regarding the tangible benefits of renewable energy resources also may hinder ... Global Environmental Politics 15:2, May 2015, doi:10.1162/GLEP_a_00300.
Marketing Renewable Energy through Geopolitics: Solar Farms in Israel •
Itay Fischhendler, Daniel Nathan, and Dror Boymel
Mounting evidence of the harmful effects of conventional energy resources on human and ecological systems has led to an increased development of renewable energy technologies. Indeed, resources such as wind, solar, and biomass are increasingly lauded as enhancing “energy system flexibility”1 given their untapped potential as “routinely available, indigenous” supplies of energy.2 However, renewable energy technology (RET) and services face many barriers to effective implementation. Renewable energy actors must compete with conventional energy powers over land, water, and other natural resources.3 The NIMBY (not in my back yard)4 effect and a lack of consumer knowledge regarding the tangible benefits of renewable energy resources also may hinder RET backing and progress.5 Several studies point toward environmental implications of RET that are frequently downplayed given its eco-friendly gloss, including sizeable land footprints from infrastructural expanses (e.g., solar and wind), air pollution (e.g., biomass and waste burning), water and ecosystem degradation and habitat disruption (e.g., hydroelectric, wind, and geothermal power), and aesthetic degradation from nearly all forms of RET.6 Specific supporting conditions, such as institutional and market modifications, help transform established energy economies to include more RET.7 These conditions include new advocacy constituents8 in the form of “technology-specific advocacy coalitions”9: “prime movers” that increase awareness, promote capital investments, afford legitimacy, and diffuse RET.10 An increasingly common approach for establishing advocacy coalitions to market RET involves geopolitical benefits. The “Roadmap for EU-Russia Energy 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
Blarke and Lund 2008. Akella et al. 2009, 390. Smith 2007. Warren et al. 2005. Bang et al. 2000. Abbasi and Abbasi 2000. Jacobsson and Lauber 2006. Sabatier 1998. Jacobsson and Lauber 2006, 258. Jacobsson and Johnson 2000, 636.
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Cooperation until 2050,” for example, sees renewable energy as a geopolitical opportunity for energy cooperation that is “mutually beneficial for both sides,” as both Russia and the EU will increase their energy system resiliency through RET exchange.11 Similarly, in politically charged North Africa, RET is considered “geopolitically more promising” given its potential to “promote stronger intraregional and Euro-Mediterranean cooperation.”12 As a “discursive practice by which intellectuals of statecraft ‘spatialize’ international politics,”13 viewing RET through the geopolitical lens elevates renewable energy to a strategic power position in the energy politics game.14 Despite the acknowledgment that RET may intertwine with geopolitics, academic literature mostly discusses its economic viability, technical feasibility, and environmental merits.15 As a result, a gap in the literature remains regarding how (and if at all) geopolitical argumentation is constructed 16 for the purpose of marketing renewable energy and by whom, and how such argumentation impacts RET decision-making processes.17 Given that the literature on geopolitics calls for critical analysis of geopolitical discourses,18 coupled with various studies that identify a research gap on how RET discourse coalitions impact renewable energy policies,19 we should critically examine how and why geopolitical abstractions are used to market RET. In this article we argue that the promotion of contested large-scale energy projects opens the door to geopolitical rhetorics and rationales that sidestep some of the opposition to them. We use publicized protocols from various decision-making circles regarding the promotion of solar energy in the Israeli Negev Desert from 2001 to 2012 to trace the use of competing geopolitical considerations for renewable energy goals.
Geopolitical Philosophy and Appeal Classical geopolitics pertains to “the global balance of power and the future of strategic advantage in an anarchic world.”20 The physical environment and geographical location of a state are thus the principal determinants of a state’s political destiny,21 fueling the assumption that fixed and observable geopolitical realities provide a backdrop on which international politics plays out.22 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.
European Commission 2013, 22. Marktanner and Salman 2011, 6. Ó Tuathail and Agnew 1992, 192. Dunn 2002. Shen et al. 2010. Mamadouh and Dijkink 2006. Westphal 2006. Müller 2008; Ó Tuathail and Agnew 1992. Barry et al. 2008; Jessup 2010. Ó Tuathail 1999, 107. Mackinder 1890. Ó Tuathail and Agnew 1992, 192.
