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- Convenor:
-
Katarzyna Bogdziewicz
(Mykolas Romeris University)
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- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract
The session rethinks “resilient futures” through transformative environmental justice, exploring how Indigenous and local knowledge, decolonial practices, and cross-border solidarities can reshape green transition policies toward genuine co-governance and equity.
Description
The green transition is widely lauded as a model of sustainability and fairness. Yet, the research reveals a deeper tension: despite the rhetoric of inclusion and openness, many Indigenous, grassroots local, and cross-border communities remain marginalized in decision-making on energy and environmental policy. The present open session invites contributions that examine how the aspiration of “resilient futures” can be re-imagined through the lens of transformative environmental justice—emphasising power redistribution, decolonial practices, and multi-scale deliberation.
We encourage submissions that explore questions such as: how do local and Indigenous epistemologies challenge the predominant techno-managerial framing of the green transition? In what ways can regional policy frameworks move beyond typical stakeholder consultation to genuine co-governance? How can cross-border (e.g., Baltic-Nordic) solidarities deepen the capacities of historically marginalized communities to shape trajectories of change? We invite contributions that aim to surface the systemic injustices embedded in energy transitions and to rethink STS approaches to “resilient futures” through an explicitly justice-oriented prism.
This session seeks to bridge empirical case studies, theoretical reflection, and methodological innovation: we invite proposals that deploy novel participatory methods, comparative perspectives across the Nordic-Baltic area and beyond, or conceptual critique of resilience, transition and justice narratives. Ultimately, we hope to stimulate a richer STS conversation: no transition is just unless democratic engagement, epistemic plurality and historic inequalities are placed at its core.
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
In Kathmandu, river corridor interventions show how green transitions and NbS rely on technocratic planning, overlooking local and Indigenous knowledge, community needs, and ecological perspectives. This study explores how environmental justice can support inclusive and place-based urban resilience.
Paper long abstract
Nepal is vulnerable to effects of climate change, facing floods, landslides, glacier hazards, and unplanned urbanization. Certain adaptation policies and programs are in place; however, these apply traditional top-down approach, mostly anthropocentric. Rivers, wetlands, and urban green infrastructure are regarded as instruments for mitigation and urban development overlooks natural ecosystems shaped by both human and non-human interactions. Kathmandu Valley is an ideal spot for case study to observe these problems. Poorly planned urbanization, degradation of the river corridor, wetland areas, and intensified monsoons have worsened flood-risk while perpetuating social and environmental inequalities.
While river restoration and urban greening have become popular, the process of designing and implementing is adopted without involving grassroots communities. This research adopts mostly a qualitative methodology, combining policy and planning documents analysis, field observations along selected river-stretches, interviews with relevant stakeholders, and FGDs with certain communities.
The research explores how resilience ideas are defined and how decision-making takes place. It also analyzes the roles that different forms of knowledge can play in the planning and decision making. Finally, the research demonstrates how urban resilience strategies can shift towards more participatory, balanced, and context-sensitive pathways for green transition and governance.
In Kathmandu, river corridor interventions highlight how green transition agendas and nature-based solutions often rely on technocratic planning, while sidelining local and Indigenous knowledge, community priorities, and ecological relationships. This paper examines how transformative environmental justice can help reframe resilient futures by promoting fairer distribution of power, inclusive decision-making, and more grounded approaches to urban environmental governance.
Paper short abstract
The paper presents a participatory research protocol that repurposes online data to foster collective problematization with diverse coastal workers, arguing for more plural, situated, and inclusive forms of environmental observation and governance.
Paper long abstract
Researchers and protected areas’ managers are tasked with quantifying the activities that exert pressure on the ecosystem and their impact, mobilizing increasingly technology-intensive data collection systems that carry a social cost. In parallel, the development of coastal production projects, such as the installation of offshore wind farms or new polluting industries, seek the input of diverse concerned actors. However, the decision-making processes tend to overlook consultation results, marginalizing situated knowledges, particularly when there are conflicting interpretations. Both environmental monitoring and plans for territorial transformation question the authority over what counts as ecological knowledge and how legitimate knowledge is built, calling for inventive forms of hybrid forums.
