlach, this article further argues that the recent turn towards marine renewables not only signals a new future for a low-carbon Scotland, but that the advent of renewable technologies provides contemporary poets with new materials through which to imagine alternative models of community, power, and relation in an era of environmental change.
Idiomatic English expressions such as "oil and water don't mix" or "like oil and water" – to describe a profound incompatibility – take on a specific political meaning in the context of water rights and Indigenous opposition to the extractive oil industry. Most recently, opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline (the #NoDAPL movement, which started in 2016) highlights the threat to clean water supplies to the Standing Rock Sioux Indian Reservation. Originally planned to run further north, near the city of Bismarck, North Dakota and thus avoiding the reservation, the pipeline route was changed because of the risk of toxic crude-oil leakage into the city's water supply. This redirection – and the transfer of risk from US to Sioux communities – has been termed "environmental racism" and an expression of "environmental colonialism" by activists, to which is added the charge of cultural genocide because construction of the pipeline desecrates tribal burial grounds and has destroyed other sites of sacred and archeological value. NoDAPL protesters emphasize that while the environmental threat posed by the pipeline impacts the Sioux Nation most immediately, it is not restricted to the Standing Rock Reservation but affects the quality of water supplies to all communities downstream of the point where the pipeline crosses the Missouri River. The powerful public response to the NoDAPL movement – by Indigenous activists and non-Indigenous allies – was provoked in important ways by the mobilization of social media specifically and digital media more generally. Evoking the title of the United Nations International Decade for Action (2005-2015) – "Water for Life" – activists gathered, physically at Standing Rock and virtually through online platforms, under the slogan "Mni Wichoni" – "Water is Life" – to protest environmental destruction, the erasure of Sioux tribal sovereignty (Sioux jurisdiction over the Missouri River and its shorelines as defined by the 1851 Treaty of Fort Laramie, affirmed by the US Supreme Court in 1904) by the US Army Corps of Engineers, and also the global threat to water posed by extractive industries. A significant recent deployment of digital media to raise public consciousness of such urgent environmental issues is Anishinaabe/Métis artist Elizabeth LaPensée's Open Access video-game Thunderbird Strike (2017), which has been condemned by Republican Minnesota State Senator David Osmek as "an eco-terrorist version of Angry Birds." The game uses interactive digital narrative to perform Indigenous concepts of environmental care-taking and social justice, concepts that motivate ethical action – if only within the virtual diegetic environment of the game-world. This presentation engages the notion of "aesthetic activism," in the context of "social impact" video-games, by exposing the primary narrative strategies by which the player is positioned in the virtual role of "eco-terrorist" or Water Protector. By rehearsing a restorative Indigenous relation to the environment and other-than-human nature, based on the values of respect, reciprocity, and preservation, Thunderbird Strike proposes an alternative to exploitative, colonialist, and literally toxic valuations of environment.
Abstract : African countries endowed with natural resources, especially oil have seen violent conflicts due to poor management of the natural resources. Violent conflicts largely where local communities have been systematically excluded from decision-making processes and when the economic benefits are concentrated in the hands of a few thereby causing economic disequilibrium in the society. Misuse of the natural resources has frequently been cited as the main factor that activates, increase or support violent conflicts around the world. When the key stakeholders disagree on the management, distribution and protection of natural resources and related bionetworks. Natural resource conflicts arise when parties disagree about the management, distribution and protection of natural resources and related ecosystems. These conflicts can heighten into brutal relations and violence when the parties are incapable or reluctant to engage in a positive process of dialogue and conflict resolution. While there are many issues associated with extractive industries, the role of natural resources in triggering, escalating or sustaining violent conflict is the focus of this survey and consequently offer relevant in reducing these conflicts so that the natural resources found in Turkana County can truly be a blessing and a catalyst for poverty reduction in Turkana County. Conflict turns out to be difficult once societal mechanisms and institutions for handling and determining conflict break down, giving way to violence. Societies with weak institutions, fragile political systems and divisive social relations can be drawn into cycles of conflict and violence. Preventing this negative spiral and ensuring the peaceful resolution of disputes is a core interest of the international community. The general objective of the survey was to offer strategies in reducing conflicts associated with extractive industries. The methodology used in this survey was both qualitative and quantitative. The research design employed was descriptive survey ...
