Energy, Governance and Security in Thailand and Myanmar (Burma)

A Critical Approach to Environmental Politics in the South

Adam Simpson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317143581
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Environment & Energy Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Across the world states are seeking out new and secure supplies of energy but this search is manifesting itself most visibly in Asia where rapid industrialisation in states such as China and India is fomenting a frantic scramble for energy resources. Due to entrenched societal inequities and widespread authoritarian governance, however, the pursuit of national energy security through transnational energy projects has resulted in devastating impacts on the human and environmental security of local populations. These effects are particularly evident in both Thailand and Myanmar (Burma), which, located at the crossroads of Asia, are increasingly engaged in the cross-border energy trade. Based on extensive fieldwork and theoretical analysis this ground-breaking book proposes a new critical approach to energy and environmental security and explores the important role that both local and transnational environmental movements are playing, in the absence of effective and democratic governments, in providing 'activist environmental governance' for energy projects throughout the region. By comparing the nature of this activism under two very different political regimes it delivers crucial theoretical insights with both academic and policy implications for the sustainable and equitable development of the South's natural resources.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Introduction

Access to cheap and plentiful energy is the foundation of modern economies and the search for energy security is one of the key dynamics that is re-shaping global politics, governance and security in the twenty-first century. With the energy needs of Asia rapidly increasing centrally placed Thailand and Myanmar (Burma) are taking on greater significance in the emerging energy supply and demand chains that criss-cross the region. Contracts for hydropower dams, gas pipelines and other large energy projects have been signed at a furious rate in Beijing, Delhi, Bangkok and Naypyidaw, the new Myanmar capital.

While helping alleviate energy security concerns in relatively affluent states the growing global reliance on energy sources from energy-rich states in the less affluent South has also resulted in detrimental effects on the environmental security of marginalised communities across the South. Effective environmental governance of energy projects, particularly those that cross national borders, is therefore necessary to ensure that the pursuit of energy security does not exacerbate local injustices or fuel localised environmental insecurity. Globally, an increasing understanding of environmental concerns has led to improved environmental governance at many levels but often the most important issues remain the least well governed; energy – and the impacts of its production, trade and consumption – provides a key example. The centrality of energy security to modern states and economies ensures that it is often a key focus of foreign policy activities but there have been limited attempts to construct an effective global energy governance system and those that do exist have often bypassed the United Nations, the central global governance institution (Florini and Sovacool 2011; Karlsson-Vinkhuyzen 2010; Lesage, Van de Graaf and Westphal 2010). In the absence of a coherent global system, formal governance is largely undertaken in an ad-hoc manner at regional or national levels. Although this arrangement is far more subject to the vagaries of national political regimes it can also allow for less powerful non-state actors to influence local or regional outcomes.

The formal governance of transnational energy projects is usually undertaken by an array of administering bodies attached to the governments of the states involved in the projects. Environmental activists can play an important informal role in communicating community concerns to these bodies, as well as to transnational corporations (TNCs) and their governments, but the extent of their influence depends on the nature of the political regimes under which they operate. This activism is most efficacious under democratic systems where domestic popular opinion is regularly tested in free and fair elections, although it can also sway more authoritarian regimes (Mertha 2009: 1002–6). Despite regular opposition by powerful business and political interests, this activism, particularly in its emancipatory form, is a potentially significant tool in contributing to the environmental governance of transnational energy projects.

The history of the two core states in this book, Thailand and Myanmar, contrasts the opportunities and openings available for engaging in this activism, which can be defined as ‘activist environmental governance’, under two very different political regimes. Despite the democratic limitations in Thailand’s political landscape, including a recent intervention by the military, in general there have been significant opportunities for political dissent and debate. As a result Thailand developed a dynamic, if fragmentary, domestic environment movement that played a key role in the environmental governance of its transnational energy projects. In contrast, enduring military rule in neighbouring Myanmar provided few opportunities for domestic activism. Until the new quasi-civilian government was formed under President Thein Sein in 2011 activists held no hope of directly influencing their own government. As a result they focused almost entirely on transnational modes of environmental governance, particularly those exiled activists who removed themselves from the military’s sphere of influence to the contested border regions.