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Critical geopolitics emerged from the recognition that classical geopolitics takes existing power structures for granted.23 Critical geopolitics entails careful consideration of ideology and power in the process of policy-making.24 This situates discourse at the forefront of critical geopolitics because the spatial representation of foreign affairs involves numerous ideological representations of “places, peoples, and dramas” by a vast array of actors embedded in power struggles.25 The appeal of geopolitics is largely found in its “seductive simplemindedness,” which allows normalizing declarations of world order and reactive policy-making to endure.26 Indeed, through simplified geographical and political representations, a “straightforward explanatory framework” allows for the linkage of disparate issues into clear-cut political benefits and risks.27 This confirms that “geopolitics provides the discursive context for [a] grand strategy” to be created28 by allowing powerful actors to fulfill certain interests over others to maintain existing perspectives.29 Natural resources are integral to geopolitics in that they fuel the material notion of power (e.g., economic and military) by their strategic relevance to political systems operating on the basis of resource competition.30
The Appeal of Geopolitics to RET Conventional energy resources have long been promoted through geopolitics due to their strategic importance in upholding national interests of prosperity and development.31 Since nations are territorial entities with demarcated borders encapsulating particular natural resources, the presence or lack of energy-fueling resources within national boundaries plays a critical role in a state’s social, military, and economic prowess.32 Furthered by a widespread desire for fuel availability, the twentieth century bore witness to an emerging geopolitically charged concept called energy security, which initially called for energy supply reliability for economic growth and development. However, this regularly tied energy development to foreign affairs, which raised the importance for a nation to become energy independent. This implied the need to curtail political, economic, and technological “barriers” that hindered local energy production, effectively placing RET at the forefront for enhancing energy security.33 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.
Ó Tuathail 1999, 107. Mamadouh and Dijkink 2006. Sharp 1993. Ó Tuathail 1999, 107. Dittmer and Dodds 2008, 438. Dalby 2010, 285. Hepple 1992, 139. Le Billon 2004. Pascual 2008. Patterson 2012. APERC 2007, 19.
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The widespread campaign for energy independence opened the door for geopolitical rhetoric that championed RET as an energy approach free from the vulnerabilities associated with inauspicious, foreign energy abstractions. Klare,34 for one, discusses the need for the US to “reverse the militarization of its dependence on imported energy and ease geopolitical competition with China and Russia over control of foreign resources” so that an enhanced domestic energy economy can be achieved through RET development. Likewise, South Korea promotes RET as a way to reduce the “cycle of volatility” created by foreign energy exports.35 In other words, RET serves as an alternative to the “centralized or totalistic controls” of conventional energy systems because it is produced by local communities in their own back yards.36 Tied to this notion of restricting the influence of politically motivated energy disturbances is RET dispersing the spatial balance of power through energy system interconnection and diffusion of services. For instance, a solitary, interconnected power grid in Europe might provide numerous domestic benefits, which could deter political uprisings from outside the EU.37 Similarly, the Mojave Desert and other public lands in the western US are being lauded as a “new energy frontier” capable of providing energy independence through regional infrastructure development and state networking.38 RET also enables foreign policy-making through cooperation. In Pakistan, for instance, RET collaboration has facilitated the country’s status as a potential “trade corridor” as South Asia develops “a symbiotic relationship on energy” despite ongoing regional tensions.39 Similarly, in the Czech Republic, the use of RET in satellite settlements is seen as “being packaged…within a narrative that attempts to accommodate the climate change implications” of conventional energy services, thus allowing the country to partially fulfill cooperative renewable energy goals within the greater EU.40 Even Desertec,41 despite its recent dissolution, was initially celebrated as being capable of contributing to regional economic and political stability in North Africa and the Mediterranean by creating win–win scenarios for participating nations.42 34. The Nation, May 19, 2008. The New Geopolitics of Energy. Available at http://www.thenation. com/article/new-geopolitics-energy, last accessed January 31, 2015. 35. Pascual 2008, 17. 36. Abbasi and Abbasi 2000, 122. 37. Patt et al. 2011, 738–739. 38. US Department of Interior, 2013. 39. Sahir and Qureshi 2007, 2036. 40. Petrova et al. 2013, 1452. 41. Desertec was a network of politicians, scientists, and economists from the Mediterranean region working towards establishing sustainable power, namely from solar grids, by utilizing renewable sources of energy where they are most abundant, all for the purpose of providing climate protection, energy and water security, and socioeconomic growth. For more information, see http://www.desertec.org/. 42. New York Times. 2009. Europe Looks to Africa for Solar Power. Available at http://www. nytimes.com/2009/06/22/business/energy-environment/22iht-green22.html?_r=0, last accessed January 31, 2015.
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Although these anecdotal examples demonstrate how RET is justified as an alleged geopolitical benefit, we still lack research on how geopolitical argumentation is constructed43 for the purpose of marketing renewable energy, by whom it is constructed, and how it impacts RET decision-making processes.44 We also do not know if this RET rhetoric is indeed new or is merely an extension of the previous energy geopolitics rhetoric around fossil fuels.
