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Contribution short abstract

Marine renewable energy technologies present both opportunities and risks for changing extractive and commoning patterns. How are tidal power initiatives in Nova Scotia affected by rural struggles for energy independence, fisheries conflicts and relations with First Nations groups?

Contribution long abstract

New marine renewable energy infrastructures are part of increasingly busy, multi-purpose oceanic spaces. Many analysts see these power technologies as requiring new commoning institutions and norms towards marine justice. Like other nascent ‚green’ industries, marine renewables are shaped by sedimented economic and political patterns and visions, that affect how these technologies are taken up - or not.

The Canadian province of Nova Scotia claims the most powerful tides in the world, and has invested heavily for a decade in developing tidal turbine stations. Though many agree that the idea is good, the decision-making process around investment, benefit-sharing and environmental impact has been very fraught. This paper uses early results from stakeholder interviews, participant-observation and media analysis to analyze the experience of tidal energy production, and how different actors in the province conceive a tidal energy commons. In particular, I examine how the tidal power dream is affected by island community struggles for energy independence, high-stakes fisheries conflicts, evolving relations with First Nations land and sea stewards, and the push- and pull around decarbonizing Canada. Lastly, the paper asks how this particular form of making and sharing energy is similar or different from locally established common-pool resources such as coastal tourist sites or education. Such a case-study perspective will help elucidate how the notion of 'energy' itself is constituted, and what kind of energy-related processes are valued as extractive or reciprocal.

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Contribution short abstract

How is solar taken up by customers in Kenya as a relatively neutral technological means of harnessing an abundant, untapped energy resource in the absence of costly infrastructure while at other times ascribed an ontology that lays bare much larger socio-technical, post-colonial extractivist logics?

Contribution long abstract

Kenya's solar market has been one of the world's leading markets for off-grid solar products - with rural households turning to solar devices as an opportunity to receive basic electricity in regions to which the national electricity grid hasn’t been extended, but also as a cheaper/more reliable/sustainable “alternative” to grid electricity. Engaging with ethnographic research conducted between 2020 and 2024 amongst solar customers in Kenya, the paper gives nuance to the disparity of local framings that in part paint solar energy as a relatively neutral, new, cleaner technology made available to those that have so far remained “unelectrified” versus solar as an abundant, renewable, natural “common resource”, that comes directly from the sun and should therefore be “free”. The paper seeks to hereby engage with local critiques by solar customers wherein solar is ascribed a technological ontology attentive to postcolonial dimensions of renewable energy transitions and wherein modern energy technologies are "in and of themselves" seen to be embedded in broader political economic patterns of green extractivism. What exactly is disentangled as customers claim that “solar is the power of God” and therefore “must be free” and how are these claims, in turn, weaved into local critiques of colonial or neocolonial power dynamics, imaginaries, discourses, and practices? With what framings and with what vocabulary do customers of solar products come to participate in global debates around consumption, extractivism and energy colonialism?

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Mega energy projects are reshaping and reconstructing human–animal relationships and mobilities. The initiation of extractions, solar energy projects, and infrastructure-related projects, the region has experienced the reshaping and tranforming of desert ecologies from camels to solar energy.

Contribution long abstract

Mega energy projects in the Thar Desert of Pakistan are reshaping and reconstructing human–animal relationships and mobilities. Desert is known to be a habitat for indigenous pastoralist groups. Since the initiation of extraction, solar energy projects, and infrastructure-related projects, the region has experienced the reshaping, relocation, and dispossession of animal and human commons and their existence. The region's identity, sense of belonging, and subsistence livelihood have been shaped by rain, drought, and human-animal common, particularly during the monsoon season or in drought years. Recent energy and development projects have affected, transformed, dispossessed, and disrupted their local relationships with animals, their historical migration routes, and common lands, and reshaped their animal rearing activities and mobilities along with changing water bodies and solar energy water projects. The shrinking of common lands and urbanization have reshaped new mobilities with the possibility of solar water pumps, not only altering the pattern of seasonal mobility but also changing human-animal relationships and practices in the desert. Furthermore, this paper will highlight how camels, historically known as desert ships, are becoming a burden in energy regime infrastructure, while donkeys, once domesticated, are now reverting to a wild state. This research is based on ethnographic fieldwork and embedded knowledge as a native of the region belonging to a pastoralist family. Ethnographic fieldwork was conducted for a doctoral project between 2022 and 2023 in the southeastern district of Pakistan bordering India.

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This paper examines Iceland’s and Kenya’s renewable energy landscapes, focusing on tensions between local empowerment and global market priorities. It highlights dynamics of un/commoning, exploring whether these cases represent green sacrifice zones or sustainable energy landscapes of value.

