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- Convenors:
-
Elisabeth Moolenaar
(Regis University)
Ana Isabel Afonso (FCSH-Universidade Nova de Lisboa CRIA-NOVA)
Dorle Dracklé (University of Bremen)
Nathalie Ortar (ENTPE-University of Lyon)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- 6 College Park (6CP), 01/035
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 26 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel focuses on energy transitions and explores how transition is produced, experienced, and negotiated in particular contexts, and examines the hopes or challenges it carries for different communities and citizens and which futures it enables.
Long Abstract:
Energy transition from fossil fuels to renewables is at the heart of the on-going energy politics in many places. The transition affects the energy systems as well as the everyday lives of people. Transitionist imaginaries suggest a gradual, consensual change and tend to depoliticize its real implications on local life worlds and landscapes from a centralized, governmental perspective. Local environmental and social effects and the quality of the life are often not questioned, thus rendering invisible its consequences. However, certain forms of renewables can be disruptive, engendering new inequalities and environmental disasters. Tensions may arise between the local management of the commons, government policies and industry lobbies regarding the direction and shape of the transition. Examining centralized versus decentralized efforts reveals issues regarding energy justice and (dis)empowerment.
In this panel we would like to examine how transition is produced, experienced, and negotiated in particular contexts, and explore the hopes or challenges it carries for communities and citizens and which futures it enables. Papers will debate how and which future is considered energy transition bearing, which (in)equalities and conflict transition might bring, and how it can instigate new forms of communing and create local solutions. The panel welcomes papers on sites switching from fossil fuels to renewables, and territories experiencing energy transition.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 26 July, 2022, -Maria Trifon (National University of Political Studies and Public Administration)
Paper short abstract:
By analyzing how the last laid off miners in the Jiu Valley, Romania experienced the multifaceted post-socialist energy transition, this research aims to portray the salient transformations in the configuration of the local community and their imprint on the future of the area.
Paper long abstract:
Restructuring the mining industry in the Jiu Valley, Romania, has been an abiding pernicious process, characterized by structural uncertainty, authorities’ neglect and no viable alternative to sustain the local economy. Started in the early years of the post-socialist transition through brutal deindustrialization, the transformation of the Jiu Valley into the “valley of tears”, as locals call it, has reached its end point amid the nowadays’ energy transition from fossil fuels to renewables. 2018 has marked the beginning of a final wave of layoffs brought about by the closure of the last functional mines. Based on several life-narratives of former miners dismissed in 2018 from Lonea and Lupeni mines, this research explores the link between their individualized future prospects and the future of the area. Is the life of the Jiu Valley communities hanging by the coal thread or are there viable solutions for the revitalization of the area? The energy transition altered the identity of the former mining community, aggregating new forms of communing and solidarity in the face of structural precariousness. By analyzing how these former miners experienced the multifaceted transition in all its stages, this research aims to portray the salient transformations in the configuration of the local community. How former miners and their families have learned to individually navigate political, economic and social isolation and create local solutions for the escalating poverty and unemployment rates is crucial to understanding the processes involved in shaping the future of the area in the absence of authorities’ intervention.
Lena Gross (UiT The Arctic University of Norway)
Paper short abstract:
This paper discusses how the transition to green energy can play out as green colonialism in the Norwegian part of Sápmi. It looks at moral premises, values, and knowledge hierarchies that have the power to enable Indigenous dispossession in the name of a green transition.
Paper long abstract:
Industrial projects connected to green energy and the extraction of raw materials needed for a "green shift" increasingly diminish the quality and size of reindeer pastures throughout Sápmi (Northern Scandinavia). In recent political and academic debates, this has been described as "green colonialism", a term first coined by former president of the Sámi parliament in Norway, Aili Keskitalo.
Prior to the start of any industrial project on Sámi reindeer herding lands in Norway, its impacts, and the possibility of co-existence between reindeer herding and industry needs to be evaluated in an environmental impact assessment (EIA). EIAs are the base for marine and land-use planning decision. Reindeer herders, however, experience that the cumulative impacts of human activities and fragmentation of pasture by far exceed what is usually anticipated in environmental impact assessments.
This paper explores how narratives of a green shift and the common good do not align with Sámi experiences of a new (green) colonialism in Norway. It does so by focusing on the case of a planned quartz mine at Násásvarre, a mountain at the border between Nordland, Norway and Västerbotten, Sweden that is used for cross-boundary Sámi reindeer herding.
Ana Isabel Afonso (FCSH-Universidade Nova de Lisboa CRIA-NOVA)
Paper short abstract:
This paper reflects on local responses to energy transition in the National Park Montesinho, characterized by old controversies, agriculture decay and rural abandonment. Ethnography focus ruptures and continuities with ancient communitarian assemblies that provide for the management of the commons.
Paper long abstract:
In one of the remotest parts of the country, National Park of Montesinho(PNM) is the stage of strong polemics surrounding the possibility of constructing a future wind farm. While the municipality and some local groups have received the ever to be wind farm with applause, local representatives of the ICNF (Institute for Nature Conservation and Forests) as well as tourism entrepreneurs were against such infrastructures, manifesting vocally in public hearings and opening space for controversies, ambiguous positions and fragile arguments during the last decade.
Social acceptance (or resistance) towards renewables has been reflected in two polarized positions: On one side, the old farmers have the expectation that it would bring modernity to the region, as well as added value to abandoned lands, nowadays useless. On the other side, environmentalists and tourism entrepreneurs use the rhetoric of landscape threatened by gigantic turbines that damage “pristine” landscape they aim to preserve or to promote, fearing the risk of compromising recent investments on local development projects.
Among those controversies and negotiations, the “Assembleia dos Compartes” is reviving and sharing the profits of the new renting for the abandoned commons. Such local landscape management device was composed by an assembly of neighbors that were able to give inclusive access to land, according to needs and customary law, and to provide the communitarian management of the commons (baldios in Portuguese).
To understand those subtle processes and how they contribute to reconfigure local politics and to envisage new energy futures is the aim of this proposal.
Kirsten Nielsen (University of Oslo)
Paper short abstract:
Focusing on how unstable electricity supply in rural northern Uganda propels investments in alternative sources of electricity such as solar panels and diesel generators in households and businesses, this paper discusses end-users’ role in driving energy transitions in Africa.
Paper long abstract:
This paper focuses on the transition that followed in the wake of the electrification of a small trading centre in northern Uganda in 2016. Widespread electrification is a political priority in Uganda, envisioned to address both the need for socio-economic development in rural areas and the transition to renewable forms of energy (most of the electricity generation in Uganda is hydropower). Over the past 20 years, the rural electricity access rate has grown from around 1 percent to around 25 percent. However, in many rural areas unstable and unpredictable electricity supply is the standard. Based on ethnographic research in 2019, this paper shows how electrification through the national grid initially broke its promise of development and economic prosperity at the same time as it set in motion a transition that was driven by connected household and businesses’ needs and wants. To mitigate the effects of unstable electricity supply, which disrupted newly adopted work and leisure activities that relied on the constant flow of electric current, people invested in solar panels and to lesser extent diesel generators that they then used in combination with the grid. Interestingly, this end-user-driven transition partly realized the development potential associated with electrification: it sustained new businesses that could provide services to people locally and it provided light and entertainment through television sets in homes. Against this ethnographic background, the present paper discusses end-users’ role in driving energy transitions in Africa while questioning any linear conceptualization of such transitions.