Israeli Energy Discourse and Policy Until recent discoveries of offshore natural gas, Israel was thought to lack indigenous supplies of energy, thus being highly dependent on unpredictable, imported resources.45 This perception first formed after the 1973 oil embargo, when Arab members of OPEC raised global oil prices, decreased production amounts, and ultimately boycotted oil distribution to Israel and her allies. To address this scarcity, the 1952 Petroleum Law gave authority to licensed excavators to locate and estimate reserves of oil by sample drillings. However, the intense excavations that followed proved Israel to be extremely barren of fossil fuels.46 In 2009, for instance, only 12 percent of Israel’s energy came from in-country resources.47 Israel was (and still is) perceived as an “energy island,” in light of its disconnected energy infrastructure system with neighboring states such as Lebanon and Egypt.48 This geopolitical predicament, coupled with low national power reserves, implies that even a minor malfunction in the electrical system could result in rolling electrical blackouts. In 2002 this occurred when a sharp increase in electricity consumption resulted in nationwide blackouts, costing roughly 700 million NIS to the state economy.49 Such a precarious energy portfolio has not permitted Israel to depend on regional energy resources in the past, effectively resulting in a drive for “indigenous production” and source diversification.50 In 2004, the Israeli Energy Master Plan recognized the need for a new energy reserve, replacing the use of coal with natural gas from Egypt and gas found offshore from Gaza.51 However, this plan was eventually shelved for political reasons. A shift in the Israeli energy mix occurred in the early 2000s, with the discovery of the Yam Titus offshore gas reservoir and the signing of an agreement between Egypt and Israel in 2005 to provide Israel with 25 billion cubic meters 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.
Mamadouh and Dijkink 2006. Westphal 2006. Bahgat 2010; Shaffer 2011. Bahgat 2008. IEA, 2012. Shaffer 2011, 5379. State Comptroller 2009. Bahgat 2010, 407. Israeli Energy Master Plan 2004.
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(bcm) of natural gas over 15 years via a transboundary gas pipeline.52 By the end of 2010 these new gas resources provided 36 percent of the Israeli energy mix, the rest coming from coal (62 percent) and oil (2 percent).53 However, the pipeline was closed permanently in 2012 following repeated terrorist attacks.54 Also, the development of a Palestinian offshore gas field to serve the Israeli market was delayed due to Israeli geopolitical concerns of becoming dependent on the Palestinians. Consequently, Israel’s energy plan was modified yet again by incorporating more imported resources like coal and oil.55 This precarious energy position has steadily driven forward the call for “indigenous production” and source diversification,56 a plea that gained weight with the discovery of offshore natural gas. From 2009 to 2012, Israel’s energy position as a net energy resource importer was drastically transformed with the discovery of several offshore natural gas deposits in the north of the country, two of which are considered large in global terms. These discoveries, coupled with several small gas field discoveries, have resulted in approximately 950 bcm of natural gas, which could provide up to 73 percent of Israel’s energy supply over 50 years if not exported.57 However, the discourse around the gas discoveries and their potential use has been entrenched in the same traditional discourse of securitization, which supports the continuation of a Zionist state and the need for energy independence.58
Opportunities and Challenges for a New RET Energy Policy Set against this backdrop of energy insufficiency, in 2008 the Israeli government decided to provide financial incentives for solar developers by granting tax benefits to photovoltaic facilities. In 2009, the government set national RET energy production targets at 10 percent by 2020, and called for the allocation of sites for solar facilities in the Negev Desert. The decision also called on Israel’s electricity authority to publish tariffs and criteria for the establishment of solar initiatives, resulting in numerous proposals submitted to various planning and construction bodies by the private sector.59 Similarly, a national master plan for photovoltaic facilities was approved in 2010 to simplify procedures for rooftop solar initiatives and ground-mounted facilities. As a consequence, in 2012, approximately sixty plots of land in the Negev Desert were authorized by the Israeli land administration for developing solar facilities. Despite this governmental endorsement of RET, solar initiatives face considerable barriers, such as land acquisition. Encompassing approximately 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.
Brokman 2010. Ecoenergy 2012. Ministry of Energy and Water Resources 2013. Israel Electricity Corporation 2012. Bahgat 2010, 407. Farkash 2014. Fischhendler and Nathan 2014. Government of Israel 2009.