Contribution long abstract

Renewable energy landscapes are emerging as sites of complex negotiations between local needs and global demands. This paper examines two contrasting cases, Iceland and Kenya, to explore how energy resources are appropriated, distributed, and contested within different socio-political contexts.

In Iceland, 80% of electricity generated from renewable sources powers aluminum smelters, prioritizing industrial production over local consumption. This dynamic highlights the export-driven model of resource utilization, where economic imperatives overshadow communal benefits. Moreover, Icelandic aluminum production raises environmental concerns, since it can be cheaper than recycling the metal. In Kenya, geothermal energy development is heralded as a driver of national electrification and socio-economic progress. Yet, plans to establish data centers and export green electricity as hydrogen to industrialized nations like Germany reveal similar tensions. Interviews with Kenyan geothermal professionals expose competing narratives—one emphasizing local empowerment and another shaped by global market logics.

The analysis focuses on the un/commoning of renewable energy landscapes in these contexts, addressing two core questions: How are renewable resources managed to balance local and global interests? And should the two distinct yet parallel cases be understood as green sacrifice zones or as energy landscapes of value, reflecting competing logics of extraction and communal benefit? By diving into these cases, this paper contributes to understanding the socio-political dimensions of renewable energy transitions. It highlights the need for equitable frameworks that prioritize sustainable benefits for local populations while interrogating the global pressures shaping energy landscapes in the Global North and South.

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Swiss commoners’ forests lost value after the fossil energy turn, but regained value in the green energy turn as a sustainable timber resource. After having maintained the forests outside the capitalist system until today, the new turn helps commoners to re-enforce decentral heating systems.

Contribution long abstract

Access to timber but also to forests generally for multiple reasons had been a central part of rights and duties of Swiss Commoners systems since the 13th century. Still today the more than 1600 commoners’ organizations own more than 1/3 of all forests in Switzerland in common property and are the main force to maintain biodiverse cultural landscape ecosystems. But since the devalorisation of timber after the energy turn to fossil fuel, the forest commons shift from a revenue to a burden, as the maintenance costs are rising due to rising labour costs in a post-industrial market context. But as many commoner’s organizations have been holding the value of identity of collective forests high, they still managed them outside the capitalist value system via internal cross subsidies by income from real estate land, housing, gastronomy and water rights for hydropower. Since the green energy turn, increasingly timber as a regrowing natural source of energy becomes an important resource again and also serves for forest maintenance. But different as in other parts of the world, the Swiss commoners, thanks to their secured common property, use this rising value to invest in collective decentralized heating systems beyond a market logic, helping to further subsidize forest ecosystem maintenance. Two cases from commoner’s organization in the German speaking (Sarnen, Canton Obwalden) and the French speaking part (Val D’Annivier, Canton Valais) illustrate this innovation trend which allows them to re-enforce commoning processes as responsibility to care for the landscapes in the age of the extractivist ‘green capitalist turn’.

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Contribution short abstract

Frackquakes near the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in the Permian Basin problematize assurances of geological stability and thresholds of containment needed for nuclear waste management and policy. This paper approaches a prefigurative and incomplete politics of fracture at imperceptible scales.

Contribution long abstract

Nuclear waste containment theories, policies, and public perception depend on technoscientific certainties about geological composition. But frackquakes near the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in the Permian Basin problematize assurances of stability and separability. Moreover, disagreements among geologists, waste disposal specialists, the fossil fuel industry, and government agencies create vague or obfuscated data about what’s happening underground. As ordinary people attune to massive sinkholes, radioactive leakage, methane emissions and frackquakes at the surface, they question calculable thresholds of waste, exposure and pollution that delimit safety in proximity to waste.

This opens questions about the role of sensing and sensing technologies at imperceptible scales and durations. Descriptions of sensation challenge technoscientific forms of seismic and infrasonic monitoring that distinguish among frackquakes, nuclear activity, seismic prospecting, acoustic shadows or cloud cover, showing how uneven practices and technologies of seismic and infrasonic monitoring intensify affects of living in a sacrifice zone.

Situated in a context of nuclear colonialism in the American West, this paper approaches a politics of listening with fractures. Drawing on sonic and sensory ethnographic research, it focuses on how imperceptibility is central to ongoing projects of energy extractivism. It suggests that tremors complicate assumptions of separability that determine calculable thresholds of waste or containment, as well as who or what matters at imperceptible scales. Ultimately, it argues that sensation problematizes both event and perception, and offers the felt zone as a concept for a prefigurative and incomplete politics of fracture.