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- Convenors:
-
Katharina Bodirsky
(University of Konstanz)
Eva Riedke (University of Konstanz)
Clemens Greiner (University of Cologne)
Mario Krämer (University of Cologne)
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- Format:
- Workshop
- Transfers:
- Closed for transfers
Short Abstract:
This workshop is split into two thematic sessions: Session one explores competing claims to energy commons within unevenly experienced renewable energy transitions. Session two examines processes and perceptions of un/commoning of renewable energy sources and related landscapes.
Long Abstract:
This joint Workshop examines the interrelations between un/commoning and renewable energy transitions from two angles: Session One starts out from the observation that the Anthropocene narrative foregrounds the need for renewable energy transitions but also glosses over the unequal social relations involved in environmental destruction as well as the (post-)colonial exploitation of (extra-)human energy. How is the global ‘good’ of carbon reduction experienced by unequally positioned populations when new extractive industries are set up for renewable energies and what notions of ‘commons’ emerge in this context? The session explores this along two (interrelated) understandings of the commons. Firstly, we examine claims to ownership of energy commons and the kinds of struggles they are embedded in. Secondly, we discuss existing commoning initiatives concerned with communally managing energy sources.
Session Two explores processes and perceptions of un/commoning of renewable energy sources and related landscapes. The accelerating transition to renewable energy sources brings about a substantial transformation of (predominantly rural) landscapes. The resourcification of wind, solar or geothermal energy can lead to ‘sacrifice zones’, as well as to dynamics of communal valorization. We examine these processes by focusing on three interrelated issues: First, the practices and politics of communal management of renewable energy sources and related landscapes; second, resistance movements against an extractivist logic of implementing renewable energy sources, as well as against the remodeling of landscapes; and third, resulting communities of solidarity and responsibility that aim at creating more sustainable and resonant landscapes.
Accepted contributions:
Session 1Contribution short abstract:
Marine areas, including straits, occupy an important place as commons in the culture of coastal communities in Indonesia. This paper explores the changes and consequences of the discourse on renewable energy infrastructure development in the Larantuka Strait.
Contribution long abstract:
This paper explores the meaning of the strait as a commons for coastal communities in Larantuka, Indonesia, in relation to the discourse of marine renewable energy infrastructure development in this location. Culturally, eastern Indonesian communities such as Larantuka share a common concept of access to marine resources. This discourse has created anxiety that is reflected in public responses between support and opposition, also hope and fear. How do the coastal communities interpret the Larantuka Strait as a common? What are the techno-social imaginaries that emerge? Finally, in the face of the infrastructure development plan, how is the strait as a common being transformed into a private site for the production of electrical energy? To answer these questions, I conducted ethnographic research in the Larantuka Strait, Indonesia, in September-October 2024, and this year in April-August.
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.
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?
Contribution short abstract:
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.
Contribution short abstract:
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.
Contribution short abstract:
Winning is a former colliery community in England. Its extensive remediation process resulted in a new taskscape. I explore how some villagers came to view rites and futures forged as part of the process as threatened by new forms of extractivism associated with decarbonisation and green energy.
Contribution long abstract:
How do residents of a remediated, post-coalonial colliery village react when their recently created rites and novel ideas about future possibilities are threatened by new, previously unimagined, forms of extractivism? I explore this question by drawing on 18 months of fieldwork carried out in just such a community between 2022 and 2023.
Winning is a medium-sized village in rural North East England. For much of its existence the settlement’s taskscape and temporalities were informed by extractivism. Specifically, a workforce largely composed of male villagers won vast amounts of coal from the town’s mine. However, owing to Thatcherism this mine was shuttered at the 20th century’s end. In place of this extractivist endeavour which had led to a blighted landscape there developed a remediated woodland, new forms of light industry, and commerce. Some effort was also made to preserve accounts of the past and generate forms of community orientated to the future. Not only did old villagers begin to think of their environment differently but the composition of the village’s population changed bringing migrants from the south.
Yet, during my fieldwork, it was felt this new future was at risk. Specifically, the remediated landscape, which villagers had come to regard as common property, was now threatened anew by the prospect of renewable energy generation. Efforts were underway to extract wind and solar resources from the village. I detail in my presentation why these proposed developments created a panic among some residents.
Contribution short abstract:
The paper explores the (un)changing perspectives on the meanings of landscape in rural Germany. It investigates two cases of opposition to energy infrastructure projects (dam building and wind power extension) interfering with emic perceptions of landscape aesthetics at different points in time.
Contribution long abstract:
The paper investigates the (un)changing perspectives on the meanings of landscape (and energy landscapes in more particular) in rural Germany from a diachronic perspective. More specifically, it compares and analyses two cases of opposition to technological innovations and energy infrastructure projects interfering with emic perceptions of landscape aesthetics at different points in time. The first is the opposition to dam building: the building of dams in the lower-mountain regions of Germany started in the late 19th century and progressed on a relatively large scale in the first decades of the 20th century. The second case is the current controversy on wind power extension in rural areas. In both cases, landscape and nature conservationists substantiate/d their opposition to these technological developments by referring to an infringement of landscapes and landscape aesthetics. The paper asks what has been and is perceived as ‘the landscape’ and ‘nature’ and in how far these perceptions have changed – and might further change – in the course of time. My argument is that the past and current concerns for landscape aesthetics were/are based on perceptions of loss and drastic change (Marris 1986) which are triggered by a traditional impulse (Krämer 2024) and produce/d what Angé/Berliner (2020) refer to as ecological nostalgias. However, perceptions of landscape and nature are not static but commonly change and the case of dam building in particular illustrates an interesting conversion from opposition to acceptance – and partly even admiration – within a few decades.
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.
Contribution short abstract:
This paper will consider proposals for wind farms in the Baltic Sea. The Baltic sea is a common resource bordered by several nations yet they compete for it as a resource. How do proposals for wind farms speak to current political, environmental and social concerns and who stands to benefit?
Contribution long abstract:
This paper will consider proposals for wind farms in the Baltic Sea. The Baltic sea is a common resource bordered by several nations yet they compete for it as a resource. How do proposals for wind farms speak to current political, environmental and social concerns and who stands to benefit?