To address this, we designed a research protocol at the intersection of Science and Technology Studies, design research, and environmental sociology. We engage inventively with online data, developing it into sensitive formats to collectively examine problematic situations and the contexts in which they are defined and transformed. How do coastal workers and inhabitants describe their practices and their concerns? We discuss the methodology and results of a series of workshops (2024–2025) in Rochefort, Marseille, and Dunkirk, conducted within FUTURE-OBS, a transdisciplinary project on coastal observatories in France. We argue that such methods contribute to redistributing epistemic authority, opening pathways toward more situated and plural forms of environmental observation, and prefiguring modes of inclusive governance grounded in care, conflict, and collective inquiry.
Paper short abstract
As data centers expand, freshwater becomes a contested resource. This paper explores how grassroots movements challange the narrative of "green AI" by make water visible in struggles over digital infrastructures in Europe.
Paper long abstract
The UN recently published a report stating that we are now living in a time of global freshwater bankruptcy (UN, 2026). At the same time, the rapid expansion of data centers for AI-use is placing increasing pressure on freshwater resources and the communities that depend on them. However, the infrastructure- and resource conflicts are often obscured by narratives of “green” digitalization, where AI and renewable energy are framed as drivers of sustainable transition. In this article, I examine how notions of “green AI” are constructed and contested in relation to the expansion of data centers in Europe.
Drawing on socio-technical imaginaries, affective infrastructures, and decolonial theory, this study analyzes counter-narratives articulated by grassroots movements and local actors engaging with data center development. Using narrative network analysis in which discursive nodes, such as water, are mapped to make visible how resources, infrastructures, and affective expressions are linked in alternative socio-technical imaginaries.
Preliminary findings suggest that freshwater emerges as a central node in these counter-narratives. While industry narratives portray water as a neutral technical commodity for cooling data centers, grassroots narratives emerge as a relational and political node where ecological boundaries and local living conditions converge. The narrative network analysis reveals how grassroots movements develop alternative ways of “making water visible” through narratives that link local water practices and digital infrastructure. This articulates alternative socio-technical imaginaries where the struggle for AI infrastructure also becomes a struggle over how water is noticed, valued, and managed in the green digital transition.
Paper short abstract
NGOs in Bulgaria hybridize scientific expertise and legal mobilization to produce counter-expertise that documents ecological harm and non-compliance. This reveals the green transition as an epistemic struggle and calls for transformative environmental justice and co-governance.
Paper long abstract
Bulgaria’s green transition is widely framed as a pathway to resilience and decarbonization. Yet, it often reproduces patterns of environmental injustice by advancing projects through techno-managerial logics that constrain meaningful participation and marginalize local ecological knowledge.
Focusing on the Lobosh (Pchelina) dam, one of the largest reservoirs in southwestern Bulgaria, and broader SHPP development, this paper examines how environmental NGOs such as Balkanka and WWF Bulgaria challenge dominant state narratives. Beyond advocacy, these organizations act as producers of counter-expertise and as accountability actors within environmental governance: through independent water bodies' monitoring, expert-led reporting, and strategic legal mobilization that combines scientific expertise with legal argumentation. They generate hydrological and ecological evidence that is translated into legally actionable claims, documenting environmental harm and demonstrating systematic non-compliance with existing regulations. In doing so, they foreground conflicts between dominant techno-scientific framings and locally grounded epistemologies.
Controversies around SHPP reveal competing claims over ecological impact, and regulatory compliance, while legally entrenched water rights create institutional lock-ins that limit authorities’ responsiveness to ecological stress and public contestation. These dynamics expose the limits of formal participatory mechanisms and the absence of meaningful co-governance arrangements.
