Material Politics

Disputes Along the Pipeline

Andrew Barry

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781118529126, 9781118529119
• eBook ISBN: 9781118529096
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

In Material Politics, author Andrew Barry reveals that as we are beginning to attend to the importance of materials in political life, materials has become increasingly bound up with the production of information about their performance, origins, and impact.

• Presents an original theoretical approach to political geography by revealing the paradoxical relationship between materials and politics
• Explores how political disputes have come to revolve not around objects in isolation, but objects that are entangled in ever growing quantities of information about their performance, origins, and impact
• Studies the example of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline – a fascinating experiment in transparency and corporate social responsibility – and its wide-spread negative political impact
• Capitalizes on the growing interdisciplinary interest, especially within geography and social theory, about the critical role of material artefacts in political life

Chapter One

Introduction

In July 2004 officials from the International Finance Corporation (IFC) visited the small village of Dgvari, in the mountains of the Lesser Caucasus, in the region of the spa town of Borjomi in Western Georgia. The village, which was built on a slope that was prone to landslides, was gradually ­collapsing, and the villagers wanted to be moved elsewhere. The visit from the IFC was not prompted directly by the occurrence of landslides, however, but by the construction of an oil pipeline in the valley in which Dgvari was situated. The villagers feared that pipeline construction would intensify the frequency of landslides, and they looked to the pipeline company, which was led by BP, to address the problem. Geoscientific consultants, paid for by BP, had previously visited the village, taken measurements and produced a report, reaching the conclusion that although the villagers did need to move, the construction of the pipeline would not make the situation worse. A controversy therefore arose between the villagers and BP over whether or not the construction of the pipeline carried significant risks for the village, and whether the company had the responsibility for addressing the problem. It was this dispute that brought the IFC officials to the village of Dgvari.

In recent years geographers and social theorists have increasingly drawn attention to the critical part that materials play in political life. No longer can we think of material artefacts and physical systems such as pipes, houses, water and earth as the passive and stable foundation on which ­politics takes place; rather, it is argued, the unpredictable and lively ­behaviour of such objects and environments should be understood as integral to the conduct of politics. Physical and biological processes and events, ranging from climate change and flooding to genetic modification and ­biodiversity loss, have come to animate political debate and foster passionate disputes. Yet if geographers have become interested in what has ­variously been described as the force, agency and liveliness of materials, thus probing the limits of social and political thought, then at the heart of this book lies an intriguing paradox: for just as we are beginning to attend to the activity of materials in political life, the existence of materials has become increasingly bound up with the production of information. Disputes such as those that occurred in Dgvari have come to revolve not around physical processes such as landslides – which have activity in themselves – in isolation, but around material objects and processes that are entangled in ever-growing quantities of information. The problem of the landslides of Dgvari was assessed by BP’s consultants and Georgian geoscientists, as well as by the officials from the IFC, and the ­deteriorating condition of the villagers’ houses was observed by numerous environmentalists and journalists over many years, as well as by myself. To understand the puzzling political ­significance of the landslides of Dgvari, I will suggest in what follows, we need to understand how their existence became bound up with a vast quantity of documents and reports that ­circulated between the village and the offices of ministries, scientists and environmentalists in Tbilisi, Washington, DC, London and elsewhere.

