Energy infrastructure transitions and environmental governance

ABSTRACT

At a time of great urgency for transitions to sustainability in light of climate mitigation targets, energy infrastructure is in a state of flux. Expansions in renewable energy and the persistent grasp of fossil fuels over a historically centralised sector surface new challenges of socio-spatial and environmental justice. Where does new energy infrastructure appear, how is this decided, who benefits and who is burdened? What land uses are displaced and with what socio-ecological implications? This collection pulls together insights from environmental and land governance, ethnographic studies of situated social identities, and emerging conceptualisations of energy infrastructure to address these concerns. It features contributions focused at multiple scales – the urban, regional, national and trans-local – and informed by a variety of cognate conceptual lenses: political ecology, human geography, social anthropology, urban studies, socio-technical transitions and epistemic politics. Examining cases from three continents, both the Global South and North, the theme issue presents an array of perspectives from established and emerging scholars. It seeks to combine empirically rich and theoretically rigorous enquiry at the conjuncture of energy infrastructure transitions, changing land use and morphing social identity. The aim is thus to further interdisciplinary knowledge on socio-ecological implications of cross-sectoral transitions.

KEYWORDS:

• infrastructure
• energy transitions
• environmental governance
• justice
• multi-scalar

CLASSIFICATIONS:

• SDG7 Affordable and Clean Energy
• SDG10 Reduced inequality
• SDG11 Sustainable cities and communities
• SDG13 Climate action

Introduction

All assessed modelled pathways that limit warming to 1.5°C or well below 2°C require land-based mitigation and land-use change … [with] reliance on rapid and far-reaching transitions in energy, land, urban systems and infrastructure, and on behavioural and lifestyle changes

– Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2019, 26–27)

As renewable energy expands while fossil fuels persist, prospective energy infrastructure transitions intersect with coterminous land use and ownership concerns (Moss, Becker, and Naumann 2015). They moreover appear to be modulated by many factors familiar to land governance researchers: social capital and networks, property rights and financial instruments, citizenship-based claims to access energy services, socio-technical innovation, and multi-scalar political economies (Bridge, Özkaynak, and Turhan 2018). There is hence a need to jointly unpack the governance of energy infrastructure transitions and land (Wolford et al. 2013; McEwan 2017). Despite recognition of the land-energy intersection, the rigorous ethnographic lens that marks research on land and multi-scalar environmental governance has been marginal in energy infrastructure transitions scholarship (Abram, Winthereik, and Yarrow 2019). Consequently, everyday power relations, cultural and place-specificities, and their justice implications are under-attended.

This special issue seeks cross-fertilisation and potential convergence of these streams. It takes point of departure in rich knowledge of geographical contexts, within which authors situate energy geographies by drawing critically on emerging energy infrastructure transitions scholarship (Bouzarovski, Pasqualetti, and Castan Broto 2017; Sareen and Oskarsson 2017). Our collective enquiry is centred on a carbon-critical, cross-sectoral phenomenon: energy infrastructure (e.g. transport, electricity or buildings) expansion at urban, regional, national and trans-local scales and evolving social imaginaries of transition (Smith and Tidwell 2016).

Climate change mitigation in line with 1.5 or 2 degree Celsius targets places clear limits on any new commitment to carbon-intensive infrastructure, yet growth continues unabated in many critical sectors. New infrastructure is regarded as a marker of development and interwoven with societal desires (Winther 2008) and concrete demands around greater access to mobility, housing and energy services. These drivers have tended to overcome restrictions posed by the more diffused sense of urgency around climate mitigation and socio-cultural values associated with nature (Guðmundsdottir et al. 2018).

Yet increasingly frequent climate change related disasters such as cyclones, wildfires, droughts and floods are rapidly reshaping public debate (Capstick et al. 2015; Lujala, Lein, and Rød 2015), as are everyday phenomena like urban smog (Zhu et al. 2020). As public recognition of the links underlying these competing tensions (between mitigation and growth, broadly construed) is increasingly articulated in political form (Pallett, Chilvers, and Hargreaves 2019), it portends tussles over authority and public understandings of progress that are likely to be definitive of our generational choices with regard to energy infrastructure in post-modern societies (Sareen 2020).

We draw together three related strands. First, energy infrastructure transitions, spanning concerns that range from questions of basic needs to consumerist lifestyles, and from affordability to carbon budgets (Bulkeley, Castán Broto, and Maassen 2014). Energy infrastructure is understood as an obdurate socio-material bricolage being reconfigured unevenly across space and place. Second, environmental governance, approached as critical institutional change, explicating structure-agency interplay in relational terms (Mahoney and Thelen 2009). We interpret institutional change through assemblage understandings of actors who reconfigure and reconstitute institutional authority. Institutions are thus socially shaped, produced and reproduced, and subject to shifts as manifest forms of social regulation. Third, land use and place-based identity, which we unpack by drawing ethnographically on the resource politics that are at play in various empirical contexts (Li 2014; Hall et al. 2015). This sets focus on winners and losers, the influential and voiceless actors involved or excluded in decision-making on energy infrastructure design and investment, and the transitions they articulate and seek to enable.