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60 percent of Israel’s territory and sparsely populated, the Negev Desert in southern Israel is seen by many as highly suitable for solar energy development.60 In reality, however, the rocky arid expanse accommodates many competing users that currently occupy extensive amounts of lands. The Israeli military uses about 55 percent of the Negev for training and other army-related activities.61 Numerous nature reserves and national parks provide extensive open space to protect species and natural habitats. In fact, over 90 percent of the Negev Desert is designated as preserved land.62 A third competing use is agriculture, which holds an important position in the region, extending over 8 percent of the desert and representing a significant portion of total agricultural property in the country.63 Finally, part of the Negev is lived in by nomadic Bedouin tribes, whose property claims over the land are an ongoing social and political issue. Critics often consider this land conflict with the Bedouin a result of Israel’s ethnocratic tendencies, in which the ongoing, non-democratic seizure of land by the dominant ethnicity is imposed on the minority and rationalized through notions of migratory right, expansion, and strengthened sovereignty.64 Additional barriers for the successful development of solar in Israel stem from governmental inefficiencies. For example, the generous feed-in tariff (FIT) given to solar developers was rejected in 2011 by Israel’s Ministry of Finance and Public Services Authority; both argued that the use of FIT to meet the renewable energy targets would increase Israel’s national electricity bill by 15 percent.65 This increase may be further aggravated by recent offshore gas discoveries, which are significantly cheaper than RET. Given these barriers, Israel is lagging far behind in achieving its goal of 20-percent reduction in greenhouse gases and 10-percent increase in RET-produced energy. These holdups may fuel the use of geopolitics to accelerate RET development.
Methodology Database To identify how geopolitics is employed to promote RET, we examine a variety of official protocols published from November 2002, when the Israeli government first decided to promote renewable energy, through December 2012.66 The protocols specifically deal with solar initiatives that were up for discussion in many different venues (political and technical public arenas) and decision-making levels. The venues examined were classified into political (e.g., parliamentary 60. 61. 62. 63.
Ministry of National Infrastructure, Energy and Water Resources 2013. State Comptroller 2011. National Master Plan 2005. Calculation based on information attained from the Israeli Nature and Parks Authority website (2011). Available at http://www.parks.org.il, last accessed January 31, 2015. 64. Yiftachel 2006. 65. Agamon 2011. 66. Government of Israel 2002.
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committees), national (e.g., the National Planning and Construction Council), and regional groupings (e.g., Regional Planning and Construction Council). Of 98 protocols spanning over a decade, 19 included geopolitical references.67
Data Coding In each protocol, geopolitical justifications for solar energy in Israel (geopolitical events) were identified by language that pertained to the impact of geographical (spatial) abstractions on foreign affairs (e.g., the location and distribution of resources, regional tensions). A geopolitical event indicated that a decisionmaker was promoting (or condemning) RET by stressing the effect of the “inescapably social and political geo-graphing” of the issue on foreign affairs and/or sovereignty. Altogether, 49 events from 98 protocols made use of a geopolitical rationale for RET. A single event was therefore pinned down by identifying when RET was deliberated on the basis of its geopolitical merits or shortcomings within an individual protocol. This implies that a single protocol could include several geopolitical events, each deliberated by different stakeholders. Each event was associated with the stakeholder raising it and their overall position on RET, including the policy for promoting it. With the aim of determining the reason for geopolitical promotion (or opposition) of solar energy, we identified three rationales as the dominant discourse for solar energy in Israel. The energy independence rationale presents RET as a means to achieve energy independence given the risks of associating imported energy from exterior and potentially unstable states. The cooperation rationale presents solar farms as a platform for cooperation that can achieve geopolitical goals with other countries beyond energy production, such as climate change reductions. The land-safeguarding rationale stresses the importance of solar farms for the protection of the Jewish Homeland, principally in borderland areas that symbolize the claim for strengthening or eroding sovereignty. This rationale emphasizes events that justify RET on the basis of competing (desert) land uses that are geopolitically charged.68 An additional rationale opposed the geopolitical contribution of solar farms, either by stressing the impracticality in crafting energy policies on unstable energy sources that are sensitive to climatic changes, or by defusing the nexus between geopolitics and renewable energies (the counter-geopolitics rationale). For the purpose of determining how and why geopolitical reasoning is employed, each event was also associated with the actor that articulated the event. Actors were divided into those that represented the private sector (e.g., entrepreneurs), governmental regulators (e.g., Ministry of Energy and Water) and politicians. Since the regulators were not completely homogeneous, the distribution of geopolitical rationales among them was determined separately. 67. A protocol can be 3–150 pages long. 68. For more on how the struggle over land between the Jewish establishment and the Bedouin is framed in terms of “space,” “power,” “politics,” and “borders,” see Yiftachel 2006.
