Long Abstract:

The politics of energy today can hardly be pinned down to one particular locality or a category of actors. Rather, we can see that energy politics are spread across various political arenas and scales of practice. One of the issues that contributed to scaling up energy politics is climate change. But also environmental and technological risks of various energy technologies, socio‐natural disasters (like the Fukushima disaster or black‐outs), and shifting interregional dependencies of supply and demand for energy sources led globally to changes in the dynamics of energy politics.

We will discuss what the sociological approach to science and technology study has to offer in addressing current dynamics and transformations of energy policy. We will discuss how various issues produce contemporary energy politics. More precisely we focus on changing relations of the social and the technical within the socio‐technical (energy‐) systems. We will explore new actors in the field of energy and ask if impulses for new social movements or socio‐technical assemblages are given by this development. And, finally we will discuss how scales of politics that are re‐produced by new technologies.

The panel will include: Ulrike Felt, Head of Department of Science and Technology Studies,University of Vienna; Les Levidow, Senior Research Fellow, Development Policy and Practice, Open University; Harald Rohracher, Professor, Department of Technology and Social Change, Linköping University; Thomas Saretzki, Professor, Centre for the Study of Democracy, Leuphana University Lueneburg; Gordon Walker, Professor, Lancaster Environment Centre, Lancaster University; Gregoire Wallenborn, Researcher, Centre for Studies on Sustainable Development, Université Libre de Bruxelles