This activist environmental governance is particularly important in the South, where environmental security is most precarious and energy-rich states are often ruled by authoritarian or illiberal regimes. Due to either limited will or governance capabilities, or both, the effectiveness of formal environmental governance institutions and regimes in these regions is particularly lacking. For states in the South with plentiful energy resources the export of energy via transnational energy projects takes on a high priority, either as a source of government revenue for development or a stream of rent that facilitates corruption. Under military rule in Myanmar – a state with few established democratic institutions – five decades of authoritarianism and relative international isolation ensured that rent seeking was the norm, leaving much of the country in poverty. In Thailand, characterised by a more dynamic economy and civil society, corruption and rent seeking still influenced decision making, although the benefits of development were more widely distributed.

As the analysis in this book suggests, the pervasiveness of environmental insecurity within a country often mirrors the degree of authoritarianism that characterises its domestic political regime. In situations where states are either unable or unwilling to provide environmental security for their citizens, environmental activists often provide the most effective environmental governance of cross-border energy projects. The conditions that face environmental activists in the South are, however, fraught with risks and hazards that are entirely foreign to most activists in the North and which provide significant impediments to engaging in activism. In Thailand activists faced harassment, and occasionally assassination, by developers and the state but in Myanmar civil conflict between the Myanmar military and ethnic minorities, widespread poverty and, until recently, a repressive authoritarian state, combined to stifle domestic dissent and significantly magnify the hurdles to undertaking activism.

These circumstances can be illustrated by the situation on a remote conflict- ridden stretch of the Salween River where it forms the border between Thailand and Myanmar.¹ The Ei Tu Hta camp for ethnic Kayin (Karen) internally displaced peoples (IDPs) was established in 2006 on the river between the proposed Dar Gwin and Wei Gyi Dam sites in Karen National Union (KNU)-controlled Myanmar. In 2009 Hsiplopo, the camp leader, was unable to visit his family. Although they only lived three hours walk away, the camps of the Tatmadaw, the Myanmar military with which the KNU was engaged in the world’s longest- running civil war, lay in between.²

Boxed in against the western shore of the Salween River, the camp was also built on the steep hillsides of a valley, denuding the limited forest cover to provide accommodation in the narrow area available. Due to poor soils and limited space the residents were unable to grow their own rice, relying instead on regular donations from the UN and other non-governmental organisations (NGOs) shipped upriver by longtail boat.³ This type of insecurity coloured the daily existence of both the Kayin people in this camp and many other ethnic minorities in Myanmar. Nevertheless, despite these conditions, Hsiplopo’s commitment to the campaign against the nearby dams was resolute: ‘we don’t want dams … the military cannot build the dams because the KNU will not let them while the people do not want them’.⁴

Hsiplopo’s stance reflected that of many environmental activists and groups who inhabited the nebulous and dangerous borderlands of eastern Myanmar. The dams were opposed for many reasons: they were likely to require forced labour from local ethnic minority communities; they would submerge villages and large areas of pristine forest and arable land; they would adversely impact food security and fisheries; they would cut off a major route for refugees fleeing repression into Thailand; and they were unlikely to alleviate energy insecurity for the local ethnic communities. While the campaign against the dams emphasised the universal human rights of the affected ethnic minority communities in Myanmar, it also promoted their culturally specific identities and was emancipatory in its outlook. This cultural particularism extended into the ecological realm where the activists highlighted the importance of indigenous knowledge of biodiversity, making a direct connection between environmental and political concerns (KESAN 2008: 5). Despite the civil conflict, exiled Myanmar environmental groups undertook perilous work with the KNU in this region to promote human and environmental security for the Kayin people. As an exiled activist from the Karen Environmental and Social Action Network (KESAN) explained: ‘KESAN’s programs are in the KNU area [in Myanmar] so we have a close relationship with the KNU leaders’.⁵

It can be difficult for environmental activists from the affluent North, unfamiliar with this precarious existence, to fully comprehend the existential struggle that dictates much environmental activism in the South. As a result, many Northern environment movements, and the American environment movement in particular, have been largely apolitical, with the issues of ‘human health, shelter, and food security’ traditionally absent from their agendas (Doyle 2005: 26). Despite increased attention from the North much more research is required to provide a more robust and nuanced picture of environmental activism in the South.