The paper argues that Bulgaria’s green transition is not a neutral technical process but a site of epistemic struggle. Democratizing the transition therefore requires a more transformative approach to environmental justice; one that redistributes epistemic and decision-making power and institutionalizes epistemic plurality, so that marginalized voices can genuinely shape socio-environmental futures.
Paper short abstract
This article analyzes the layered meanings and impacts of two REE mining projects in southern Kalaallit Nunaat through the notion of sacrifice zones, understood as areas damaged for a (purported) greater good.
Paper long abstract
The residents of Kalaallit Nunaat are facing a confluence of interests around rare earth elements (REE)—vital for military hardware and green technology—and global power. The notion of “sacrifice zones” has been variously deployed US nuclear policy, geography, and to describe environmental harm (Reinert, 2018). While mining may eventually contribute to Kalaallit Nunaat’s economic independence, their impacts are experienced unevenly. European and Nordic approaches to the green transition require REEs for green technologies, which risks shifting the onus of extraction from choice to an obligation for those living near these resources. The battle over the Kvanefjeld REE mining project reflects Sokolova’s (2025) question: “Who gets to imagine a fossil-free future?” Most local and national political opposition concentrated on potential uranium exposure and environmental destruction, but the mine’s other impacts were clearly documented. The project’s Environmental Impact Assessment found that it would increase Greenland’s greenhouse gas emissions 45% (2020, EIA, p. 21). This paper analyzes local resilience and organizing in the face of potential environmental harm through an STS lens based on ethnographic interviews, mining company documents, and court records to interrogate the tension between a projected marketed as “green,” yet clearly documented as causing significant environmental harm.
References:
Greenland Minerals A/S, “Kvanefjeld Project: Environmental Impact Assessment,” 13 December 2020. https://etransmin.com/wp-content/uploads/20201213-EIA_GML-2020-_EN__Final30068214064.1.pdf
Reinert, Hugo. 2018. “Notes from a Projected Sacrifice Zone.” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 17(2):597–617.
Paper short abstract
Degrowth is often framed as a just sustainability strategy, yet it remains anthropocentric. Without posthuman and decolonial justice it risks reproducing socio-ecological exploitation. Integrating Indigenous knowledges and more-than-human perspectives is essential for resilient degrowth transitions.
Paper long abstract
Amid accelerating ecological breakdown and deepening socio-economic inequalities, degrowth has gained traction as a framework for rethinking well-being within planetary boundaries. Yet dominant degrowth debates remain largely anthropocentric, centering human welfare and, to some extent, obscuring the exploitation of more-than-human actors. We argue that this “weak” form of degrowth reproduces structural injustices embedded in contemporary green transition regimes and risks a cyclical “yo-yo effect” – returning to extractive relations.
This paper advances a justice-oriented reconceptualization of degrowth informed by posthuman and decolonial STS perspectives. We develop a framework of “strong degrowth” that foregrounds more-than-human agency, epistemic plurality, and power redistribution as constitutive – rather than supplementary – elements of socio-ecological transformations.
To operationalize this approach, we outline three interrelated strategies: (1) a stepwise expansion of more-than-human inclusion and emancipation within co-governance and inclusive organizational practices; (2) decolonial value-flows that enable reciprocal engagement between Indigenous and local epistemologies and Western posthumanist theory, resisting extractive forms of knowledge translation; and (3) the socialization of posthumanism, rendering its conceptual commitments actionable within participatory and deliberative arenas.
Drawing on examples of posthumanistic management and organizational experimentation, we show how posthuman values can be materially embedded in decision-making arrangements that move beyond stakeholder consultation toward co-production and co-governance. We conclude that neither degrowth nor posthumanism alone can deliver just transitions. Their integration is necessary to reframe resilience as a justice-based project attentive to historic inequalities, marginalized voices, and more-than-human futures.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines a place-based eco-literacy practice that combines ecological observation and future imagination to explore how local and Indigenous knowledge systems can reshape imaginaries of the green transition.
