Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Reassembling Caribbean Energy? Petrocaribe, (Post-)Plantation Sovereignty, and Caribbean Energy Futures

2018; University of Texas Press; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/lag.0.0086

1548-5811

Conor Harrison, Jeff Popke,

Caribbean history, culture, and politics

In this paper, we probe the possibilities and limits of Petrocaribe, a Venezuelan-led oil alliance that has shaped energy and development initiatives in the Caribbean basin since the mid 2000s, as well as U.S. responses to the program. Drawing from a range of sources, including interviews with regional actors and leaked diplomatic cables from Wikileaks, we describe some of the contours of these competing regional energy assemblages, and analyze how they intersect with both the legacies of colonial dependency and more recent neoliberal models for development within the Caribbean region. We contextualize and frame these initiatives by drawing from Caribbean scholarship on regional history and contemporary change and focus in particular on the continuing role of the plantation model in shaping regional affairs. We place this Caribbean scholarship in conversation with recent work in the social sciences utilizing the concept of assemblage that, we suggest, can be usefully adopted to trace how Caribbean energy networks and relations are structured and change over time. We argue that while Petrocaribe successfully provided opportunities for new forms of Caribbean development, the program had to be layered onto an already-existing oil assemblage comprised of durable infrastructures, private sector actors, and geopolitical interests, thus responding to conditions that limit the available options for truly transforming energy relations within the region. While such conditions opened up a space for a viable U.S. response to Petrocaribe, we argue that U.S. government initiatives in the region have consistently embraced a private sector approach that reproduces existing dependencies rather than enhancing the region’s energy sovereignty.