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Since a geopolitical rationale is promoted against the backdrop of other competing land uses and concerns, competing interests to RET were also coded.69 These included ecological concerns and uses (e.g., RET may crowd out nature reserves); public health concerns (e.g., some forms of RET may result in electromagnetic radiation); food security concerns (e.g., RET often comes at the expense of arable land); and military concerns (e.g., RET often requires the appropriation of military training areas).
Tracing the Social Construction of Geopolitics As a discourse, geopolitics is the communication of “intellectuals of statecraft [who] ‘spatialize’ international politics” through the representation of regions, people, and shifting boundaries.70 This geopolitical imagination, as it is often called, is imbued with power and knowledge, allowing certain groups to maintain and legitimize certain perspectives over others.71 Typically, this is sustained by the use of discursive devices or tropes, which we documented as hard truths (classical constructs reflecting the impact of the physical environment on foreign policy conduct)72; simple narratives and myths, which reduce complex issues to familiar concepts like colonialism or independence73; binary relations, which utilize dualities to construct socio-political boundaries, such as ally and adversary74; and time-space continuums, which supplant conventional perceptions of time and space given a new world order in which borderless risks (e.g., climate change or nuclear catastrophe) create new risks and dependencies. In each geopolitical event we tried to identify these discursive devices. Since the use of geopolitical rationales is “imbued with ideological assumptions” that suggests “the framing of ‘national interest’…[to be] the outcome of domestic struggles and power relations,”75 we coded each event by the contextual (catalyst) factors that legitimized using geopolitics as a rationale for solar energy initiatives. We also documented external factors like fluctuations in global energy prices or Israel’s global commitment to climate change mitigation and internal (domestic) factors like the raising of levies for land converted from agriculture to solar. To provide context for the examination of geopolitical rationales—as part of the requisite for geopolitical discourse analysis76—we included other elements pertinent to RET development in Israel. These ranged from the establishment of 69. Only competing rationales for geopolitics that were depicted as existential threats were coded, so that the risks posed by RET could be clearly identified. 70. Ó Tuathail and Agnew 1992, 192. 71. Hepple 1992, 139. 72. Ó Tuathail and Agnew 1992, 192. 73. Ó Tuathail and Agnew 1992. 74. Ó Tuathail 1999, 108. 75. Mamadouh and Dijkink 2006, 350. 76. Müller 2008; Ó Tuathail and Agnew 1992.
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Figure 1 Dominant Land Use Concerns
institutions for regional cooperation to infrastructural entities, such as the positioning of solar farms near electricity generators.
Results Figure 1 shows the distribution of events representing various land use concerns if RET were introduced to the energy system in Israel. The dominant land use concern is militaristic, with geopolitical benefits close behind. Figure 2 shows that all actors made use of most rationales to market solar development, but energy independence was favored most (63 percent of all events), followed by regional cooperation (20 percent of the events), land safeguarding (10 percent), and counter-geopolitics (7 percent). Indeed, RET was often presented as less vulnerable to external events, such as the sabotage of the Egyptian
Figure 2 Geopolitical Events by Actor Type
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Figure 3 Geopolitical Events by Venue Type
energy pipeline, and hence as a better fit for achieving energy independence. Figure 2 also highlights how politicians were found to utilize geopolitical reasoning most often (as 45 percent of all events were raised by politicians), with regulators (30 percent) and the private sector (25 percent) close behind. Figure 3 shows the explicit use of geopolitical rationales as a function of the venue; 82 percent of all geopolitical events occurred in political rather than technical venues. The political venue overwhelmingly contributed to the reasoning of solar development through energy independence and cooperation. It is interesting to note that each interpretation of geopolitics is associated with a different policy action: while energy independence leads to the diversification of the Israeli energy mix, cooperation around RET, for example, triggers the establishment of new institutional settings and solar farms in adjacent counties where land is not scare. Figure 4 shows the distribution of geopolitical events motivated by contextual (catalyst) factors and their distribution by actors. Seventeen of the 49 geopolitical events were motivated by contextual factors—44 percent internal and 56 percent external. Common internal contextual factors included domestic gas market demand; land use planning (e.g., plans for settling the Bedouin tribes in the Negev); and land taxation, which could hinder the stability of future solar development. External factors related to the global energy fluctuations in supply and demand, especially the increase in Chinese demand for energy or the decrease in Russian and Egyptian gas supplies; Israeli commitments to a post-Kyoto regime; and the political volatility of Israeli relations with regional neighbors like Egypt. Internal events were articulated mostly by the private sector (50 percent), with the rest equally distributed between regulators and politicians; external events, on the other hand, were mostly raised by politicians (70 percent), with the rest voiced by the private sector.
