(Ir)Responsible Business: Examining EU Energy Companies in the Global South: A Foucauldian Discourse Analysis of Corporate Responsibility Disclosures

Abstract

European energy companies have long been central to debates on corporate responsibility in the Global South, given the scale of their impacts, their efforts to manage those impacts, and the historical power relations that shape their presence in these regions. In light of this, their corporate responsibility disclosures become especially important sites for examining how they present and justify their activities. This thesis therefore examines how European energy companies operating in the Global South discursively construct and justify their activities as responsible and how underlying power relations may interact with the discourses they create. It further highlights the functions of the discourses they produce and how they allow the companies to legitimize their presence in these regions. To achieve this, the study adopts a Foucauldian lens and analyzes the corporate responsibility discourses produced by two European energy companies through the concept of power/knowledge. Past literature has examined both corporate responsibility disclosures and the operations of energy companies in the Global South, including how disclosures are used to manage public perception and how Global North companies operate within historical power structures of extraction and neo-coloniality. Little attention has been paid, however, to how corporate responsibility discourses themselves function as an exercise of power. There is a need, then, to examine how the discourses produced by energy companies actively construct ‘truth’ about their activities. This thesis therefore seeks to address this gap by examining corporate discourses as sites where power and knowledge are produced and maintained. A qualitative research design was adopted for this study, with Foucauldian discourse analysis used as the main analytical method. The research focused on two cases involving European energy companies operating in the Global South: TotalEnergies’ EACOP and Tilenga projects in Uganda and Tanzania, and Repsol’s response to the 2022 oil spill in La Pampilla, Peru. The data consisted of corporate responsibility reports and press releases produced by the companies in relation to these projects. These texts were analyzed to identify the dominant discourses, their functions, and how they interacted with external power relations. The findings show that both TotalEnergies and Repsol produced three dominant discourses: a legal compliance discourse, a technical authority and expertise discourse, and a community-development discourse. Through these discourses, the companies emphasized their adherence to laws and regulations, their coordination with experts, their use of advanced technologies and methodologies, and their role in delivering development-oriented initiatives for the communities. The analysis further found that these discourses served several key functions. First, they helped legitimize the companies’ presence by presenting them as committed to community well-being. Second, they normalized harm by portraying impacts such as displacement as manageable and resolvable through their frameworks of remediation. Third, the discourses controlled who could speak by giving an authoritative voice to selected community members and experts, while sidelining critics. Lastly, the analysis revealed how the discourses actively reproduced broader power relations by positioning local communities as beneficiaries of corporate support, critics as misinformed, and the companies as benevolent entities. In this way, the discourses actively constructed and maintained the companies’ relationships with external actors in ways that privileged their position. This thesis therefore shows how corporate disclosures participate in the production of truths that are undeniably influenced by the power relations within which the companies operate. The production of these truths as corporate discourses allowed TotalEnergies and Repsol to frame their presence as responsible and justified, even in the face of controversy. The study contributes to existing literature by showing how corporate discourses in the energy sector can reflect and reproduce broader North–South power relations, while also functioning as a tool through which corporate authority is maintained. Future research could expand this analysis by including a wider range of energy companies or by examining how alternative discourses produced by critics could challenge corporations’ truths about their actions and impacts.