Sustainability spectacle and ‘post-oil’ greening initiatives

ABSTRACT

Sustainability projects are being promoted around the world with a large dose of spectacle, including those in the Arabian Peninsula where governments have invested heavily in large greening projects and events. This article examines these spectacular projects in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which are typically dismissed by Western observers as mere PR and ‘greenwashing.’ Moving past this simplistic critique, I contextualize ‘sustainability spectacle’ as a broad cultural phenomenon, with deep roots in Western countries. Based on ethnographic research on sustainability events, sites, and initiatives in the UAE, I show how ‘post-oil’ greening initiatives use sustainability spectacle to promote a positive narrative about the ‘modern’ national self, and reflect the growing international imperative to be green.

KEYWORDS:

• Sustainability
• spectacle
• modernity
• energy transition
• Arabian Peninsula
• United Arab Emirates

Introduction

Under the theme of ‘Connecting Minds, Creating the Future,’ Dubai hosted EXPO 2020, one of the top-tier World’s Fair expositions that happens every five years, from October 2021 to March 2022. After Covid-19 disruptions forced the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to call for its postponement, I was able to attend for several weeks in January 2022. Everything about the event was supposed to be spectacular, including the site’s hypermodern facilities stretched across 4.38 square kilometers in the southwest fringes of Dubai, to the individual pavilions, performances, and displays – and the event’s commitment to environmental sustainability.

Sustainability was named as one of the major thematic pillars of EXPO 2020 and the site had a dedicated ‘Sustainability District,’ where visitors were told they could see ‘some of the world’s most advanced technology in action, what countries are doing to champion sustainability, and experience how the human race can enjoy living in harmony with nature in a high-tech future’ (Expo 2022, Dubai 2022). The Sustainability District was anchored by the sustainability pavilion, ‘Terra,’ which showcased this vision of a ‘high-tech future’ through its modern-looking architectural design and profuse use of rotating solar panels and shade structures called ‘E-trees’ (Figure 1). Images of the pavilion have circulated widely in publications and advertisements for EXPO, including the Daily News handout from another event I attended in January 2022, the World Future Energy Summit (WFES) (Figure 2). Likewise, EXPO’s ‘Mobility’ pavilion had already been making the rounds to visually index the UAE’s commitment to ‘going green’ in other publications distributed in early 2020, before the event was postponed (Figure 3).

Figure 1. Terra – the sustainability pavilion at EXPO 2020 Dubai. Source: Author’s photograph, January 2022.

Figure 2. Opening image to an article about the UAE’s sustainability initiatives, featuring a rendering of EXPO 2020ʹs sustainability pavilion. Source: WFES (2022), 10 (author’s photograph, fair use).

Figure 3. Opening image to an article about the UAE’s sustainability initiatives, featuring a rendering of EXPO 2020ʹs mobility pavilion. Source: Rotana (2020), 24–25 (author’s photograph, fair use).

By harnessing the multiple layers of real and mediated images of modernity, the UAE’s boosters skillfully worked to advertise their high-tech visions of a more environmentally sustainable future. This article examines the contemporary politics of sustainability through the lens of spectacle. As I argue, these examples from EXPO’s use of spectacle are just one part of a much larger political, cultural, and aesthetic ecosystem that has long defined the idea of ‘sustainability’ not just in Dubai but around the world. EXPO is a powerful entry-point, though, because it was not just Emirati actors and institutions that were curating the spectacle of sustainability – it could be seen in some form in nearly every country’s individual pavilion. The fact that this kind of spectacle was used so widely at EXPO, I suggest, demands that scholars and commentators move beyond quick dismissals of it as greenwashing and instead seek to understand spectacular sustainability as a broader phenomenon implicated in how countries, companies, and individuals promote positive narratives about their ‘modernity.’

Sustainability has become an important discourse across the Gulf region in the past 15 years, and governments have invested huge sums of money in a range of spectacular greening projects, ranging from hosting global events, such as COP18 in Doha and EXPO and WFES in the UAE, to building solar parks and green university campuses. These investments are most often dismissed in the West as mere PR and ‘greenwashing’ (e.g. Rueter 2012; Thomas and Venema 2022). While there is much to critique about these projects, such dismissals often end there – without further analysis. In my position as a political geographer, I aim to go beyond the greenwashing critique to approach sustainability as a discourse with material and rhetorical dimensions that need to be analyzed on their own terms. As Death (2010, p. 2) notes, the notion of sustainable development cannot be simplistically categorized as a ‘universal public good, or alternatively as a cynical rhetorical device for legitimating continued inequitable and ecologically damaging economic development.’ Rather, a discursive approach positions sustainability as ‘an assemblage of practices of government which produce their own particular ways of seeing, knowing, acting and being’ (Death 2010, p. 2). Viewed thus, Gulf sustainability initiatives can be understood as constructed narratives that carry specific political and symbolic meaning for different audiences.

