Национальный инвестиционный совет

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Содержание Summing up the Evidence Reformulating Social Science Research into Russia's Energy Sector: Contingency as Strategy Redefining the Research Focus: New Questions, New Answers Хан Ли-хуа 1. Внешняя политика России Отношения с СНГ Отношения с США Отношения с Евросоюзом Отношения с Японией Отношения с Китаем

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Summing up the Evidence

By reviewing the current trends of research into the Russian energy sector, the explanatory weaknesses, in terms of inference generation, of the security paradigm are exposed. Indeed, the security tack may be useful in clarifying specific aspects of relations among certain actors at a particular stage of their energy relations³⁰⁵. However, expanding the scope of the energy sector issue into the context of the above mentioned research, one can conclude that the security discourse's added value comes into play only when interests and subsequent energy strategies have been solidified; and is at a loss to produce insight into the causality behind historical events that lead to the securitisation of energy relations between states before their policy positions become increasingly mutually exclusive. By neglecting the interaction of particular pre-existing conditions, mechanisms, and preferences that lay the foundations for potential competing energy policies from the outset, researchers only provide insight post-factum, thus too late for substantial policy re-think or modifications


Reformulating Social Science Research into Russia's Energy Sector: Contingency as Strategy

Far from being pre-ordained as laid out in the security paradigm, Russian energy policy in the context of the research outlined above, can be portrayed as a set of actions undertaken by associated actors within the policy environment in which they find themselves. It is hardly likely that in an abstract sense while taking into all the constraints that Russian energy firms encounter in their activities that they will be able to maximise to the full extent (I assume here total gate keeper status over decisions of supply and demand in the Eurasian energy sector) under prevailing conditions. Instead, the historical record has demonstrated thus far that actor agency in the Russian energy sector has been far from perfect in terms of following a set plan to the letter. Instead, Russian agency has taken advantage of the opportunities presented within the prevailing policy environment under a sector-based consolidation strategy.

This contingency based approach is better suited for gleaning inference due to its rejection of determinism. Whether it is the failure to structure incentives for long term investment, resolving conflicts over the ownership of formerly centrally controlled critical infrastructure, management of the resource base, inefficient or unbalanced rent distribution, or managing the environmental fallout from industrial production, the challenges put forth by existing physical, financial, institutional and informational factors are compounded by interaction with human activity. Simply put, the actions undertaken now by actors in the energy sector have ramifications for future activity. In that sense, there are no guarantees that steps taken today will ensure future strategic success.


Redefining the Research Focus: New Questions, New Answers

The type of questions asked to a large extent determines the nature of the research programme as well as the type of answers derived from the research. For purposes of providing new directions for research into the formulation of Russia's energy policy, I follow the structuration paradigm developed by Aalto, Dusseault, Kennedy and Kivinen.³⁰⁶ Without going into too much detail, the structuration paradigm is a distillation of Gidden's and Wendt's attempts to characterise actor agency within a specific policy context. The independent variables that influence both energy policy as well as actor agency are financial, physical, institutional, and informational factors. The dependent variable is Russian energy policy formation. The authors hypothesise that the extent to which the four factors are present in observable cases, the more likely energy policy will be "structured", i.e., more influenced by the environment in which the strategy is formulated. The causal inference that can be derived from the hypothesis then becomes clearer. The more structured the environment is from which policy derived, the more complicated it becomes for actors to maximise interests.³⁰⁷

The gap between the Russian state's capability to exploit its natural resource wealth and the security paradigm's predictions for strategy maximisation are unbalanced in light of the physical, financial and institutional hindrances the industry faces. Based upon the critique of the security paradigm's viability in the context of the highlighted research and through the application of the structuration model, I have delineated three macro-areas in which social science based research into the Russian energy sector may derive policy relevant value.

First, in the security paradigm, Russia's state is presented as a unitary system, with federalism perceived as in the best case procedural, in the worst case, an out and out sham. Even if it can be argued that in a procedural sense that the institutions of democratic government are opaque and do not allow for divergent interests to be heard in the public political arena, it does not necessarily mean that regional elite interests, political and economic, do not deviate from Moscow's preferences. The variation in institutional, physical, informational, and financial factors on a region by region basis in Russia would support the concept of a complicated bargaining process among the relevant federal and regional elites in the strategic energy policy formation process.

