Paper short abstract:

This presentation will discuss the Indigenous movement struggle against large projects in the Amazon, such as the Belo Monte dam and Belo Sun gold mining. Focus will be given for Indigenous performative strategies and online activism actions based on such performances.

Paper long abstract:

This research results of an ethnography of indigenous people in Brazil demanding rights in global arenas. It is populated by actors such as BNDES (Brazilian Federal Bank for Socioeconomic Development), electricity sector bureaucrats and indigenous leaders that travel worldwide to attract international support against Dilma Roussef administration's megaprojects in the Amazon.

The Xingu indigenous people invested a lot of social capital in opposing the dam since the project was launched during the dictatorship. Belo Monte became an important knot in the network that links Amazonian waters with governmental interest in accelerating Brazilian growth, and investors of private sector financed by public money with indigenous and river dwellers' resistance. The indigenous movement was the strongest and the most visible actor in this fight. We will try to show that they got this leading position because of the weight that feathers have, ensuring the right of indigenous people to take the stage and spotlights.

Indigenous peoples put in action some of their symbolic triumphs: a) ancient and special rights protected in national laws and international agreements; b) purity and natural images (in one hand they do help them to communicate with urban or "metropolis" audiences, but in other hand it also strengh an essencialist and culturalist image that locks them up in a cage out of time).

It ressonates with ideas of indigenous people as "nature's guardians". It doesn't help them to win the war but it supports their political position in the hegemonic game as the "natural" and rightful counter-hegemonic actor.

Paper short abstract:

This study aims to provide insights on the attitudes, values and motivations that fuel opposition and support for renewable energies in Mexico by analysing local communities' reactions and engagement to wind energy in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.

Paper long abstract:

While there are many global drivers of wind energy, it is often the local politics that make and reshape its prospects and pathways. This holds true for the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in Mexico where the expansion of wind energy has increased social inequality and has revived conflicts related to questions of rights, land and sustainable development. This paper will seek to provide insights on how wind energy articulates forms of access and use of land that affect local communities by analysing the politics of wind energy. Amongst others, the construction of wind as a resource and as a commodity play out in the politics of wind. Because of its materiality and its low energy density, wind energy requires of land to generate the same amount of energy that can be extracted from a ‘hole’ in the case of fossil energies. The production, distribution and use of wind energy, therefore, articulate different mechanisms of discourse creation, control and dispossession that have to do with forms of access, claim and exclusion to land. These mechanisms undermine land-based livelihoods and provoke a diversification of forms of employment in which peasants are obliged to combine farming activities with waged vulnerable to its own forms of oppression interacting class, gender, identity, ethnicity amongst others. By exploring these mechanisms and their effect on land-based livelihoods and labour, this paper will contribute with a nuanced account on renewable energy development and will provide insights on the reasons that fuel support or opposition for wind energy in Mexico.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the 2016 cancellation of São Luiz do Tapajós dam in Brazil. It demonstrates the difficulties in separating this decision from the shifting political context in which it was made and that, as a result, the end of the project does not represent the end of the battle against it.

Paper long abstract:

In August 2016, the construction of the São Luiz do Tapajós dam in Brazil was cancelled. This paper will explore this decision by assessing interviews with figures drawn from political and civil society - including those who made the decision itself - to gauge the numerous understandings of the reasons behind this decision and its wider significance for hydropower in the Brazilian Amazon. This paper has found that many locate the cancellation of the project within a specific transformation of the political context in which dams are built in Brazil. This context involves claims of widespread corruption in the construction industry, the entrenchment of a financial crisis, and a controversial transition of presidential power.

Furthermore, it will be argued that it is such a contextual political understanding of the cancellation of the São Luiz do Tapajós complex that results in the celebrations of the opposition movement being short-lived. Although the movement against this project had been successful in its efforts to re-articulate the project and counter the pro-dam claims that surrounded it, many opposition actors continue to assert that the Tapajós project will, one day, return.

Despite a victory that was celebrated in many other nations, Brazilian activists turned to each other to ask what does it mean to win? The answer to this question, explored in this paper, demonstrates a continued focus on the future, a belief that this "golden moment" will pass, and that the battle is not yet over.

Paper short abstract:

The oil discovered in Turkana in 2012 has already affected the lives of many people who respond to the growing insecurity they face by drawing from their past and traditions. Turkana thus contest an untrustworthy present and an uncertain future with reliable values and practices from the past.

Paper long abstract:

Large amounts of hydrocarbons were discovered in Turkana, Northern Kenya in 2012. A consortium led by Tullow Oil is in charge of this energy project, which is still at the appraisal and drilling phase. Turkana County is one of the most marginalized and under-developed areas in Kenya inhabited mostly by Turkana people the majority of whom still practice nomadic pastoralism. Even though poor or non-existing infrastructures as well as the low prices of oil of the last years have slowed down considerably the development of the oil operations in Kenya, nevertheless unfolding events of economic, political and social nature have already affected the lives of the Turkana. Overall, Turkana people are facing a rising in conflict and friction among their own communities aggravated not only by Tullow's policies but also by national and local politicians. To respond to a growing insecurity perceived not only when trying to grasp the complexity of oil operations in their land but also when coming to terms with the social injustices and the unfulfilled promises and expectations that the discovery of oil has brought, many Turkana have started drawing from their past and traditions. Thus, histories of origins and belonging become popular, people´s attachment to traditional customs and to the ancestors are revived and traditional pastoralist mechanisms of rights allotment and alliance making for surviving droughts and cattle rustlings are strengthened. In doing so Turkana encounter and contest an untrustworthy present and an uncertain future with reliable and familiar values and practices from the past.