Making low-carbon places

Introduction

How are low-carbon places made/to be made? This question, which is tightly bound up with the politics and practical challenges of rapidly achieving ambitious climate change mitigation targets, is one that confronts scholars, policymakers, and practitioners alike. Taking this central focus as a common point of departure, the five articles in this special issue of Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift–Norwegian Journal of Geography explore the fertility of placing emphasis on a combination of three key terms: making, low carbon, and places. Our editorial introduction provides a conceptual anchoring for each of these terms, reflects on how the phenomena (making as a processual ontological phenomenon, low carbon as a sociotechnical flow phenomenon, and places as a situated stock-cum-flow phenomenon co-produced by infrastructures and practices) entangle and evolve together, and provides an overview of the contributions in this special issue. The editorial concludes with reflections on making low-carbon places for future research. We emphasise the importance of relational analyses of change processes, place-specific approaches to the study of sociotechnical transitions, and the recognition of how low-carbon place-making implicates the intertwined nature of power relations, individual agency, and path dependencies in built environments.

In a time when rapid climate change mitigation ambitions have led governments at multiple levels – from the global and national to the urban, neighbourhood, and community – to embrace time-bound targets for carbon neutrality and climate neutrality, the question of how low-carbon places are made/to be made gains salience. This question has long interested human geographers with a broader focus on place-making predominantly at lower spatial scales, but importantly also translocal and nested spatial scales, and increasingly over the past decade (i.e. since the early 2010s) also transition scholars who have mobilised various conceptual lenses on how to enable low-carbon development at multiple levels. It is timely and important to unite this focus across thematic and interdisciplinary scholarship, in light of the many efforts underway to make low-carbon places for sustainability transitions.

In the following three subsections, we open up lines of enquiry in extant scholarship on making, low carbon, and places. Thereafter, we briefly consider how these terms and phenomena come together from the vantage points of several competencies as interdisciplinary environmental social scientists within the editorial team in energy transitions, human geography, and political ecology, and we are mindful that the span of individual interests and expertise overlaps several of these fields. This conceptual and scholarly grounding equips us to offer an overview of the five articles in this collection, with a view to highlighting their implications to advance understanding of making low-carbon places. Finally, we conclude this introduction by highlighting the priorities for future engaged research on this theme. With the flow of argument established, we next present our theoretical underpinning.

Making

Relational analyses in human geography and urban studies have enabled advances in our understanding of urban places, such as enhanced awareness of their metabolisms and development, alongside contestation over what they have become and are becoming (Ward 2010; Kjærås 2021). Such analyses feature attention to the roles and agency of actors as expressed in interactive relation through their social and material practices. Insights from this scholarship are crucial for understanding how places are made and thus offer avenues for how they may be made differently. In probing the making of low-carbon places along these lines of enquiry centred on the act of making, we are interested in the processual nature of how change is enacted and takes effect, and in how the content of what constitutes urban and rural development is assembled (McFarlane 2011; McGuirk et al. 2016). This interest also implicates effects spanning multiple scales, as urban change is often entangled with regional and peri-urban dynamics, and with translocal linkages (e.g. through supply chains).

Our interest in change leans towards the use of the future tense, not just to what places have become or are becoming, but also to what they may become. In this realm of places yet to come, we may encounter speculative fictions with diverse premises (technical scenarios, utopian/dystopian fantasies, emancipation through the pluriverse), emerging arenas of consensus and contestation (net zero targets, climate emergency declarations), and performative interventions with diverse prefigurative intentions (normalisation of future imaginaries, catalysis of change, prolongation of the status quo, peaceful protest, and persistent localised conflict) (Kothari et al. 2019; Grandin & Sareen 2020). This is to say that at the local spatial scale (i.e. a given place) visions become materialised and thus have material effects; visions also spring from local contexts, even if their effects are then felt across spatial scales. Hence, attention to making affords consideration of the conversion between changing imaginaries and evolving infrastructures, which are held in recursive relation such that emergent infrastructures are also seen as imbued with the agency to change prevalent imaginaries or the zeitgeist.

