Clean, Mean and Dirty: Energy in the United Arab Emirates

Abstract

There is a major reconfiguration of state–society relations happening in the Arab Gulf states, and it is not the result of a protest movement for democratic reform. The larger process at work has been progressing since the 1970s, when Gulf states declared their independence from the trucial relationships with Great Britain. It is a process of state building, both in institutional capacity and in state identity formation. While the Arab Spring has necessitated a response from Gulf states, in some places a brutal crackdown on protesters, in others a silencing of civil society groups, all have reacted with the tried and true policy of patronage, increases in social benefits to increasingly minority citizen populations among large expatriate workers. Patronage politics, or the commonly understood practice of rentierism, is a limited domestic framework for understanding policymaking. It assumes certain homogeneity within the domestic political sphere and does not explain the variance and competing pressures of federal politics and international constraints. These patronage remedies from the center can be seen as the latest efforts at an on-going project: state-building in a hurry. In fact, the pattern of state-building in the Gulf, particularly in the Arab Gulf States¹ (Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, United Arab Emirates and Oman) is characterized by a few discrete mechanisms: a state-led economic development model, a consensus-based policy process, a nationalist ideology that is prestige-hungry, and a nascent foreign policy that is reliant on informal networks based on colonialist ties and defense subsidies.