Spaces of Indigeneity within the
West Siberian Oil Industry:
The Case of Salym Petroleum Development
MSc dissertation in Nature, Society and Environmental Policy
Kärg Kama, candidate number 51562
University of Oxford
Centre for the Environment
September 2007
CONTENTS
ABSTRACT.......................................................................................................2
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .......................................................................................3
ACRONYMS......................................................................................................4
1. INTRODUCTION ..........................................................................................5
1.1 Oil Industry Relations with Local Communities ...........................................5
1.2 Space of Indigeneity ...............................................................................7
2. RESEARCH METHODS ..................................................................................9
2.1 Research Aims .......................................................................................9
2.2 Case Study Approach............................................................................ 12
2.3 Field Work ........................................................................................... 13
3. SETTING THE SCENE ................................................................................. 16
3.1 West Siberian Oil Industry..................................................................... 16
3.2 The Khanty of Salym ............................................................................ 16
3.3 Petroleum Development in the Salym Fields ............................................ 19
4. SALYM PETROLEUM DEVELOPMENT’S SOCIAL PERFORMANCE ......................... 23
4.1 Approach to Sustainable Development .................................................... 23
4.2 Instruments of Social Performance ......................................................... 25
4.3 Social Investments ............................................................................... 28
4.4 A Social Issue of Indigenous Peoples ...................................................... 33
5. SPACES OF INDIGENEITY WITHIN SALYM OIL INDUSTRY ............................... 36
5.1 Territories of Tribal Lands...................................................................... 36
5.2 Territories of an Oil Concession .............................................................. 39
5.3 Mobilization or Cooperation? .................................................................. 54
5.4 The ‘Rabbit Ears’ of Salym Petroleum Development .................................. 57
6. CONCLUSIONS.......................................................................................... 63
BIBLIOGRAPHY .............................................................................................. 66
1
ABSTRACT
In West Siberia, multinational oil corporations are about to introduce new policies into
the industry’s relations with local indigenous minorities. In studying the case of Salym
petroleum development, this dissertation examines the ways in which the interaction
between the local population, a foreign company and state authorities is mutually
governed and territorially constituted through an oil concession on the Khanty tribal
lands. Whereas Michael Watts argues that this interaction may produce a ‘space of
indigeneity’, the Salym project presents multiple indigenous spaces. Generated by
different forms of rule, conduct and imagining, these spaces can be abstracted as (a)
the dominant regime of Russia’s authorities in granting specific ethnic groups
indigenous rights and territories, (b) the actions of cooperation or mobilisation among
the indigenous population in response to oil development, and, (c) the company’s
attempts to manage its indigenous stakeholders and to employ native culture for
corporate marketing purposes.
2
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Visits to the Siberian oil-fields have rarely been made alone. I would like to thank Art
Leete, Kaur Mägi and Eva Toulouze from the University of Tartu for their advice and
support during my fieldwork preparations. I am grateful to my father Kaido Kama for
the inspiring stories of his West Siberian travels and for his guidance throughout my
studies. Special thanks to Emma Wilson, Florian Stammler and Laur Vallikivi from Scott
Polar Research Institute for their comments on the draft version of this work.
The people in Salym Petroleum Development were kindly willing to meet and
discuss my research interests, as well as enabled access to the oil company documents
and territories. The Estonian Kindred Peoples’ Programme helped to cover the
expenses of travelling to Siberia. The Forest Management Centre in Salym provided us
with free accommodation during our stay in the village and helped to solve the
complications with our immigration stamps. I am thankful for their time and efforts.
I would like to thank the indigenous people of Yugra – the Khanty in Salym village
for their hospitality and sympathy for my research, as well as Agrafena Pesikova and
Tatyana Gogoleva for their support in Surgut and Khanty-Mansiysk.
I am indebted to Jaanika Vider, an Oxford undergraduate student in Anthropology
and Archaeology. Her bilingual abilities, adventurous mind and minimal sleeping needs
made the most out of our travels in Russia. I hope the fieldwork was inspiring for her
future studies and, from here on, I will refer to both of us as researchers.
Finally, my greatest thanks go to my supervisor Andrew Barry for sparking my
interest in oil studies and for not losing faith in the success of my project throughout
the year in Oxford.
3
ACRONYMS
CSR = Corporate Social Responsibility
ESHIA = Environment, Social and Health Impact Assessment
KMAO = Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug – Yugra
HSE = Health, Safety and Environment
NDACIPN = Nefteyugansk District Administration’s Committee for the Issues of the
Peoples of the North
NGO = Non-Governmental Organisation
PSA = Production Sharing Agreement
SPD = Salym Petroleum Development N. V.
4
1. INTRODUCTION
1.1
Oil Industry Relations with Local Communities
Within the studies of nature and society relations, the interaction between the
extractive industries and local communities is of growing academic interest. New
theoretical and empirical understandings of resource governance gain importance in
the context of an emerging hydrocarbon scarcity, when the multinational corporations
searching for new oil and gas reserves move to the remotest areas of the globe.
Unfamiliar to the developers, these places are often the remaining homelands of the
world’s indigenous tribes. However, while the devastating impacts of oil and gas
exploitation on indigenous livelihoods are widely recognized, the ways in which the
interaction between the native communities and industries is mutually understood and
governed, have gained much less scholarly attention.
The changes in the global geopolitics of resource accessibility reshape the
relations between the hydrocarbon developers and the local societies. On the one
hand, the new entrants often challenge the existing industry-community relationship
by introducing global policies and practices. On the other hand, they still need to adjust
their operations to local circumstances, becoming dependent on their residential
communities. Therefore, in order to integrate their exploration and production activities
from these recently opened diverse environments into coherent global production
networks, the multinational oil corporations need to acquire, develop and mobilize
various types of knowledge on local affairs, including skills to cope with the placespecific socio-cultural issues (Bridge and Wood, 2005).
Increasingly, the impacts of the petroleum extraction on the natural environment
5
and local communities are becoming matters of public scrutiny and moral judgement.
This new era of ‘ethical capitalism’ has presented various practices and procedures,
through which the ethical or unethical conduct of the oil developers is publicly
demonstrated (Barry, 2004). On the side of the global oil industry, these techniques
are often framed with a claim of corporate social responsibility (CSR) towards its
stakeholders. The latter include the neighbourhoods of the oil development, such as
the impacted population and local authorities.
Some multinationals like Royal Dutch Shell and BP have integrated CSR into their
main business practices. These efforts were driven by intensified public criticism of
their operations, most notably in the Brent Spar event in 1995, when a Greenpeaceorganised media campaign raised widespread opposition to Shell’s plan to dispose of its
redundant oil buoy in the depths of the North Sea. In terms of impacts on indigenous
communities, Shell’s operations in Nigeria have been widely interrogated by
international organisations and academia.
Within the framework of CSR, the petroleum companies have now begun to
develop specific instruments to manage their community relations in order to secure
access to oil-reserves, to manage risks from local opposition and to make their ethical
conduct visible to the international public. An example of such instruments is the
system of social performance management. With this approach, the industry often
supports the communities not only by making charity donations but by meeting their
investment demands and actively participating in the local development. However,
even the most CSR-oriented companies like Shell have been continuously criticized
because their social investments are driven by corporate interests and fail to address
the long-term development needs of the locals (Frynas, 2005).
6
1.2
Space of Indigeneity
At the same time, as the global overview of case studies by Al Gedicks (2004)
demonstrates, the conflicts between extractive industries and indigenous communities
over the last decades have empowered native rights movements towards selfdetermination. The industry-community relations are therefore not necessarily
unidirectional, where the natives appear as mere victims of resource extraction and the
corporations attempt to legitimise their operations by making use of various CSR
instruments, but in fact much more complicated.
The studies of Michael Watts on Nigerian oil-producing communities indicate the
effects of petroleum development on ethnic mobilisation. Drawing on Foucauldian
theories of governmentality, Watts (2004a, 2004b, 2005) suggests that the community
movements, which have emerged in response to contemporary oil capitalism, have
created sorts of ‘governable spaces’1 in oil-dependent societies. He has abstracted
three such ‘spaces’ from the Nigerian affairs of community and petroleum industry
relations - ‘the space of chieftainship’, ‘the space of indigeneity’ and ‘the space of
nationalism’ – among which the second is of particular interest to this research.
For Watts, these governable spaces are produced and operated by the interaction
between community, state and oil company, “that is territorially constituted through oil
concessions” (2005: 199). Within this interaction, each governable space has
generated different “forms of rule, conduct and imagining” (2004a: 61; 2004b: 280;
2005: 205). According to his position, very little scholarly attention has so far been
paid to the presence and activities of the multinational oil companies in producing such
1
Watts has taken this term from N. Rose (1999).
7
‘spaces’ as they may challenge the existing community relations and thereby
encourage mobilisation within local societies (2004a: 53–54; 2005: 199).
A ‘space of indigeneity’ emerges within oil-producing societies when its ethnic
subjects begin to make claims in terms of indigenous identities, rights, and territories
in response to petroleum development. As Watts explains, particular minority groups
among larger communities are then constructed as indigenous people, attracting
support from international advocacy organisations and launching an ethnic
mobilization. Oil, with its characteristics of being both territorial and material,
constitutes the necessary ground upon which ethnic identities and rights are
constructed and indigenous claims are made. Indigenous space is therefore achieved
“through an imbrication of […] oil and ethnicity” (2004a: 72) because the very
existence and exploitation of petroleum reserves enables to generate and amplify
indigenous movements.
On the other hand, as Watts’ study on the Ogoni people’s mobilisation against
Shell exemplifies, this indigenous space may simultaneously be problematic,
contentious and unstable, because the involved ethnic subjects do not necessarily
share same imaginations, neither do they articulate consistent claims on their own
identity and rights. Additionally, the oil-grounded indigenous claims can also
exacerbate the historical conflicts between different ethnic groups within these
communities (2005: 209).
8
2. RESEARCH METHODS
2.1
Research Aims
This dissertation explores how the introduction of corporate social responsibility policies
into West Siberian oil industry may reshape the relations between the developers and
indigenous minorities. Namely, the post-Soviet North has recently become a popular
destination for the Western multinationals in their quest for new, easily accessible and
relatively risk-free oil reserves. At the same time, the international public is
increasingly concerned with the industry’s impacts on Northern indigenous livelihoods,
which tightens the scrutiny of the multinationals working in Siberia. For example,
Survival, a major indigenous rights organisation has published a web-portal in five
international languages to support the Khanty people in their confrontations with the
oil exploitation (Survival, 2007). As this portal is regularly updated and provides a
technological basis for presenting petitions, it may jeopardize the stability and
profitability of Siberian-based operations, if native protests are taken up and amplified
by the international activists. After a long break in their Russian-based oil
developments, the Western oil companies are once again expected to face the preSoviet dilemma whether they should “start buying [and drilling] cheaper Russian oil, or
[…] continue to stand back on both moral and business grounds?” (Yergin, 1993: 240).
One possible theoretical starting point to interrogate the ethicalities and impacts
of multinationals’ entrance on local indigenous politics would be to employ Watts’
theory on industry-community interactions and test its applicability in another oil
province. However, there are some crucial differences between the Nigerian
communities studied by Watts and West Siberia, which complicate this approach. Most
importantly, whilst Watts’ work can be largely divided into studies on ‘economies of
violence’ and ‘governable spaces’, in his understanding these topics are largely
9
entangled because his oil-grounded ‘spaces’ are “characterised by violence and
instability” (2004b: 278). Instead, this dissertation is concerned with the second notion
for the obvious reason that so far no large-scale violent conflicts have occurred in
response to the oil operations in the Russian North (but see Balzer, 1999: 152;
Golovnev and Osherenko, 1999: 106, 112).