This book focuses on a series of disputes that arose along the length of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline that now passes close by the ­village of Dgvari. In the period from 2003 to 2006 the BTC pipeline was one of the largest single construction projects in the world. Stretching 1760 km from south of Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, on the Caspian Sea to the port of Ceyhan on the Turkish Mediterranean coast, it had first been conceived in the late 1990s when, in the aftermath of the break up of the Soviet Union and the first Gulf War (1990–91), international oil companies sought to gain access to off-shore oil reserves in the Caspian Sea, including the giant Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli (ACG) field. At the outset, the route of the pipeline through Georgia and Eastern Turkey was explicitly determined by geopolitical considerations, so as to enable oil exports from Azerbaijan to bypass alternative routes through southern Russia and Iran. Indeed, the pipeline was regarded from the late 1990s through the early 2000s as having enormous strategic importance both for the region and, according to some commentators at the time, for the energy security of the West. By 2004, the BTC pipeline employed nearly 22,000 people in Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey, with a projected cost of approximately $3.9 billion and the capacity to carry 1.2 million barrels of oil per day. While the pipeline was built by a consortium led by BP (BTC 2006), it involved a number of other ­international and national oil companies including the State Oil Company of Azerbaijan (SOCAR), Unocal, Statoil, Turkish Petroleum (TPAO), ENI, TotalFinaElf, Itochu and Delta Hess (see Table 1.1). It was also supported by the US and UK governments, the International Finance Corporation (IFC)¹ and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD). Prior to its construction, the BTC pipeline had figured in the plot of the James Bond film, The World is Not Enough.

Table 1.1 Institutions and organisations involved in the development and politics of the BTC pipeline

Sources: BTC/SRAP 2003a, BTC/PCIP 2003, BTC 2003b, 2006, Platform et al. 2003, House of Commons 2005b

Participant oil Companies (equity stakes in 2003)	BP International and BP Corporation North America (30.1%); State Oil Company of Azerbaijan SOCAR (25%); Turkiye Petrolerri A.O. (TPAO) (6.53%); Statoil ASA (8.71%); TotalFinaElf (5.0%); Union Oil Company of California (Unocal) (8.9%); ITOCHU Corporation (3.4%); INPEX Corporation (2.5%); Delta Hess (2.36%); Agip (5.0%); Conoco Phillips (2.5%).
Contractors and consultants (selection)	Botaş (design, engineering , procurement, inspection); Spie Capag Petrofac (construction); WS Atkins (engineering consultants); Bechtel (engineering and procurement services); Environmental Resources Management (environmental and social impact assessment); Foley Hoag (human rights monitoring); Ernst and Young (sustainability monitoring); Mott Macdonald (lenders’ environmental and social consultants); D’Appolonia S.p.A (lenders’ independent environmental consultant); Worley Parsons (lenders’ engineering consultant).
International financial institutions	International Finance Corporation – World Bank Group (IFC); European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD).
Commercial lenders (selection)	Royal Bank of Scotland (UK); Citigroup (US); ABN Amro (NL).
Export Credit Agencies	Eximbank (US); OPIC (US); COFACE (France); Hermes (Germany); JBIC NEXI (Japan); Export Credit Guarantee Department (UK).
International NGOs and related organisations	Amnesty International (UK); World Wildlife Fund for Nature; International Alert; Central and East European Bankwatch (CEE); Friends of the Earth (USA); Crude Accountability (USA). The Baku-Ceyhan Campaign: Friends of the Earth International; Kurdish Human Rights Project (KHRP); The Corner House (UK); Platform (UK); Bank Information Center (USA); Campagna per la Riforma della Banca Mondiale (Italy).
Regional NGOs (selection)	Open Society Institute (Azerbaijan and Georgia); Green Alternative (Georgia); Georgian Young Lawyers Association (GYLA); The Committee for Oil Industry Workers Rights Protection (Azerbaijan); Caucasus Environmental NGO Network (CENN); Association for the Protection of Landowners Rights (APLR) (Georgia); Centre for Civic Initiatives (Azerbaijan); Entrepreneurship Development Foundation (Azerbaijan); Institute of Peace and Democracy (Azerbaijan); Coalition of Azerbaijan Non-Governmental Organizations For Improving Transparency in the Extractives Industry.
NGOs involved in BTC Community Investment Programme (CIP) in Georgia	Care International in the Caucasus; Mercy Corps.