Low carbon

Major crises come equipped with their own vocabularies. Not so long ago, the term ‘low carbon’ made little to no sense to the general public, but the climate crisis has made it – together with related terms such as ‘net zero’, ‘climate neutral’ and ‘climate positive’ – a ubiquitous catchword for desired futures beyond the crisis. As an adjective, it can be attached to energy systems, cities, transport systems, value chains, places, and so forth, to signal an intention to take part in addressing the global challenge of achieving a green transition. If the transition is the journey, low carbon is the destination. We approach the need for low-carbon transitions as an external impetus that may be interpreted and embedded in local practice and decision-making mechanisms in infinite ways. The perceived urgency and the planetary scale of the challenge bring with them an inherent focus on generating rapid and scalable impacts, since a few low-carbon places in isolation do not amount to much on their own. This requires renewed attention to the complexities of scale (Bouzarovski & Haarstad 2019) and to the momentous politics of rupture, tendencies of polarisation, and possibilities of consensus. Low carbon as a target brings with it many dynamics that demand foregrounding power relations, societal patterns, and the formation of political coalitions that lend weight to policy choices and legitimate transition pathways.

An additional element that a focus on low-carbon introduces is temporality. Low carbon can imply an orientation, but the urgency associated with time-bound targets makes time of particular significance. However, transitions unfold over multiple simultaneous temporalities; infrastructures have a timeline of decades and encrust choices into the socio-material fabric for far longer than more ephemeral temporalities, such as those of an event that annually changes energy consumption briefly (e.g. during New Year’s Eve celebrations). The former means that a poor choice on developing road infrastructure (e.g. by locking in car dependence and associated energy consumption over public transport in urban mobility) in 2025 will frustrate planning goals for low-carbon mobility even in 2050, whereas a policy to reduce energy consumptive practices during a few major annual events for peak shaving and grid optimisation would have effects on grid infrastructure development within a year. This understanding of temporalities conditions policies and prospects for reaching low-carbon targets. It also necessitates thinking in complex ways about what low-carbon futures might look like in terms of the rhythms of energy use associated with changing energy practices.

Places

Our interest in future ‘becomings’ translates into a focus on place as the site of ‘becoming’ (Gibson-Graham 2004), as the event of our ‘throwntogetherness’ (Massey 2005), and as something that not only locates but situates (Casey 1997). If something that is low carbon is to be made, it must be made somewhere, and in fact, the ‘it’ constitutes that somewhere. Thus, making is in fact remaking, the reconstitution of what is co-produced through infrastructures and practices as these themselves evolve, yet with its point of departure necessarily in what exists and what has been made, understood iteratively. This perspective follows a shift from seeing places as static to appreciating the dynamism that produces them as its effect. Transitions then become about a shift in this dynamism with an orientation that changes a sense of place by reconfiguring the assemblage of its co-constitutive elements.

While acknowledging the continued pertinence of space, which connects and ensconces spaces, we turn attention to the places where the climate crisis becomes situated, real, and unavoidable. As a ‘constellation of processes rather than a thing’ (Massey 2005, 141), place is pliable, open to change, pregnant with possibility, a wellspring of becoming (Gibson-Graham 2006), and of unmaking. In multilevel governance systems, municipalities are charged with interpreting and implementing key decisions locally (i.e. to make them take place, whether this be a city, suburb, village, valley, forest, or an airport). Too often, the municipal level is equated with cities, whereas many municipalities are only lightly urbanised (Robinson 2002; Bell & Jayne 2009). Cities concentrate and accelerate sociomaterial flows (Rice 2014; Pérez 2020) and serve as key sites of decision-making and the enactment of transitions. However, low-carbon cities brought about at the cost of renewed extractivism and the appropriation of pastoral and variegated rurality through enclosure and commodification of natural resources may well represent a prolongation of exploitative relations and lead to revolt (Rodríguez-Pose 2018). Hence, tenable transitions to low-carbon places entail also overcoming patterns of territorial difference and enabling substantive shifts in developments at the regional scale.

In response to the problem framing that stems from the above-presented tripartite conceptualisation, this special issue on making low-carbon places features contributions on a broad range of combinations of these concerns. Collectively, the contributors investigate the ‘technologies’ through which low-carbon place futures are being made, not as technologies in a technical sense but by way of interventions that shape larger sociotechnical transitions (as Kerschner et al. 2018 show). Before working through the individual contributions, we bring together the three concepts in unison, and consider how the collective framing resonates with specific disciplines and fields within the environmental social sciences, in engaged relation to making low-carbon places.