Although being inspired by Watts’ work, this dissertation narrows down his
theoretical standpoint and focuses only on the notion of ‘space of indigeneity’ as
understood to be a ‘governable space’ emerging in multiethnic oil-producing
communities. In learning from the encounters between indigenous minorities, state
authorities and multinational oil corporations in yet another society, this work strives to
gain new understandings of the ways in which their relations can be mutually governed
and particular ‘spaces’ be produced. By doing so, it still develops from Watts’ central
claim that petroleum development can provide new opportunities for certain minority
groups to articulate their claims in terms of indigenous identities, rights and territories.
However, it focuses primarily on the questions of rights and territories, paying less
attention to the changing identities of Siberian indigenous peoples in post-Soviet
Russia (see Balzer, 1999; Anderson, 2000).
Thereby, this dissertation is concerned with the following theoretical questions:
°
Can claims in terms of indigenous rights and territories be based on the
characteristics of territoriality and materiality of oil?
°
In which ways can the interaction between indigenous communities, state
authorities and oil developers be mutually governed? How are these governance
actions territorialized through the licensed oil concessions?
°
What different forms of rule, conduct and imagining can be generated within
10
this interaction? What sorts of ‘spaces’ do they reveal?
°
Are the produced ‘governable spaces’ stable or contested? Does instability
necessarily generate indigenous mobilisation or even violence?
°
Does this interaction present a homogenous ‘space of indigeneity’ or can
different actors produce multiple indigenous spaces?
Given this theoretical ground, the dissertation aims to answer the following
empirical questions in the context of the West Siberian oil industry:
°
To what extent do the newly entered multinationals follow international industry
practice in managing their community relations? On the other hand, to what
extent do they employ Russian knowledge and practice?
°
How do the foreign companies address and manage the issues of local
indigenous minorities? Are these issues integrated into their policy instruments
of corporate social responsibility for local communities?
°
What claims have been articulated in response to the oil development on the
ancestral lands of local indigenous groups? Who has made these claims? How
do state authorities and petroleum industry address them?
°
How is the interaction between local the indigenous population, Western
companies and Russian authorities mutually governed and territorially
constituted through the licensed oil concessions located on tribal lands?
°
What sorts of ‘governable spaces’ have been produced in this interaction?
11
2.2
Case Study Approach
Having set these research questions, this dissertation focuses on a particular case of a
multinational’s entrance into the post-Soviet situation of indigenous politics and
resource governance in the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug, the oil province of the
Russian North.
There are currently only two multinational oil companies working in this region,
Shell and BP, both positioning themselves as outstanding examples of corporate
commitments to social responsibility. The decision was made in favour of Shell for
various reasons. Firstly, the development of Salym oil-fields in Nefteyugansk district is
a relatively new project, Shell’s only exploration and production site in West Siberia
and its second in Russia next to Sakhalin-2, as compared to BP’s involvement in
various projects with different histories. Secondly, Salym joint venture’s operations are
mostly defined by Shell thereby representing a case of a fully international oil project,
whereas BP cooperates with TNK and Rosneft, both experienced Russian oil companies.
Thirdly, Salym Petroleum Development (SPD) has been making strong public
statements of taking care of the natural environment and supporting local community
by meeting its investment needs. Fourthly, by the time of the fieldwork, Salym
community affairs had not yet attracted any attention of the international public, as
compared to the wide-spread public activism and growing body of academic analyses
addressing Shell’s community relations with regard to its Sakhhalin-2 project (e.g.
Wilson, 2000; Stammler and Wilson, 2006).
By combining geographical research questions with ethnography-inspired
methods, this research seeks to find a middle ground between the currently dominant
paradigm of macro-economical analyses on the geopolitics of Russian oil industry (e.g.
Bradshaw, 2006; Sagers, 2006), and the single anthropologists’ descriptions of the
12
devastating impacts of petroleum extraction on Khanty livelihoods (e.g. Wiget 1997;
Balzer 2005). It hopes to describe industry-indigenes interaction from a more localised
and balanced point of view, by coupling the analysis of corporate management tools
with interpretation of the natives’ understandings and representations of the oil
development. The focus on a single case of Salym oil development thereby responds to
Florian Stammler’s and Emma Wilson’s recent call for more “locally grounded
ethnographic research” on the engagement of Western multinationals in community
development in the Russian North (Stammler and Wilson, 2006: 31).
For some particular historical reasons, which will be discussed in sections 3.2, 3.3
and 5.3, the Salym petroleum development cannot be presented as the most typical
case characterising all potential future relationships between the global oil giants and
Siberian indigenous minorities. However, as it will be demonstrated, for the same
reasons Salym is the most remarkable case, which can be currently studied. The focus
on this specific project has the advantage to give further insights into the various ways
in which in which the indigenous affairs are governed and particular spaces are
produced in oil-dependent societies.
2.3
Field Work
In addition to work with available literature and web-sources, the research undertaken to
write this dissertation involved 17 days of fieldwork in the Russian Federation, from 9 to
25 July. The trip to Russia was accompanied by an Oxford undergraduate student in
Anthropology and Archaeology, who acted as an independent translator between Russian
and Estonian languages. The field-trip began and ended with meetings in SPD office in
Moscow. For ten days in between, the researchers lived in Salym village. The rest of the
fieldwork involved interviews in Nefteyugansk, Surgut and Khanty-Mansiysk cities.
13
During the fieldwork, the researchers familiarized themselves with the local
situation, collected additional literature in Russian and carried out a series of interviews
with various informants, including the representatives of Shell and SPD oil companies,
the indigenous peoples’ committee in Nefteyugansk District Administration, the native
residents of Salym village and high-level indigenous activists from regional cities.
Altogether, 12 semi-structured interviews were conducted, three of them in English
and the rest in Russian with partial translations to Estonian. Seven of those interviews
were recorded using a Sony minidisc player and five were documented by regular notetaking, according to the consent of the interviewees. In addition, the students spent
significant time accompanying and talking to both the SPD local staff and indigenous
villagers in Salym, when notes were also taken. Useful information was also gained
during a number of informal chats and observations.
In addition to the interviews, further insights into the interaction between oil
developers and the local indigenous population were gained during two visits to the
Salym oil-fields. The first visit was organised by SPD staff to their base camp and wellpad no. 23. Another was initiated by the researchers together with the native landusers to visit one of the tribal land allotments at the oil-fields. The impressions and
emotions gained by passing through the same entrance gate twice with different
companions and by observing the perceptions and representations of the same
geographical territory of the oil concession as presented by its competing user groups
provided an invaluable input to the research and will be discussed in chapter 5.
Based on the work with literature and the ethnography done at the field, the
dissertation at first situates the Salym project historically and geographically in the
West Siberian oil industry (chapter 3), and then proceeds to examine the relations
between the indigenous population and oil developers in their residential community
14
(chapters 4, 5). This interaction is discussed by analysing SPD managerial documents
and public statements, and by interpreting the impressions and representations
encountered during the fieldwork. In abstracting from the collected data, the research
materials are also produced with the help of author’s descriptions of personal
experiences, photographs and short quotes from the interviewees.
15
3. SETTING THE SCENE
3.1
West Siberian Oil Industry
In the late 1950s, first flares were lit among the vast wetlands of the West Siberian
Plain, launching the industrial exploration of its hydrocarbon reserves. In the 1960s, an
oil boom began. Large oil-fields were set into production and people from all over the
former Soviet Union were invited to work for the promising industry. Since then, West
Siberia has performed as the most intense oil-producing area in Northern Eurasia. The
region currently supplies about 70% of Russia’s crude oil. Over 80% of it originates
from the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug - Yugra (KMAO). Although KMAO’s larger
reserves are gradually depleted, the petroleum industry is expected to sustain its
production flow for several decades to come by expanding the existing oil-fields and
making use of undeveloped smaller fields (Sagers, 2006).
Not only are Russian oil companies expanding their operations to new fields, but
the former Soviet North has also become a popular destination for global oil
corporations. However, the Russian crude is definitely not ‘easy oil’ (Bridge, 2007) for
the Western multinationals, in the sense that very few of them have succeeded in
meeting the geo-technical challenges of extracting oil in the sub-arctic environment. In
addition, the re-emerging ‘state-capitalism’ resource politics of the Russian Federation
(Sagers, 2006: 509) is further complicating the possibilities of gaining access to the
Siberian reserves, engaging in PSAs with the Russian government, and establishing
profitable and sustainable international business operations in the North.
3.2
The Khanty of Salym
Historically, various non-Slavic indigenous tribes have inhabited the Russian North. As
the name suggests, the region currently called Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug 16
Yugra was established in 1931 on the homelands of Finno-Ugric speaking Khanty and
Mansi people, and Forest Nenets, a southern sub-group of Samoyedic-speaking
Nenets. Since the oil exploitation was started in the 1960s, KMAO’s population has
increased about 12 times, while a million Russian-speaking oil and gas workers have
moved into the region (KMAO, 2007). The three local ethnic groups are now
acknowledged as Yugra’s indigenous minorities according to the regional legislation,
and exercise all rights granted to indigenous peoples in Russia.
While there are approximately 21 000 Khanty and 8200 Mansi living in West
Siberia altogether (Csonka and Schweitzer, 2004: 53), the indigenous groups currently
account for only 1.5% of KMAO’s total population (2002 census, KMAO 2007). Due to
the massive influx of outsiders, the Nefteyugansk district is represented by even
smaller proportion of the ‘numerically small peoples’, as the indigenes are now called,
compared to KMAO’s northern territories. Recent calculations indicate only 410 natives
living in the district, most of them Khanty. Only 64 of them continue their traditional
semi-nomadic lifestyle in the taiga, whereas the majority is now assembled in urbanstyle settlements, including 50 indigenes living in Salym village. (NDACIPN, 2007)
The historical clans, which resided along the Salym tributary of Ob River, are
classified as Salym Khanty, one of the eastern language groups of Khanty people.
Since the 16th century, they have stood on the main path of Russian conquest to West
Siberia from the southern steppes. Today, this historical route is marked by the
Tyumen-Nefteyugansk highway, which passes through Salym village (Forsyth, 1992:
390–391). Being therefore prone to assimilation long before the oil development was
started, the Salym Khanty language and culture are now considered to have largely
disappeared (Jordan and Filtchenko, 2005: 73). Despite this understanding, they have
so far remained entirely out of the discussion in the Western scholarship over Khanty
17
(see Balzer, 1999; Jordan, 2003).
However, the recent studies by Russian archaeologists (Vizgalov, 2000;
Glavatskaya et al, 2005) suggest, that despite the relatively active trade and marriage
relations they had with the immigrating Russians, the Salym Khanty retained their
traditional lifestyle until quite recently. They lived in permanent settlements of 3-10
families (yurts) and built additional wooden dwellings for seasonal hunting and
gathering activities in the forest. A Khanty settlement called Kintus yurts was located
at the site of the current Salym village.
