What next for supply-side policy in the south: emerging lessons from Ecuador’s Yasuní initiative

Abstract

In the light (or in the darkness) of the current climate and energy crises, a future in which the extraction of carbon-based fuels is phased down sounds less utopian, though still an upward struggle in an international context shaped by mainstream technoeconomic narratives. Concepts like "unburnable carbon," or the idea that fossil fuel reserves would need to remain under the ground in order to comply with the Paris Agreement, become prominent, and research on supply-side climate policy aimed at limiting further expansion of fossil fuel extraction gains momentum. Yet, there has been scarce attention so far to the role of supply-side approaches in building an equitable and just energy transition. With a view to filling this gap, in this contribution I build on the insights of Ecuador, a quintessential example of a natural resource-dependent country in the Global South and revisit the widely discussed Yasuní initiative, a pioneering international cooperation scheme to leave oil reserves in the ground, which is again topical due to the referendum of 2023. On the one hand, I argue that the energy transition underway imposes additional challenges when thinking about decarbonizing the energy sector and the national economy in a country, which traditionally followed a natural resource-driven development path. On the other hand, I discuss the social and political arrangements that surround the results of the referendum on stopping oil extraction in the Yasuní national park in the Ecuadorian Amazon region. With the insights of Ecuador, I finally intend to shed light on social, political, and international conditions needed for innovative supply-side projects to succeed in natural resource-rich countries in the Global South.