Conceptual synthesis of making low-carbon places

What does making low-carbon places mean for scholars of energy transitions, human geography, and political ecology? Proceeding sequentially, we begin with energy transition research. Over the past decade (i.e. since the early 2010s), the related literature has exploded, contributing valuable insights into a range of sociotechnical change dynamics. However, as with much interdisciplinary scholarship, it has fared less well at integrating existing insights on place-making into its repertoire (Krupnik et al. 2022). One manifestation of this is the considerable literature on urban living labs. Many studies have focused on experimentation and innovation for rapid sociotechnical transitions. Building on such cases, scholars have addressed questions of replication and upscaling, probing whether pilot projects yield insights and models that can multiply and proliferate rapidly. Place-making research has long emphasised the difficulty of transposing particular approaches to other contexts, even contexts comparable across several factors, due to the place-specific nature of embedding an intervention within sociocultural practices. A way of countering this challenge, which urban living labs have proactively championed (in this regard, see the treatment by Rogge & Stadler (2023)), is through the production of principles and best practices, and more adaptively framed ‘fit-for-purpose’ and ‘joined-up’ policy mixes.

However, to have an impact, even place-appropriate policy mixes need local implementation. Here, the question of agency arises: who is able to bring change to bear, and with what consequences for whom? Where the impulse for change arises matters for any given context, especially in terms of who takes ownership and how the intervention is socially legitimated. This is not straightforward to reproduce across sites for upscaling any approach to making low-carbon places (Bouzarovski & Haarstad 2019). Rather, it suggests a challenge for intermediaries who act as boundary crossers and who build bridges between pilot projects and wider deployment sites. These sites are places with their own complex sociotechnical entanglements, both internal and external, which condition the likelihood of who exercises agency to promote or counter an intervention towards making low-carbon places. Energy transition scholars have made headway on the roles of intermediaries in low-carbon transitions (e.g. Kivimaa et al. 2020). The recognition that societal embedding matters in place-specific ways, while not novel, can be more pronounced in the conceptual underpinning of energy transitions research, especially in problematising replication and upscaling in relation to the situated agency of diverse societal actors.

By deepening understanding of situated agency and agents, and by changing energy practices and infrastructures, energy transitions scholarship can in turn shed valuable light on how low-carbon places are made/to be made. Also, relations between intermediaries and inhabitants of a place can be placed in wider relief within the political economy of a given sector, understood at and across multiple scales. For instance, the challenge of decarbonising the transport sector makes us mindful of the relation between place and space, where location conditions the transport modes embodied in the everyday practices of the inhabitants of a place at and across multiple spatial scales (Sareen et al. 2022). An island reliant on tourism for livelihoods may switch to green electricity, but if its sustainability branding increases high-emission flights from afar, the overall impact will hardly amount to low-carbon place-making. Thus, a task that the focus on making low-carbon places unveils for scholars of energy transitions is to embed their analyses into the big picture and multiscalar political economies of and across sectors.

In human geography, practices and processes of place-making have always been a nodal point on the research agenda, with the rise of relational geography and locality studies from the 1980s onwards being particularly influential today. Those engaged in the task of figuring out how low-carbon places can be made therefore stand to learn a great deal from the rich repository of scholarship on how places have been made. The co-constitutive role played in relational geography of scholarship from the Global South (e.g. through post-colonial and de-colonial perspectives) has to be highlighted here as an absolutely necessary means for countering the Eurocentrism that continues to impede both academic research and the policy landscape (as Roy (2016) shows).

Place is where spatiality is directly encountered and where it can be acted upon. In the same sense, the climate and nature crises are never encountered directly in their general and global sense but always confront us in place. However, rather than confining place to the local, what relational geography teaches us is that not only can places be variously scaled, but also that they are always already translocal (Greiner & Sakdapolrak 2013). Places co-constitute one another through a radical relationality where the here-and-now always depends on a multiplicity of ‘elsewheres’ and ‘elsewhens’ – what Massey (2005) referred to as the ‘throwntogetherness’ of place. A translocal sense of place can make it clear how apparently successful attempts at making low-carbon places sometimes come about simply by displacing high-carbon activities to other places.