Paper long abstract
The green transition is frequently framed through technocratic narratives that prioritise policy instruments and technological solutions. Such framings often marginalise local, experiential, and more-than-human knowledge systems that shape how communities understand and live within ecological change. This paper explores how place-based eco-literacy practices can contribute to rethinking resilient futures through the lens of transformative environmental justice.
The study draws on a participatory eco-literacy session conducted in Phoenix Park, Dublin. Participants begin by slowly observing their environment, attending to species, sounds, textures, and ecological relationships through sensory engagement with place. They then create relational maps that document interactions among plants, animals, landscapes, and human presence. In a subsequent step, participants imagine hopeful future versions of the same environment, mapping how ecological relationships and forms of coexistence might evolve over time.
By grounding futures imagination in direct engagement with ecosystems, the practice shifts attention from abstract transition narratives toward situated ecological knowledge. This relational approach resonates with principles found in many Indigenous and local knowledge systems, in which environmental understanding emerges through long-term observation, reciprocity, and care.
Positioned within Science and Technology Studies debates on environmental justice and sustainability transitions, the paper argues that such practices help pluralise the epistemologies shaping the green transition, opening space for more relational, inclusive, and regenerative visions of resilient futures.
Paper long abstract
Lithuania’s pursuit of energy independence and climate neutrality has accelerated the development of renewable energy infrastructure, particularly wind farms. This process has been strongly shaped by geopolitical pressures, international environmental commitments, and binding European Union climate legislation promoting the rapid expansion of renewable energy. As a result, wind power has been framed as a strategic national priority. Despite generally positive public attitudes toward the green transition, resistance to the local implementation of wind farm projects remains widespread. This opposition often emerges not from rejection of renewable energy itself, but from shortcomings in decision-making processes at the local level. Although Lithuanian law establishes minimum distance requirements between wind farms and residential buildings, communities frequently report limited consultation and inadequate opportunities to participate in planning. In many cases, residents learn about proposed projects through the media rather than through direct engagement, contributing to feelings of marginalisation and distrust. This presentation examines how Lithuanian local communities in Širvintos, Molėtai, and Pagėgiai articulate their concerns regarding wind farm development and attempt to influence policy outcomes – at some instances successfully.
Paper short abstract
International climate action requires shared responsibilities, yet countries disagree over costs allocations. Surveys in six countries (N=10852) examine public views on fair responsibility for burden-sharing, identifying three stable opinion groups with distinct ideological and attitudinal profiles.
Paper long abstract
Because greenhouse gas emissions and their impacts transcend national borders, meaningful efforts depend on countries agreeing on shared responsibilities, common goals, and long‑term commitments. However, national governments diverge on in their economic interests, historical responsibilities, and prioritization of climate action, leading to persistent disagreements over burden‑sharing, fairness, and the distribution of costs and benefits. Citizens’ beliefs about fairness, responsibility, and the acceptability of different climate strategies can shape domestic political incentives and ultimately influence states’ willingness to commit to international climate action. Despite this relevance, relatively few studies investigate public opinion of the global governance dimensions of climate policy, and even fewer have examined views on fairness, equity, and burden‑sharing specifically. Taking carbon dioxide removal (CDR) as a case of emerging climate interventions, through nationally representative surveys in six countries in the Global South and North (N=10,852 respondents across the UK, Italy, Norway, Brazil, Saudi Arabia and Malaysia), we investigated public fairness perceptions of six among the most discussed burden-sharing principles. Respondents reported different fairness assessments across the principles and with Latent Class Analysis analysis we identified three distinctly populated attitudinal groups, stable across countries: two with clearly articulated fairness judgements and a third characterized by greater uncertainty. A post-hoc descriptive exploration of the characteristics of the individuals show distinct class-specific ideological and attitudinal orientations, stable across contexts. The results provide new evidence on how publics understand fair global responsibility for emerging climate technologies, with implications for the design and legitimacy of international climate governance.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines indigo as a natural dye, highlighting artisanal alternatives to toxic industrial dyeing. It argues these practices reframe resilience through more-than-human, decolonial environmental justice.