Rationale for this Book

This book developed during a decade and a half of research on environmental activism in Thailand and Myanmar.⁶ Its origin can be linked to a residential course I was attending on Buddhist economics in 1998 at Schumacher College in the UK where one of the course teachers, Sulak Sivaraksa, a renowned Thai social activist and advocate of Engaged Buddhism, told me about forest protests that he was participating in over the Yadana Gas Pipeline Project that was to carry natural gas from Myanmar to Thailand.⁷ Later that year I travelled to Thailand to make contact with the major environmental actors involved with the protests including the transnational NGO EarthRights International (ERI) and the local Kanchanaburi Conservation Group (KCG). Many of the issues that activists were addressing in this campaign were quite different from the ones often examined by scholars from the North, including my own previous research (Simpson 1998). The Yadana Pipeline was to transport gas through the Thai-Myanmar borderlands populated by the ethnic Kayin people. Decha Tangseefa described the experience of the people living in this region, many of whom, such as the IDPs at Ei Tu Hta camp, had been displaced from their homes in attacks by the Tatmadaw:

Although these people are living in danger zones, the territorial sovereignty of the despotic state renders them imperceptible to the ‘outside’ world. Their sufferings have rarely been accounted for by the international community. Most of their stories have never been disclosed, and even when they have, they have often been ignored. No matter how loud they have screamed, a large number of forcibly displaced peoples ‘inside’ the Burmese nation-state have been tortured and killed without being heard as they dissolve back to the soil they hoped would be their homelands. (Tangseefa 2006: 405)

As my research project developed it became apparent that insecurity in these communities was exacerbated by the civil conflict and environmental degradation that accompanied large-scale energy projects. The research for this book therefore coalesced around the attempts by environmentalists to improve human and environmental security for local communities by contributing to the environmental governance of four transnational energy projects based in Thailand and Myanmar. It became clear that the extent and nature of the environmental campaigns against these projects was highly dependent on the level of authoritarianism of the political regimes under which the activists operated, and that this affected local and transnational activism differently. Local and transnational business interests that supported the energy projects also collaborated with illiberal political regimes in the pursuit of profits and rents. It became apparent that, while the proponents often cited improved energy security as a rationale for pursuing the projects, the actual impacts on the environmental security of local communities were often detrimental. This paradox drove the research project from its inception.

By examining the campaigns against these energy projects in Thailand and Myanmar I focus on how environmental politics is played out in both the states and transnational spaces of the less affluent South. Throughout the book I use the terms ‘North’ and ‘South’ as useful shorthand to distinguish between states, regions or communities that differ markedly in affluence. Interests in particular countries are far from homogenous, however, and throughout the countries of the South ‘one can find dominant “local” elites supporting and sustaining global capitalism’ (Chaturvedi 1998: 704), while it is also challenged by counter-hegemonic forces allied to the marginalised and exploited (Gramsci 1971; Harvey 2005). As a result there is a North (affluent class) in what is generally termed the South (poor states) and vice versa. While using these dualisms indiscriminately can be problematic (Eckl and Weber 2007), they can be usefully employed if their shortcomings are acknowledged and understood.

The North and South differ not only in levels of affluence but also, as a result, in the issues on which their environment movements tend to focus. Southern movements are often more concerned about immediate existential ‘environmental security’ priorities, such as access to food and water, while Northern movements are often motivated by post-materialist or longer term issues such as wildlife conservation and climate change. These differences can also be discerned between countries within the South that exhibit relative disparities in wealth (Doyle and Simpson 2006). Although some environmental movements in the North have shifted their focus over the last two decades to include social justice issues, differences in foci between activists based in the South and those in the North remain. These differences are also reflected in academia, which is dominated by scholars in the North.