Our ambition is programmatic. We see the cobbling together of these strands of scholarship as a necessary intervention to integrate academic enquiry on climate mitigation strategies, social identities and imaginaries (Jasanoff and Kim 2013), sector-specific material choices and cross-sectoral coordination under transition (Hansen and Coenen 2015), and to generate timely insights on emerging political ecologies and metabolisms as energy infrastructure evolves. The focus on energy infrastructure transitions brings together conflict over land resources – a long-standing concern of environmental governance scholarship that enmeshes questions of identity into decision-making over resources (Adger et al. 2003) – and climate change mitigation (Kiesecker and Naugle 2017), not as oppositional concerns but rather as forces that are being resolved in reflexive relation with evolving social imaginaries of energy futures.

The four papers in the collection unpack these issues at the urban and sub-urban scale [Verheij and Nunes (this issue), Kovacic et al. (this issue)], and also bring socio-spatial justice at the regional and national scale into play [Silva and Sareen (this issue), Chandrashekeran (this issue)]. They showcase rich ethnographic insights in a variety of ways. Some bring urban geography lenses to the fore, highlighting power relations in decision-making [Verheij and Nunes (this issue)] and the tensions between formal processes and lived experience [Kovacic et al. (this issue)]. Others emphasise social identity in relation to renewable energy uptake [Silva and Sareen (this issue)] and a continuum of social identity-based marginalisation as well as scope for agency [Chandrashekeran (this issue)]. By traversing these multi-scalar issues in African, European and Australian contexts, the collection foregrounds the globally interwoven nature and challenge of energy infrastructure transitions and environmental governance across various place-based socio-cultural identities and land-use contexts.

Energy infrastructure transitions and environmental governance

Two papers focus on Portuguese cases, drawing out issues at different scales. In a paper entitled ‘Justice and power relations in urban greening: Can Lisbon’s urban greening strategies lead to more environmental justice?’, Verheij and Nunes focus on contestations around urban greening in the Marvila suburb of Lisbon, the European Green Capital of 2020. They mobilise established understandings of environmental justice (Schlosberg 2004; Walker 2009) and adopt an explicitly socio-spatial perspective to construe urban greening as a multi-scalar exercise. This allows them to bring forth the reductive ways in which greening as an infrastructural project is implemented without adequate attention to or scope for expression of people’s situated local identities. They make the case for more cross-sectoral coordination and caution that a failure to adopt such holistic urban planning measures may lead to eco-gentrification. Marvila thus emerges as not only a very specific sort of suburb shaped by competing identities and ideologies, but as a scale of action within the larger urban project of greening Lisbon, where the authors highlight complex questions of how to ensure procedural justice and recognition. This complements the larger characterisation of Lisbon as a trendsetter for urban sustainability projects. Such branding can catalyse and accelerate greening projects but must nonetheless remain sensitive to place-based concerns, including the realities of marginalised stakeholders. Such a multi-scalar approach to implementation is integral to long-term realisation of sustainability visions.

The paper by Silva and Sareen, entitled ‘Solar photovoltaic energy infrastructures, land use and sociocultural context in Portugal’, adopts an explicitly multi-scalar approach as its point of departure. The authors aim squarely at one of the main energy infrastructure transitions afoot in Portugal and globally – solar photovoltaic plants. They choose three cases at different scales to draw out the varied issues, but also overlaps, that are related to this energy transition across a range of sizes and spatial locations. This choice brings multiple socio-technical aspects into play: regulatory and institutional factors, the spatial legacy of existing infrastructure, and varied sociocultural contexts within the same country. Local communities care about multiple factors cognate to energy infrastructure transitions, such as shifting land use, local revenue flows for welfare functions, and altered landscapes. These intertwined dynamics must be addressed to ensure dispositions favourable to solar projects, for what the authors term sociocultural solar worlding. The paper builds on earlier explications of the justice effects of multi-scalarity in transitions (Eriksen 2016; Howe 2014), pointing out how national energy policy has tended to favour large solar developers over more democratic visions of distributed rollout and ownership. These multi-scalar cases thus surface the need both to anticipate and ameliorate cross-sectoral conflicts, such as over land use change, as well as to ensure socially situated equitable effects of accelerating energy infrastructure transitions.

