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Paper short abstract

Drawing on research with UK community energy practitioners, this paper explores what we can learn about infrastructuring a climate-change world through attention to everyday practices of energy commoning, showing how they enact a feminist politics of care as a radical approach to decarbonisation.

Paper long abstract

Over the past decades, community energy has emerged as a response to the climate crisis, taking the form of decentralised renewable energy projects that are owned and controlled by, and directly benefit, local communities. Community energy projects often articulate their intervention by conceptualising energy and community through the language of 'the commons'. Drawing on research with community energy practitioners in the UK, this paper explores what we can learn about infrastructuring a climate-change world through attention to these everyday practices of commoning. We show how commoning is enacted not only as a principle of economic redistribution but operationalises a broader feminist politics of care that offers a radical alternative to state- and market-led approaches to decarbonisation. Commoning here exceeds a focus on who owns infrastructure, encompassing instead a broader set of concerns about forms of social organisation, interpersonal relations, and questions of responsibility and agency.

We also consider frictions that arise in the process of energy commoning, and how it takes places in confrontation with socio-material, regulatory, and access constraints that affect how renewable energy can be shared and utilised. These frictions, and the ways in which projects seek to navigate them, illuminate energy commoning and its politics as an ongoing, negotiated practice that attends not only to energy flows but also, crucially, to the social and ethical relationships of care involved in sustaining everyday collective life. This offers important insights into the possibilities and struggles of those seeking to generate revolutionary infrastructures in the face of ecological breakdown.