Paper long abstract
The contemporary green transition is frequently framed through techno-managerial solutions that prioritise innovation, efficiency, and scalability, yet such approaches often marginalise alternative epistemologies and lived practices. This paper contributes to debates on environmental justice and “resilient futures” by bringing a more-than-human perspective to indigo-based practices in South Asia, foregrounding indigo as a natural dye and a regenerative alternative to chemically intensive and toxic dyeing processes.
Historically constructed as a colonial plantation commodity shaped by extractive regimes and later displaced by synthetic dyes, indigo is typically situated within linear narratives of industrial progress and decline. Drawing on historical sources and ethnographic engagement with contemporary artisanal and ecological practices, this paper challenges such accounts by tracing indigo’s persistence and reconfiguration across time. Rather than a residual practice, indigo emerges as a site of ongoing entanglement among human actors (farmers, dyers, artisans) and more-than-human actors (plants, soil, water, microbes, and climatic forces), while also offering materially grounded alternatives to polluting industrial dye systems.
Engaging decolonial, feminist, and Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholarship, the paper reframes resilience as an emergent outcome of situated and negotiated relations rather than a property achieved through external intervention. In doing so, it highlights how artisanal practices challenge dominant framings of the green transition by foregrounding epistemic plurality and more-than-human worlds. The paper argues that just and resilient futures require not only inclusion but a redistribution of epistemic authority, recognising more-than-human worlds as central to sustainable transitions.
Paper short abstract
How do metropolitan marine research infrastructures shape the green transition in French postcolonial territories, and for whom are these so-called ecological transitions made? This paper traces epistemic frictions from the CNRS's expansion into three “scientific outposts” and examines their implic.
Paper long abstract
In the 1990s, France's largest research organization, the CNRS, shifted towards establishing a lasting presence in French overseas territories by founding permanent laboratories, where it had previously operated only through short-term missions.This movement intensified in the 2010s with the creation of the CNRS institute dedicated to the environment (INEE) and the restructuring of major research infrastructures (TGIR), including facilities for long-term ecosystem monitoring.
These developments occurred within the “oceanic turn” (Artaud, 2023), driven by ecological concerns as well as scientific and strategic ambitions, as French policy called to “set a course for the oceans.” Overseas territories thus became privileged sites for producing knowledge on tropical biodiversity and coral reef ecosystems, while consolidating CNRS’s prestige nationally and internationally. This also reflects broader efforts to govern and valorize these spaces amid ecological degradation and environmental transition (Le Meur & Muni Toke, 2024; Bérard, 2025).
This paper examines the effects of these institutional implantations in postcolonial territories shaped by enduring colonial power relations: for whom are these research stations created, and whose knowledge counts in defining the green(s) transition(s) ?
Drawing on three French marine “scientific outposts” (Dumoulin Kervran et al., 2024), a marine station in French Polynesia and overseas deep-sea observatories, we combine ethnography, interviews with CNRS science policymakers, and archival analysis. We show that these epistemic frictions concern not only differences in ways of knowing, but also the material organization of scientific work, the profiles of researchers involved, and the types of actors they collaborate with.
Paper short abstract
This study examines citizen participation in EU Climate City Contracts through an environmental justice lens, analysing decision-making influence in nature-based solutions governance. Findings indicate predominantly procedural participation with limited development toward co-governance arrangements.
Paper long abstract
Green urban strategies, including nature-based solutions (NbS), are increasingly promoted as pathways to climate neutrality that can also support social inclusion and spatial justice within EU climate-neutral and smart city agendas (Beretta & Bracchi, 2023). Within the EU Mission: Climate-Neutral and Smart Cities, Climate City Contracts (CCCs) formalise local transition strategies and emphasise citizen participation (Doci et al., 2025). However, it remains an open question to what extent participatory approaches embedded in CCCs enable meaningful influence on decision-making and contribute to more inclusive urban transitions (Kiss et al., 2022).