Yet the pipeline was much more than a vast financial and engineering project with security implications that stretched across three countries. For a period it was also viewed by many as a public experiment intended to demonstrate the value of a series of innovations in global governance that had developed progressively through the 1990s and 2000s, notably transparency, corporate social responsibility and ‘global corporate citizenship’ (Thompson 2005, 2012, Watts 2006, Lawrence 2009). Indeed, one of BP’s explicit goals in developing BTC was to establish ‘a new model for large-scale, extractive-industry investments by major, multinational enterprises in developing and transition countries’ (BTC/CDAP 2007: 2, emphasis added, BTC 2003a: 7). It was, in particular, the first major test of the Equator Principles, the financial industry benchmark for ‘determining, assessing and managing social and environmental risk’ in project financing (Equator Principles 2003, Browne 2010: 172). This was a demonstration or test that would have to be performed in a region, the South Caucasus, in which none of the key parties – international oil corporations, investment banks, international NGOs – had much prior experience. In these circumstances, the parties involved in the development of BTC sought to carve out a space, simultaneously governmental, material and informational, within which this test could be performed and its results published. The BTC project is therefore remarkable not just because of its scale and complexity, or what was thought to be its geopolitical significance, but because an unprecedented quantity of information was made public about both the potential impact of its construction and how this impact would be managed and mitigated.² Indeed, as the project came to fruition in 2003, thousands of pages of documents about the pipeline were made public by BP, heading the consortium behind the project, while further reports were released by the IFC and other international institutions. At the same time, the pipeline attracted the attention of numerous documentary film-makers, artists, environmentalists, journalists, academics and human rights organisations.

The global oil industry has, of course, long been a knowledge production industry focused on the problem of how to locate and extract a complex organic substance that takes multiple forms from a range of distant and dispersed locations (Bowker 1994, Bridge and Wood 2005). Moreover, the oil industry has always been concerned with the problem of how to suppress, channel, contain or govern the potentially disruptive activity of materials and persons. In this light, the recent efforts to promote the virtues of transparency, public accountability and environmental and social responsibility have to be understood in the context of a longer history (Mitchell 2011). The story of BTC is in part a story of how the production and publication of information appears to offer capital a new, responsible and ethical way of managing the unruliness of persons and things. To understand the construction of the BTC pipeline, I suggest, we need to appreciate how its existence became bound up with the publication of information intended to effect its transparency. And to understand why and how its construction was disputed, we need to attend to the controversies that it animated, which did not just revolve around issues of ­geopolitics or the pipeline’s relation to state interests, but also around quite specific technical matters concerning, for example, the likelihood of landslides, the impact of construction work on agricultural production, and the depth that the pipeline would need to be buried in the ground to protect it from sabotage. Indeed for a period, the BTC pipeline became the focus of an extraordinary range of particular disputes about what was known about its construction, its environmental impact, and even about the material qualities of the pipe itself.

I have already suggested that a case such as this poses a challenge to geography and social theory. The challenge is how to understand the role of materials in political life in a period when the existence of materials is becoming progressively more bound up with both the production and the circulation of information. At a time when social theorists and philosophers have drawn our attention to the agency, liveliness and unruly activity of materials, we need to be aware that the existence of materials is also routinely traced, mapped and regulated, whether this is in order to assess their quality, safety, purity, ­compatibility or environmental impact. This is not a new phenomenon; but the generation and circulation of information about materials and artefacts, including massive infrastructural assemblages such as oil pipelines, has come to play an increasingly visible part in political and economic life. One core argument of this book is that we need to develop accounts of the political geography of materials whose ongoing existence is associated with the production of information.

A second core argument follows. It responds to the claim that when information is made more transparent and publically available, rational and open forms of public debate should ensue (cf. Hood 2006). In this book I put forward an alternative account of the politics of transparency. I argue that the implementation of transparency, along with the growing salience of other core principles of transnational governance and social and environmental responsibility, foster new forms of dispute. The practice of transparency and corporate responsibility, I contend, does not necessarily lead to a reduction in the intensity of ­disagreement, although it does generate new concerns, sites and problems about which it matters to disagree. My central questions are geographical. In a period in which the virtues of transparency and environmental and social responsibility have been so insistently stressed, how and why do ­particular materials, events and sites become controversial? Why should quite specific features of the pipeline, such as its relation to the village of Dgvari, become matters of transnational political concern, while other ­candidate problems do not? If we understand the construction of the BTC pipeline as a demonstration of the practice of transparency, then, as we will see, the results of this vast public experiment turn out to be instructive.

