Paper short abstract:

This paper critically evaluates the performative enactment and logistical operations of the energy transition in the port of Rotterdam. By looking at how relation to the (re)production of industrial accumulation.

Paper long abstract:

Under increased public pressure to reduce C02 emissions, the port of Rotterdam is in the process of becoming a “sustainable port” that can, however, still provide economic growth. This paradoxical drive for “green growth” leads to tensions and contradictions on the work floor and has far-reaching repercussions for the everyday lives and health of dockworkers, particularly in industrial sectors that are to become obsolete. By drawing on ongoing fieldwork with unions, port officials, and dockworkers in the coal sector in the port of Rotterdam, this paper directs ethnographic attention to the way labor arrangements are being reconfigured in light of the energy transition.

The empirical focus of this paper is two-pronged. On the one hand, I will trace the performative work that goes into creating a “sustainable port”, and analyze how talk of the energy transition operates as a mechanism to justify a continuing infrastructural lock-in with the fossil fuel industry. In addition, I will also examine what the energy transition means ‘on the ground’ by analyzing how workers in the coal sector are subjected to the rhythms of the global economy, how they try to mitigate detrimental health effects to their bodies in the long run, and how they deal with the prospect of supposed obsolescence in a sustainable port landscape. In this way, this paper critically evaluates the performative enactment and logistical operations of the energy transition in relation to the (re)production of industrial accumulation.