As crises of climate and nature have intensified in recent decades, human geographers have followed suit by increasingly attending to aspects of place-making that relate to how places become more or less climate-friendly and nature-friendly. Given the inherent translocal nature of place, such scholarship could be connected and amplified by adopting comparative methods derived, for example, from the work by Hart (2018) in post-colonial Marxism on relational comparison. This could enable knowledge about the making of low-carbon places to travel translocally in new ways – not as a simple transfer mechanism but through multidirectional transformations where knowledge is allowed to attune itself gradually to each place, and to transmit new knowledge between places. This has nothing to do with the transfer of ‘best practices’ from one place to another. Rather, knowledge is generated in the relation between places, with each involved place functioning both as origin and recipient. A relational geography along these lines will not provide blueprints or offer up certain places as models for other places. Rather, it can provide a translocal learning encounter where each place is enabled to see itself through the other.

Finally, we come to low-carbon place-making and political ecology research. Rooted in the social and intellectual currents of the 1970s and 1980s, political ecology emerged because of a growing understanding that the relationships between humans and the biophysical environment are inherently social and political. Although the term political ecology was coined by Eric Wolf the early 1970s (Wolf 1972), it was not until the late 1980s that Thomas Bassett used the term in a geography journal (Bassett 1988). However, within anglophone geography, elements that comprise much political ecology were already present in classic works by Michael Watts (2013), first published in 1983, and Piers Blaikie (2016), first published in 1985.

The social and intellectual currents comprising early political ecology emerged from a critique of cultural ecology and natural hazard studies. The former critique targeted the failure to account for extra-local variables in human-environment change, such as how subsistence communities alter their production to be embedded in global markets (Watts 2015), while the latter critique addressed the failure to see the extent to which disasters are mediated through social inequalities. For example, Watts (2013) found that the famine in Sahel was not solely caused by drought, but also importantly because of land use shifts brought about through colonialism and its ongoing influence. This perspective challenged the then prevalent thinking in natural disaster studies. The shift from production of subsistence goods for local use towards capitalist patterns of commodity production was often spearheaded or forced by post-colonial states, sometimes criminalising customary land use, to increase earnings and further ‘development’ (Peluso 1992; Escobar 2012; Bridge et al. 2015). As a result, political ecology, with its roots in southern agrarian struggles, has developed new theoretical and methodological insights for understanding the evolving relationships between humans and the biophysical environment (for a more extensive overview, see McCarthy 2017).

Despite its roots in Marxist analysis of agrarian struggles in the Global South (for an overview of agrarian studies, see Borras et al. 2022), political ecology has progressively incorporated a wider range of theoretical, empirical, and scalar perspectives. This integration includes feminist theory (Rocheleau et al. 1996; Elmhirst 2015; Stock 2023, this issue), anarchist contributions (e.g. Mateer et al. 2021), and a move towards post-structuralism (Agrawal 2005). Particularly relevant to this special issue on making low-carbon places are the growing bodies of work on energy (Bridge et al. 2013; McCarthy 2015), extraction (Dunlap & Jakobsen 2020), climate change (Sovacool 2021), other-than-human relations (Srinivasan & Kasturirangan 2016), and decolonisation (Tornel 2022; Barau 2023, this issue), which have expanded to urban contexts (Heynen et al. 2006) and northern contexts (Benjaminsen & Robbins 2015; Karam & Shokrgozar 2023, this issue). Increasingly, by embracing heterodox imaginaries, political ecology sheds light on the implications of power asymmetries in accessing and controlling land and resources, thus countering capitalist and neocolonial/imperial efforts to marginalise indigenous and agropastoral communities, and to present nature as immaterial through the use of terms such as ‘empty land’.

In summary, political ecology’s contribution to making low-carbon places can be seen from three perspectives. First, by exploring alternative ‘onto-ethico-epistemic possibilities’ – to borrow a term from Barad (2007) that describes the entanglement between ethics, knowing, and being – it allows for the recognition of cultural differences and the valuation of heterodox imaginaries. Second, by revealing power asymmetries, political ecology highlights how extra-local forces have shaped human and other-than-human relationships over time. Third, and finally, political ecology demonstrates how the process of making or remaking low-carbon places can perpetuate patterns of territorial difference when new resource frontiers are transformed into commodity frontiers under the pretext of making low-carbon places. Political ecology rejects the notion of apolitical claims of making low-carbon futures, and takes a clear stance by overtly advocating the making of anti-capitalist and anti-colonial low-carbon futures.