Discussion: Russian strategic interests are not entirely the product of a continuously centralising state bureaucracy under the guidance of the Kremlin elite. The federal structure of the Russian state betrays the fractured nature of interests and their formation along not only federal and regional lines, but within the regional units as well, at the local level. The formalised institutional distribution of political preference formulation and agenda setting is complicated by the existence of cross-cutting and competing economic interests, financial flows, and shared physical (geological & environmental) factors.

If any lessons could be learned from the Yeltsin presidency, it was that regional elites have their own interests that are not always in line with those of the Kremlin, no matter how powerful the federal centre's power of administrative persuasion is. Economic and political interests in the regions are fused to varying degrees across the constituent units of the RF³⁰⁸. Many regions see Moscow not as an arbitrator or a mechanical distributor of the Federation's resources, but as a serious economic as well as a political competitor with its own interests and motivations that sometimes run contrary to those of regional elites. Instead of displaying a clear, mutually exclusive delineation among federal and regional decision making responsibilities and capacities, the Russian federal system is inhabited by legislative gray areas, where core concepts such as resource ownership, oversight, and associated rent distribution between Moscow and the regions are left seemingly ambiguous. This institutional no-man's land may provide Russian regional and federal decision-makers the manoeuvrability and security needed to forward their interests in a very short-term, cynically organised policy environment. Without consensus among actors or significant incentives to play by the established rules of the game over the long term, resources have more value left in the ground than in a commercialised form because their value and ownership are neither guaranteed by the state's institutional structures or the actors that populate the state itself³⁰⁹.

If we assume that Russian energy policy must take into consideration not only federal level prerogatives (both domestic and international, formed in Moscow), but those of the regional and local preferences (formed locally), the process of policy formation in Russia becomes more manifold and should be re-examined. The main objective of this research direction would be identifying the actors, their interests and their interplay with prevailing physical, financial, informational and institutional conditions that determine Russian energy policy.

Second, in the security paradigm, the influence of the internal institutional structure of the state is de-emphasised by aggregating industry interest formation exclusively to federal level state actors: the presidential administration, federal level oligarchs, ministries, and energy sector monopolies. The existence of gray areas in natural resource rent distribution contradicts the strong state / state centred model and could be evidence of a complicated set of competing political and economic interests both inside and outside the Kremlin walls.

Research question: What role(s) does the state play in energy policy formation in the Russian Federation?

Discussion: Although I understand and to a large extent agree with the critical analytical tack on Russia's energy policy taken by Milov et als³¹⁰, their analysis is in scientific terms, incomplete. It is one thing to identify the shortcomings of a particular policy. However, without providing conclusions drawn from the inference gleaned from their analysis, particular solutions to the identified policy deficiencies are hardly forth-coming. If we agree for the time being that Russian interests are not determined solely by the Kremlin elite, but are a compilation of regional and federal interests that change over time, then we need to refine our research into the different roles played by the Russian state in energy policy formation in order to qualify and quantify state intervention in the sector as well as locate pressing areas of policy that need to be addressed.

For starters, the Russian state's most obvious function in energy policy is its support of a domestically formed energy strategy in the international context. However, the Russian state also plays a role in domestic structuring of policy, the distribution of rents from the profits accrued from resource export, as well as coordinating sector-based efforts to maintain the industry's production and competitiveness.

Far from being a unitary omnipotent actor though, the Russian state is apparently geared to perform macro-level functions³¹¹. The Kremlin leaves the details of exploration, production and organisation up to the country's energy majors, ministries and individual actors, who compete amongst each other for their own preferences within a wider, more general set of strategic priorities. A valuable contribution to the literature from this macro-project would be to discover the degree to which sector-based interests overlap with the state-based preferences in the Russian energy sector, determine the extent to which the state can organise and aggregate interest competition among various actors and assess the appropriateness of observable policy outcomes in the state based, industrial and societal context.

Third, Russian energy policy does not take place in a vacuum. As much as Russia's domestic interests hold sway in policy formation, Russian energy policy interests interact with the preferences, conditions, and structures that exist in the international context. Causality in terms of energy policy competition on the international level is therefore is multi-directional.

Research Question: How does Russian energy policy manifest itself internationally?