A constructivist approach to sustainability and nature-society relations encourages scholars to take spectacular greening initiatives seriously by asking, who is promoting them, when, where, and with what effect? In developing a geographic approach to spectacle, I have argued that these are the same questions we need to ask about spectacle. In the most general terms, spectacle can be understood as something of uncommonly large scale or experientially exceptional: it can be extraordinary in terms of space, time, reach, emotion, and more. It defies easy categorization because what counts as ‘spectacular’ depends on the context and who is interpreting it. Since it works through many mediums, scales, spaces, and temporalities, differently-positioned actors work with spectacle in countless ways. As such, spectacle has no essence but can only be understood by asking who is using it, when, where, and with what effect (Koch 2018b, p. 13). This article unites these questions to examine how specific actors perceive the utility of spectacle in promoting their visions of sustainability, development, and modernity, as well as how they work within the structure of openings and closures that spectacle can offer. In this way, the green branding spectacle at events like EXPO can be understood not just as PR, but a complex geopolitical identity project designed to promote the Gulf and local actors there as ‘modern.’

I have been investigating sustainability projects in the Arabian Peninsula since 2012, but data here are primarily drawn from four rounds of ethnography at an annual series of events tied to the Abu Dhabi Sustainability Week in the UAE each January from 2019–2022, as well as at EXPO 2020 Dubai in January 2022 (on event ethnography, see Campbell et al. 2014, Koch 2014, 2018c, Nelson 2021).¹ As a young, white woman from a US university, I largely fit the target demographic of these events and was thus given easy access, moving through their various spaces uninhibited and mingling comfortably with attendees and organizers alike. Repeated event ethnography allowed me to trace the evolution of language and actions of a wide range of actors over the years, and to interpret these practices as arising from both the discrete event in question and the broader semiotic context of international business, politics, and culture surrounding sustainability. While my case study of the UAE addresses local politics, I show that the spectacular greening projects found there are ultimately part of a much broader and longer history of sustainability spectacle seen around the world.

Modernity, spectacle, and the imperative to be green

References to environmental sustainability today are inextricably tied to narratives of modernity. Claiming modernity requires ‘green’ credentials.² That is, actors and institutions wanting to assert their status in the global order of modernity – whether to achieve financial, political, or moral aims – are increasingly required to demonstrate their commitment to environmental sustainability. There are dissenters to this now-dominant trend, of course, famously including former US president Donald Trump and Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro (Tharoor 2019). But the fact that even oil companies now flaunt their green credentials suggests that an environmentally-friendly image is recognized as important in nearly every realm of business and social life (Domonoske 2021, Li et al. 2022). To be green is to be modern. And yet, this is not a new story. To take another World’s Fair example, an early instance of spectacle’s fusion with environmental narratives was seen with the U.S. pavilion for EXPO ‘67 in Montreal, Canada, designed by the American architect and futurist, Buckminster Fuller.

In his ‘Spaceship Earth’ design concept, Fuller was responding to the narratives of eco-catastrophism that began to proliferate in the late 1960s (Buell 2010) (Figure 4). In contrast to the doomsday stories of environmental collapse advanced by Rachel Carson (1962) and Paul Ehrlich (1968), Fuller was a techno-optimist who believed humans could engineer their way out of the coming environmental apocalypse. The geodesic dome design for the U.S. pavilion at EXPO ‘67 helped launch Fuller to international fame and promoting his hyper-modern vision about environmental sustainability before the term ‘sustainability’ was trendy. Fuller deftly mobilized the image of modernity that was broadcast through the spectacle of EXPO ‘67 and produced his own spectacle of modernity at the U.S. pavilion to stake his position in contemporary debates about humanity’s ability to overcome Earth’s resources limitations. His techno-optimistic tract, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (Fuller 1969), would further capitalize on this spectacle to assert the primacy of human ingenuity and the possibilities of geoengineering to design sustainable futures on Earth and beyond (Höhler 2015, Koch 2021).

Figure 4. EXPO ’67 postcard of the U.S. pavilion designed by Buckminster fuller. Source: Fair Use.

Spectacle is not always about advertising modernity, but it is necessarily ephemeral. So it is not surprising that Fuller’s once-spectacular dome today encases a mostly unspectacular museum dedicated to the environment, the Montreal Biosphère. The remains of Fuller’s EXPO pavilion now stand as a clear monument to the longer history of spectacle in broadcasting Western narratives about the environment and nature-society relations. Of course, the question of how nature-society relations ‘should’ be configured is highly political, rendering the spectacles that advertise these ideas themselves highly political. Dominant global narratives about environmental values are firmly rooted in Western notions of purity and pastoralism (Spence 1999, Merchant 2003, Nixon 2005). These ideas have been diffused through a wide range of state-based policies, international organizations, non-governmental organizations, and even more diffuse social interactions – but with the overall result being the contemporary hegemony of the idea that those who promote or otherwise wield the language of environmental sustainability are coded as ‘modern’ and anyone who challenges it is coded as threatening and ‘backward’ (Goldman 2005, Dalby 2009, Falkner 2012, Adams 2020).

