PrintKnuth, S., Behrsin, I., Levenda, A., & McCarthy, J. (2022). New political ecologies of renewable energy. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 5(3), 997-1013.
This paper is the introduction to a special collection of scholarship on "Critical Renewabilities". The paper highlights important themes in political ecology of renewable energies found in the papers in the special issue and beyond, these include:
- Theorizing Renewables-Driven Land Transformations
- Advancing Industrial Political Ecologies of Renewables
- Locating Power within Technical and Artifactual Politics
- Generating Knowledge and Tools for Just Transitions
"The critique of fossil fuel regimes has been a foundational concern for the field of political ecology, in its drives to expose the injustices and harms of energy extractivism and its early warnings of the climate crisis. However, it is increasingly evident that renewable energy sources and their infrastructures will carry their own costs and trade-offs, and that critique, resistance and alternative movement-building are needed to forge a truly just renewable energy transition. This theme issue underlines the many ways in which political ecology is well-positioned to lead critical and engaged scholarship in support of energy/climate justice."
Bridge, G., Bouzarovski, S., Bradshaw, M., & Eyre, N. (2013). Geographies of energy transition: Space, place and the low-carbon economy. Energy policy, 53, 331-340
This paper makes a case for examining energy transition as a geographical process that invovles the reconfiguration of current patterns and scales of economic and social activity. The authors lay out six concepts are introduced and explained: location, landscape, territoriality, spatial differentiation, scaling, and spatial embeddedness, that can be used to understand the geographical implications of transition to a low-carbon economy.
"Focussing on the UK Government's policy for a low carbon transition, the paper provides a conceptual language with which to describe and assess the geographical implications of a transition towards low carbon energy. Examples illustrate how the geographies of a future low-carbon economy are not yet determined and that a range of divergent – and contending – potential geographical futures are in play."
NOTE: Links to the readings are located in the Week 8 module in Canvas.