Overview of case studies and their analytical implications

The five articles in this special issue of Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift–Norwegian Journal of Geography contribute to scholarship on energy transitions, human geography, and political ecology in diverse and complementary ways, and advance understanding of how low-carbon places are made/to be made from interdisciplinary environmental social science perspectives. Two of the articles focus on the UK: Holmes et al. (2023, 143–156) take up three wired electricity infrastructure systems in a multisited study (of which one is on Italy’s Apulia region), whereas Crowther et al. (2023, 157–170) adopt a multiscalar approach in their study of the Greater Manchester region. Whereas the former article addresses where low-carbon places are made through its case studies, the latter problematises a place as compound, given the multiplicity of narratives that cut through and across the scales within which the place is implicated. The article by Barau (2023, 171–182) takes us to a situated understanding of Kano City in Nigeria as a place with scope for nature-based decarbonisation to be advanced through the sociocultural revival of tree-based artisanal industries. Stock (2023, 197–205) focuses on the politics of dispossession and resistance through solar park development in the Indian states of Gujarat and Andhra Pradesh, foregrounding the embodied injustice of displacement and the emotional geographies of place-making and unmaking linked to low-carbon transitions. Karam & Shokrgozar (2023, 183–196) focus on the adverse impacts of wind power development in Norway on reindeer herders in Åfjord Municipality, whose everyday practices and relations with the landscape have been torn asunder. With contrasting degrees of urgency, conflict, opportunity, and a melange of actors, these analyses offer insightful perspectives on low-carbon place-making. In the following, we discuss each article in the same order as above and reflect on their key takeaways for the overarching theme.

Given the importance of low-carbon place-making, Holmes et al. (2023) argue that it is also important to consider where these places actually are. In relation to decarbonising electricity infrastructure, they turn attention to places that they term ‘infrastructure junctions’. These can be understood as nodes where several elements of the networks come together in ways that imbue the nodes with particular material and spatiotemporal characteristics. However, unlike a node, a place has its own internal dynamics in addition to interlinkages with elsewhere. Holmes et al. draw out these dynamics at the intersection of sociotechnical transitions scholarship with relational conceptualisation of place-making (Murphy 2015) on the one hand and with theorisation of the ‘power geometries’ of place and time (Massey 2005) on the other. They instantiate the value of this interpellation through application to electric grid development in the Apulia region of Italy, the Rampion Offshore Wind Farm off the south coast of England, and a Central Manchester primary substation. On this basis, they contend that the dynamics of place-making at these infrastructure junctions are intricately intertwined with dynamics of electricity demand and they exercise considerable force to shape the latter, often in ways that are hard to discern.

Attention to low-carbon place-making thus becomes a vehicle to shed light on how energy infrastructure transitions could be better governed for desirable societal impact, and to understand why outcomes are often suboptimal due to the complex shaping forces in play. Holmes et al. foreground the relevance of embedded socio-material relations and dynamics towards an appreciation of low-carbon place-making, using their multisited analysis to harness insights from multisited and diverse infrastructure junctions. Their approach takes infrastructures as a useful point of departure to understand how low-carbon places are made.

If a place has interlinkages with elsewhere as well as internal dynamics, then the nature of those internal dynamics will deserve direct attention, not least in terms of their implications for low-carbon place-making, as these dynamics locally comprise the (continuously contingent) sociomaterial outcomes of place-making. Crowther et al. (2023) point out that dynamics internal to a place exhibit multiscalarity and demand attention both to the manner in which place is mobilised and the translation of narratives to action at and across those scales. They focus on the Greater Manchester city region in northwest England for its target of carbon neutrality by 2038, and unpack how strategic approaches towards this end have been implemented in keeping with a place-based approach to decarbonisation. Crowther et al. also focus on two localised decarbonisation cases and show how both of them rely on multiscalar interactions to work. Moreover, the decarbonisation vision itself aims to fix place in place, so to speak, while simultaneously mobilising it towards future decarbonised place-ness. This move builds upon calls to rescale and localise decarbonisation efforts (Rutherford & Coutard 2014), while maintaining the importance of attending to multiple scales even in relation to the local. The upshot leads them to highlight the relationship between formal governance mechanisms and the diffused nature of responsibility down to the individual, and relatedly the need to support broader participation in decarbonisation at and across these local to regional scales.