Research on environmental politics has largely focused on the role of institutions in disseminating Western notions of sustainability, but some scholars have shown that spectacles and summits are key nodes in these processes (Dalby 1996, Brosius and Campbell, 2010, Death 2010, 2011, Campbell et al. 2014, Koch 2014). As Death (2010, 2011) illustrates in his research on the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, environmental mega-events play an important role in broadcasting and institutionalizing the discourses of sustainable development and climate change. Events such as the 1992 Rio ‘Earth Summit’ or the 2002 Johannesburg Summit are often dismissed as ‘failures,’ but he argues that the very theatrics of the summit spectacles nonetheless succeeded in injecting ‘the discourse of sustainable development, as well as the science of climate change, within the remit of international diplomacy’ (Death 2011, p. 4). What is more, these spectacular events are productive insofar as they ‘allow political elites to show that they ‘have risen to the challenge and are hard at work resolving the differences that stand in the way of effective action on environmental problems’ (Death 2011, p. 7). Or, as Greta Thunberg irreverently said of the COP26 climate meetings in Glasgow in November 2021, the summit was a ‘global north greenwash festival’ and a ‘two-week long celebration of business as usual and blah, blah, blah’ (quoted in BBC 2021).

Beyond the environmental movement, spectacular sustainability is now commonly used by a wide range of actors to flaunt their environmental credentials to make some kind of profit or cover up negative environmental track-records (Laufer 2003, Wright and Nyberg 2014, Death and Tobin 2018, Gunderson 2020). As Ren (2012) argues, spectacular green branding is frequently elitist and anti-democratic. In her critique of greening projects in China’s cities, she shows how entrepreneurial politicians and local governments – together with an international network of consultants, planners and sustainability experts – cynically use eco-friendly rhetoric for career advancement and profit, at the expense of popular involvement in city planning (Ren 2012, pp. 23–25; see also Caprotti et al. 2015). Such green branding is found at many scales beyond cities, of course, ranging from individuals to corporations, buildings, universities, neighborhoods, islands, territorial states, and more. And it is not limited to countries aspiring to be deemed ‘modern’, it is also practiced by actors in Western countries that have learned to capitalize on their green credentials to advance their foreign policy agendas and business deals alike, as with politicians and businesses from Germany and Sweden (Death and Tobin 2018).

The flaunting of green credentials, or what Brown refers to as the ‘certification of virtue,’ can proliferate as incentives become institutionalized and ‘pressures to game the system increase’ – ultimately leading to a ‘moral involution that breeds cynicism and, inevitably, a degree of hypocrisy’ (Brown 2010, p. 748). The political stakes of spectacular sustainability go well beyond cynicism bred through dishonest PR, however. As Zehner (2012) argues in Green Illusions, the spectacle around utopian accounts of alternative energy futures, produced by the hydrocarbon industry, media, politicians, and environmentalists themselves, all preempt essential questions about energy conservation and reduction: ‘these spectacles […] narrow our focus. They misdirect our attention. They sidetrack our most noble intentions. They limit the very questions we even think to ask’ (Zehner 2012, xvi, emphasis in original).

Not all spectacular sustainability projects must be dismissed as a priori ‘bad,’ however. In their research on eco-island projects, Grydehøj and Kelman (2017) argue that ‘conspicuous sustainability’ initiatives may or may not ‘genuinely’ contribute to environmental sustainability and therefore ‘should not be denigrated en masse’ (111). This more nuanced approach to spectacle is welcome, but we are still left with the challenge of judging what ‘genuinely’ contributes to sustainability. Today, this is usually done on the basis of scale. That is, the impact of a sustainability initiative is judged (often implicitly) on how its price-tag aligns with the scope of the problem and the scope of the population it benefits. This is exemplified in reporting on the UAE’s Masdar City project, discussed below, where its estimated US $22 billion price-tag is held up as shameful, given the eco-city’s the relatively small spatial and social reach (e.g. Rueter 2012).

Nearly always missing from this scalar evaluation, however, is the question of who is serving as the judge. In the West, academic and non-academic observers alike almost uniformly judge anything spectacular, showy, and pricey to be bad. Indeed, spectacle has a decades-long history of being stigmatized within the West (see Koch 2018b, pp. 9–11). A longer discussion is outside the scope of this article, but it is important to note that this stigmatization of spectacle is precisely what underpins the dominant Western reading of Gulf sustainability initiatives as mere PR and ‘greenwashing.’ If the Arabian Peninsula’s new greening projects were ‘really’ about sustainability, the narrative goes, they wouldn’t be so expensive, flashy, and narrowly fixated on selling a (probably completely false) story about their sponsors’ environmental credentials.

