Format/Structure

Traditional format - oral presentations

Long Abstract

The global push to de-fossilize economies entails far more than a technical shift in energy systems. It reshapes geographies, societies and power relations, creating winners and losers across boundaries. While decarbonization is often framed as a universal imperative, its material and socio-spatial consequences remain deeply asymmetric. Mainstream discussions on climate overlook how territories are reshaped, new conflicts generated, and social relations of production altered. Moreover, those who are at the forefront of the resistance in socio-environmental conflicts generated by energy transitions increasingly call for a shift of the main just transition narrative and framings by including an approach based on decolonial perspectives, local knowledge and pluriversal understandings of energy transitions.

This panel seeks contributions that examine the nexus between critical energy geographies and uneven development through a political ecology and decolonial lens. We encourage, theoretical, empirical, and participatory research that asks: whose sustainability, narratives, knowledge and framings are prioritized and who bears the costs of moving beyond fossil capitalism?

We warmly welcome papers about, but not limited to:

• Green sacrifice zones and energy peripheries: The creation of new territorial inequalities in the rush for critical minerals and green grabbing for renewable energy deployment.

• Geographies of discontent and resistance: local contestations that emerge to these processes, and how grassroots movements oppose, reclaim, or reimagine energy systems

• Counter-geographies, narratives, interpretations: Energy democracy movements, community-owned renewables, and decolonial approaches to "transition” that emerge both in rural and urban contexts.

• Green growth: How discourses of “green growth” and “just transition” intersect with patterns of uneven development.

• Innovative research methodologies: Approaches that best capture the socio spatial interdependencies between energy flows, land use change, and environmental justice outcomes.

This Panel has 9 pending paper proposals.
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