This lifestyle endured for centuries until it was disrupted by the collectivisation
and dislocation campaigns of the Soviet Union. In the 1950s, the Khanty people living
along the Salym river basin were resettled for collective work into Lempino village,
about 200km north of Salym. However, one family from Kintus yurts refused to leave
their home. While yet another family later returned from Lempino, the ancestral lands
of Salym Khanty were gradually overtaken by neighbouring Yugan Khanty, who had
begun to move into the area since the 1930s in search of new hunting grounds and
relief from collectivisation in their own river basin.
Just a decade after resettlement, the remains of Kintus yurts were overrun by the
construction of the Surgut sub-section of Trans-Siberian railway (see figure 1). The log
houses built during 1968–1970 to accommodate the railway constructors established
Salym village and remained homes for its first non-Khanty settlers (Yusupov and
Shevtsova, 1999). Later the village was expanded by Transneft and SurgutGazprom
companies that built new blocks of houses for their employees working on the oil and
gas pipelines, which now parallel the Tyumen-Nefteyugansk highway transporting West
Siberian hydrocarbons to southern regions.
18
Figure 1.
A view over Salym village from the railway station.
By 1999, when the Salym settlers celebrated the 30th birthday of their village, its
population had grown to more than 5500 people. Taking pride in the fact that Salym
originates from the Khanty word ‘solhem’, which means ‘created’ or ‘constructed’, the
villagers raised a massive anniversary monument in front of the local administration
building, next to the historical site of the Kintus yurts. The native villagers made then
up less than 1% of this multiethnic population. Many of them were still born in the
yurts, “before the construction and progress”, as one of them noted.
3.3
Petroleum Development in the Salym Fields
Salym oil-fields extend from the Salym village to the KMAO’s southern borderline,
covering 2141.4km2. The currently licensed concession consists of a group of three oil19
fields – West Salym, Vadelyp and Upper Salym (see figure 2). Situated next to the
central route of oil and gas export facilities, highway and railway transport systems
passing through Salym village, the geographical location of the concession favours
profitable oil production. However, although the Upper Salym oil-bearing sands were
discovered already in 1966 and the two other fields in the 1980s, they were not
developed because of complicated geo-technical circumstances.
Figure 2. Location of Salym oil-fields in West Siberia2
Only in July 1992, several regional industrial units3 were given the federal
approval to establish a new, share-based oil company Evikhon for conducting
geological studies and preparatory works to plan oil production at the West and Upper
Salym fields with a perspective of further foreign investment. Curiously enough, in the
2
Downloaded from www.spdnv.ru on 13 February 2007, no longer available.
3
Yuganskneftegaz, Tyumenneftegaz, Yugraneft, Yurang and Ivakon
20
context of the Soviet Union collapse, Evikhon was called into existence as a “company
of regional development […] in the interest of the numerically small Khanty and Mansi
peoples living at the territories of these oil-fields” (translated from Kryazhkov, 1994:
210). Later, the shares of Evikhon were taken over by Sibir Energy plc, which is
declared to be an independent Anglo-Russian energy company.
Soon, an international tender was organised by the Russian authorities to find
foreign developers for Salym oil-reserves. In 1996, a joint venture was set up between
Evikhon and Shell Salym Development B.V, a member of Royal Dutch Shell Group.
Established on 50/50 basis, Salym Petroleum Development N.V. oil company is
therefore governed mostly by non-Russian shareholders and claimed to be the largest
on-shore foreign investment project in Russia (Sibir Energy, 2007).
During the years following the successful joint venture agreement, the rights to
develop Salym oil-fields were re-negotiated and the licences transferred to SPD.
However, the production was delayed because the shareholders did not succeed to
engage in PSA with the Russian government due to the changes in the federal
legislation and protracted negotiations. Only in 2003, under a threat of loosing the
licences altogether, the joint venture proceeded to develop the project under Russian
domestic tax/royalty regime. Followed by rapid construction works, oil production was
commenced from the West Salym wells in December 2004. (Sagers, 2006: 520; SPD,
2004c, 2007b) By the time of the current research, all three Salym oil-fields were put
into production and connected to a 88km pipeline transporting petroleum to the
Transneft’s oil export system. In Vadelyp field, SPD had utilised Shell’s most advanced
‘smart wells’, introducing this technology for the first time in Russia.
Located just 30km west of Salym, the oil industry non-arguably has an important
role in the local life, most notably because of the number of people working in the
21
village’s vicinity for the next 30 years, which is the estimated lifetime of the reserves.
During the preparatory phase, the project employed over 4000 temporary
constructors. Today, there are over 1500 oil-workers daily present at the oil-fields,
most of them coming from outside of Salym area and many having international
backgrounds with Shell’s operations in other states.
22
4. SALYM PETROLEUM DEVELOPMENT’S SOCIAL PERFORMANCE
4.1
Approach to Sustainable Development
Shell has responded to the pressing needs to manage its relations with impacted
societies and to legitimise its operations in regard to growing public concerns by
introducing CSR policies and programmes of community development support in many
oil-producing regions, firstly in Nigeria (see Shell, 2006: 28, 30). Following Shell’s
international practice, SPD despite being a relatively new entrant to the West Siberian
oil industry, has chosen environmentally-safe operations and social responsibility to be
its top priorities for publicity since the beginning of its operations (see SPD, 2004c).
Most visibly to the international public, it has presented those concerns among the
main headlines on its daily updated web-page www.salympetroleum.ru.
According to the joint venture agreement, Salym operations are based on Shell
Group’s main business standards, including its General Statement of Business
Principles establishing responsibilities to the society and the community (in SPD,
2007c) and an overall contribution to sustainable development, as understood to be
comprised in “efficient operations, protection of the environment and attention to social
issues” (SPD 2007a). Among other measures, SPD’s commitment to sustainable
development has entailed the conducting of Environmental, Social and Health Impact
Assessment (ESHIA) and applied systems of HSE Management and Social Performance
Management – the latter being of primary interest for this study.
SPD’s public commitment to CSR has yet to be managed in the context of Russian
legislative requirements and the overall practice of West Siberian oil business. In
principle, this context may condition SPD’s ability to implement the requested
mechanisms to manage its community relations in practice, and in turn, make it
23
dependent on specific local circumstances, which characterize the interaction between
the oil industry and local population in KMAO in general and in the vicinity of the Salym
fields in particular.
Aiming to accommodate the relevant global practice and guidance into the
Siberian context SPD has developed a separate Sustainable Development Strategy
(SPD, 2004a). Based on consultations with ERM, an international environmental
consultancy company, and preceded by ESHIA, this document formulates SPD’s
approach to contributing to sustainable development and integrating these principles
into its daily business procedures and decision-making. In addition to introducing
mainstream HSE procedures, the sustainable development strategy together with
annually updated plans focuses on social investments as a major instrument of social
performance alongside the regular impact assessment and management tools. This
approach commits SPD to support regional socio-economic development through
additional expenditure. In the Russian context, such social spending can be regarded
as a sort of informal tax paid to the Russian authorities in addition to the regular
revenues collected under the tax/royalty scheme (Gaddy and Ickes, 2005: 11–12).
However, SPD itself sees this approach to sustainable development as “an important
differentiator to help it to gain its licence to operate and grow” (SPD, 2004: 4).
Shell therefore attempts to position itself in the West Siberian oil industry by
priding itself on promoting sustainable development and by making use of advanced
Western CSR practices. At least initially, such an approach has proved to be successful.
SPD’s social performance was credited already in 2005, a year after it started with oil
production. The joint venture won awards in two categories at the Black Gold of Yugra,
an annual contest held between all KMAO’s oil corporations. One of those awards was
given for SPD’s social and economic partnership within the region.
24
4.2
Instruments of Social Performance
Although the promises of community support are articulated in various management
documents, SPD performs its interaction with the local society through its actual
residence in the vicinity of Salym village. Locally, the relations with Salym population
are governed by permanent staff in sustainable development matters, the sustainable
development advisor and community liaison officer. Working in close cooperation, the
latter is mainly responsible for negotiating the developmental needs with the village
administration and other potential beneficiaries, including coordinating the work of the
Community Advisory Committee, whereas the former is also involved in managing
company’s encounters with affected individuals such as the indigenous villagers who
hold land use rights over the territory of SPD’s oil concession. Their work is coordinated
by the Department for External Relations and the Division for Sustainable Development
in SPD’s Moscow office.
The employees currently filling these positions are both long-time residents of
Salym settlement. Prior to their recruitment by SPD some years ago they had highlevel jobs in the village administration. Being experienced in everyday village affairs
and its administrational matters, the Russian-speaking coordinators seemed to identify
themselves more with regard to the village community than with the oil-workers 30km
away. This impression of a relative estrangement from the daily operations of oil
extraction was not improved by the fact that their office rooms were located in Salym
Culture and Sports Centre in the middle of the village with only a telephone connection
and no Internet access. Although they were provided with Internet in SPD base camp,
these rooms were located in a rusty barrack, which stood behind the fence separating
the camp from the surrounding taiga (see figure 3). As they joked among themselves
over the barrack, they were indeed the ‘external relations’ of the oil development.
25
Figure 3. The ‘external relations’ of sustainable development in SPD base camp
External to the oil production, the sustainable development staff nevertheless
perform as important mediators between the neighbouring communities of Salym
village and oil-workers in a double sense – they are expected to coordinate the
relations between these two societies, but at the same time they themselves represent
the minority of locally employed oil-workers (about 50 altogether), who occupy an
ambiguous position between the development project and its residential community.
Interestingly, these two communities seem to be simultaneously distanced and
amalgamated by the SPD governance activities. Most of the directly employed oilworkers are accommodated at the territory of the oil concession, in SPD base camp,
Central Processing Facility camp or in temporarily raised camps at the fields.
Considering that Salym village has one of the highest rates of HIV in KMAO, SPD’s
26
annually updated Social Performance Plan (2007c: 22) indicates the need to limit the
contacts between its employees and the near-by settlement on the highway. On the
other hand, SPD has expressed an interest in employing more staff locally when its
regular production operations will have settled down. To this end, it has developed an
apprenticeship programme for local youths. This programme has already educated
some young oil-workers now employed by SPD on a long-term basis. Such an approach
to increased local employment, which was regarded as the most outstanding
commitment to social performance by the interviewed field manager, may be expected
to build closer relations between the company and Salym population in the future.
In addition to the locally employed staff, SPD’s another instrument of managing
its social performance is the Community Affairs Committee. For some years, this
committee has been making recommendations on investment needs, overseeing the
progress of social projects and giving evaluative opinion on funding requests made by
local organisations. Bringing together the high-level representatives of local authorities
and organisations, such as the village mayor and the head of Forest Management
Centre, this committee provides a potential forum to negotiate the investment
decisions of the oil industry with the village administration and local population.
Thus, while SPD appears to have utilized advanced Shell and Russian industry
knowledge in its internal exploration and production operations, in managing its
‘external relations’ it has decided to employ mostly local knowledge and networks. This
approach has resulted in delegating the management of daily community relations to
former village administrators, who are not familiar with the specificities of the oil
extraction, whereas central policies are developed in Moscow. These measures have
enabled SPD to establish instantly good relations with the local authorities. At the same
time, they have raised concerns and envy among those villagers who do not benefit
27
from the oil project. They complained about lacking direct access to SPD leaders and
were unhappy with the mediating role of the local sustainable development staff.
