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ABSTRACT
This special section of New Political Economy demonstrates the value of critical environmental political economy for our understanding of energy, and possibilities for, just energy transformations. In the following essay, I identify key themes from the special issue papers addressing the political economy of decarbonisation strategies and potentially deeper green transformations in capitalist economies. These are: (1) the historicity of energy-society relations; (2) the crisis tendencies of energy capital; (3) the spatial re-configurations associated with energy transitions, and (4) the generative and contradictory dynamics of political contestation. By foregrounding these analytic themes, political economic analyses challenge much of the existing energy transition literature that describes fuel switches and technological innovation without thematising relations of power or the historical significance of capitalist eco-social relations of energy. In order to advance the critical political economy contributions to our understanding of energy transition, I discuss key analytic insights from this tradition into agency, structure, space and process.
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Rebecca Pearse
Rebecca Pearse is Lecturer in environmental sociology at the Australian National University. Her current research investigates the possibilities for rapid and just energy transition, with particular focus on land and labour relations. She is a Chief Investigator on two ARC Discovery Projects: Decarbonising Electricity (Goodman et al. 2018–21) and Environmental Justice and the Making of Just Food and Energy Policy (Schlosberg, Pearse and Rickards 2020–22).