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Figure 4 The Contextual Factors that Trigger Geopolitical Events by Actors The numbers in the chart refer to the number of geopolitical events by each actor.
Examples of geopolitical argumentations show the extent of the geopolitical discourse on solar farms in Israel. Table 1 shows that varying geopolitical rationales are promoted by actors using different discursive geopolitical devices to advance their agenda and any contextual events that serve as catalysts. For instance, in example 1 a regulator promotes independence as a geopolitical rationale using two discursive geopolitical devices: a simple narrative or myth (in this case shaped by a oft-used metaphor) that spatially presents Israel as an energy island devoid of regional energy partners, and a hard (physical) truth that depicts Israel as a small country with scarce energy resources. The strategic depiction of Israel as an isolated island is both an observable and permanent reality in which foreign energy policy is crafted and an ideological representation of Israel’s political position in the region. Such ideological representation by perpetuation of narratives in myths is further witnessed in example 5, which advances solar development by the geopolitical imagination of Israel as a powerful and pioneering Zionist enclave. In example 2, the discursive geopolitical device used to promote land safeguarding is a binary relation, a discursive structure common in traditional geopolitics.77 This example makes use of pronouns (we, them) to distinguish between two separate subjects (Israelis and Bedouins) clashing over competing land use. In example 6, the binary relation is structured on the friend–enemy dichotomy, which (along with other binary relations) simplifies geopolitics into causality by pointing towards the basis of the problem (that Israel is enclosed by [its] enemies) and its simplified solution (the need to have energy reserves due to scarcity and isolation). In example 7, space becomes compressed given that the discursive geopolitical structure for marketing RET is through the Kyoto Protocol, which binds global energy producers and consumers together under the specter of new global climate risks and dependencies. This is advanced by the external contextual catalyst of the global economic crisis. We identify two dominant discourses. While the energy-independence rationale is based on emotional linguistic tools highlighting the need to stand up 77. Ó Tuathail 1999.
Actor
Regulator
Regulator
Example
1
2
Land Safeguarding
Independence
Geopolitical Rationale
• Binary relations (us-them)
• Simple narratives and myths (describing a foreign policy problem normalizes reality) • Hard truths (physical environment determines foreign policy conduct)
Discursive Geopolitical Device
Table 1 Examples of Geopolitical Rhetoric, its Structure and Context by Actors
National Plan for the Development of Bedouin Settlements
Contextual Catalyst for Geopolitical Claim
Israel is a small country and an energy island with geopolitical issues. Therefore we have no connection with the electricity grids of neighboring countries, so if we want the energy created from such solar stations to be fully integrated we need to worry about power output that is…more stable and predictable.97 The Bedouin have claims of ownership over land…We are trying to convince them to reach an agreement with the state…to release land for other purposes, including business considerations and…photovoltaic facilities.98
Example*
Regulator
Private
Private
Politician
Politician
3
4
5
6
7
Cooperation
Independence
Land Safeguarding
Cooperation
Independence
• Time-space compression (global risk society)
• Hard truths (physical environment determines foreign policy conduct) • Simple narratives and myths (describing a foreign policy problem normalizes reality) • Binary relations (friend-enemy)
• Hard truths (physical environment determines foreign policy conduct)
• Simple narratives and myths (describing a foreign policy problem normalizes reality)
Economic crisis
Volatility in energy prices and capital gains taxes
Betterment levy on the construction of solar fields
Fluctuating prices of imported energy sources
(Continued on next page)
We are a state enclosed by enemies and need to have many different [energy] reserves.102 Steadfastness with the Kyoto Protocol.103
Israel has limitations in terms of the fuels that can be brought to the state…so the issue of alternative energy is also important for…energy security and diversification of energy sources.99 [In the Negev Desert] there is hidden potential in the execution of solar projects with Jordan.100 In the periphery [of Israel] a new factory can be established, a Zionist factory of solar energy.101
Politician
8
Independence
Geopolitical Rationale • Binary relations (inside-outside) • Hard truths (physical environment determines foreign policy conduct)
Discursive Geopolitical Device
Contextual Catalyst for Geopolitical Claim
Israel is a country that depends on oil…and coal from the outside and cannot for long…rely on such external dependencies. We are a country blessed with sun, a country that in some areas is blessed with wind, a country with beaches, and we can produce a variety of solutions for alternative energy that will release us from this dependence.104
Example*
97. Shlomo Wald, Chief Scientist at the Ministry of Energy and Water Resources, Israel. Comment made at the National Planning Committee, December 7, 2010. 98. David Cohen. Comment made at the Regional Planning Committee, November 14, 2010. 99. Hezi Kugler, CEO of Adira Energy Israel, Ltd. and former Director General of the Ministry of Infrastructure, Israel. Comment made at a science and technology meeting at the Ministry of Energy and Water Resources, January 16, 2007. 100. Dror Nahmias, Environmental Consultant for the National Infrastructure Committee, Israel. Comment made at the National Planning Committee, May 12, 2009. 101. Eitan Parnass, CEO of Green Energy Association of Israel. Comment made at a Ministry of Interior meeting on environmental quality, February 21, 2012. 102. Amnon Cohen, chairman of the Israeli State Control Committee and Member of Parliament. Comment made at a Ministry of Interior meeting on environmental quality, July 16, 2012. 103. Roni Bar-On, former member of Parliament and Minister of Finance. Comment made at the Ministerial Council for Social and Economic Issues, January 1, 2009. 104. Dov Khenin, member of Israeli Parliament. Comment made at a science and technology meeting at the Ministry of Energy and Water Resources, January 16, 2007.