4.3
Social Investments
SPD’s contribution to local community development was launched in 2003, when the
company decided to donate 2.5 million dollars to support the social infrastructure in
Nefteyugansk district. In fact, this sum was paid out in 2005, when first social projects
were established. Initially, these projects addressed the most critical needs of
investments into healthcare, schooling and telecommunications facilities in Salym
village. Additionally, SPD presented itself in terms of charity and sponsorship by
participating in supporting some major cultural events and sports contests in KMAO.
In 2006, a three-year memorandum signed between SPD and KMAO government
framed a new commitment to additional expenditure on community development.
According to this mutual agreement, the joint venture complied with further
investments into several regional community projects during 2006–2008 totalling 7
million dollars. This support involves contribution to local infrastructure investments,
such as supplying equipment for Salym’s existing hospital and schools and supporting
the construction of a new hospital. In parallel, SPD has established another programme
to fund ‘softer’ projects initiated by local organisations. Operating on a competitive
basis, this programme allocates small grants according to the results of annual calls for
project applications.
In order to analyse SPD’s role in local community development, it is important to
remember that Salym village was founded by extractive industries. These enterprises,
although now privatised and acting under commercial principles, still have considerable
status of an employer and investor as they operate the system of oil and gas transport
28
pipelines in Salym’s vicinity. Similar contribution is expected from a new entrant. As
explained by Michael Bradshaw, “in Soviet times, it was expected that large regionforming enterprises would support the local community by paying for schools,
hospitals, and housing”. In his understanding though, the Russian companies are today
“attempting to reduce the scale of this activity, developing Western-style social
programs promoting corporate responsibility” (Bradshaw, 2006: 737). However, in
Salym, there exist still differences between the conduct of the local industries and a
multinational joint venture. Locals considered the Russian companies to be mostly
concerned with improving their own operational environment not the general living
conditions in the village. For example, SurgutGazprom is currently building a new
group of modern blockhouses in the village, but reserves the apartments for its own
employees, whereas the majority of Salym population is still living in the old log
houses (see figure 4).
On the contrary, SPD has declared that its investments will benefit the whole
village. By making social investments, SPD hopes to ensure that these are “aligned
with SPD’s and the community broader objectives, based on consultation and not
regarded as an alternative to managing social issues and impacts or as a means of
buying SPD out of an issue” (SPD 2004a: 8). Namely, Shell claims to implement its
social performance policy based on the results of community dialogue, involving the
work of the community liaison officers, locally held forums and focus groups, and not
to start with spending according to the wish lists of local authorities (Macklin in
Gouldson et al, 2005: 4). In Salym, however, the villagers have not been actively
attending SPD’s annual open forums and the community dialogue has taken the form
of a discussion between the former and current village leaders.
29
Figure 4. The old and new Salym houses
The largest social investment made prior to the 2006 memorandum of new
projects was the construction of the kindergarten ‘Ulybka’ (‘smile’) for 210 children in
Salym village (see figure 5). SPD not only financed the project, but also organised the
construction works, thereby actively participating in implementing its social projects. A
spectacular ceremony to open the new building was held on 1 September last year.
Called ‘the SPD face’ by one of the villagers, the red-coloured kindergarten building has
performed as the main tool of publicizing SPD’s contribution to community
development since its inauguration. Demonstrably, SPD had really met the region’s
expectations, as KMAO’s governor Alexander Filipenko assured in public cutting
through the symbolic red ribbon (in SPD, 2006: 6).
30
The kindergarten example reveals yet another interesting aspect of SPD social
investments. They have deliberately targeted youths and children, some of them
possibly future oil-workers. With 15% of kindergarten places booked for the child care
needs of SPD employees the improved local social facilities could also attract more
qualified oil-workers from KMAO to move into the village in the future.
Figure 5. SPD-constructed kindergarten in Salym village
Although SPD is concerned with tackling the excessive community expectations
and worried ending up in the role of the government (2007c: 19), overall it acts
according to the mainstream Siberian industry practice. It invests most of its social
support into local infrastructure projects both in terms of the budget spent and the
number of projects financed. As explained by the SPD’s sustainable development
31
division in Moscow, the company would ideally prefer to channel its investments
through ‘softer’, community-initiated projects but yet it has to meet the expectations of
the local and district’s authorities. A public declaration to apply its own, Shell-inspired
funding criteria pertains also to the programme of small-scale community projects.
Specifically, SPD refuses to give grants or to make one-off payments to any
individuals, religious organisations and organisations established for political purposes.
In addition, it claims to not make any “social investments that benefit only one, or a
few, ethnic groups in an ethnically divided community”. (SPD, 2007a) In this regard,
SPD clearly positions itself as addressing the society as a whole not its individual
members. As the interviewees in Moscow explained, the above-listed criteria are
generally followed, although sometimes misunderstandings appear on the side of the
community because of the specific situation in Salym. For example, the village has a
potential of social initiative under the congregations of three churches but according to
Shell criteria these are regarded ineligible for investments.
Under the new framework agreement with regional government the infrastructure
projects continuously prevail over the projects initiated by the community members.
While some ‘softer’ projects such as ‘Raduga’ summer camps for children from underprivileged families were established years ago, when the sustainable development
coordinators were working for the village administration, and only recently taken over
for SPD funding, new community projects are only beginning to be initiated.
However, trying to accommodate Shell’s understanding of sustainable
development to the local conditions, SPD has focused on children and youths as the
most neutral target group. Meeting the needs of ‘future generations’ enables the joint
venture to respond best to the criteria of their shareholders, the expectations of
Russian society and the ethical concerns of the international community.
32
4.4
A Social Issue of Indigenous Peoples
Contrary to SPD’s statements some years ago, its Social Performance Plan for 2007
indicates the impacts on indigenous people among its main concerns of external
relations. Defined as “an emerging or unresolved matter that has the potential to have
an impact, either negative or positive, on local community at whole and/or related
company activity”, indigenous affairs are now understood to be a key social issue for
SPD, which needs further identification and management (SPD, 2007c: 16).
Making its social contributions visible to wider public, the information at SPD’s
web-page informs about supporting “indigenous culture protection projects” (SPD,
2007a). Remarkably, this is the only reference to the existence of indigenous villagers
on the web-page. It gives an impression that the social issue of indigenous people has
been managed under the same framework of social investments as other
responsibilities towards the local community. However, the researchers learnt that to
date there has been no social spending targeted directly to indigenous people. Indeed,
community projects benefiting a certain ethic group in the village would contradict the
funding criteria listed above. Exceptions hold for SPD’s small donations given to the
indigenous peoples committee in the Nefteyugansk District Administration.
Instead, there are other instruments designed to identify, manage and perform
SPD’s relations with local native minorities and their advocate organisations. As the
latest Social Performance Plan states, the company is first and foremost concerned
with those indigenous persons holding land use rights over the territory of the oilfields. Prevailingly, relations with these natives are regulated by contracts signed
between the two parties. There are two types of these contracts. First, the ‘call-off
33
agreements’ (framework contracts)4 frame the general provisions regarding oil
development at the so-called family communal lands (rodovye ugodia) and establish
SPD’s obligations to pay compensation to affected families. This means annual
payments and additional finances allocated for fuel purchase. Secondly, the additional
‘socio-economic agreements’ define further payments according to consequent
construction works and production operations undertaken at the indigenes’ lands.
Whereas the framework contracts were signed once with an effect over the whole
period of SPD licences, socio-economical agreements are signed in the case of every
new construction.
Therefore, the local indigenous affairs, although being integrated into SPD’s
recent social performance policies, are not targeted by its social investments. By
compensating the native land-users the damage caused to the indigenous livelihoods,
SPD complies with KMAO regulations and Russian oil industry practice. However, there
are some differences between the practices of the joint venture and the Russian
companies. Namely, SPD refuses to provide the natives with goods such as
snowmobiles, which has been the mainstream approach in West Siberia, and channels
its compensations only through financial payments. Importantly, SPD does not apply
the funding criteria cited above in this case and makes one-off payments benefiting a
specific ethnic group – the Khanty people. Although the annual compensations paid to
the indigenous families are ridiculously small, the very fact that someone is privileged
to benefit directly from the oil industry without working for it may cause concerns
among the rest of the village’s multiethnic community. As one person in the village
administration noted, “the Khanty are smarter than us”. However, as the following
4
ramochnyi dogovor’ in Russian should be translated as ‘framework contract’ and this notion was also used
by SPD staff, whereas a term ‘call-off agreement’ was formulated in the English parts of the contracts.
34
analysis in chapter 5 will reveal, this is not the only outcome of the mutual interaction
between the oil developers and the local natives. In addition to the place-specific
challenges discussed above, the social issue of ‘numerically small’ members of Salym
population further challenges SPD’s abilities to manage the expectations of the local
community, to ensure its continuous presence in the West Siberian oil industry and to
demonstrate its ethicalities to its shareholders and the international public.
35
5. SPACES OF INDIGENEITY WITHIN SALYM OIL INDUSTRY
5.1
Territories of Tribal Lands
The questions of rights and territories of the Northern indigenous minorities were first
publicly addressed in the time of the collapsing Soviet Union, when the devastating
environmental and social impacts of the rapid industrialisation in the Russian North
became facts, which could no longer be ignored. In 1992, President Yeltsin signed an
edict on ‘Urgent measures to protect the inhabited areas and livelihoods of the
numerically small peoples of the North’, calling for reserving them territories to
continue with indigenous ways of land use. This attempt to save the ‘endangered
species’ of Northern tribes (Slezkine, 1994) caused a wave of indigenes’ claims over
their ancestral territories all across the post-Soviet North, and on the opposite, raised
developmental concerns among local authorities and industries.
In Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug, Yeltsin’s edict inspired further developments
into the regional legislation, which already in late 1980s had introduced a notion of
‘territories of priority natural resource management’ with a purpose to allocate certain
allotments for traditional land use practices. In addition, KMAO’s legal acts granted
indigenous minorities rights to participate in the decision-making over industrial
development on these territories (Alferova, 2006: 153). KMAO authorities now started
to register fixed allotments of so-called family communal lands (rodovye ugodia),
hereinafter also referred to as tribal lands. Additional legal acts were soon developed to
manage competitive claims made by the privatised oil and gas companies over the use
of these lands. The extractive industries were obliged to compensate for damage and
constraints to the traditional ways of using renewable natural resources on these
territories and to support the socio-economic development of the indigenous minorities
36
living at the licensed areas (Alferova 2006: 154).
Although the legislative requirements for allocating lands to traditional resource
management were the same all over KMAO, the district administrations implemented
them in different ways. In Nefteyugansk district, the access to land-use rights seems to
have been relatively unrestricted for native (and allegedly, also non-native) families.
Consequently, 33 territories of tribal lands have been registered in this district.
Moreover, the indigenous family leaders of Nefteyugansk district were also provided
with certificates granting them use rights over their ancestral lands – contrary to some
other districts, where these documents were kept by the local authorities and the
natives had no access to them (Pesikova, 2007). However, these indigenous territories
have been simultaneously governed by a specific governmental committee (NDACIPN)
dealing with all the issues of the 410 indigenes living in Nefteyugansk district.
Over the last decade, these legislative measures have introduced complicated
administrative geographies into the region’s land-use practices. These geographies are
best illustrated in a Russian book ‘Territories of traditional nature use in Khanty-Mansi
Autonomous Okrug – Yugra during 1992–2004’ (Bulatov and Timoshkov, 2005). This
book summarises the most relevant regional statistics and examines the pre-conditions
to continue with indigenous land uses. But most importantly, page-by-page, it presents
maps of KMAO districts, where the areas of tribal lands are indicated in green and the
licence areas for resource extraction in grey tones. Numerous black numbers on these
maps reveal the names of the male leaders of indigenous families and single red
numbers refer to the developers, all of them published in the legend. Some of the
district maps in this analysis remain overwhelmingly green with smaller spots of grey.