In the paper entitled ‘Building capacity towards what? Proposing a framework for the analysis of energy transition governance in the context of urban informality in Sub-Saharan Africa’, Kovacic and co-authors engage with a relatively neglected aspect of energy infrastructure, namely that linked with informal energy use. They employ an ambitious customised approach to three case studies in informal urban settlements, with a focus on the implementation of a national charcoal ban policy in Nairobi, Kenya; a renewable energy housing upgrade iShack project in Stellenbosch, South Africa; and a biomass-to-fuel briquette-making project in Kampala, Uganda. In specific informal settlements in each city, they examine how these framings of energy transitions impact informal energy use practices not reflected in formal policy design. To assess justice effects, they develop and apply a policy analysis framework that captures policy design and implementation through a four-fold protocol: attention to problem definition, policy strategy, mobilised capacities and instruments. Their analysis uncovers a trans-local tendency to prioritise technocratic fixes while failing to build capacity to integrate actual energy practices into the problem-solution orientation. The authors argue that these findings point to a failure of external validity in the problem framing that must be challenged for energy infrastructure interventions to advance social justice during energy transitions. Drawing on Bailey and Darkal (2018), they distinguish between energy justice and social justice, pointing out that simplistic targeting of the former risks perpetuating or exacerbating social injustice, especially in the widespread contexts of urban informality.

A paper by Chandrashekeran, entitled ‘Rent and reparation: How the law shapes Indigenous opportunities from large renewable energy projects’, completes the collection. She problematises an influential narrative of ‘energy dispossessions’ (Baka 2017), to consider whether rent-seeking by historically marginalised groups under progressive legislative safeguards may enable forms of energy justice and reparation as large renewable energy projects expand their land footprints. The paper draws on two prominent cases on Aboriginal land held under Land Rights and Native Title legislative regimes in Australia, where the Northern Territory Suncable Project and Asian Renewable Energy Hub projects propose to install 10–15 gigawatts of solar and wind energy capacity, mainly for export via overland and undersea cable. The analysis shows potential for socio-spatial differentiation in outcomes through protracted legal struggle, by drawing on modalities such as a right of veto. However, such procedures do appear to be weaker than social protection measures applicable to extractive activities, bringing into question the way that large renewable energy projects are socially legitimated vis-a-vis land rights. The author argues that richer attention to dynamics of contestation can reveal strategic scope for benefit-sharing with formerly dispossessed but contemporarily recognised Indigenous communities, thus creating value for marginalised groups during large infrastructure projects that reshape land relations and valuations during rapid energy transitions. The study shows that contextual variation can lead to significant sub-national differences in these distributive outcomes.

Conclusion

Together, these contributions showcase the value of turning a rigorous ethnographic and multi-scalar lens onto energy infrastructure transitions and firming up links with environmental governance research. The studies foreground and unpack complex justice issues that are inherently cross-sectoral, and require integrated attention to multiple cognate sectors whose evolution is interlinked. Socio-spatial patterns of injustice are evident, at the sub-urban and sub-national scale as well as trans-locally. Explicit attention to dynamics at and across scales must be complemented by a grounded understanding of place-based concerns, varied worldviews, and scope for mechanisms that secure fair representation, especially for marginalised citizens across a range of intersecting inequalities. The rich treatment of socio-cultural contexts in this collection reveals the value of such nuanced analysis, both for our characterisations of environmental governance challenges to have conceptual integrity and for scholarship to inform policy in ways that can impact energy infrastructure transitions to achieve social and environmental justice.

This is a tall order, and only possible to accomplish due to generous collaborations and exchanges across disciplines and with complementary bases in expertise. On a concluding note, the vibrant intellectual enterprise that has led to this collection deserves mention. It has been made possible by the engagement of several colleagues, who shared their work openly and gave reflective and critical feedback to others. A hybrid workshop convened a larger group of us, both in person and remotely, and a seminar with wider participation and role-play by the audience challenged us to communicate our insights in a manner accessible to broader publics. The journal’s recognition of the value of the original idea and capable stewardship of the peer review process made it possible to complete this theme issue in a timely manner. The people and funding bodies that supported this process are acknowledged separately. A substantive closing reflection here is that such proactive academic practices should not only be recognised and valued, but are in fact intrinsic to the realisation of thorough, interdisciplinary and multi-scalar analyses that span as broad and yet conceptually consistent a range as this edited collection. It is possible to say with modesty and gratitude that this collegial exercise has been an instructive foray into combining scholarship on energy infrastructure transitions and environmental governance, which the 2020s will hopefully advance.

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to participants at a 2–4 February 2020 manuscript workshop in Voss (Sangeetha Chandrashekeran, Zora Kovacic, Luís Silva, Ankit Kumar, Jessica Verheij, Kenneth Bo Nielsen, Patrik Oskarsson and Sören Becker) of whom the last four also served as panellists for a thematic seminar on 5 February 2020 at the National Sustainable Development Goals Conference in Bergen. Generous funding from the Meltzer Foundation and the Norwegian Network for Asian Studies enabled these events. The author also wishes to thank the journal’s editorial office for their steady support throughout the process, and the anonymous reviewers whose feedback helped improve the quality of the collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.