Making power sustainable: Exploiting environmental sustainability for the sake of authoritarian regime resilience in the oil- and gas-exporting Arab monarchies

The absolutistic monarchies in the Arabian Peninsula face various challenges of reconfiguring their hydrocarbon-based rentier economies, minimizing their large ecological footprint and cushioning the severe effects of a looming climate collapse. The oil boom brought prosperity, development and modernization that helped the authoritarian state-building processes among the Arab Gulf monarchies: Oil revenues were key for the economic and political stability. However, the countries’ long-term hypermodern development course created an ecologically questionable lifestyle of unprecedent overconsumption. In a steadily growing carbon- and climate-restrained world, they experience mounting pressure to fundamentally alter their governance model. With less financial reserves of selling oil and gas Gulf leaders have less power to distribute their welfare gains as anchor of their political stability. However, as this contribution will show the field of environmental sustainability also offers opportunities for strengthening authoritarian regime resilience. This is especially apparent among ‘green frontrunners’ such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar. Using the example of clean technology and energy diversification (e.g. developing low-carbon or carbon-free energy sources), it shows how incumbents in these countries seek to maintain their control over the sustainable transformation and instrumentalize the field as a means to consolidate their power base. The analysis shows how sustainability governance helps in upholding the Gulf states’ neopatrimonial system of interlocking privileges and interests through strategically binding various actors including other family members, technocrats and powerful business elites. Furthermore, green business and the promotion of like-minded and meritocratic technocrats with international outreach help to booster economic hedging towards new global partners, in particular towards authoritarian global powers such as China.