Others are dominated by expanding grey. However, on the maps of Surgut,
Nizhnevartovsk and Nefteyugansk districts, the two colours are melting into one.
37
Thus, when Evikhon initially began to explore Salym oil-reserves, the project was
paralleled by Salym Khanty applications to gain official land-use rights over their
ancestral hunting grounds in the same territory. Representing one of those overlapping
geographies on the maps described above, the SPD project today affects directly 5
indigenous families, whose tribal lands cover majority of the licensed territory of the
three Salym oil-fields. In addition, the pipeline transporting crude from SPD’s Central
Processing Facility into Transneft’s oil export system is located in the communal lands
of another 4 families. Being mostly the descendants of Kintus yurts residents, the
Khanty holding land use titles over the SPD-operated territory reside permanently in
Salym and Lempino villages, depending on the fates of their families. Nevertheless,
they have continuously used these lands ‘out in the forest’ for their own subsistence.
For that, they have constructed temporary wooden hunting huts in the forest (see
figure 12), as had been done by their ancestors for centuries. As the natives
themselves explained, when their tribal lands were registered in 1993, they just
showed the authorities the territories their families had always kept in use.
A basis for the interaction between Salym petroleum industry and the indigenous
land-users was thereby established by KMAO’s legal acts, in particular, by the conditions
made in Evikhon’s licence agreements, which were later re-issued to SPD. Among other
conditions, the agreements incurred an obligation to compensate for the negative
impacts of oil extraction on indigenous livelihoods. Moreover, as mentioned earlier, the
federal decree ‘On the oil companies’ work for regional development in the Khanty-Mansi
Autonomous Okrug’ from 21st July 1992 called Evikhon into existence with a purpose to
meet the needs of the indigenous minorities active at the territories of Salym oil-fields
(in Krjazhkov, 1994: 209–210). For an interviewed indigenous member of KMAO Duma,
this peculiar commitment was regarded to be binding on SPD as Evikhon’s successor.
38
It was into this evolving network of complicated regulations, practices and
competitive geographies of tribal lands and extraction licences that Shell entered in
1996. This entrance had implications in a double sense. On the one hand, as the SPD
field manager stated referring to his previous experience in Nigeria, Shell was pleased
to meet a system of 'well established indigenous rights”. It just had to implement the
existing legislative requirements and local industry’s practices to cope with its
indigenous affairs. On the other hand, as will be argued in the next sections, these
rights were not yet fully established. First, they needed to be exercised through the
actual encounters between the native land-users and the joint venture, and secondly,
the changing post-Soviet resource politics introduced its own complicacies into the
interaction between native minorities and extractive companies in KMAO, where the
Western-style corporate conduct now had its specific role to play.
5.2
Territories of an Oil Concession
So far it was discussed that the rights of the Siberian indigenous minorities in relation
to industrial development are tied to traditional activities of using renewable natural
resources on their ancestral lands. But, if the rights (and accordingly, territories) of the
indigenes are allegedly well established, what about the territory of an oil concession?
How is the particular concession of Salym petroleum development allocated and
constituted in relation to the tribal lands where it is located and to the native persons
who are entitled to use this territory in alternative ways? Or more specifically, how is
this relatively new territorial unit mutually understood and represented by its
competitive user groups?
In this mutual interaction, there are particular spaces produced in Lefebvreian
sense – be it a physical space of a given oil concession or more abstract ‘spaces’ of the
social relations surrounding it. For Henri Lefebvre, there is no rigid separation between
39
the material production of objects and the mental projection of ideas. Rather, the
perceived realities of concrete spaces and the concepts of abstract spaces are
generated through a socially lived space. Space in this sense is socially produced
through the encounters with the world, being materially and mentally constructed at
the same time. It is a ‘space as real-and-imagined’. (Elden, 2004: 44, 181–192)
In what follows, it will be argued that the interaction between Salym oil
developers and its indigenous stakeholders has indeed produced particular spaces –
first of all, the alternative ‘territories’ of the oil concession, which are constituted
through the lived experiences and imaginations of its users and visitors, including the
researchers. Furthermore, following Watts’ theory, these real-and-imagined territories
of the oil concession and tribal lands are argued to reveal a genesis of a broader ‘space
of indigeneity’ in the interaction between the actors involved in the Salym oil industry.
The majority of the licensed area of Salym oil development is still covered with
taiga forest, bogs and wetlands, if ignoring the expanding well-pads, roads and
pipelines. There is no physical boundary such as a fence surrounding the three oilfields. Rather, the licensed concession area is first established on various maps, like
the one described above (see Bulatov and Timoshkov, 2005: 67) and secondly, with
the help of physical landmarks. The latter are, for example, a column with the SPD
logo standing next to the Tyumen-Nefteyugansk highway announcing the closeness of
the oil-fields (see figure 6) and a gate with a checkpoint, which is raised a bit further
away (see figure 7).
40
Figure 6. A column marking the entrance to the Salym oil-fields
The procedures of passing through this gate should in principle exclude any
potential attempts by outsiders to access the oil-fields with their vehicles, if they
cannot present or will not be issued the permits to do so. If requested, permits have to
be presented to SPD security guards or HSE representatives for examination at all
times when at the fields (SPD, 2004b). SPD hereby constitutes its licensed oil
concession through a process of territorialization, by “marking out a territory of
thought and inscribing it in the real, topographizing it, investing it with powers,
bounding it by exclusions, defining who or what can rightfully enter” (Rose, 1999: 34).
41
Figure 7.
Checkpoint at the entrance gate
When outsiders, for example, students from Oxford University or local children
from ‘Raduga’ summer camp are invited to visit joint venture’s operations, they might
be shown its base camp, and if lucky, also the well-pad no. 23 situated just next to the
entrance gate. Although being escorted by SPD staff, the visitors experience entrance
into concession territory through specific enrolment procedures and instructions. These
supply the company with all necessary identification data and legally binding
documents admitting visitors’ own responsibility for forthcoming events. SPD safety
and security regimes are also vividly demonstrated. In students’ case, for example,
they were shown a video with driving instructions at the oil-fields – SPD’s primary
safety concern. ‘Salym Field Rules’, a document distributed at the gate, was
particularly instructive in this regard. However, an additional sheet with ‘The rules of
42
conduct on the territory on the tribal land’ enclosed in this document puts the visitor
under a personal obligation to take additional environmental precautions when at the
fields because of the responsibilities to indigenous ‘landowners’ (SPD, 2004b).
Here, the oil company distinguishes between its own rules and other codes of
conduct. It admits the existence of alternative territories within its concession. In fact,
SPD employees and contractors are obliged to comply with a similar code of conduct on
tribal lands, which has been agreed under the framework agreements signed between
the natives and the company, but importantly, the latter does not ensure compliance
to these rules by third parties.
Figure 8. The accommodation barracks in SPD base camps
43
Contrary to the oil-fields, the base camp is encircled with a high physical fence
separating it from the surrounding taiga (and also from the bears that were rumoured
to consume the leftovers of SPD’s dining hall). At first, one might be surprised by the
austerity of the camp’s rapidly constructed facilities. For example, most of the staff is
accommodated in the barracks staying in straight lines and tagged with SPD logos in
both Russian and English (see figure 8). Despite these relatively poor living conditions,
which give an image of oil workers working in the harsh conditions of Siberian taiga,
the camp is strictly organised and structured. In this well-governed organisation, one
cannot spot any signs of oil production, except on the photos displayed on the walls
inside the ‘Northern Lights’ main building (see figure 9).
Figure 9. The well-organised space of SPD base camp – ‘Northern Lights’ house
44
Similarly, the real operations of oil extraction as can be witnessed at the well-pad
no. 23 with its tiny green-coloured oil wells on the background of green-leaved taiga
(see figure 10) are made almost invisible compared to the visible signs of smoking
bans, protective equipment and other safety and security requirements (see figure 11).
Figure 10. Oil wells at well-pad no.23
Are these the advertised ‘smart wells’? No, the workers explain that these are
“the stupid ones” inherited from Evikhon’s first experiments. Despite that, the oil
production is here represented as something ‘sublime’ – fitting to and caring about the
safety of the surrounding environment (Sawyers, 2004). Indeed, it is “made visibly
invisible”, leading one to contrast the flaring images of the Soviet-style derricks around
Surgut with well-managed Western operations, where all “social and environmental
45
consequences would be monitored, minimized and mitigated” (Barry, 2006: 248).
Figure 11. Safety regulations at the well-pad no.23
Apparently, SPD intends to give an impression of a well-governed, secure and
relatively safe territory of an oil concession with its own regime of rules, standards,
obligations and responsibilities. At the same time, it distances itself from the messy,
uncontrollable and insecure activities of the so-called third parties at the tribal lands,
and claims one’s own responsibility for encountering or performing such activities.
These activities characterise the other ‘territory’ of the oil concession for SPD and can
be performed by both human and non-human actors, for example, by the bears or
encephalitis-bearing ticks. A crucial example concerns the activities of illegal hunters.
As explained, SPD does not take any responsibility for the activities of the third parties
46
at the tribal lands although it controls all vehicles entering its gate. Discussing this
policy, the native land-users were convinced that SPD issues entrance permits to far
too many people, some of them having no connections with the oil development but
only interests in hunting, as proved by the numerous cars tagged with SPD passes
driving between the village and the oil-fields.
As this example shows, the SPD gate procedures do not exclude from the oilfields other people using different transport routes and means. The illegal hunters
might easily drive over the frozen bogs with their snowmobiles in winter. In fact, the
Salym Khanty themselves continue to use these territories extensively for hunting,
fishing and berry-picking and spend significant periods of time there living in their
wooden huts (see figure 12). But, as the SPD staff remarked, the indigenous landusers need to be managed. Managing the fields involves not only imposing duties on its
employees and visitors regarding their conduct on Khanty tribal lands, but also
managing the activities of the indigenes themselves. Apparently, this is necessary for
some practical reasons, for example, that the oil-workers would not accidentally get
shot by the hunters. In order to constitute the whole territory of its licensed oil
concession, SPD attempts to make its own rules and regulations upon the local natives
and their tribal lands, whereas not all them are inscribed into written documents.
SPD’s foremost instrument to manage the indigenous persons is to raise their
awareness about its rules and to control their visits to their shared territories. To this
end, it performs its imaginations of the oil concession as a distinct geographical unit
with its own borders and regimes, at first, through the maps of oil-fields, which have
been enclosed in the framework agreement contracts signed with the natives, and
secondly, through the procedures established regarding their entrance through the
gate.
47
Figure 12. One of the hunting huts on tribal lands
Regarding the SPD rules and codes of conduct inscribed in documents, the idea of
indigenous land use rights as provided by the regional legislation seems to be
restricted by the framework contracts between the Khanty family leader and the CEO
of the oil company, which were signed in the presence of the chairman of NDACIPN.
Having read these contracts and having experienced the procedures of entering the
gate together with the SPD staff and the ‘landowners’, the author is able to anticipate
some ways in which SPD attempts to govern its indigenous stakeholders, and how the
territories of an oil concession are further constituted through this particular interaction
between the Khanty and the oil company.
