The title of Adam Simpson's Energy, governance and security in Thailand and Myanmar (Burma) might lead readers to think the book will focus mostly on macro-level institutions, discourses, and structures. The individual chapter headings, however, then seem to strike a stark contrast, as they include topics such as ‘Activist environmental governance’, ‘Local activism’, and ‘Transnational campaigns’. Yet this apparent discordance between statecraft and contentious political action dissolves when Simpson elaborates his objective: as most scholarly treatments of both ecological issues and the movements working with or against them ‘still focus particularly on the affluent states of the North’ (p. 6), Simpson proposes to instead ‘link environmental activism to critical approaches to environmental security’ (p. 8) by focusing on politics in the global South. Simpson argues that such movements, which in his research ‘encompassed both formal and informal activism and included protests on Thailand's beaches, research in Myanmar's jungles and court cases brought by NGOs in the US and France’, should be seen as ‘constitut[ing] “activist environmental governance”’ (p. 185). In other words, the central claim of this book is that the cumulative effect of these activist movements adds up to nothing less than a new way of regulating ecological (and hence social) dynamics.
To substantiate this claim, the book describes and analyses the political effects of environmental activist mobilisations around four transnational energy projects located in Myanmar and Thailand: the Yadana pipeline, which sends gas from Myanmar to Thailand; the Thai–Malaysia pipeline, which sends gas from southern Thailand to Malaysia; the Salween dams project, which proposed a series of hydroelectric dams in ethnic-minority majority states in Myanmar; and the Shwe Gas pipeline, which sends gas from western Myanmar to southern China.
But before exploring these cases, Simpson destabilises the dominant understanding of ‘environmental activist’ movements in general, writing that, ‘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’ (p. 5). This broadening of the definition informs Simpson's analysis of the activist organisations. First, he identifies ‘four pillars of green governance’ — ‘participatory democracy, ecological sustainability, social justice and nonviolence’ (p. 21) — and insists that these pillars must apply to both an organisation's internal operations and to its activities (ibid.). Then, extending the scholarship of Brian Doherty and Tim Doyle (‘Green public spheres and the green governance state: The politics of emancipation and ecological conditionality’, in Environmental Politics 15, 5 [2006]: 881–92), Simpson delineates activist groups into three categories: Emancipatory Governance Groups (EGGs) who adhere to the four pillars of green governance; Compromise Governance Groups (CGGs) whose internally-hierarchical structures undermine their good-faith pursuit of justice; and the ‘organizations of the environmental governance state (EGS), predominantly Northern conservation groups that have both conservative aims and structures resulting in conservative rather than emancipatory outcomes’ (p. 21).
The book continues by elaborating the four case studies. Rather than dividing the chapters case-by-case, though, Simpson uses a ‘multi-scalar’ analytic that divides the cases into local, intermediate, and transnational levels of advocacy, showing how these domains work together in the pursuit of governance objectives. Simpson here stresses that the respective political systems in Thailand and Myanmar compelled different combinations of transnational and local strategies: Thailand's hybrid liberal–authoritarian system made local responses both necessary and possible; Myanmar's fully authoritarian system, on the other hand, made local responses necessary but impossible — and hence made the ‘activist diaspora’ that developed particularly powerful. Hence local Thai activists opposing the Yadana pipeline could recruit Buddhist monks to ‘ordain’ trees or demand that the government conduct Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs), while across the border ethnic communities were terrorised by the Myanmar military, and hence activists (based in Thailand) directed campaigns at transnational corporations (successfully litigating Unocal). In Thailand, by contrast, transnational activists were not as interested or could not find the same leverage points.
A deeper finding Simpson draws in his discussion of these campaigns is that organisations that internalise the green pillars into their organisational structures experience benefits that more hierarchical organisations do not. For example, in the chapter devoted to Earthrights International (ERI), an organisation presented as bridging the local and the transnational domains, Simpson argues that ERI's field research — which generated the evidence used in the successful litigation against Unocal — ‘may not have been possible had exiled activists and their project teams not been given the empowerment and operational autonomy they were afforded in ERI’ (pp. 140–41). Simpson uses this evidence to generalise about all governance work: ‘As a result of their conservative structures CGGs were less effective in achieving emancipatory outcomes than EGGs’ (p. 190). Moreover, even when direct outcomes are not forthcoming, Simpson identifies residual benefits: ‘Despite often being unable to halt the projects, EGGs in these campaigns succeeded in other important respects by promoting a generation of socially and environmental [sic] aware community activists and leaders’ (p. 198). Taken together, it seems that emancipatory organisations generate a field of regulatory force that shames corporations, restrain states, and even builds a collective consciousness. This is governance from below.
There are a number of potential problems, however, with such conclusions. The first is one of selection bias, in which we must ask if it is reasonable to take four exemplary campaigns as a synecdoche of the entire field. As Simpson acknowledges, ‘Due to the emancipatory nature of the campaigns discussed in this book most of the participating organisations qualified as EGGs’ (p. 190). This is especially relevant when we consider that tools used by campaigners — such as the tort statute that allowed villagers to sue Unocal in US courts — have been curtailed since the litigation (perhaps in response to such litigation) and are hence no longer available. In other words, the force of activist governance that Simpson adduces may not be as powerful as he claims, as his findings reflect a privileged set of groups at privileged moments.
Relatedly, in Simpson's account there are simply no trade-offs — in either efficiency or efficacy — involved in taking the more ‘emancipatory’ path: CGGs never benefited from lean, well-organised, outcome-driven hierarchies; conversely, EGGs never suffered from mildly anarchic, cellular organisational forms that stressed improvisation and deviation. A fuller consideration of cases and evidence might have produced more nuanced findings.
This points to a third issue: the creation of, and then reliance on, clean divisions between categories (i.e., those between EGS, CGG, and EGG). In the messy world of Thai and Burmese activist politics, outside of ERI perhaps, it seems difficult to identify any group as fully emancipatory — at least by the standards advanced here. For instance, can the Rakhine Shwe Gas pipeline activists really be described as ‘emancipatory’ when they callously exclude the hyper-marginalised Rohingya minority? Indeed, the Rohingya issue is mostly elided in Simpson's account. Moreover, in many cases, among activist groups inside Myanmar, the very idea that internal structures should be ‘democratic’ (in the ways defined in the Doyle/Doherty model) might not have purchase. To wit, ‘democratic structures’ seems a high, or rather a culturally specific, bar for what constitutes an emancipatory organisation; a leader instituting horizontal internal governance structures might be seen as abdicating responsibility by foisting undue burdens upon his or her less experienced comrades. This suggests that the ‘emancipatory’ label may warrant deconstruction.
Acknowledging such caveats, however, does not undermine Simpson's important project, but rather only deepens his focus on considering ‘environmental security’ projects from the perspective of those whose environments and lives are often made more insecure as a result of such projects. Simpson's call to rethink energy by focusing on the experiences of those who often bear the greatest costs, and benefit least, from energy extraction should stimulate further research by students of both environmental and Thai/Burmese politics.
