Paper short abstract:

How can post-development and pluriversal thinking help design energy transitions that are decolonial and anti-capitalist? Drawing on the pluriverse and post-development, this talk will argue for decolonizing ‘energy justice’ to ‘make space’ for actual possibilities of pluriversal-justice to emerge.

Paper long abstract:

How can post-development and pluriversal thinking help design energy transitions that are decolonial and anti-capitalist? The hegemonic discussion of energy transitions has concentrated at high levels of government, embraced corporate interests and tied to a unilinear-Modern version of development. The term 'transition' has become a passive revolution, a spectacle even, which aims to reaffirm extractivist and colonial values and principles, legitimizing strategies of dispossession that promote a 'green', 'just' or 'fair' transition, consisting of a technological substitution leaving consumption patterns and capitalist power structures intact. Especially in Global South, the deployment of so-called “renewable infrastructure” megaprojects has begun to raise criticisms of the supposed 'renewability' and 'acceptability' of these projects associated with the demand for space, 'critical' minerals, fossil fuels and the counterinsurgency tactics used to conceal dispossession. Calls for a radical socio-ecological transformations are also questioning the metabolically unequal relations embedded between different places and in colonial-extractive terms that reproduce terra nullius logics and settler-colonial strategies that inaugurate new commodity frontiers as spatiotemporal solutions (or spatial fixes) 'buying time' through 'green' capitalism.

Alternatives 'from below' seeking to reorganize relations with the territory are also resisting the alienation, abstraction and commodification of energy by(re)conceptualizing energy as a territorialized relationship, based other(ed) knowledges. Drawing on pluriversal and post-development frameworks, this talk will argue that ‘energy justice’ must be decolonized by separating its main tenets form the onto-epistemic commitment with a unilinear model of development, ‘making space’ for actual possibilities of pluriversal-fairness based on different onto-epistemic forms of justice to emerge.