Namely, the framework contracts give the head of the indigenous family a right to
48
visit his tribal lands via the previously described gate located on the main way from
Salym to SPD base camp. For this, the indigenous person is issued an entry permit to
pass through the gate’s checkpoint. For reasons that remained unclear for the
researchers, until recently these permits wore titles ‘Khant’ but new ones position them
just as ‘hunters’. According to the contracts, SPD will also provide the indigenous
person with an off-road vehicle and a driver to visit his lands to observe the progress
of their agreements, but this is guaranteed upon a preliminary notice at least 2 weeks
in advance and not more than three times a year.
In reality, the indigenous families own no cars and their entrances through the
gate depend on the willingness of SPD to provide them with company transport.
Considering the number of SPD cars driving in the village, it is not surprising that so
far no problems have occurred with organising this transport, even though the Khanty
do not always follow the rule of two weeks notice. This is not the only flexibility
regarding the implementation of SPD field regimes. For example, the framework
contracts do not address the family members or friends of the indigenous land-users.
The procedures of their access to the concession have been solved in a given situation,
but usually there have been no significant problems or delays with their permits been
issued.
On the other hand, the Khanty considered these procedures of gate-regulated
access to their ‘own’ tribal lands as an offence to indigenous dignity. They claimed to
exercise the right to order SPD transport as little as possible, and for most of the time,
to use alternative routes to the fields by avoiding the gate. This option means at least
a 30km journey over bogs and wetlands – by foot defying the mosquitoes in summer
as experienced by their ancestors for centuries, but most conveniently in winter, by
manoeuvring between the trees with snowmobiles, which have replaced the earlier
49
reindeer and dog sledges. However, even then the oil company can exercise a sort of
control over their activities, because the natives have to present their identification
documents and access permits, if they are requested to do so by SPD workers.
On 20 July 2007, this practice of a relatively flexible implementation of SPD field
rules was suddenly interrupted, when the native land-users asked the oil company to
provide transport for visiting their lands together with the researchers from Oxford
University. A jeep with a driver could have been easily provided within only two days.
Yet there were no procedures designed regarding such ‘high-level’ guests of the Khanty
and their connections to the external world. The procedures used during their first
field-visit no longer applied because these did not guarantee company’s control over
forthcoming events. Not only did the indigenous people need to be managed, but their
guests even more so. For that, new procedures had to be invented in order to
eliminate possible invalidations of the representations of a well-governed oil
concession, and possibly, also to minimize risks of potential attacks on its operations
and international reputation. After requesting its new stakeholders to follow all kinds of
new procedures, for example, to apply for an additional permit from NDACIPN, which
were however not described in any documents, the company decided in favour of even
stricter enrolment and surveillance measures.
At the fields, indigenous representations of the petroleum development were
indeed contesting the ones offered by the oil company staff. In their imaginations,
somewhere at these lands were their hunting huts surrounded with forest, lakes and
rivers, which were full of berries, game and fish, all ready for harvesting. One of the
land-users even said that he rather avoids the sites with oil wells in order not to spoil
these imaginations. Questioning the innocence and invisibility of the oil exploitation,
the Khanty however told of the construction of roads, which have encircled their lands
50
hindering animals to move to traditional hunting grounds, and mentioned incidents of
spills, which have killed some wildlife.
Figure 13. Indigenous representations of oil operations: the exploration ‘profile’
For Khanty, their tribal lands out in the forest were safe and welcoming, as
opposed to the construction and progress undergone in the village, and the impurity
51
and hazards of the expanding petroleum extraction. By telling of their imaginations and
providing counter-representations, they disputed the practices of the oil company. For
example, contrary to the opposition between old and new styles of oil operations
described above, the natives now contrasted the Soviet-time forestry at these lands
with the exploitative activities of the Western joint venture. They wanted to show two
exploration ‘profiles’ from different time periods, which were cut through the taiga (see
figure 13). Due to a reckless harvesting by SPD workers, high stumps were bulking up
from the rest of the debris, which was not cleaned away. Observing the progress of
their ‘call-off agreements’, the Khanty now voiced personal concerns about the
violations of their expectations of how should their tribal lands be managed.
As suggested by Michael Watts (2004a, 2004b, 2005), the interaction between
local communities, oil developers and state authorities, which is territorially constituted
through oil concessions, may generate some ‘governable spaces’ within the petroleum
industry. The different representations and imaginations encountered during the two
field-visits characterise indeed particular ‘spaces’ – the physically overlapping but
mentally separated territories of the Salym oil concession and those of tribal lands,
which are created through the lived experiences of involved actors – the oil-workers,
native land-users and visitors. Furthermore, the different forms of rules, codes of
conduct and imagining described above also reveal some other social spaces produced
in this interaction of mutual governance.
Namely, over the last decade, the representatives of KMAO indigenous minorities
have increasingly voiced concerns in response to the exploration and extraction of
subsurface resources on their ancestral territories (see Aypin and Shustov, 1998;
Tammilehto et al, 1999; Toulouze, 2005; Balzer, 2006). Therefore, it appears that the
characteristics of materiality and territoriality of oil here provide a ground upon which
52
the claims in terms of indigenous rights are made and the territories of tribal lands are
constructed. However, abstracting from the fieldwork experiences, it appears that in
the context of post-Soviet resource politics the dominant ‘space’ of indigenous rights
and territories is produced and governed by the Russian authorities – by their legal
acts, codes of practices and administrative institutions regulating the competing affairs
of resources extraction and ‘numerically small’ people.
In the case of SPD, these administrative legacies have necessitated the design of
specific rules and codes to manage the indigenous people in order to minimize risks to
company’s operations and international reputation. For this purpose, SPD has
developed instruments to govern natives’ visits to the oil-fields. Some other
instruments, such as the ‘Code of Conduct on Tribal Lands’, also perform as tools for
demonstrating SPD’s care for its indigenous stakeholders to external observers.
On the other hand, the corporate attempts to manage its indigenous stakeholders
by establishing specific rules over the oil concession have also enabled the natives to
dispute, disregard and invalidate SPD regime by imposing their own imaginations and
representations upon the same territory. They can introduce flexibility into
implementing SPD rules or just ignore them. By doing so, they also contest the ‘space’
of interaction between oil developers and indigenous minorities as foreseen by the
state authorities.
In the next two chapters, the dissertation proceeds to discuss further examples of
governing indigenous affairs within the Salym oil industry. As will be argued, these
examples can be also characterised in terms of ‘spaces of indigeneity, which further
multiply the forms of interaction of constituting the territories of the oil concession
discussed in this chapter.
53
5.3
Mobilization or Cooperation?
In this process of producing the ‘territories’ of the Salym oil concession, the petroleum
developers and their indigenous stakeholders render some facts and lived experiences
visible but silence others depending on the impressions they attempt to make.
However, sometimes the silenced stories still emerge from the past of the Salym
project in order to inform its present and future.
There was one such story, which none of the parties was happy to remember but
which nevertheless found its way through the rest of the representations. When told, it
revealed that during the early years of Salym industry, there was a potential for
another type of interaction between the oil developers and indigenous people, which
was however never fully realised. Not only was Evikhon initially intended to act as a
commercial ‘regional development company’, but also it was seemingly established
under the modern principles of common resource governance. Either Evikhon’s
founders did it for a sincere purpose to support KMAO’s indigenous population or just
for ‘buying it out of an issue’, in effect, they allocated 10% of Evikhon’s shares to an
indigenous organisation ‘Save the Yugra’ (Spasenie Yugra), more specifically, to its
branch office in Nefteyugansk district. Whatever the exact motivations, the results are
remembered with shame. The indigenous activists in Nefteyugansk soon sold the
shares back to the industry and the money just disappeared from the organisation
together with these people.
During the perestroika of the late 1980s, ‘Save the Yugra’ had first emerged as
an informal group of female indigenous activists in Khanty-Mansiysk. By the time the
Salym oil development began, it was registered as a central regional advocacy
organisation representing the interests of Yugra’s indigenous minorities. For quite some
time, it functioned as a non-governmental organisation articulating indigenous
54
concerns about the expanding exploitation of the region’s natural resources. (Balzer,
1999: 148–150) However, by the time of this research, it had been developed into a
partly government-operated organisation – in fact, its current chairman held a parallel
position in the regional government.
Although Salym has been allegedly the only case when ‘Save the Yugra’ acquired
company shares, other cases of accepting oil money have undermined its reputation
among the natives. Some of its former leaders have therefore moved to work for the
region’s authorities, hoping to implement their visions of indigenous future in this way.
Other representatives of indigenous intelligentsia are increasingly expressing their
personal opposition by undertaking independent actions against the industrial
development in their districts (Toulouze 2005).
In Nefteyugansk district, however, there are no such outstanding indigenous
activists. After ‘Save the Yugra’s representatives in Nefteyugansk lost their credibility,
the office is no longer considered to represent the interests of the district’s indigenous
population despite being still officially registered. No new civil society organisations
have been founded either. While this district is located too far south of Surgut and
Khanty-Mansiysk cities, it also remains distant to the everyday indigenous politics
there. In short, no organised forms of indigenous mobilisation in response to the oil
extraction have occurred.
Quite the contrary, the Salym natives seem to have regarded their interaction
with the petroleum development, at least initially, rather in terms of cooperation than
opposition. Even though the Kintus yurts descendants have not forgotten how the
Trans-Siberian railway was built across their graveyards, they helped the first railway
constructors to survive the Siberian winter (Yusupov and Shevtsova, 1999). When
Evikhon conquered their tribal lands, similar type of collaboration between the natives
55
and the developers took place at first. The company acted in the interests of the
indigenous people using the territories of the oil-fields. In 1993, it built a house for one
of the indigenous families in the middle of the fields, although none of the natives had
ever permanently lived there. However, after experiencing all the difficulties with
constructing this house in the forest, another family leader was given money to build
himself a new home in Salym village and yet another decided in favour of purchasing
an apartment in one of the blockhouses. Additionally, Evikhon provided a market for
the indigenous ‘traditional nature use’ activities. Similar to feeding the railway
constructors just couple of decades ago, the natives now supplied Evikhon’s dining hall
with fresh meat and other forest-harvested products.
Since Shell took over the project, these informal agreements of mutual
cooperation were substituted with the contracts of financial compensations only. The
joint venture increasingly appears to regard its indigenous stakeholders as simply a
nuisance, while the natives are calling back the ‘Evikhon-times’ of larger and nonfinancial ways of support. Hereby, a question of sustainability emerges once again.
Whereas Evikhon was said to encourage the Khanty to continue with their traditional
ways of using renewable natural resources, the joint venture attempts to control and
diminish the scale of these activities. At the same time, it has initiated no social
projects to help the natives develop alternative economies – soon become a serious
issue if the oil-fields are further expanded and there is literally no space for indigenous
subsistence.
In the light of this ‘Evikhon’s 10% story’, the single incident of such industryindigenes relationship in KMAO, it appears, that there was a potential for another
‘space of indigeneity’, where the natives would have possibly had a better position to
govern their relations with the oil industry (cf. Slezkine, 1994: 379). However, these
56
were the early years after the August Coup, when oil business was related to “big
money, big lies and blood” as the former chairman of ‘Save the Yugra’ described,
explaining why the central organisation had distanced itself from the activities of its
branch. During the coming years, the relations between indigenous minorities and oil
developers were taken under the control of regional authorities, as discussed above.
