Cities play increasingly recognised roles in global climate change responses: as change laboratories, spaces of opportunity, and as administrative and economic hubs that concentrate human and ...financial resources and needs. They host high climate mitigation potential and acute climate adaptation vulnerabilities. Scholarship flags conventional urban planning approaches to limit global warming to 1.5°C as inadequate. Yet urban sustainability transitions literature features few examples of functioning alternative governance and planning paradigms. This paper assesses one such approach, new municipalism: social movements centred on a democratic transformation of the local economy and state. We combine attention to urban sustainability transitions and new municipalism research to interrogate whether and how the latter can facilitate the provision of leadership and institutional arrangements that enable urban transformation to sustainability. Our desk study considers two prominent examples of new municipalism in Spain, where Barcelona en Comú and Ahora Madrid arose as anti-austerity movements to combat neoliberal urban agendas during the 2010s. We find that the praxis of collective decision-making associated with new municipalism does offer inclusive, innovative policy pathways and the potential to implement experimental knowledge and learning in complex real-world settings at the urban scale. We argue, however, that powerful neoliberal mechanisms impose structural constraints on the very push for deep political change that new municipalist movements embody. By linking transformative climate governance needs with new municipalism movements and wider political economic structuring forces, we explicate the tensions and contested dynamics of institutionalising progressive social movements in the multi-scalar governance of urban sustainability transformation.
Within the energy geographies debate on the uneven scalar effects of energy transitions, this article addresses the under-examined, increasing intersection of automation and energy transitions. Using ...a comparative case of national smart meter rollouts—the deployment of distributed energy monitors whose diffusion constitutes the foundation for layering and automating energy infrastructure—it draws on two contrasting studies. One features an urban living lab during Norway’s rapidly completed smart meter rollout to 2.9 million consumers; the other targets the national scale in Portugal during its recently accelerated two-fifths completed smart meter rollout across six million consumers. The article identifies twin scalar biases: (i) social aspects of automation are controlled at higher scales while users are responsibilised for them at the household scale, and (ii) both control over and responsibility for technical aspects are restricted to higher scales. It empirically specifies how these scalar biases modulate socio-technical infrastructural interventions, such as smart meters. On this basis, it argues that embedding social and technical differentiation due to such scalar biases risks dehumanising technical aspects while detechnicising social aspects in this early intersection of energy transitions and automation.
This open access book reframes sustainable energy transitions as being a matter of resolving accountability crises. It demonstrates how the empirical study of several practices of legitimation can ...analytically deconstruct energy transitions, and presents a typology of these practices to help determine whether energy transitions contribute to sustainability. The real-world challenge of climate change requires sustainable energy transitions. This presents a crisis of accountability legitimated through situated practices in a wide range of cases including: solar energy transitions in Portugal, urban energy transitions in Germany, forestland conflicts in Indonesia, urban carbon emission targets in Norway, transport electrification in the Nordic region, and biodiversity conservation and energy extraction in the USA. By synthesising these cases, chapters identify various dimensions wherein practices of legitimation construct specific accountability relations. This book deftly illustrates the value of an analytical approach focused on accountable governance to enable sustainable energy transitions. It will be of great use to both academics and practitioners working in the field of energy transitions.