To be clear, the critique of ostentatious greening projects like Masdar is not exactly ‘wrong.’ Sustainability initiatives across the Arabian Peninsula are deeply problematic and, more often than not, thinly veil gross abuse and misuse of natural resources, and an inescapable legacy of profiting from an extraordinary amount of hydrocarbons pumped from the region – and into the Earth’s atmosphere – for nearly 100 years. But this critique is inherently political because it raises the question of who has the right to judge the green credentials of others. Adjudicating the ‘real’ quality or value of sustainability initiatives – spectacular or otherwise – is itself a geopolitical act. In the Arabian Peninsula, local actors are keenly aware that their environmental credentials are being evaluated by actors in the West. Gulf sustainability initiatives are accordingly part of a broader geopolitical concern with challenging prevailing narratives in the West, which narrowly cast the region as ‘backward’ (see Smith 2015). If the adjudication of green credentials continues to remain in control of Western observers, and the story that ‘to be green is to be modern’ is indeed a Western-dominated one, then it behooves scholars of environmental politics to understand the effects of these narratives for those who are relegated to the margins of modernity, and to do so with caution and humility. Thus, in what follows, I do not aim to draw a normative judgment. Rather my goal is to interrogate the geopolitics of spectacle in Gulf sustainability projects and the diverse narratives, aspirations, economies, and material infrastructures that are spun out from them.

Capitalizing on green futures in the Arabian Peninsula

Articulating ‘post-oil’ futures through spectacle

Like the rest of the world, there is no shortage of spectacular sustainability projects underway in the Gulf region today.³ And yet the region is still best known as the world’s epicenter of hydrocarbon extraction and home to the worst climate ‘pariahs’ (Woertz 2021). Further, thanks to huge state subsidies, countries such as Qatar, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia have some of the highest energy- and water-consumption rates per capita globally (Al-Badi and AlMubarak 2019) This reputation has impeded local leaders’ developmentalist objectives over the past decade, leading them to increasingly integrate environmental sustainability in state development plans, such as the Qatar National Vision 2030, the UAE’s Vision 2021, and Saudi Vision 2030. Funded with a mix of state and private money, spectacular new solar parks and eco-cities, renewable energy research centers, and iconic, LEED-certified architectural icons now dot the region. Saudi Arabia, for example, set a record for the largest LEED Platinum project in the world for the entire campus of its new King Abdullah University of Science and Technology outside Jeddah, while the UAE hosts the new International Renewable Energy Agency headquarters in Abu Dhabi at its iconic ‘carbon-neutral’ Masdar City project.

Since most of these projects are predicated on a well-established model in the Gulf countries of cycling oil rents through major construction projects, various scholars have argued that state-led efforts to adopt and adapt the sustainability discourse is part of a broader effort ‘to maintain already existing strategies of legitimation, such as promoting alleged good governance cover structures, boosting the country’s reputation and the leader’s personal image, as well as preserving the social contract based on providing welfare gains as long as possible’ (Zumbrägel 2017, p. 54; see also Luomi 2012 Koch 2014, 2018a, Krane 2020). But the spectacle of sustainability is not limited to iconic buildings alone – countries in the Arabian Peninsula now also proudly host large international forums geared toward the sustainability community, such as EXPO 2020 or the new Saudi Green Initiative Forum held in Riyadh in 2021. So too have Qatari organizers promised to make the 2022 FIFA World Cup a green spectacle (Koch 2014, Meza Talavera et al. 2019).

In all cases, these efforts are symbolically indexed as signs of development, prosperity, and the visionary future orientation of their leaders. Or as Zumbrägel (2017) explains, the sustainability discourse is strategically deployed to reinforce narratives of modernity and reinforce the image of the rulers as ‘enlightened monarchs’ and ‘modernization managers.’ That is, these projects are all positioned as markers of Gulf modernity generally, as well as Gulf leaders’ commitment to bringing enlightenment and modernity that justifies their rule. We see this vividly in the case of the United Arab Emirates, which has been home to the largest number of spectacular sustainability projects in the Arabian Peninsula in recent years. The UAE’s economy continues to be heavily reliant on oil, ranking seventh in the world for both proven crude oil reserves and oil exports, about 30% of its GDP currently comes from oil (Embassy of the UAE 2022). Recognizing the political and economic risks of over-reliance on oil rents, Emirati leaders have intensified their diversification plans in the past decade. The push to promote sustainability, renewable energy, and the ‘green economy’ is a key part of this effort (Luomi 2012, Kumetat 2015, Abdelraouf and Luomi 2016, Ewers 2016, Akhonbay 2019, Dicce and Ewers 2021).