However, another interviewed indigenous leader regarded this story as a good example
of common resource governance practices, which should be introduced again in the
future, thereby making quite explicit claims over the subsurface resources under the
indigenes’ historical territories.
5.4
The ‘Rabbit Ears’ of Salym Petroleum Development
Today, when arriving at Salym, an outsider can witness the presence of SPD
everywhere she goes. The green-blue SPD logo displayed on the entrance passes of
numerous cars in the village serves yet further purposes as one might assume at her
first glance. Firstly, the logo aims to accommodate the Western company into the
context of Siberian symbols and values. Secondly, it performs as the foremost tool
visualising SPD’s corporate social responsibility and commitment to sustainable
development. As explained in SPD’s corporate booklet and on its web-page,
“The two arms represent the horns of the Siberian reindeer, reflecting the
spirit of joint activity and partnership. The drop of oil symbolises how the
joint venture is committed to the safe and environmentally-conscious
development of the Salym oilfields” (SPD, 2004c: 2; 2007d).
However, the villagers referred to the logo with a knowing smile. While the
abbreviation of SPD refers to exactly the same words transliterated either into Cyrillic
or Latin, the figure on its corporate logo has a different meaning altogether in the
57
native culture. For the locals, the KMAO regional flags and the ‘Yugra’ passenger trains
passing through Salym village, for example, presented the patterns of reindeer horns,
but the crossed ‘arms’ on the SPD logo revealed ‘the rabbit ears’ of the Salym
petroleum development.
Despite such drawbacks, SPD increasingly appears to “produce, acquire and
develop knowledge” about the local socio-cultural environment (Bridge and Wood,
2005) by learning from and claiming to protect Khanty traditions. For example, on 7th
April 2007, a remarkable event was organised in Salym, which was immediately
publicised with press releases on SPD’s bilingual web-page. The company drillers
gathered in the local Culture and Sports Centre, where the sustainable development
coordinators gave them a presentation on the new social projects launched during
2006–2007. An additional slide show introduced the Khanty culture and traditional way
of life in the Salym area. On the last slide titled “Our beloved ones” the drillers were
presented with photos of native girls wearing their colourful national dresses in forest
huts. In addition, the Centre’s theatre group of local children performed a play based
on Khanty fairy-tales, explaining to the oil-workers how in local culture “each pattern
has special symbols and purpose, and is only applicable to certain items” (SPD,
2007e).
The researchers witnessed another interesting example of producing and
developing corporate knowledge about indigenous culture when they first visited one of
the indigenous land-users. The accompanying sustainable development advisor asked
him for “10 words in Khanty language”. It turned out that SPD was preparing to
publish a new company booklet using examples of Khanty language. It also planned to
enclose an appendix CD of Khanty fairy-tales with parallel translations into Russian.
Although these examples may seem insignificant at first, both are remarkable
58
when one remembers the history of Salym indigenes. While SPD was interviewing a
Kintus descendant about words in Salym Khanty language, the ‘beloved’ natives in the
slide show were the Yugan Khanty, who had immigrated to the areas quite recently.
Settled at the riverbanks south of Salym village, the ‘forest people’ as the villagers
called them are supposed to be the representatives of the most traditional Khanty
culture. Living in the wooden huts, sustaining a small-scale reindeer herding and
harvesting products from the forest, they depend largely on a subsistence economy.
According to local sources, some of them speak no Russian, only Khanty. Moreover,
only 15 out of 64 ‘forest people’ are supposed to be literate. This makes them the most
vulnerable group to oil exploitation, which is now rapidly expanding to the upstream
banks of Salym River, where the huts of Yugan Khanty are located.
In the light of these examples, the legislative privileges of land-use rights and
compensations that the local indigenes have enjoyed compared to the rest of Salym
population have to be examined again. Namely, the situation as explained in section
5.1 has not remained the same. After a course of changes in the legislation regarding
the rights of the indigenous minorities to their ancestral lands, a new regional law ‘On
the territories of traditional nature use of indigenous numerically small peoples of the
North’ from 27 February 2006 is going to re-organise the administrative legacies of
tribal lands completely.
Similar to the above-discussed grey-green map of overlapping geographies,
where the tribal lands wore just black numbers of their users, who were further
identified in the legend, the new law now separates the tribal land allotments from the
use-titles over them. In order to sustain their rights over these lands, the indigenous
families have to submit new applications and to prove documentarily how they are in
fact still continuing with indigenous ways of traditional resource use (Duma of KMAO,
59
2006). What exactly is considered to be ‘traditional’ is however not explained. It is
unclear, whether the natives are supposed to live permanently in the forest like the
Yugan Khanty or can they also sustain their land use rights if they live in the village
and use their hunting grounds only seasonally, like the Salym Khanty do.
Although to date there are no further orders issued with instructions on how to
implement this law and a reasonable transition period is given until 2009, in
Nefteyugansk district, NDACIPN has actively started to apply the new requirements. On
11 July this year, the day when the researchers arrived to the village, there was a
peculiar meeting organised between the chairman of NDACIPN (see figure 14) and the
indigenous representatives from Salym neighbourhoods. Even the ‘forest people’ had
arrived to discuss emerging future issues. What issues were discussed, was however
unclear. For NDACIPN and SPD, there was an issue of community consultation with
regard to a potential new social investment project to construct a historical park in the
village for introducing Khanty culture. However, for the gathering Khanty, both literate
and illiterate, there was an issue of new documents, which they were asked to sign in
order to apply for new use rights over their tribal land allotments. During this event, a
sort of mobilisation emerged, when most of the natives refused to sign these
documents and asked for explanations as to why they have to apply for new rights if
they supposed to ‘own’ these territories confronted by existing and future oil projects.
Given the changes in the legalisation and the expanding oil development, the
rights of the local indigenous minorities no longer appear to be so well established. In
the imaginations of Salym land-users, the close collaboration between SPD and
NDACIPN has now become a symbol of something else than an advocacy system for
protecting their interests against oil exploitation. They regard with growing suspicions
the donations, which SPD has given to NDACIPN outside the framework of other social
60
investments, as well as their recent plan to invest into the historical park. Whereas the
outcomes of previous donations, such as a first aid booklet for the ‘forest people’ are
found to be just ridiculous, the perspectives of an entertainment park constructed at
the shores of their sacred lake, at first demanding new archaeological diggings and
later welcoming the whole Salym population (according to SPD funding criteria) as well
as tourists, make some of the natives even more concerned.
Figure 14. The chairman of NDACIPN posing together with Putin, Filipenko and
Semenov represents all three levels of Russian authorities for the local indigenes.
Far beyond the local indigenous imaginations, suspicions, expectations and claims
is yet another context of Russia’s resource politics, which challenges the Salym
petroleum development. One might propose this context as a possible explanation for
61
why SPD has recently determined the indigenous affairs to be a key social issue, and
why it is now so eager to demonstrate its contributions to protecting local traditions
and constructing a Khanty historical park. Considering the remarkable changes in
Russian business climate for Western multinationals after the Sakhalin-2 events in
December 2006 (Turkeltaub and Bailey, 2007), Shell is not as firmly positioned in West
Siberia either, as it may have appeared to be in the beginning of its operations. In this
new set of powers, compliance with all existing regulations and even better relations
with local authorities becomes crucial if SPD wants to secure its licences ‘to operate
and grow’. This includes KMAO’s legislative requirements and codes of conduct
regarding local indigenous minorities. Although the indigenous issues are minor
compared to the number of other relevant regulations, they might still perform as
serious violations, especially when local industry-community encounters are taken over
and amplified by international activists.
In this complicated situation of changing federal resource politics, it is not clear
anymore, who is making ‘rabbit ears’ to whom. SPD has not yet won another award at
the Black Gold of the Yugra contest – Company of the Year for Work with Indigenous
Peoples. The oil company now produces new governable spaces through its
instruments of social performance. For that, it demonstrates publicly its social
investments into community development, targeting currently children and youths, but
in the future possibly also indigenous minorities. By collaborating with NDACIPN, it
additionally attempts to employ native culture for its corporate marketing purposes. In
this peculiar interaction, the Salym Khanty are however not convinced that they will
sustain their use rights over SPD oil-fields, and that it is necessarily their disappearing
culture, which will be protected by SPD social spending and marketing activities. Not
surprisingly, the join venture silences these aspects of indigenous issues and problems.
62
6. CONCLUSIONS
This dissertation aimed to give further insights into the ways in which multinational
corporations can reshape the industry’s relations with indigenous communities by
producing new ‘governable spaces’ in the oil-producing societies. The case of Salym
petroleum development in West Siberia has the advantage to render these ‘spaces’
visible due to its particular location and history.
Regarding location, SPD extracts oil on the traditional hunting grounds of Salym
Khanty people. Within only couple of decades, this disappearing indigenous group was
turned into an insignificant ethnic minority in its own settlement, when Kintus yurts
were overrun by one of the Siberian main routes of highway and railway, plus oil and
gas export systems. Addressing history, Salym oil-reserves were set into development
during the early years after the Soviet Union collapse, when the regional companies
introduced commercial principles and indigenous activists started to express their
concerns in response to the expanding industrialisation of their homelands. This
resulted in a single incident in the West Siberian oil history, when Evikhon, a new oil
company was established with a purpose of socio-economic development of Salym
indigenous population and 10% of its shares were allocated to an indigenous adovacy
organisation. However, this peculiar interaction of common resource governance was
later re-organised, when the project proceeded.
Shell’s entrance into the Salym project has had interesting implications. Firstly, it
has drawn even more, and increasingly international, attention to the existence of a
specific group of Khanty people within the village’s multiethnic population. The Salym
case study therefore supports Michael Watts’ theory in its broadest sense. The
petroleum development provides the necessary ground upon which SPD’s social issue
of indigenous peoples are constructed. Secondly, the currently insecure position of
63
Salym Petroleum Development itself, being a major foreign project in Russia, reshapes
the relations between the state authorities, oil developers and indigenous community.
Michael Watts has suggested that such an interaction can produce a ‘space of
indigeneity’ within the oil industry. However, the Salym case reveals that the
complicated relations between the Russian authorities, SPD, the community of Salym
village, its Khanty residents and KMAO’s indigenous population have generated rather
multiple indigenous spaces, which are territorially constituted through the socially lived
experiences of the oil concession. Overall, three such spaces can be abstracted from
the past and present of the Salym project.
First, the Russian authorities have introduced a dominant regime of their
legislative requirements and codes of industry conduct, which have granted Khanty
people specific indigenous rights and territories, privileging them compared to the
majority of the population. In Nefteyugansk district, this administrational indigenous
space is performed through the NDACIPN’s activities of governing local indigenous
affairs in the context of expanding oil development and changes in the regional
legislation. Given these changes, the indigenes’ rights and territories are no longer so
well established as they had imagined in the beginning of Salym oil operations.
Second, the indigenous persons themselves have undertaken various actions in
response to Salym petroleum development at local, district and regional levels. This
space has been the most unstable and contentious, but contrary to Watts’
understanding, it has not resulted in a large-scale indigenous mobilisation, not to
mention violence. Rather, the indigenes have historically understood and performed
their interaction with the oil producers rather in terms of cooperation than opposition.
Two examples described this attitude on the side of the indigenes: the acquisition of
Evikhon’s shares by some KMAO’s high-level indigenous representatives and the
64
collaboration between Evikhon and local land-users in the beginning of the Salym
operations. However, Shell’s entrance into this interaction has challenged these forms
of cooperation, and increasingly, positioned the Khanty to oppose the oil development.
