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Fueling Resistance examines conflicts over development projects in "energy frontiers"--places in the world far from sites of economic and political power that are seen as potential suppliers of new energy commodities. Neville looks at biofuels in Kenya and fracking in the Canadian Yukon and shows how organizers connect specific energy projects to broader issues of globalization, climate, food, water, and justice. Taken together, the intersecting elements of the political economy of energy (finance, ownership, and trade relations) shape the contentious politics of biofuels and fracking at both local and global scales, and help explain how and why particular mechanisms of contention emerge at different times and places.
List of contents
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Chapter 1: Introduction: The Changing Politics of Global Energy
- Chapter 2: Triple Wins?: The Rise and Fall of Biofuels and Fracking
- Chapter 3: Catalyzing Local Contention: The Political Economy Drivers
- Chapter 4: Biofuels in Kenya's Tana Delta
- Chapter 5: Fracking in the Yukon
- Chapter 6: Conclusions: Political Economies and Resistance
- Notes
- References
- Index
About the author
Kate J. Neville is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto, where she is cross-appointed to the Department of Political Science and the School of the Environment. Her research is positioned at the intersection of contentious politics and global political economy, with a focus on contested energy and extractive projects.
Summary
A series of concurrent pressures in the early 2000s--climate change, financial system crashes, economic development in rural regions, and shifts in geopolitics--intensified interest in alternative energy production. At the same time, rising oil prices rendered alternative fuels a more economically viable option. Among these energy sources, liquid biofuels (bioethanol and biodiesel) and natural gas derived from hydraulic fracturing ("fracking") took center stage as promising commodities and technologies. But controversy quickly erupted in surprisingly similar ways around both renewable fuels. Global enthusiasm for these fuels--and the widespread projections for their production around the world--collided with local politics in debates over "food versus fuel" and concerns over "land grabs." What seemed, from a global perspective, like empty lands ripe for development were, to rural communities, vibrant and already contested spaces. As proposals for biofuels and fracking landed in specific communities and ecosystems, they reignited and reshaped old disputes over land, water, and decision-making authority.
Fueling Resistance offers an account of how and why controversies over these different fuels unfolded in surprisingly similar ways in the global North and South. To explain these convergent dynamics of contention and resistance, Kate J. Neville argues that the emergence of grievances and the patterns of resistance to new fuel technologies depends less on the type of energy developed (renewable versus fossil fuel) than on intersecting elements of the political economy of energy: finance, ownership, and trade relations. As local commodities enter global supply chains and are integrated into existing corporate structures, opportunities arise to broker connections between otherwise disparate communities.
Neville looks at biofuels in Kenya and fracking in the Canadian Yukon and shows how organizers connect specific energy projects to broader issues of globalization, climate, food, water, and justice. Taken together, the intersecting elements of the political economy of energy shape the contentious politics of biofuels and fracking at both local and global scales, and help explain how and why particular mechanisms of contention emerge at different times and places.
Additional text
Fueling Resistance sets a new standard for social movement scholarship and, more pragmatically, illuminates the political terrain for environmental activists. It explains how international finance, ownership, and trade shape energy projects and, paradoxically, offer tools of resistance. Neville has produced a wonderfully insightful and elegantly written book.