These efforts have largely been pushed by the federal UAE government, typically moving from the visionary declarations of state leaders to getting operationalized through institutions including the Ministry of Climate Change and Environment and the Ministry of Energy and Infrastructure. Support also comes from policy frameworks such as the emirate-level Dubai Clean Energy Strategy 2050 and the federal-level UAE Energy Strategy 2050 – the latter being launched in 2017 with the promise of huge investments in ‘nuclear and clean energy sources to meet the UAE’s economic requirements and environmental goals’ (UAE 2021). Other state backing comes from national oil companies, municipal water and energy authorities, and the UAE’s sovereign wealth funds and their many subsidiaries. Though the line between state- and non-state corporations is notoriously difficult to discern (see Hanieh 2018), the private sector has also been involved in the Emirati push for sustainability and energy transition.

The Masdar eco-city project and its evolution into the Masdar Future Energy Company is exemplary of this blurriness. Masdar was established in 2006 as a subsidiary of Mubadala, which is a sovereign wealth fund controlled by the emirate of Abu Dhabi. However, Masdar is designed not just to take money from the state’s oil rent coffers, but also to make money for the state. As such, it actively recruits private-sector partners in the UAE and from abroad, and is now making huge investments in the renewable energy sector around the world (Masdar 2022a). Masdar, in many ways, represents the official Emirati vision and logic about pursuing sustainability, clearly articulated in its Mission statement: ‘To help maintain the UAE’s leadership in the global energy sector, while supporting the diversification of both its economy and energy sources for the benefit of future generations’ (Masdar 2022b). An effective spectacle attracts attention to a central point, location, theme, or experience that its orchestrators want to highlight. Spectacular sustainability projects in the UAE allow its boosters to emphasize all the positive sides of this story (e.g. environmental protection, future prosperity, etc.), while down-playing the less savory sides which would presumably challenge the eco-friendly image that is desired (e.g. maintaining the UAE’s place in the ‘global energy sector’). In this sense, the cost of the UAE’s recent greening projects would be miniscule if the spectacle is effective at allowing them to retain their economic privilege in a world order built on hydrocarbon extraction.

The spectacle of sustainability events and spaces in the UAE

Much more than economic considerations is driving recent greening efforts in the UAE, however; political and symbolic capital are crucial too. Sustainability initiatives are inextricably related to Emirati national identity narratives, especially those surrounding the country’s ‘founding father,’ Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan. Sheikh Zayed oversaw the country’s transition to independence in 1971 and ruled as President of the UAE and Emir of Abu Dhabi until his death in 2004. He is locally framed as a committed conservationist and a visionary pioneer of ecological sustainability in the Arabian Peninsula and beyond (Ouis 2002, Koch 2015). As Luomi (2012, p. 196) describes it, the justification of sustainability projects around the figure of Sheikh Zayed represents a kind of ‘neotraditional environmentalist discourse […] that imitates an imagined pre-modern, Bedouin-inspired environmentalism.’ As with many other strands of Emirati nationalism, tropes of Bedouin heritage are fused with stories of modernity to show how the UAE can unite past and present for a prosperous and progressive future.

The eco-consciousness that Zayed is said to represent is now inextricably fused with Western language of sustainability. This nationalist rhetoric is not just promoted by Emiratis, but also by foreign visitors who attend its high-profile sustainability events. Figure 5 shows one vivid example I observed in January 2022, a salesman for the Dutch company Hydraloop dutifully paid homage paid to Zayed’s environmental vision at the end of his talk at the World Future Energy Summit. While Western environmental ideals are important in the UAE, the (unspoken but clearly understood and enforced) rules of public discourse require that iconic sustainability initiatives be justified through nationalist storylines about Sheikh Zayed’s visionary concern for the homeland’s environment. This is clearly illustrated by the Sheikh Zayed Sustainability Prize – an annual award recognizing ‘innovators and visionaries whose achievements have furthered the global proliferation of innovative, impactful and inspirational sustainability solutions’ (Zayed Sustainability Prize 2022).

Figure 5. Hydraloop speaker referencing Sheikh Zayed at the world future energy summit. Source: Author, January 2022.

Established by Mohammed bin Zayed in 2008, the award is described as ‘a tribute to his father, the late Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, and his sustainability legacy’ (ibid). The award is given every year at a major award ceremony at the World Future Energy Summit (WFES), which was also inaugurated in 2008. The ceremony also opens the annual Abu Dhabi Sustainability Week (ADSW) and is presided over by Mohammed bin Zayed and attended by many ruling family members, Emirati notables, foreign dignitaries, and a predictable media entourage to capture it all (Figure 6). The spectacle of sustainability governs the organization of all these events, which reverberate through local press and internationally to amplify the message of Abu Dhabi’s commitment to sustainability. This messaging opportunity was shared with Dubai in January 2022, when the Sheikh Zayed Sustainability Prize was instead awarded at EXPO – lending further sustainability credentials to that event, the emirate of Dubai, and its ruler Sheikh Mohamad bin Rashid, who delivered the awards (UAE Times 2022).