Third, Shell has contended to secure itself a position in the West Siberian oil
industry and to respond to the ethical concerns of the international public. Prevailingly,
this approach is performed through making social investments into community
development, which have not yet directly targeted the social issue of indigenous
people. Additionally, SPD also manages the risks to its operations and international
reputation from confrontations with indigenes. For that, it attempts to establish the
Salym oil concession with its own specific regimes and codes of conduct and to manage
the indigenes entitled to alternative land-use rights. Furthermore, SPD has started to
employ native culture for corporate marketing purposes, demonstrating an ethical
conduct based on its own imaginations about learning from and protecting Khanty
traditions. The Salym Khanty, on the other hand, are not convinced that these
activities necessarily protect their cultural heritage and ancestral lands.
In conclusion, the Salym project reveals multiple spaces of indigeneity, which
have been produced through different imaginations and various forms of rule and
conduct. Being both material and mental at the same time, these socially lived
governable spaces are overlapping, instable and contentious. However, this instability
has so far produced neither large-scale indigenous opposition to the oil development
nor violence.
65
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aypin Y. D. and Shustov, V. B. (1998) Материалы международной
конференции “Коренные народы. Нефт. Закон.” [Materials of international
conference “Indigenous Peoples. The Oil. The Law”] held 23–25 March 1998 in KhantyMansiysk, Moscow: OOO “FKH Ltd”.
Alferova, L. (2006) Legal provisions for safeguarding the rights of indigenous
minorities of the North in the Khanty-Mansiisk Autonomous Region (Yugra), in relation
to protection of their ancestral lands, traditional ways of life, and livelihood activities.
Sibirica: Interdisciplinary Journal of Siberian Studies, 5 (2), 153–160.
Anderson, D. G. (2000) Identity and ecology in Arctic Siberia: the number one
reindeer brigade, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Balzer, M. M. (1999) The tenacity of ethnicity: A Siberian saga in global
perspective. Princeton, N.J.; Chichester: Princeton University Press.
Balzer, M. M. (2006) The tension between might and rights: Siberians and
energy developers in post-Socialist binds. Europe-Asia Studies, 58, 567-588.
Barry, A. (2004) Ethical capitalism. In Larner, W. and Walters, W. (eds) Global
Governmentality: Governing International Spaces. London: Routledge. Pp. 195–211.
Barry, A. (2006) Technological zones. European Journal of Social Theory, 9 (2),
239–253.
Bradshaw, M. (2006) Observations on the geographical dimensions of Russia's
resource abundance. Eurasian Geography and Economics, 47 (6), 724–746.
Bridge, G. (2007) A precarious power: International oil companies, knowledge
66
and global reach. Presented at ‘Oil and Politics’ conference held 10–12 May 2007 in
London. Available at
www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/csisp/papers/BRIDGE_A_Precarious_Power_FINAL_WEB_VERSI
ON.pdf, last accessed 06.09.2007.
Bridge, G. and Wood, A. (2005) Geographies of knowledge, practices of
globalization: Learning from the oil exploration and production industry. Area, 37 (2),
199–208.
Bulatov, V. I. and Timoshkov, S. N. (2005) Территории традиционного
природопользования Ханты-Мансийского автономного округа – Югра в период
1992-2004 гг. [Territories of traditional nature use in Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug
– Yugra during 1992–2004]. Ekaterinburg, Department for the Matters of Numerically
Small Peoples of the North in KMAO-Yugra.
Csonka, Y. and Schweitzer, P. (2004) Societies and cultures: Change and
persistence. In: Einarsson, N. et al (eds) Arctic Human Development Report. Akureyi,
Iceland: Stefansson Arctic Institute. Pp. 45–68.
Duma of KMAO (2006) Закон Ханты-Мансийского АО от 28 декабря 2006 г N
145-оз "О территориях традитционного природопользования коренных
малочисленных народов Севера регионального значения в Ханты-Мансийском
автономном округе – Югре" [Law of the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug from 28
February 2006 No 145-oz “On the territories of traditional nature use of indigenous
numerically small peoples of the North in the regional sense of Khanty-Mansi
Autonomous Okrug – Yugra”].
Elden, S. (2004) Understanding Henri Lefebvre: Theory and the possible.
67
London, New York: Continuum.
Forsyth, J. (1992) A history of the peoples of Siberia: Russia's north Asian
colony, 1581-1990. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Frynas, J. G. (2005) The false developmental promise of Corporate Social
Responsibility: Evidence from multinational oil companies. International Affairs, 81 (3),
581–598.
Gaddy, C. G. and Ickes, B. W. (2005) Resource rents and the Russian economy.
Eurasian Geography and Economics, 46, 559–583.
Gedicks, A. (2001) Resource rebels: Native challenges to mining and oil
corporations. Cambridge, MA: South End Press.
Glavatskaya, E.M. et al (2005) Населенные места Салымского края
[Settlements of Salym area]. Ekaterinburg: Basko.
Golovnev, A. V. and Osherenko, G. (1999) Siberian survival: the Nenets and
their story. Ithaca; London, Cornell University Press.
Gouldson, A., Wilson, E. and Bradshaw, M. (2005) Draft seminar report:
Seminar 3: Sustainability and the governance of corporations. ESRC Seminar Series:
Trans-sectoral Partnerships, Sustainability Research and the Oil & Gas Industry in
Russia, held 20 June 2005 in the Centre for Environmental Policy and Governance, LSE.
Available at http://www.spri.cam.ac.uk/events/russianoil/seminar3report.pdf, last
accessed 06.09.2007
Jordan, P. (2003) Material culture and sacred landscape: The anthropology of
the Siberian Khanty, Walnut Creek, CA; Oxford: AltaMira Press.
68
Jordan, P. and Filtchenko, A. (2005) Continuity and change in Eastern Khanty
language and worldview. In Kasten, E. (ed) Rebuilding Identities: Pathways to Reform
in Post-Soviet Siberia. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag. Pp. 63–88.
KMAO (2007) ‘Population’. Available at
http://www.admhmao.ru/english/obsvedE/frame1.htm, last accessed 06.09.2007.
Kryazhkov, V. (ed) (1994) Статус малочисленных народов России: Правое
акты и документы [Status of the small-in-numbers peoples of Russia: Legal acts and
documents]. Moscow, Yuridicheskaia Literatura.
NDACIPN (2007) untitled. Комитет по делам народов Севера администрации
Нефтеюганского района. Copied in Nefteyugansk, 17.07.2007, data from May 2007.
Pesikova, A. (2007) personal communication. Surgut, 21.07.2007.
Rose, N. (1999) Powers of freedom: Reframing political thought, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Sagers, M. J. (2006) The regional dimension of Russian oil production: Is a
sustained recovery in prospect? Eurasian Geography and Economics, 47 (5), 505–545.
Sawyer, S. (2004) Crude properties: The sublime and slime of oil operations in
the Ecuadorian Amazon. In Verdery, K. and Humphrey, C. (eds) Property in Question.
Value Transformation in the Global Economy. Oxford, Berg. Pp. 85–111.
Shell (2006) Meeting the energy challenge: Shell Sustainability Report 2006.
Available at http://www.shell.com/shellreport/, last accessed 06.09.2007.
Sibir Energy (2007) ‘Salym group of fields’. Available at
69
http://www.sibirenergy.com/operations/upstream/48/, last accessed 06.09.2007.
Slezkine, Y. (1994) Arctic mirrors: Russia and the small peoples of the North.
Ithaca; London: Cornell University Press.
SPD (2004a) Sustainable development strategy. Salym Petroleum Development
N.V, document no F01.00011.
SPD (2004b) Salym field rules. Amendment 1. The rules of conduct on the
territory of tribal land. Salym Petroleum Development N.V.
SPD (2004c) Salym project: Achievements and perspectives. Salym Petroleum
Development N.V.
SPD (2006) ‘‘Smile’ for Salym children.’ New Horizons. Corporate publication of
Salym Petroleum Development N.V., No.3, October 2006. Available at
http://www.salympetroleum.ru/content/en/file/SPD_NG_en3.pdf, last accessed
06.09.2007.
SPD (2007a) ‘Close to the community’. Available at
http://www.salympetroleum.ru/en/social_responsibility/, last accessed 06.09.2007.
SPD (2007b) ‘Project timeline’. Available at
http://www.salympetroleum.ru/en/project/timeline/, last accessed 06.09.2007.
SPD (2007c) Social performance plan 2007. Salym Petroleum Development N.V,
document no F01.00011.
SPD (2007d) ‘SPD logo’. Available at
http://www.salympetroleum.ru/en/about/logo/, last accessed 06.09.2007.
70
SPD (2007e) SPD press release ‘Presentation of Social Programmes for 2006–
2007’. Available at http://www.salympetroleum.ru/en/press/page2/147_17.04.07, last
accessed 06.09.2007
Stammler, F. and Wilson, E. (2006) Dialogue for development: An exploration
of relations between oil and gas companies, local communities, and the state. Sibirica:
Interdisciplinary Journal of Siberian Studies, 5 (2), 1–42.
Survival (2007) ‘Khanty’. Available at http://www.survivalinternational.org/tribes/khanty, last accessed 06.09.2007.
Tammilehto, O. et al (1999) Indigenous peoples and oil: Report of a seminar in
Finland, held in Helsinki 1–12 February 1999. Helsinki, The Fourth World - First
Peoples. Available at www.maanystavat.fi/oil/oil_eng.html, last accessed 06.09.2007.
Toulouze, E. (2005) The intellectuals from Russia's peoples of the North: From
obedience to resistance. In Leete, A. and Valk, Ü. (eds) Studies in Folk Culture Vol 5,
‘The Northern peoples and sates: Changing relationships’. Tartu, Tartu University
Press. Pp. 140–164.
Turkeltaub, A. and Bailey, S. (2007) Sakhalin-2 deal will alter business climate,
markets. Oil & Gas Journal, 105 (3), 34–35.
Vizgalov G. P. (ed) (2000) Салымский край [Salym area]. Ekaterinburg: Tezis.
Watts, M. (2004a) Resource curse? Governmentality, oil and power in the Niger
Delta, Nigeria. Geopolitics, 9, 50-80.
Watts, M. (2004b) Violent environments: Petroleum conflict and the political
ecology of rule in the Niger Delta, Nigeria. In Peet, R. and Watts, M. (eds) Liberation
71
ecologies: Environment, development, social movements. 2 ed. London, Routledge. Pp.
273 – 298.
Watts, M. (2005) Antinomies of community: Some thoughts on geography,
resource and empire. Transactions of British Geographers, 29 (2), 195–206.
Wiget, A. (1997) Black snow: Oil and the Khanty of West Siberia. Cultural
Survival Quarterly, 20, 13–15.
Wilson, E. (2000) North-eastern Sakhalin: Local communities and the oil
industry. School of Geography and Environmental Sciences and Centre for Russian and
East European Studies, University of Birmingham.
Yergin, D. (1993) The prize: The epic quest for oil, money and power. New
York; London: Pocket Books.
Yusupov, T. and Shevtsova, L. (1999) Сибирь у каждово своя: 30 лет посëлку
Салым [Siberia for everyone: 30 years of Salym village]. Nefteyugansk District: GUP
KMAO ‘Nefteyuganskaja tipografia’.
72