The choice of ‘mainframing’ the regional scale in analyses of low-carbon place-making allows for effective inclusion of dynamics at more local scales where actions unfold through the agency of various actors in engagement with sociotechnical infrastructures. A narrower reading of place might miss out on the mobilisation of place itself, yet Crowther et al. show how interactions between multiscalar and place-based practices are important to appreciate a low-carbon transition and the governance choices, challenges, and indeed attitudes entailed therein. Thus, explicit attention to multiscalarity in low-carbon place-making acknowledges and unpacks the rescaling of low-carbon policies and their affects, in respectful recognition of the multiple narratives of transition that are expressed, contested, and put into practice.

Moving from the UK to Kano City in Nigeria, the article by Barau (2023) starts from the important place-based recognition that in the studied context a low-carbon transition can imply tapping latent potential within the urban milieu to recreate tree-based artisanal industries. As a complementary measure, Barau emphasises the scope to conserve indigenous trees, and shows how his study participants co-produced a list of 10 tree species and 21 ideas for low-carbon place-making. The push to develop nature-based urban artisanal industries in a generally very urbanised country marks a multifaceted understanding of transitions, not necessarily as embracing something new but as a return to the known in ways that have gained revitalised relevance. Part of this continuity during reorientation comes from Barau’s approach of co-designing pathways for transition with varied stakeholders within Kano City. This inherently implies that the stakeholders are able to see themselves in reoriented practices that are consistent with low-carbon transitions. The other element that lends continuity is customisation of pathways to a place understood as dynamic and evolving. Rather than necessarily continuing to become heavily urbanised, Barau holds that nature-based solutions can help the city to centre its relation to nature, as expressed in the productive and sustainable practices of local artisanal workers using tree-based resources.

One striking aspect of invoking possibilities dormant within a place is the necessarily sited nature of urban transitions, which play out in energy landscapes. Trees, their growth, harvest, and reuse of components, all comprise part of urban metabolism. By utilising these resources, grown from the soil in local and small-scale ways, this metabolism remains relatively slow and stable, without great effects on or from translocal contexts. This is a back-to-the-future argument of sorts, where low-carbon transitions have decolonisation co-benefits of reclaiming cultural practices and ecosystem characteristics in an ancient and formerly colonised city. This anchoring of a co-produced low-carbon place-making pathway in the historical development and the colonial and post-colonial industrial complexes of Kano City is a strong example of how transition processes require identification of not only agency but also meaning – actions that make a place low carbon can stem from a sense of commitment to multiple aligned goals and aspirations rather than being standalone interventions. Such an embedded mobilisation of low-carbon transitions could not only help Nigeria top meet its target of halving greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, but also lead to vibrant, nature-based urban places where local environments and livelihoods would regain sustainable synergies.

On the more sobering theme of the dispossessive effects and injustices wrought by large-scale and top-down imposed solar energy parks in India, Stock (2023) juxtaposes these rapidly implemented low-carbon infrastructures with the unmaking of place they exercise on hapless inhabitants, whom they displace or impact adversely in indirect ways. Stock highlights the embodied experience of dispossession due to low-carbon transitions that do not come combined with adequate consideration of place-making: disruptions to livelihoods and existing land uses such as cattle grazing, and inequitable access to basic resources such as water and energy (both as electricity and fuelwood). The article addresses the question of how geographies of solar energy transitions are embodied, as some places are made into solar parks A feminist political ecology lens is then applied to the affective responses of dispossessed peasants, and diverse emotional geographies and forms of embodied resistance come into view.

If unaddressed, the described injustices threaten to become spectres that could haunt such low-carbon energy infrastructures and the geographies they occupy, and reconstitute in time to come. This would make low-carbon places undesirable for their impacts on displaced and proximate others. The conflicts that accompany these cases of low-carbon place-making are internalised in the bodies of inhabitants. Barau’s focus on emotions associated with transitions, and on impact and resistance in everyday lives, is a strength of his analysis of the embodied and affective injustices of displacement sparked by low-carbon impositions. If violent excesses do not result in outcry and pushback because the ones picked on are so vulnerable and disenfranchised, then critiques of trends could speak truth to power and hope to inform and hold accountable the decision-makers who are entrusted with the responsibility of securing energy justice along procedural, recognition, and distributive lines.

