Processes of elite power and low-carbon pathways: Experimentation, financialisation, and dispossession

Highlights

• Explores three ways that responses to climate change can entrench, exacerbate or reconfigure the power of elites.

• Experimentation is when elites test or pilot low-carbon technologies or policy models, transferring risks but not benefits.

• Financialisation refers to the expansion of finance, capital, and markets in decarbonisation pathways.

• Dispossession is when elites use decarbonisation as a process through which to appropriate land, wealth, or other assets.

Abstract

What is a low-carbon pathway? To many, it is a way of mitigating climate change. To others, it is about addressing market failure or capturing the co-benefits attached to low-carbon systems, such as jobs or improved health. To still others, it represents building adaptive capacity and resilience in the face of climate change. However, these interpretations can fail to acknowledge how pathways of low-carbon transitions can also become intertwined with processes and structures of inequality, exclusion and injustice. Using a critical lens that draws from a variety of disciplines, this article explores three ways through which responses to climate change can entrench, exacerbate or reconfigure the power of elites. As society attempts to create a low-carbon society, including for example via coastal protection efforts, disaster recovery, or climate change mitigation and renewable energy, these efforts intersect with at least three processes of elite power: experimentation, financialisation, and dispossession. Experimentation is when elites use the world as a laboratory to test or pilot low-carbon technologies or policy models, transferring risks yet not always sharing benefits. Financialisation refers to the expansion and proliferation of finance, capital, and financial markets in the global economy and many national economies, processes of which have recently extended to renewable energy. Dispossession is when elites use decarbonisation as a process through which to appropriate land, wealth, or other assets (and in the process make society more majoritarian and/or unequal). We explore these three themes using a variety of evidence across illustrative case studies, including hard and soft coastal protection measures (Bangladesh, Netherlands), climate risk insurance (Malawi), and renewable energy auctions and associated mechanisms of finance and investment (South Africa and Mexico).

Introduction

Avoiding dangerous climate change will require a transformation of national and global energy systems by 2030, if not earlier (Rockström et al., 2017). As many have argued, this will involve far-reaching social and economic changes, including disruption to transport systems, decarbonizing electricity generation, reducing consumption, and shifting economic activity towards the delivery of services rather than products (Green and Denniss, 2018; Creutzig et al., 2018; Geels et al., 2018). The rate and scale of change required is best described as revolutionary: there are few historical precedents and progress to date has been limited (Geels et al., 2017). This transformation will require large institutions, industrial players, systemic structures, governments, households and individuals to: adopt a range of low-carbon technologies (e.g. electric vehicles, energy storage, heat pumps, smart homes); reduce and change energy-consuming behaviours and lifestyles in significant ways (e.g. in transport and food choices); support ambitious climate policies (e.g. carbon pricing, material efficiency measures and stringent energy efficiency standards, and geoengineering projects); and accept far-reaching changes in local and national energy systems (e.g. widespread diffusion of wind turbines, district heating, solar farms).

Using a critical lens that draws from political ecology, political economy, and other disciplines, this article explores how low-carbon measures—such as coastal protection, climate risk insurance, and climate change mitigation via renewable energy—can end up being guided, shaped, and coopted by elite processes and institutions in positions of socio-economic, technocratic and/or political dominance (Bonds, 2016). In this way, low-carbon measures and the pathways they promote can compound existing injustices and inequalities and consolidate wealth. In particular our analysis focuses on the following three elite processes:

• Experimentation: using peripheral spaces (geographically, socio-economically, or politically) as a laboratory to test climate change solutions or low-carbon technologies, transferring risks there but not always the benefits (Paprocki, 2018);

• Financialisation: the expansion and proliferation of financial instruments, innovations, logics, and markets within the global economy and many national economies. Commonly described as “the increasing role of financial motives, financial markets, financial actors and financial institutions in the operation of the domestic and international economies” (Epstein, 2014:3), we examine how financialisation has extended into the realm of climate change adaptation and mitigation;

• Dispossession: often an outcome of experimentation and financialisation, this sees climate change measures as dispossessing others of their land, wealth, political and economic participation or other assets, exacerbating inequalities in the process (Paprocki, 2018; Sovacool, 2018).

After describing our conceptual approach and explaining our methods, we explore these three processes at both national and global levels. Firstly, we examine the implementation of coastal protection measures in Bangladesh and the Netherlands. Secondly, we analyze climate risk insurance as a mechanism of climate change adaptation, with Malawi as a case study. Thirdly, we look at processes of renewable energy finance, drawing from case studies in Mexico and South Africa.

In pursuing this approach, our aim is to make at least two contributions. First, we both integrate and extend beyond existing discussions of elites or inequality that often centre importantly, but more narrowly, on the politics of knowledge production or technology transfer. Demeritt (2001) and Friman and Linner (2008) for example note how climate science has political undertones and has tended to privilege European and North American institutions but not ways of knowing in the Global South. Bonds (2010) explores how elites in the United States shape the environmental policy process by funding institutions or suppressing and manipulating information. Another body of scholarship focuses on inequality and elitism within international climate negotiations under efforts such as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (Najam et al., 2003; Gordon, 2007; Schroeder et al., 2012). Others discuss patterns of technology transfer that cement unequal positions in the world economy, as they consolidate expertise among wealthy countries, and hamper the rate of technical development on things like climate change adaptation (Baumgartner et al., 2015; Callaway, 2014), or act as an instrument for pollution and resource extraction (Jorgenson and Givens, 2014). One very recent study discusses how elites can come to view vulnerable groups as threats and then weaponize and securitize social responses to them (Thomas and Warner, 2019). These threads are all salient yet seemingly disparate and disconnected—we seek to offer a more holistic discussion of elites which centres on active pathways as well as varying types. In doing so we make an empirical contribution in showing the roles of elites within different climate change sectors, as well as making a conceptual contribution highlighting the role of different elites.

Second, we seek to insert a degree of caution and restraint amidst narratives of climate urgency (Partridge et al., 2018; Baumler et al., 2012; Kerr, 2007) and climate emergency (Kunstler, 2007; Markusson et al., 2014). While a case can be made that climate change is urgent, we must be perpetually aware that the social responses to it can also entrench elitism and generate “sacrifice zones” (Healy et al., 2018). In the rush to combat climate change, especially amidst calls to mobilize action similar to war (Delina and Diesendorf, 2013; Delina, 2016), we must be cognizant of shifting power and control in ways we may not otherwise allow (Kester and Sovacool, 2017). Our discussion of elites and low-carbon pathways is expressly intended to shape more reflective and socially just responses, to ensure urgency is matched with considerations of equity.