Figure 6. The Zayed sustainability prize ceremony at WFES in 2019 (top left), and various images from the WFES event in 2020. Source: Author, January 2019, 2020.

The pomp and circumstance surrounding EXPO, WFES, and ADSW are important nodes in the spectacular production of sustainability stories in the UAE. In addition to the built spaces to put sustainability on display, such as the Terra pavilion at EXPO described above, the events also invite people to interact with these spaces and materially engage with the sustainability concept. They include a wide range of experiential spectacles to attract visitors and locals, young and old, experts and laypeople alike to participate and join in producing the Emirati vision of ‘sustainability.’ Inside Terra, for example, visitors could play games to ward off the end of the world due to climate change, interact with displays about biodiversity loss or waste, but finally end in the ‘Laboratory of Future Values’ to explore neon-lit visions for hyper-modern sustainable futures. Or for ADSW 2019, families and children were invited to a festival at Masdar City, where they were encouraged to have fun engaging with sustainability themes and, like I did, to hold up signs proclaiming that they too ‘aim to be sustainable’ (Figure 7). The sustainability-themed events in the UAE are often designed to be fun and attractive, though their flimsiness is something that Western critics are quick to point to. At Masdar, this critique has been more significantly lobbed at the site itself rather than its various special events.

Figure 7. Advertisement for the 2019 ADSW festival at Masdar City (right) and scenes from the event. Source: Author’s photographs, January 2019.

Suspicion of Masdar City has been pervasive in the Western media since the very start of the project. It was declared in Deutsche Welle, for instance, to be ‘more glitz than substance,’ with evidence taken from ‘experts’ who describe it is ‘just a big show’ and a ‘green Disneyland’ (Rueter 2012). A Guardian article also predicted in its headline that ‘Masdar’s zero-carbon dream could become world’s first green ghost town’ (Goldenberg 2016). A visitor writing for Bloomberg similarly starts with a goal of unveiling the ‘truth’ about Masdar, framing his account around the question of whether it should be interpreted as a ‘beacon of hope, feeble experiment, or fig leaf of green for one of the world’s leading polluters?’ (Flint 2020). These media cliches are themselves problematic, but it does not mean there aren’t serious problems with Masdar. After my last visit in January 2022, I can confirm that little has changed over the 10 years that I have visited and that these journalists were visiting. It remains largely empty, largely wasteful, and largely for show.

Standard media critiques of Masdar could be applied to ill-conceived sustainability projects in many parts of the world, including China, as Ren (2012) discusses, or the United States, where plenty of green spectacle is found in places from Silicon Valley to the Pentagon (Zehner 2012, Johansen 2015). However, clichéd dismissals of Masdar’s ‘emptiness’ in the media unfailingly gloss over the fact that it is a spectacle that required Western individuals and companies to make it possible. Indeed, the initial Masdar plan was developed by one of the most famous Western architecture firms, Foster + Partners, and its British lead ‘starchitect’ Norman Foster.

Involving Foster was guaranteed to get Masdar spectacular treatment in the media. Foster is not famous just because of his sensational buildings, but because he relishes the limelight and is skilled at curating the spectacle around his work (McNeill 2005, Sklair 2017). And here, he was following in the footsteps of one of his idols, Buckminster Fuller, the techno-optimist architect who popularized his ‘Spaceship Earth’ concept through the EXPO ‘67 pavilion in Montreal. Gökçe Günel (2019) explains that Foster actually conceived of his design for Masdar with reference to the Spaceship Earth concept. And according to one of the on-site Foster + Partners architects she interviewed, ‘Norman wants to be the Bucky Fuller of this century’ (quoted in Günel 2016, 364). So while Masdar may actually be a project requested and desired by Emirati partners, they did not produce the spectacle in a vacuum. Rather, they strategically harnessed the Western tradition of cultivating a spectacle around iconic architecture and iconic architects themselves (Sklair 2017). That is, in positioning the Masdar ‘eco-city’ project as a spectacular icon of Emirati modernity and its commitment to cutting-edge sustainable design, they actively sought to adopt the Western tool of using spectacle to broadcast ideas about sustainability and modernity.

The spectacle of energy transition in the UAE

The transition from hydrocarbon-based energy sources to renewables is a core theme of conversations about dealing with climate change today. Techno-futuristic images of solar panels or wind turbines fill the semiotic landscape surrounding sustainability in much of the world – not just because renewable energy sources objectively produce less greenhouse gases, but also because they are visually evocative and seem to provide a simple roadmap to a hypermodern green future for their techno-optimist proponents. Of course, there are many environmental challenges associated with renewables, as well as political and financial ones (Zehner 2012, Cross and Murray 2018, Brock et al. 2021). One basic question that Guðmundsdottir et al. (2018) argue is nearly always ignored is, what is renewable energy actually being used for? Considering the case of Iceland, they show how local politicians harness the symbolic spectacle of renewables to deflect attention from the fact that it is largely powering heavy industries like aluminum and, meanwhile, ‘boosting corporate profits while socializing the environmental and social consequences of resource use and landscape transformations’ (Guðmundsdottir et al 2018, p. 595).