Finally, coming to the article by Karam & Shokrgozar (2023), we are reminded that scale interpellates space such that places with some form of remoteness in otherwise contrasting countries can bear close resemblances. With an empirical focus on Åfjord Municipality in Norway, Karam & Shokrgozar point out trends rather similar to those that relate to the Indian solar parks, but that in their study refer to the large and controversial Fosen Vind energy project that drew a Supreme Court decision against the implementation of wind turbines in recognised Sami reindeer herding territory. They argue that low-carbon place-making in the form of large industrial land enclosures rests on a foundation of sacrifice zones (e.g. land used by indigenous peoples such as the Sami) and appropriation of habitats for both human and more-than-human others. Such modalities of green extractivism, which have received considerable recent attention by energy scholars, claim land enclosure as inevitable for climate mitigation, thereby trying to bring into opposition two concerns that have traditionally been closely wedded in terms of the publics who mobilise to secure these ends: ecological sustainability and safeguarding the rights of highly vulnerable groups. This is a false dichotomy, as equity and justice are compatible with responsibly harvested natural resources.

The large-scale mode of accessing wind energy in the Fosen Vind case, implemented even while the question of major land use change was under court consideration, represents an extreme where both government and industry actors blatantly disregard constitutionally enshrined minority group rights. A processual and relational focus reveals such trends. We again see engagement with the affective plane during analysis. Another notable element is the interplay between the formal and the informal, where Karam & Shokrgozar dwell on customary rights, and on uncommodified land use practices, as well as on the ‘invasion’ that disrupts ongoing activities and livelihoods in this challenging geography, contra legality. They show how low-carbon place-making risks becoming implicated in neocolonial actions, and point to insufficient transitions linked to land, to natural resource governance, and to practitioners’ own embodied understanding of evolving energy systems.

Conclusions: What can we learn from and for making low-carbon places?

The collection of articles in this special issue of Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift–Norwegian Journal of Geography constitutes a constructive and insightful foray into how low-carbon places are made/to be made. The ‘to be made’ indicates that the act of low-carbon place-making is still very much ongoing and located in the present and the future, in ways that are contingent upon a multitude of factors at and across various spatial scales. However, as the contributions show in various ways, there is scope to take instruction and inspiration from practices in the past and bring them into present play to imbue future pathways with some sociocultural continuity. As is evident across the contributions, the past is an important part of place-making for the future, embodied in energy infrastructures and practices that need to be made anew. Furthermore, as a common theme across the collection, the act of making is not only processual but also relational, co-produced by a multitude of actors in engaged interaction towards societal shifts.

The contributions draw out the importance of place-specific approaches, not only for low-carbon place-making, but also for the study of sociotechnical transitions. They are methodologically and empirically rich, as they employ a wide array of methods to gain contextualised perspectives on important aspects of low-carbon place-making. These aspects allow analyses to capture the salience of power relations, individual agency, and legacies of infrastructures and practices within specific contexts. The effect allows us to draw a harmonised conclusion that low-carbon transitions require a place-based approach, and must be understood as efforts at place-making to appreciate the challenges and opportunities they entail. As elaborated upon in contributions that feature explicitly multiscalar analyses, place-making occurs at and across multiple scales, both from the hyperlocal to the urban and regional, and through translocal connection. It is perhaps not surprising that place-making, like place itself, exhibits such internal and interlinked dynamism, yet it is a constitutive element often overlooked or merely treated as contextual background in low-carbon transitions scholarship. Acknowledging and incorporating multiscalarity and dynamism – including the embodiment of impacts of low-carbon transitions within individuals – reveals powerful and vital insights into the nature of place-making. Moreover, adding a multisited element to analyses reveals the variety and complexity that low-carbon place-making interventions must tackle to achieve intended objectives.

In closing, we emphasise the need for future research to bring together multiscalar, multisited treatment of place-specific dynamics for relational analysis of the ongoing change processes that constitute low-carbon place-making. Given the urgency of climate change mitigation and the rapidly evolving nature of energy and related infrastructures and practices, elucidating the complex matters at stake is a necessary contribution from scholars to enable informed low-carbon place-making towards vibrant, just, and sustainable places.

Acknowledgements

The editors acknowledge the COST Action 19126 Positive Energy Districts European Network (PED-EU-NET) for funding a workshop in 2022 that made this special issue possible, the Sustainability Transformation programme area at the University of Stavanger for additional financial support, and the Research Council of Norway (grant 314022 – Accountable Solar Energy TransitionS – ASSET) for funding Sareen and Shokrgozar’s time.