Making Space for Energy: Wasteland Development, Enclosures, and Energy Dispossessions

Abstract

This paper analyzes why and how wasteland development narratives persist through an evaluation of wasteland development policies in India from 1970-present. Integrating critical scholarship on environmental narratives and enclosures, I find that narratives of wastelands as "empty" spaces available for "improvement" continue because they are metaphors for entrenched struggles between the government's shifting visions of "improvement" and communities whose land use practices contradict these logics. Since the 1970s, "improvement" has meant establishing different types of tree plantations on wastelands to ostensibly provide energy security. These projects have dispossessed land users by enclosing common property lands and providing forms of energy incommensurate with local needs, a trend I term "energy dispossessions." Factors enabling energy dispossessions include the government's increased attempts to establish public-private partnerships to carry out "improvement" and a "field of observation" constructed to obscure local livelihoods. Unveiling these logics will help to problematize and contest future iterations of wasteland development.

The evolving borderland of energy geographies

“…Nature-society geographers have engaged both Marxist-inspired political economy and poststructuralism theories/concepts to (separately) evaluate how energy projects are assembled (Bouzarovski et al, 2015;Yenneti, Day, & Golubchikov, 2016), financed (Baker, 2015;Hall, Foxon, & Bolton, 2016;Knuth, 2018;Merme et al, 2014;Newell & Phillips, 2016;Schmidt & Matthews, 2018), constructed, and discursively framed (Hommes, Boelens, & Maat, 2016;Kuchler & Bridge, 2018) and how these practices impact processes such as governance (McCarthy, 2015;Muinzer & Ellis, 2017) and urbanization (Bulkeley, McGuirk, & Dowling, 2016;Dowling, McGuirk, & Maalsen, 2018 (Baka, 2017a;Rignall, 2016;Yenneti et al, 2016). In contrast, work on energy systems in the Global North have largely focused on the political economic logics of developing and operating energy and emissions trading markets (Bridge & Bradshaw, 2017;Carton, 2017;Kama, 2014).…”

Spatial justice and the land politics of renewables: Dispossessing vulnerable communities through solar energy mega-projects

“…Associated work in the Global South has addressed, for example, conventional energy (Grovogui and Leonard, 2007 ;Murrey, 2015) and biofuel projects (Baka, 2013(Baka, , 2014Exner et al, 2015). The work of McCarthy (2000McCarthy ( , 2007 and Baka (2013Baka ( , 2014Baka ( , 2016 are particularly significant for the discussion of energy-related land dispossessions. For example, in examining the trajectories of land acquisition and enclosure associated with bio-energy production in Indonesia, McCarthy et al (2012) argue that statesupported initiatives and subsidies for biofuel-related investments produce 'new patterns of ownership and control over nature… working to reconfigure or to entrench political power, and providing new opportunities for particular actors while marginalizing others' (p.523).…”

“…In a similar vein, in investigating land acquisition for biofuel implementation in South India, Baka highlights how the networks of power (state, private sector and middlemen) are responsible for the appropriation of 'wastelands' on which farmers had traditionally been living, dispossessing them of livelihood resources. Baka (2016) calls such practices 'energy dispossessions' (p.1).…”

Geographical perspectives on sociotechnical transitions and emerging bio-economies: introduction to a special issue

“…Differences in the way climate change is framed in terms of causes, urgency, and accountability, is an obvious example. Baka (2016) unpacks the social construction of 'wastelands' as a discursive process to identify areas considered 'suitable' for biofuel feedstock production in India, and how this intertwines with the material properties of biomass with political processes of enclosure and dispossession. As large-scale land acquisitions happen all over the world in the name of advanced bio-economies, Neville and Dauvergne (2012, 287) provide an insight into how maps, as one among many discursive tools, are 'strategically wielded within accepted processes of claim-making in legal and social forums' in order to establish control over land (see also Nalepa and Bauer 2012;Hesse, Baka, and Calvert 2016).…”