Conclusions

The final chapter revisits the intersection of political economy and multiscale protest around biofuels and fracking, offering an integrated look at the campaigns that have emerged around these new energy sources. It considers the implications of the book’s findings about the political economy dimensions of contentious politics for other resource debates, with particular attention to other emerging energy technologies: wind, solar, and hydro. Further, the concluding chapter interrogates the technological optimism and commitment to economic growth that underpins these developments. It pays attention to alternative political economies, including social and Indigenous economies and models of degrowth, with consideration of how these models might advance environmental justice. The chapter considers the ways in which scaling up energy production—often justified as a response to crisis events—increases distance in commodity chains by dislocating control from local communities, externalizing local costs, and separating the accrual of benefits from the bearing of burdens.

Triple Wins?

This chapter examines global energy politics, tracing the uneven rise and fall of enthusiasm for biofuels and for fracking. With a focus on the major players for each energy technology (Brazil, the US, and the EU for biofuels; the US for fracking), the chapter documents parallel trajectories for the fuels that later landed in Kenya’s Tana delta and the Yukon territory. In each case, champions of these fuels pointed to their potential contributions to achieving climate goals, enhancing rural economies, and diversifying national energy supplies. However, as production and extraction expanded, critics expressed mounting concern about the consequences of these fuels on the climate, water resources, and biodiversity, food prices, land rights, and community well-being. With attention to competing interests and geopolitical relations, local sovereignty and corporate power, and strategic discourses and scientific uncertainty, the chapter sets the stage for the local campaigns that emerged in Kenya and the Yukon.

Biofuels in Kenya’s Tana Delta

This chapter tracks the dynamics of contestation over biofuels projects in Kenya’s Tana River delta, providing the first of two case study chapters that analyze how the dynamics of financing, ownership, and trade shaped local responses to proposed energy projects. Enthusiasm from some community members for producing bioethanol and biodiesel in coastal Kenya collided with concerns about land transformation and access, livelihoods and identities, and the distribution of benefits and burdens. By examining the adaptive strategies and shifting composition of pro- and anti-biofuels coalitions and campaigns in and beyond the delta, the chapter reveals how political economy characteristics of development initiatives shape mobilization efforts. The chapter exposes that biofuels debates bring together local social histories and economies, national interests, transnational activists, foreign investors, and international markets. As a result, it argues, a blended political economy and contentious politics analysis is needed to understand resistance to agriculturally based renewable energy projects.

Fracking in the Yukon

Presenting the book’s second empirical case study, this chapter examines resistance to fracking in Canada’s Yukon territory, considering the transnational political economy dynamics of local energy negotiations. By tracing local responses to fracking, the chapter reveals the ways in which finance, ownership, and trade provoke and activate insider/outsider narratives and reignite long-standing political conflicts in the North, mobilizing communities across issue areas. This chapter documents the creative methods used by organizers to forward claims as they linked fracking to concerns over liquefied natural gas backup power generation, the contested Peel Watershed, and trust in government. It also examines how similar discourses are wielded by both project proponents and opponents, especially of local control and belonging. Through the mechanisms of identity activation, scale shift, and brokerage, the chapter reveals how both project support and opposition can be articulated and adapted, including through alliance-building that connects sites and communities across space and time.

Introduction

This chapter asks the core question of the book: What explains the grievances that underpin different energy projects, and how can we understand convergent dynamics of contention and resistance in very different places? It then sets out the central argument, that the emergence of grievances and the patterns of resistance depend on three intersecting political economy factors: the finance, ownership, and trade relations of energy projects and commodities. Together, the chapter explains, these factors create the conditions that provoke or mitigate community grievances, and thus mobilization. The chapter introduces the two case studies of the book—biofuels in Kenya and fracking in Canada’s Yukon territory—considering the energy frontiers that are represented by these new technologies in places at the margins of political and economic power. The resistance that emerges in response to energy projects involves a complex interplay between political economy and contentious politics.

Catalyzing Local Contention

Drawing on the global debates over biofuels and fracking, this chapter develops the core theoretical approach of the book, bringing together insights from contentious politics and political economy scholarship. The chapter details three central mechanisms of mobilization: scale shifts, identity activation, and brokerage. It specifies how key elements of political economy—that is, the conditions of finance and investment, ownership and control, and trade and patterns of exchange across global and local levels—can catalyze those mechanisms of contention. This theory-building chapter brings attention to how competing narratives and strategic discourses around biofuels and fracking were constructed at the global level, through issue linkages, scientific uncertainty, and the role of key symbols in these debates. The chapter thus establishes the basis for analyzing contestation over proposals for biofuels in sub-Saharan Africa and fracking in northern North America in the chapters that follow.