It is not just Iceland where this is happening: countless other places in the West have similar dynamics where the sustainability spectacle is produced by harnessing the eco-friendly image of renewables, but detached from the political and economic context that would determine whether they actually advance progressive environmental agendas. This dynamic is also readily apparent in the UAE. Here again, energy transition themes in Emirati greening projects arise from the Western tradition of using spectacle to advance a particular – decidedly partial – story about environmental sustainability. Hypermodern images of renewables are positioned to flag an image of a hypermodern country – one that is assiduously working to create a green, post-oil future. There is a vast gap in resources and political will that differentiates the simple act of adding a picture of a solar park to an advertising brochure and actually building a solar park, however. The fact that the Emirati government and its mix of para-statal and private allies have invested so heavily in promoting solar power in the past ten years is where the spectacle of sustainability in the UAE needs more attention.

There are now two spectacular solar parks at various stages of completion in the UAE: the Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Solar Park, first commissioned in October 2013, and the Noor Abu Dhabi Solar Power Plant, first commissioned in 2019. The Al Maktoum park currently covers a total area of 77 square kilometers outside Dubai and aims to reach a generation capacity of 2830 MW upon completion of its fifth phase in 2023. The Noor plant aims to reach 1.2 GW generation and is consistently framed as the ‘world’s largest single-site solar power plant’ – a superlative that the Al Maktoum park also claims. Like Masdar City, both solar parks serve as icons in the UAE sustainability space. They visually saturate everything from trade and government publications about the country’s energy transition to the more casual imagery in newspapers or advertisements about the country’s post-oil. They are easily added to the list when reporters, think-tank types, or consultants want to highlight the UAE’s burgeoning sustainability credentials. In the National Geographic’s feature on Dubai as ‘the world’s most improbable green city,’ for example, the Al Maktoum park illustrates the emirate’s commitment to renewables and predictably enthusiastic engineers hail the UAE’s vast solar potential (Kunzig 2017). A recent feature on Dubai’s greening efforts in the BBC does the same (Phelan 2022).

The Al Maktoum Solar Park’s namesake, the ruler of Dubai Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid, has been particularly keen on advancing Dubai’s green credentials in recent years, and with it, his own green brand. His image pervades the spectacular production of the park, just as his image pervades the spectacular production of Dubai as a whole – visitors and residents alike are constantly reminded that Dubai is his city, his emirate, his vision. The solar park discourse follows the contours of the official tropes required to pay homage to the ruler, but the park also derives its spectacular aura from its association with Sheikh Mohammed. Working in a similar way that Norman Foster’s name attracts attention to the Masdar project, having the backing of the exalted leader of Dubai is guaranteed to attract attention to the park. It is thus that Sheikh Mohammed’s name, official portrait, photographs on-site, and countless other references are curated to lend prestige to the project – repeated endlessly and variably, layer on layer (Figure 8). This is especially apparent in the iconic images of the futuristic-looking Innovation Center at the center of the complex, which was opened in 2021. Images of Sheikh Mohammed and the Innovation Center were fused and reproduced in countless media within the space itself – forcing visitors to revel in the spectacle of the spectacle in which they stood.

Figure 8. Advertisement for the Al maktoum solar park (left), images from inside the Innovation Center lobby (bottom center, top right), cover of Dubai Carbon’s state of green economy report 2020 (top center), and a Tweet about Sheikh Mohammad’s inauguration of the solar park’s Innovation Center. Source: Author’s photographs and screenshots, January 2022.

The multi-media layering effect amplifies the spectator’s sense of being overwhelmed by the message – here, the impressive modernity and green credentials of Dubai and its ruler. The hyper-mediation is more effective at communicating the idea that the park represents Dubai’s effort to promote the post-oil energy transition in the UAE because the Al Maktoum Park is a real place, with real solar panels that one can view from the Innovation Center’s observation deck. Again like Masdar, even though it is real in a material sense, it does not mean that the panels sitting in the desert outside the window are actually working properly, or even at all. When I visited with students in January 2022, the center’s guide could not answer our questions about the problem of dust storms, the efficiency of the panels, their life span, or even how much energy was actually being produced from the complex. And when asked if the solar energy was going to help power Dubai’s new reverse-osmosis desalination plants, we were told that no, the UAE’s new ‘clean coal’ plant would be the source for those. The coal power plant was put on hold the next week, but the project’s planned 3.6 GW capacity would have dwarfed ‘all the UAE’s planned solar arrays combined’ (Krane 2021, p. 77). Uncomfortable numbers were omitted by the park’s official representative, of course, but he did eventually admit that parts of the complex that I thought were already functional (namely, the robotic waterless cleaning systems and the CSP generation systems in the project’s fourth phase) were far from being operable.