*Examples represent direct quotations from actors involved in the debate on solar.
Actor
Example
Table 1 (Continued )
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against neighboring states, the cooperation rationale emphasizes the need to develop interdependencies. However, both rationales make use of RET as a way to achieve various national goals beyond energy; for independence, reducing Israel’s political vulnerability is paramount, while cooperation will improve foreign relations.
Discussion Israel has low renewable energy targets compared to the EU or California, for example, and Israel’s energy system would require backup-generating electricity infrastructure due to the embryonic state of RET. These conditions allow for questions about the fitness of RET in providing genuine geopolitical benefits to Israel. Geopolitics still represents a dominant discourse for RET development in Israel, through actors that link the volatile political position of Israel in the region with the opportunities available from RET development into a package combining energy independence and cooperation. Politicians and players from the private and governmental (regulatory) sectors formed an advocacy coalition—despite their competing interests—by frequently identifying similar national dangers that could be linked into clear-cut solutions in the form of solar farms. Moreover, by being voiced mostly in political and to some extent national planning venues, greater legitimacy was provided for RET based on a setting appropriate for ideological—not technical—discussions. As a strategic instrument, geopolitical language allowed differing actors with competing interests to promote solar development together. As a means for achieving energy independence, for example, both politicians and regulators stressed that solar development would address issues of energy scarcity. For politicians, this commonly took shape through the use of binary relations built on dualities of conflict, much like the tactic frequently used in security dialogues.78 Regulators, on the other hand, used simple narratives based on isolationism and its effect on energy system stability. This nuanced disparity, which gives RET a declarative and imperative nature, confirms that the use of geopolitical reasoning for RET promotion is strategic (as stressed in the geopolitics literature).79 This strategic use of RET was found to be true for the cooperation logic behind the geopolitical framing as well, as the private sector often emphasized RET’s role in achieving foreign policy goals (e.g., OECD targets) by opening up new markets. As mentioned in the geopolitics literature, this strategic simplification often links disparate issues into precise geopolitical benefits and risks.80 For instance, the land-safeguarding rationale simplified the highly charged and complex problem of the Bedouin into an issue of border protection and societal 78. Dalby 1992. 79. Ó Tuathail 1999. 80. Dittmer and Dodds 2008.
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integration. This indicates that Zionist-driven land policies are perceived as political opportunities, rather than constraints, for local communities. Since geopolitics is not an inherently meaningful concept but a phenomenon based on discourse and context,81 more often than not emblematic events that gave weight to the geopolitical marketing of RET were present. These included external contextual events raised mostly by politicians—such as the recent increase in global energy prices and the disruption of gas supply from Egypt—and internal events raised by the private sector, such as the raised betterment tax and leasing fee for solar farms and the abolishment of financial incentives for border communities. Such context—in the Israeli case at least—was essential for promoting RET through geopolitics, as it served to underline the big picture of energy politics in Israel and on the world stage—a facet that the literature on geopolitics assigns to geopolitical discourse.82 Yet these contextual conditions made sense only within the wider dangers of scarcity, a stipulation already noted in studies of oil and climate change.83 As is evident from Table 1 (examples 1 and 3), resource deficit was a prime catalyst for geopolitical rhetoric. In fact, politicians used the same scarcity rhetoric to advance energy independence as did regulators to advance greater regional cooperation with land-rich Arab neighbors. Such an approach, whereby Israel taps into adjacent land resources through regional cooperation, is commonly advocated by Israeli scholars and policy-makers.84 That Israeli energy discourse is sensitive to context is predictable, as earlier studies link structural and political changes with shifts in Israeli natural resource discourses such as for water.85 Yet, these studies rarely include geopolitics as a discursive phenomenon, a surprising omission given the prominence of security practices and discourses in Israel.86 Furthermore, the recent gas discoveries were not raised by supporters of RET as external contextual events or as new resources that could ameliorate regional energy scarcity. This is to be expected because stressing this would likely weaken the incentive for RET promotion, as gas is currently cheaper and more accessible.87 This may indicate that the choice to endorse RET by way of geopolitics is a function of discourse sanctioned by interest groups.
