Chapter 4: Transformative Power of Wind Energy
5. Conclusion
This thesis has shed light on the transformative power of wind energy in the social and economic use and its broader implications to the socioeconomic constitution of a rural and indigenous population. The Southern Isthmus of Tehuantepec has shown to be an excellent example to illustrate the contradictions and conflicts occurring when a fast growing industry meets the preoccupations of indigenous people for their land. Although the development of wind energy in Mexico has slowed down a bit in the last years (Figure 9) due to scepticism among the investors and regulatory inconsistencies, the development of many more wind parks will be inevitable to reach the ambitious climate change goals, Mexico set itself.
Transition towards renewable energy is on its way. Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer highlight in their work that the question should not be whether we implement wind energy but rather how this transition process should take place. We discussed that various aspects should be considered in the assessment of not only the environmental but also the socioeconomic impact of wind energy. The most salient aspect discussed here is the use and ownership of land. Seeing wind energy as a space consuming form of renewable energy generation makes it possible to formulate a counterpoint to the industry’s and government’s definition of wind energy as a technical solution to environmental issues. In this thesis I identified the main conflict in the contestation of territory.
Therefore, I asked how the implementation of wind energy impacted the socioeconomic use of land in the Southern Isthmus of Tehuantepec?
As we have seen especially in chapter 4, the implementation of wind energy impacted economic and social structures to different extents. While some communities benefitted from the money they got for their territory, others saw themselves either disadvantaged or dispossessed. The consequences were social conflicts within and among the communities and new social classes like the “hamaqueros” (Ramirez 2021) who stand for a disruption in the local economy. People who do not want or cannot work anymore furthermore are lured by a Western lifestyle that occurred like a by-product of the settling engineers and construction workers from the companies (Dunlap 2018c). The focus on land possession in the re-organization of social structures also unravelled institutional problems that occurred after the Agrarian Reform of 1992 but already existed with a systematic caciquism where local authorities de facto had power over communal owned land.
We also discussed how local authorities helped with the land grabs, which in the case of wind energy can be framed as green grabs (Dunlap & Fairhead 2014; Fairhead et al. 2012).
Framing the acquisition of communal owned land through the wind energy companies as land grabs is argued with the lack of free, prior, and informed consultations. In chapter three we also saw that the methods used by the companies and the government to implement wind energy against the will of the opposition aim to intimidate and, in some cases, to use violence against the protesters. Apart from these external influences, some sources tend to describe the social and economic structures of, for instance, ejido communities as weak and the profitability of agriculture as low. In any case the different aspects always indicated a lack of governmental regulation or involvement. The 2014 Energy Reform did too little to implement
39 prior, free, and informed consultations and at the same time promoted a fast, unhindered outspread of private developer in the region. From an institutional and legislative point, the reforms to the electricity sector and the Agrarian reform in the early 1990s stand out.
Especially the Agrarian reform, the change to article 27 of the Mexican constitution opened the way to extractive activities, not only in the generation of wind energy.
The different fields of contestation and the active resistance from the indigenous communities teach important lessons on the social side of renewable energy implementation. In the future the grievances and proposals of indigenous people and peasants should been taken a lot more into account when the Mexican government is interested in taking use of the enormous potential of wind energy extraction in the Isthmus. The analysis has affirmed that the opposition to wind energy is not just explicable with a NIMBY narrative but that the violation of participatory rights and the lacking consideration of socioeconomic impacts are grave vacancies. The study of the defence of territory from the Isthmus people could be summarized to three lessons.
First, the fixation of free, prior, and informed consultations in the Mexican legal framework needs to be reaffirmed and strengthened, since neither the original ILO Consent 169, nor the adjustments in the 2014 Energy Reform could achieve this. The need to be heard and to voice out preoccupations about the impact wind energy has on the local environment is conspicuous. The consultations need to accomplish with the claim for more participation. A consultation where the members of the affected communities are just asked for their approval like it was the case with Eólicas del Sur (Howe 2019) cannot be called participative and hence free. Including the community in strategic processes also implicates the prior character to the consultation.
