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Lilia Caiado Coelho Beltrao Couto
(University College London)
Format:
Panel
Streams:
Energy transitions
Sessions:
Wednesday 6 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Equitable South-North collaborations for just energy transitions.
Panel P35 at conference DSA2022: Just sustainable futures in an urbanising and mobile world.
Achieving just energy transitions will depend on the knowledge produced in and from the global South. This panel will discuss potentials and challenges in creating equitable partnerships among institutions and researchers from the global South and the global North.
Long Abstract:
'What we know' and 'how we know' about energy and development in the global South is important in achieving just energy transitions. While much contemporary energy research provides room for collaborations among institutions and researchers from the global South and the global North, these collaborations pose significant challenges to generating equitable partnerships and achieving epistemic justice.
To tackle this issue, the proposed session will build on UCL Energy and Development Group's (EDG) ongoing work on South-North collaborations to unpack potential avenues for generating equitable research partnerships among institutions and researchers across the South-North divide. To do so, this session will draw on the South-North Collaborations (SNC) workshop planned for March 2022. Supported by the UCL Grand Challenges, the SNC workshop will reflect on the successes and imbalances between the South-North partners and the effects that these have on research outputs. The outcomes of the SNC workshop will be translated into practical recommendations for generating equitable South-North collaborations.
The proposed DSA conference session will present the outcomes from the SNC workshop in the form of a presentation. The lessons from the SNC workshop will be used to generate interaction among the audience. The discussion will focus on epistemological, methodological and structural potentials and barriers experienced within the South-North collaborations on energy research, and their implications on achieving just energy transitions. The feedback generated from this session will be shared with all participants.
This contribution aims at highlighting specific characteristics of Global South countries that should be taken into account when discussing the concept of just transition. This specific characteristics stem from their historical position of raw material providers for the world economy.
Paper long abstract:
Climate change has set the stage: The twenty-first century will be shaped by the transformation of the reigning fossil-fueled energy system. The concept of 'just transition' arose during the 1990s in the North American labor union movement and aimed firstly at social protection programs for workers in industries potentially affected by the compliance of climate change policies. Despite the concept increasingly involves a rising number of ideas around environmental, climate, and energy justice far beyond the rather technical body of literature on energy transitions, it still focuses on and in the Global North. In order to correct this bias, my objective is to present some reflections from the Global South vis-à-vis the current climate change-driven scenario.
As the transition towards societies not dependent on fossil fuels (oil, coal, natural gas) increasingly translates into the quest for minerals (e.g. lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper) necessary for the utilization of cleaner energy sources, first and foremost, I underscore that Global South countries depend on natural resources extractivism (including mining- and fossil fuels extractivism). This, for instance, has far-reaching consequences: Whereas many countries might experience disruptions in their exports of fossil fuels, and thereby face the challenge of the energy transition with hollow coffers, others might bet on a boost of mineral extractivism and expect to benefit from it. However, the conditions imposed by the new 'green' imperative make the question if natural resources abundance is "a blessing or a curse" more topical than ever.
Increasing access to modern energy in the Global South necessitates human-centred approaches. The authors will share their experience implementing a Living Lab with Country Partners in East Africa, where human-centered and participatory methods were trialed.
Paper long abstract:
The Modern Energy Cooking Services (MECS) programme aims to increase access to clean cooking fuels in the Global South by leveraging progress in electrification. Human-centered design (HCD) methods are effective in identifying local needs and contextual constraints, for studying technology uptake, and are increasingly being used in Global South contexts. Under the HCD umbrella, Living Labs (LL) provide a methodological framework - based on co-creation - for enabling end users to participate in the design and evaluation process of products and services in their context of use over time.
To support the growth of HCD in the MECS programme, this research aimed to develop and iterate a LL framework interwoven within a live technology-driven field trial of battery-supported electricity-based cooking. The objectives of this research were twofold: (1) to construct a vision of what an ideal LL in the context of the MECS programme would look like, grounded in past experiences with HCD in the programme, and (2) to reflect on the implementation of the LL framework to contribute guidelines for facilitating LL in the context of modern energy cooking in the Global South.
We present the learnings from the LL approach implemented during this field-trial in selected on- and off-grid settings of Kenya and Tanzania. The authors describe the various challenges faced to creating and following a holistic LL framework. This paper aims to guide future implementations of LL to enable the goals of stakeholder empowerment and co-creative innovation.
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Short Abstract:
Achieving just energy transitions will depend on the knowledge produced in and from the global South. This panel will discuss potentials and challenges in creating equitable partnerships among institutions and researchers from the global South and the global North.
Long Abstract:
'What we know' and 'how we know' about energy and development in the global South is important in achieving just energy transitions. While much contemporary energy research provides room for collaborations among institutions and researchers from the global South and the global North, these collaborations pose significant challenges to generating equitable partnerships and achieving epistemic justice.
To tackle this issue, the proposed session will build on UCL Energy and Development Group's (EDG) ongoing work on South-North collaborations to unpack potential avenues for generating equitable research partnerships among institutions and researchers across the South-North divide. To do so, this session will draw on the South-North Collaborations (SNC) workshop planned for March 2022. Supported by the UCL Grand Challenges, the SNC workshop will reflect on the successes and imbalances between the South-North partners and the effects that these have on research outputs. The outcomes of the SNC workshop will be translated into practical recommendations for generating equitable South-North collaborations.
The proposed DSA conference session will present the outcomes from the SNC workshop in the form of a presentation. The lessons from the SNC workshop will be used to generate interaction among the audience. The discussion will focus on epistemological, methodological and structural potentials and barriers experienced within the South-North collaborations on energy research, and their implications on achieving just energy transitions. The feedback generated from this session will be shared with all participants.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 6 July, 2022, -Pedro Alarcon (JLU Giessen)
Marianna Coulentianos (Loughborough University) Stuart Cockbill (Loughborough University) Val Mitchell (Loughborough University) Jon Leary (Gamos)