Discussion: The scope in which Russia could serve to influence the world's energy sector is again differentiated through regionally based constraints. Russia's influence both in the near abroad can be interpreted differently from its relationship with it and strategic markets in the EU, the emerging markets in Asia and prospective markets in North America. For instance, observing Russia's behaviour in the Central Asian countries of the CIS, the Russian state is an institutionally strong, resource poor, geographically and financially advantaged actor compared to the resource rich, institutionally, financially and physically (geographically) weak former Soviet republics. Russia's ability to set the energy sector agenda in Central Asia is due to this specific combination of the four factors, particularly due to the country's geographical position and resulting natural monopoly over export transit routes from the region.

This advantage dissipates in the context of Russia's western neighbours in post-soviet space. Russia is still resource rich, institutionally stable, and financially solvent when compared to Belarus, Moldova and Ukraine. However, Russia is at a physical disadvantage due to the location of major pipelines that run through these transit states on to European markets. The difficulties experienced in Russia Ukraine, Belarus & Moldovan interstate relations may be due to the fallout from the collapse of the USSR: inefficient energy consumption, opaque resource and infrastructure ownership, debt-induced asset swaps, the institutionalisation of short term political, economic and social incentives and the spawning unstable domestic and interstate political regimes. Seen in this light, explanations for the subsequent monetarisation of the energy trade, the construction of the North European Gas Pipeline (NEGP) and the overall souring of regional relations extend far beyond the scope of the geo-political discourse.

Russia in the EU context is geographically disadvantaged, institutionally strong, resource rich, and moderately financially endowed compared to its EU counterpart. However, Russia's capacity to agenda set is contained when it concerns relations with the strategic consumer states in Europe. Russia's lack of direct access to the EU market may result in an inability to translate resource wealth into political capital in an EU institutional context. One of the EU's major institutional organising principles is liberal market competition and free transit of economic goods within the EU. Russia on the other hand is pursuing a rationalisation programme in the energy sector where vertically integrated energy majors are intent on creating a unified value chain from green field exploration to retail sales in the oil and gas industry. Whether the pursuit of these dissonant policies is politically motivated is subject to great speculation and is hardly the point here. What prevents Russia from being able to agenda set consistently and comprehensively may be its inability to interpret, navigate, and respond appropriately to disaggregated EU energy policy preferences. While Germany has signed on as the major European actor in the NEGP project, objections raised by the Baltic States, Poland and Sweden concerning the routing of the NEGP, UK concerns over Russian attempts to acquire downstream assets, and the EU requirement for reciprocity in acquisition of Russian upstream assets may be all symptomatic of a strategic policy dissonance between Russia and the EU developing from internal institutional factors and cannot be explained solely through a geo-political or even an economically rational lens.

Considering Russian interests in Asia and North America, the lure of both regions' consumer markets may be irresistible in terms of their economic potential. However, while being resource rich and geographically proximate, the Russian Far East is underdeveloped institutionally, hampered financially, as well as in an informational sense. Russia's policy and future role is therefore yet to be determined as emphasised by the delay in choosing a method of development and transit of Eastern Siberian resources. One need not look any further than the recent sale of Shell assets in the Sakhalin projects to Rosneft / Gazprom, or TNK-BP's decision to surrender its control over the Kovytka Gas Field project over to Gazprom. The major question looming here is will Russian resources be on line if regional demand continues to rise or will the whole enterprise be scuppered by internal policy squabbling and changing international conditions. In this final macro-field, it would be valuable to ascertain what is the combination of factors that contribute to and at the same time hinder Russia's energy strategy in a comparative research framework.


Conclusion

The security discourse ignores the variable conditions under which actor agency is produced due to the narrowness of its research question and lack of paradigmatic scope and structural robustness. In the energy sector, actors may have several priorities based on their ability to fulfil those preferences under ideal conditions over a period of time. Contingency thus can be seen as actors pragmatically taking advantage of short or medium term opportunities presented under prevailing conditions that fall within a more general, long term strategy. Whether the long term strategic preferences, in this case energy superpower status, are ever fulfilled cannot be fully ascertained by extrapolating preference maximisation from short to medium term decision-making, especially if incentives and conditions for actor agency are positioned to favour short versus long term strategies. By expanding the research programme to investigate factors that enter into actors' energy policy formation calculus, a more accurate picture of Russian energy policy can be formulated and a greater understanding of what ramifications energy policy can produce beyond the borders of one state may be in reach of researchers and analysts alike.