Existing NbS research highlights that these strategies are often framed as win-win solutions for climate mitigation, risk reduction, and urban attractiveness, while social and environmental justice considerations receive comparatively less attention. Alternative perspectives emphasise biodiversity protection and ecological integrity (Nóblega-Carriquiry et al., 2023; Wijsman & Berbés-Blázquez, 2022).
This article examines how citizen participation around green urban strategies and NbS is structured in CCCs. Using Arnstein’s Ladder of Citizen Participation, it maps participation levels across cities and identifies patterns of involvement and decision-making influence (Cortés-Cediel et al., 2019). The analysis is complemented by the triad of social acceptance and the Nature4Cities framework (Wüstenhagen et al., 2007; Sari et al., 2020).
Preliminary findings indicate that participation is uneven and largely situated in informing and consultation stages, with fewer cases reaching higher levels of citizen influence (Oregi et al., 2025). These results suggest that, while participatory elements are present, their potential to support more inclusive and deliberative governance arrangements remains under development.
Paper short abstract
In the face of wild pollinator decline, a stakeholder workshop on habitat restoration in Latvia uncovers a rich set of technological and social barriers and enablers, as well as deeper systemic tensions - institutional distrust, bureaucratic burdens and agricultural logics at odds with conservation.
Paper long abstract
Wild pollinators underpin food production, biodiversity, and other ecosystem services yet face decline from agricultural intensification, land use shifts and climate change. There is a pressing need to undertake targeted measures to restore pollinator habitats by adjusting land management practices, including the restoration of semi-natural grasslands. Yet adoption of recommended measures as part of this green transition by farmers and other actors remains limited.
To identify and discuss the perceptual, institutional, and practical conditions that support or get in the way of joint actions aimed at restoring wild insect pollinator habitats at field-farm-landscape scales, a stakeholder workshop was held in the Vidzeme region in Latvia as part of the EU-funded RestPoll project, bringing together 18 participants including farmers, researchers, NGO representatives and local community members.
Based on 91 barriers and 58 enablers identified by workshop participants at individual and community level spanning across informational, cultural, financial, political, biophysical, technical, and land use factors, the analysis reveals a set of practical and epistemic tensions between and within various stakeholder groups. These include ones related to knowledge gaps and distrust of institutions, mismatches between generic policy instruments and local conditions, conflicting agricultural and conservation logics, diverging interests of local and foreign landowners, and the undervaluation of farmers' practical, place-based knowledge in restoration governance.
Addressing pollinator habitat restoration effectively requires moving beyond technical and financial measures toward policy frameworks that are responsive to the diverse knowledge, conditions, and concerns of farmers and local communities.
Keywords: Pollinator habitat restoration, tensions, agricultural landscapes, Latvia
Paper short abstract
Climate adaptation through nature-based solutions can become a circular economy where stormwater becomes a recurring resource. This study shows that such a perspective could bring new light to a more ecocentric and non-market-based economy aligning with water flows.
Paper long abstract
Climate adaptation of stormwater through nature-based solutions is rarely seen as part of a circular economy. Based on interviews with engineers, planners, and ecologists working with stormwater management, this paper argues that it is necessary to question the anthropocentric view of the circular economy, where the main concerns are the materials used and reused by humans. The interviewees regard stormwater as a resource to many rather than a problem to drain as it is necessary for frogs and trees. The ontological shift of stormwater from something undesirable to wanted raises two important questions for how the circular economy could be extended: for whom is the circular economy, and what happens if there is no market involved?
First, the circular economy has largely been imagined as a utilitarian system for human use. The results from this study show how the needs of other organisms become a concern for a water utility when refusing to mow the grass around the stormwater ponds during dry periods or introducing an alder carr for retaining stormwater instead of a open water dam to improve the habitat for insects rather than strolling humans.
Secondly, the circular economy literature assumes, similarly to economics, that scarcity and markets as necessary conditions. Water is indeed a scarce resource for those organisms who suffer from heat and lack of water, but the interviewees are not referring to a market. Hence, stormwater management through nature based solutions open up the possibility to reinterpret what an economy is and for whom.