Despite an increased focus on environmental issues over the last two decades, most book-length approaches to environmental politics still examine predominantly ecological issues or regulatory regimes and focus particularly on the affluent states of the North (Howes 2005; Kutting 2000; Paehlke and Torgerson 2005). Although there has been increased attention on environmental movements in recent years, much of the material still focuses primarily on movements within the North (Bomberg and Schlosberg 2008; Carter 2007; Connelly et al. 2012; Doherty 2002; Doyle 2000; Dryzek et al. 2003; Gottlieb 2005; Hutton and Connors 1999; Paterson 2000; Rootes 2007; Sandler and Pezzullo 2007; Shabecoff 1993; Wapner 2010). Large business interests play a significant role in pursuing inappropriate development in the South, yet studies that examine the role of business in environmental politics also tend to focus on the business interests of the North (Blair and Hitchcock 2000; Doyle and McEachern 2008). There has been some analysis of environment movements in the South (Doherty 2006; Doherty and Doyle 2006; Doyle 2005; Duffy 2006; Dwivedi 1997; 2001), and various studies of transnational activism more generally (Atkinson and Scurrah 2009; Bandy and Smith 2005; Cohen and Rai 2000; della Porta et al. 2006; Edwards and Gaventa 2001; Eschle and Maiguashca 2005; Keck and Sikkink 1998; Khagram, Riker and Sikkink 2002; Reitan 2007; Routledge, Nativel and Cumbers 2006; Rupert 2000; Tarrow 2005), but few comparative studies examining how authoritarian regimes in the South impact on environmental activism or policy (Doyle and Simpson 2006; Fredriksson and Wollscheid 2007). There are numerous studies that examine civil society under authoritarianism more broadly but these tend to focus on more traditional and formalised civil society organisations (Jamal 2007; Liverani 2008; Sater 2007). Some studies have demonstrated the importance of domestic environmental movements in undermining authoritarian regimes, particularly in the former communist countries in the Soviet bloc (Galbreath 2010; Kerényi and Szabó 2006: 805), but the role of exiled environmental movements in particular remains understudied.

It is also rare to see book-length analyses of environment movements or campaigns using a multilevel (Dwivedi 2001) or multiscalar (Kaiser and Nikiforova 2006) approach. Most studies of activism tend to focus on the local (Ford 2013; Rootes 2008), or the transnational level (Reitan 2007), although a recent edited collection takes an innovative look at local activism in the South against transnational environmental injustices (Carmin and Agyeman 2011). None, however, undertake comparative analyses of activism within the same campaigns at both local and transnational scales. An edited collection by Piper and Uhlin (2004) considers transnational activism in Asia, with each case study providing some linkages to national activism in a different country, but, as with other edited books, it is a disparate collection of case studies by a variety of authors rather than an integrated book-length analysis.

A book by Forsyth and Walker (2008) provides useful analysis that complements the research I undertake here. It examines the construction of environmental knowledge in northern Thailand, a cultural and geographical territory that overlaps with the case material of this book, and is focused on the environmental narratives deployed by various actors to underpin their arguments over contested land use. It provides a juxtaposition of the mythical social construction of different upland ethnic groups as either ‘forest guardians’ or ‘forest destroyers’ and provides compelling arguments regarding the implications for conservation or development policies but, as with many other environmental works, it avoids mention of energy issues, focusing instead on forests, water and agriculture, and is a single country study.

In this book I contribute towards filling these gaps in the literature by adopting a comparative approach in the analysis of the strategies, tactics and organisation of local and transnational environment movements under two illiberal, yet distinct, political regimes in the South to develop a model of ‘activist environmental governance’. I undertake a multilevel, multiscalar analysis that examines both the various levels of environment movements – individuals, groups, NGOs, coalitions and networks – and also the various scales at which activism is undertaken, particularly the local and transnational dimensions.

In addition to the focus on governance these environmental campaigns provide an opportunity for the theoretical development of critical approaches to energy and environmental security. The concept of energy security has an uneasy place within the environmental politics literature. While it is driving the tra...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• List of Acronyms
• Notes on Language and Terminology
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Chapter 2 Activist Environmental Governance
• Chapter 3 Environmental Politics in Thailand and Myanmar
• Chapter 4 Local Activism
• Chapter 5 Bridging North and South: EarthRights International
• Chapter 6 Transnational Campaigns
• Chapter 7 Environmental Politics in the South
• Affiliation of Interviewees
• References
• Index