The fact that the solar park was actually producing very little of the renewable energy that its managers claimed it would, in a strange way, was not relevant for the production of the spectacle. What mattered most was the photographic potential – only through actually being built could this visual spectacle be fully utilized. Even more so than Masdar’s ‘eco-city’ imagery, the image of a solar panel continues to circulate globally as an almost unquestioned icon of sustainability and modern, post-oil futures. The spectacle is successful to the extent that the visually evocative site can harness this message and serve as a ‘symbolic token’ of sustainability (Brown 2010, p. 747), while simultaneously deflecting attention from the UAE’s continued reliance on – and active promotion of – a decidedly non-post-oil future. In this sense, little has changed in the ten years since construction began on the Al Maktoum Solar Park. Little, that is, except for the scope of the country’s use of sustainability spectacle in the new era of climate anxiety. In this, the UAE is again no outlier and it doesn’t require a Norwegian teenager to call out ‘global north greenwash festivals’ to see that such spectacles are proliferating around the world at a breath-taking speed.

Conclusion: to be green is to be modern

From the shiny sustainability pavilion at EXPO 2020 Dubai and solar parks in the Emirati desert, to the celebratory experiences and events during Abu Dhabi Sustainability Week, the spectacular sustainability interventions in the UAE requires a more incisive set of questions than the common impulse to focus on how sustainable they ‘really’ are. Moving beyond simple moralizing frames, a critical geopolitics of spectacle can better illuminate how global sustainability narratives are brought to life. In the diverse examples considered here, what is actually meant by ‘sustainability’ is always left strategically vague. As I have argued elsewhere, ‘it is precisely the ambiguity of the notion of sustainability that makes it so powerful’ (Koch 2014, p. 1136). There is money to be made in projecting green futures for the UAE, but capitalizing on sustainability means reaping the political and symbolic, reputational rewards that it offers too.

Emirati leaders and their allies in realizing these green spectacles all understand that the rewards of tapping into the sustainability discourse can be more effectively harnessed if it is allowed to mean many things to many audiences. This adaptability is what makes sustainability attractive to actors from sectors such as oil and gas that are resistant to aggressive climate change policies – and the leaders in the UAE who depend on continuing hydrocarbon extraction long into the future. And because ‘sustainability’ is now commonly used to index one’s modernity, it can be readily transformed into a spectacle to be consumed and engaged with to both flag and feel good about one’s status as moral environmental subject who cares about the future of the planet. On this account, the UAE is no different from the many Western countries, which have been performing the same rituals through the discourse of sustainability for decades. In producing their own spectacles of sustainability, Emirati leaders are clearly aligning themselves with the well-established Western tradition of using spectacle in promoting environmental sustainability and promoting a positive narrative about the ‘modern’ national self.

By acknowledging the dominant association of being green with being modern, we can better understand how sustainability spectacle moves through a contemporary geopolitical system stubbornly defined by (settler) colonialism and its moral hierarchies of modernity and backwardness. ‘Modernity’ matters deeply, especially for those people and places denied this status. Scholars of sustainability don’t need to stigmatize spectacle to critique it. We don’t need the moral posturing of language like ‘greenwashing,’ which preempts a critical interrogation of what spectacle does. Rather, we need a nuanced reading that considers the multiply-scaled geographies of spectacle to account for how it is used in all social, cultural, and political realms, and in all parts of the world.

Highlights for social media

To be green is to be modern. This article considers how this story of modernity is broadcast the spectacle of sustainability, illustrating how the Emirati sustainability spectacle is part of a long Western tradition of spectacular sustainability.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation [Fellowship for Experienced Researchers]; Fulbright Program [Middle East and North Africa Regional Program]; IASS-Potsdam [Visiting Fellowship]; Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University [Department of Geography and the Environment]; Syracuse University [Office of Sponsored Programs CUSE Grant].

Notes

1. This research was reviewed and approved by the Syracuse University Institutional Review Board under protocol #17-139, open from 2017–2022.

2. The coding of environmental sustainability through the label of ‘green’ is political and problematic. Quotation marks are important to mark the term as constructed and contested, but for ease of reading, I drop them hereafter. I will also embrace the slipperiness of terms like green, (environmental) sustainability, eco-friendly, and climate friendly – recognizing that these terms are frequently blurred in popular use today.

3. The large amount of scholarship covering this topic in recent years cannot be reviewed here, but see for region-wide discussions, see Abdelraouf and Luomi (2016); Ewers (2016); Koch (2018a); Luomi (2012); Sillitoe (2014).