The remainder of this introduction is organised into four parts. In the first, I introduce the idea of a public knowledge controversy, of which the case of the BTC pipeline is an example, and survey a number of key features of knowledge controversies in general, and public knowledge controversies in particular.³ There is already a substantial literature on knowledge controversies, but here I introduce the concept of the political situation in order to highlight the way in which the spatiality, temporality and limits of any given controversy are themselves likely to be in question. I suggest that individual controversies, such as the dispute over the future of the village of Dgvari, are rarely isolated events. Rather, the relation between a particular controversy and other controversies and events elsewhere is likely to be uncertain and itself a matter of dispute. Individual knowledge controversies, I propose, need to be understood as elements of multiple political situations of which they form a part.

The second part of the introduction turns to the question of the way in which the properties, qualities and design of materials are bound up with the production of information. Human geographers have increasingly argued that they need to attend to what has variously been understood as the liveliness, agency and powers of materials as well as persons. I contend, however, that although this argument is an important one, it does not address the ways in which the existence and the activity of material artefacts have progressively been subject to monitoring, assessment, regulation and management. This observation has particular significance for the oil industry, which often operates in demanding environments in which the movement and activity of materials, including oil, land and pipes, may be difficult to manage and control. In this section I also highlight the critical importance of the production of social and political knowledge for the international oil industry when it operates in regions, such as the Caucasus, that are highly populated. Following Foucault’s brief observation in the conclusion of the Archaeology of Knowledge about the need for analysis of the functioning of political knowledge, I suggest with reference to this study that such an analysis should include the social and political knowledge generated by, amongst others, BP, the international financial institutions and their critics.

In the third part of the introduction I return to consider the specificity of the politics of oil in the era of transparency, addressing two key issues. One concerns how the implementation of transparency raises questions about the range of matters in relation to which information is not made public. The other concerns how the length of the pipeline came to be constituted as a series of overlapping spaces of knowledge production and intervention – environmental, social, geoscientific, technical and legal – only some of which were rendered transparent. In the final section of the chapter, the argument turns back to consider the specific route of the BTC pipeline itself, pointing to the critical importance for the politics of the pipeline of the comparatively short section that ran through Georgia. The disputes that arose along the Georgian route became focal tests for the new model of corporate responsibility and transparency that was embodied in the ­construction of the pipeline.

Making Things Political

In 2005, the sociologist Bruno Latour and the artist Peter Weibel curated an exhibition at the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie in Karlsruhe, Germany, entitled Making Things Public. The exhibition built on the work carried out by historians and sociologists of science from the 1980s onwards on knowledge controversies (Collins 1981, Latour 1987). However, it placed this earlier work in an explicitly political frame. Conceived in the period immediately following the Iraq War of 2003, Latour took the ­­infamous declaration made by US Secretary of State Colin Powell at the UN General Assembly that there were Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq as illustrative of the critical importance of both materials and knowledge claims about materials in public political life. The existence and the ­properties of objects, he contended, could generate passionate public disagreements. ‘It’s clear that each object – each issue – generates a different pattern of emotions and disruptions, of disagreements and agreements’ (Latour 2005a: 15).

In Making Things Public, Latour therefore understood politics, in part, as a process in which objects can become the locus of public disagreement. In this view, objects should not be thought of as incidental to politics, but as integral to the disagreements and disputes that lie at the heart of political life. Here, I take Latour’s account to be an expansion of the central claim made by theorists of radical democracy that at the heart of democratic ­politic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• RGS-IBG Book Series
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Chapter One: Introduction
• Chapter Two: The Georgian Route: Between Political and Physical Geography
• Chapter Three: Transparency’s Witness
• Chapter Four: Ethical Performances
• Chapter Five: The Affected Public
• Chapter Six: Visible Impacts
• Chapter Seven: Material Politics
• Chapter Eight: Economy and the Archive
• Chapter Nine: Conclusions
• Notes
• References
• Index