Conclusions As an integral element to human systems, energy resources often fall prey to the rhetoric and competing discourses that decision-makers use to sustain, lobby 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87.
Ó Tuathail 1996. Dittmer and Dodds 2008. Huber 2012; Yergin 1991. Bahgat 2008; JNS 2012. Feitelson 2002; Nathan and Fischhendler 2012. Gavriely-Nuri 2013; Barak and Sheffer 2013. Preliminary evidence shows that it is more difficult to market RET in the face of the recent gas discoveries (e.g., Stiglitz 2012).
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for, and diffuse favored energy policies and services. Such acts of endorsement are critical for fossil fuels88 and nuclear energy.89 Recent evidence shows that discourse and rhetoric are critical to the successful growth and diffusion of evolving energy systems increasingly reliant on RET.90 However, an underdeveloped subject matter for the marketing of RET is geopolitics, a rhetorically charged discourse that has grown in use since the risks of associating conventional energy management with foreign policy affairs were fully expressed in energy security terms. Indeed, given that most countries view energy policy as a matter of sovereignty, it is reasonable to market RET through the political risks of fossil fuel importation and the political benefits of technological cooperation with regional partners. In contrast, current academic literature often highlights RET’s environmental benefits and economic contributions to supply reliability.91 The omission of the geopolitical dimension of RET is unexpected because a cursory examination of large-scale RET projects reveals that renewable energy discourse is saturated with geopolitics. RET was marketed from 2001 through 2012 by numerous actors who shaped their geopolitical rationales through linguistic (geopolitical) devices often embedded in narratives of power, ideology, and geography. The geopolitical aspect of RET was reinforced by spatial representations of Israel as an enclosed and isolated territory suffering from regional conflict and physical resource scarcity. This was promoted through binary relations common in geopolitical thinking, and through simple narratives and myths that expanded upon the powerful ideological perspectives of endurance and survival. Two dominant geopolitical discourses promoted these views: energy independence, which called for Israel to stand up against hostile, neighboring states via RET, and cooperation, which stressed interdependence and increased economic growth through RET trade. Despite the differences in their goals, the two discourses were promoted as foreign policy enablers, indicating that RET helped overcome Israeli vulnerabilities such as energy embargoes and isolationism. RET became a cross-sectorial solution to physical and political realities by cutting off cross-boundary dependencies, strengthening the much maligned periphery, reinforcing the Zionist establishment, and reducing borderless risks such as climate change through cooperation. These lines of reasoning were voiced mostly in political venues by politicians following contextual (and politicized) events that hindered RET development, such as the freezing of generous feed-in-tariffs for solar expansion, indicating that the geopolitical marketing of RET is a powerful leveraging device. In fact, the use of geopolitical argumentation in political venues suggests that the appropriate audience for geopolitics is high-profile politicians (rather than mid-level civil servants or technical staff which are mostly present at other venues). 88. 89. 90. 91.
Scrase and Ockwell 2010. Rogers-Hayden et al. 2011. Barry et al. 2008; Jessup 2010. Shen et al. 2010.
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The constructivist literature warns about the use of rhetoric for promoting contested policies that, without the use of intangibles and symbolic idioms, would not be adopted by decision-makers. In the energy sector these rhetorical tools are used to garner public support for contested energy projects92 and for creating socio-technical energy imaginaries to achieve goals beyond energy policy including regional cooperation, stability and state building.93 However, these studies, which often focus on representations in the popular media, rarely look at how discourses become institutionalized by way of deep analysis of primary documents.94 By contrast, we look at primary actors utilizing geopolitical discourse as a possible rhetorical tool to increase the political feasibility of solar farms. The generalizability of these findings to other studies requires careful consideration, since Israel is an economically advanced country in a region with constant conflict. Future research needs to examine how discourses are shaped not only by venues and players (as this article did), but also by the availability of natural and financial resources and by regional conditions. “The discursive and representational aspects” of RET remain unexplored,95 including how contested visions of energy problems and RET integration ultimately impact renewable energy policies.96 Given that this article does not examine the influence of discourse on policy outcomes, research that expands on this subject would benefit scholars and decision-makers.
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