Second, information that comes also as a factor alongside the consultations is the basis to mutual understanding between companies and local communities. I cautiously treated the topic of environmental and health impacts. On the one side, because I did not find the data in a scientifical proven frame and on the other side, I am neither an expert on the subject of how for instance the noise from the generators interferes with milk production nor do I consider these details important to my research topic. Clear is, that members of the communities are worried about the effects wind energy has on their health, the health of their cattle and the constitution of soil and land. From most of the cases it stands out that the private companies complained about “false information” in circulation (Brodziak 2014) but did little to prevent such a case, for instance with consultations or thorough environmental impact assessments.
Ultimately, the case of the planned community owned wind park in Ixtepec (see chapter three) demonstrates that wind energy is possible in conjunction and cooperation with the local communities. The NGO Yansa moreover set an example of how community involvement from scratch could look like. They also fought with misconceptions of the negative impact of wind energy and needed to convince the community first, in consultations and with impact assessments. The approval of the community also demonstrates that the main concerns of the community concern their sense of fairness and participation. In comparison to what we discussed in chapter four on the benefits for the communities with low remunerations and increasing costs of living, the Yansa Ixtepec project would have set a benchmark for private
40 companies. It would have been hard to compete with the considerably higher remunerations and participatory rights foreseen by the Yansa Group.
The community project in Ixtepec but also the protests against Mareña Renovables uncovered the nature of wind energy development in Mexico. The rejection of the Yansa Ixtepec project confirms what we discussed in chapter three. The Mexican energy sector is in its essence designed for fossil fuels. Institutions like the state-owned electric utility CFE are not meant to promote the transition towards renewable energy. Instead, the Mexican state drives a laissez-faire politic with the companies.
Finally, coming back to my question I conclude that wind energy itself did not and will not end with the communal own land in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. The statistics show that ejidos and communal land tenure still is predominant in Oaxaca and that wind energy, though demanding a lot of space (Avila Calero 2018), has not the territorial impact to replace completely traditional local systems of land tenure. However, the economic force of wind energy has altered the way people think about territory. And not only the way they think about it but the way they use their land and how they interact with each other.
The present and the future: Losing confidence and a disinterested president
As the reader of this thesis might have noticed, the name of the current Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) is not the most prominent in the literature on wind energy in Mexico. His role in the development of renewable energy is still unclear. AMLO is definitely not a friend of renewable energy, but his rejection is rather because of his plan to reanimate Pemex and manifest the position of Mexico as a petrostate. In order to protect Pemex and the weakening CFE, AMLO wants a counter-reform to the 2014 Energy Reform.
This planned counter-reform would significantly weaken the role of private developers but has also received a juridical setback since the Supreme Court detects the potential of a monopoly for Pemex (Mosso 2021). Attempts to nationalize renewable energy with a stronger state-owned utility, the CFE, raise questions about the ambitions of the Mexican government to promote the development and reach its climate goals4.
The industry, though, has taken note of the energy politics under the AMLO administration and utter serious preoccupations regarding their investments in renewable energies but also the security of future investments. Mexico even dropped 43 positions in the 2020 BloombergNEF ranking of the most attractive nations for energy transition5. As figure 9 shows, a slower development for wind energy is predicable for the next years. Nonetheless, all these developments are still too unclear and open ended that I decided to let out the antithesis that this would have brought to my argumentation. Spoken in the words of wind, we still do not know if AMLO’s energy policy is a storm or just a tender blast for the strongly rooted private development of wind energy in Mexico.
4 In the industry the CFE has a bad standing as an aged and badly managed institution: https://global-climatescope.org/results/MX
5 https://www.sinembargo.mx/10-12-2020/3907753
41
Figure 9 Slower development in the next years? (IEA 2021)
Outlook for future research
The desk research I did on the wind development in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec has introduced me to great work of a many Anthropologists and Political Ecologists but interestingly the body of literature coming from Economics is quite small. With a long-term collection of accurate data to land use and economic activities of the Istmeños, findings from the field of contract theory could enrich the Academic debate. With my personal theoretical focus on socio-metabolic processes according to the definition of Toledo, an on-field research certainly would enhance the quality of insights and analysis. Cymene Howe (2019) made an important contribution by bringing the tangible elements of wind energy to the debate (infrastructure, aesthetics, and traffic for instance). This can bring us closer to define wind energy within a socio-metabolic system.
42
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