Urban energy transitions are key components of urgently requisite climate change mitigation. Promissory discourse accords smart grids pride of place within them. We employ a living lab to study smart ...grids as a solution geared towards upscaling and systematisation, investigate their limits as a climate change mitigation solution, and assess them rigorously as urban energy transitions. Our 18 month living lab simulates a household energy management platform in Bergen. Norway's mitigation focus promotes smart meter roll-out as reducing carbon emissions, by (i) unlocking efficiency gains, and (ii) increasing awareness for demand-side management. We problematise this discourse. Raising awareness encounters intractable challenges for smart grid scalability. Scattered efficiency gains constitute modest increments rather than the substantial change requisite for rapid mitigation. Whereas promissory smart grid discourse overlooks these ground-truthed limits, our findings caution against misplaced expectations concerning mitigation. We contest discursive enthusiasm on smart grids and argue for aligning local and systemic concerns before upscaling to avoid obscuring risks. Scaling up requires understanding and addressing interdependencies and trade-offs across scales. Focus group discussions and surveys with living lab participants who used sub-meter monitors to track real-time household electricity consumption data over an extended period show that technical issues and energy behaviour, as well as political economic and policy structures and factors, pose significant limits to smart grids. Urban strategies for climate change mitigation must be informed by this recognition. Our results indicate that upscaling relies on bottom-up popular acceptance of the salient technical, organisational and standardisation measures, but that measures to improve the democratic legitimacy of and participation in energy transitions remain weak. We highlight limits to smart grids as a standalone urban mitigation solution and call for a sharper focus on accompanying thrust areas for systematisation and scalability, such as renewable energy integration and grid coordination.
Recent efforts to involve digital technologies and renewables in the electricity grid have placed users at center stage in the legitimation of energy transitions. This move has been paralleled by an ...emphasis on users and energy practices in social studies of energy related to science and technology studies. This article builds on an eighteen-month Living Lab exploration of energy practices with smart electricity users in Bergen, Norway. We make two interrelated arguments. First, energy production and distribution in Norway and elsewhere is shifting toward greater automation of tasks, possibly bypassing the “active user” concept. Energy sector practices are evolving from simply extracting natural resources (Extraction 1.0) toward extraction of users’ behavioral data (Extraction 2.0), and privacy thus emerges as a key component in the stabilization of energy systems. Second, we reflect on displacements of the roles and possibilities of users (or “energy citizens”) thereby enabled, especially their normative (political and regulatory) aspects. We propose that conceptualization of energy practices be supported by the concept of regimes of engagement from pragmatist sociology. Relatedly, we argue that market, civic, ecological, and industrial regimes are being actively merged through digital innovation and what we call the techno-epistemic network of smart electricity.
•Empirical research with 64 climate strikers in six cities in four different countries.•Examines knowledge, emotions, motivations, and actions of climate strikers.•Large variation in climate strikers ...regards to knowledge, emotions, motivations and actions.•Strikes provide opportunism also for other social and political action.•Values underpinning climate action range from individual to planetary concerns.
In August 2018, Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg started to strike from school on Fridays to protest against a lack of action on the climate crisis. Her actions sparked a historically large youth movement, leading to a series of school strikes across the world. Over the course of one week in September 2019, striking school children, students and other grassroots movements, such as Extinction Rebellion, called for everyone to participate in a global Climate Strike. This paper is based on comparative research with climate protesters in six cities: Brighton and London (United Kingdom), Montreal (Canada), New Haven and New York (USA), and Stavanger (Norway). Based on original interviews with 64 protesters, the study examines their knowledge, emotions, motivations, and actions in relation to climate change, including any lifestyle changes they have undertaken before or after their protests. Our findings show that protesters have varying degrees of knowledge about climate change, and have taken a range of actions in their own lives to address climate change. They also manifest a wide spectrum of emotions about climate change, and different motivations for taking part in climate strikes. These features are under-studied and dynamically evolving at the present conjuncture. On this basis, we call for expanded academic attention to human, emotional, epistemic, and seemingly mundane aspects of climate protests, their structural tendencies and relational expressions, and the implications for our ability to address underlying drivers.
Energy poverty, a condition whereby people cannot secure adequate home energy services, is gaining prominence in public discourse and on political and policy agendas. As its measurement is ...operationalised, metrical developments are being socially shaped. A European Union mandate for biennial reporting on energy poverty presents an opportunity to institutionalise new metrics and thus privilege certain measurements as standards. While combining indicators at multiple scales is desirable to measure multi-dimensional aspects, it entails challenges such as database availability, coverage and limited disaggregated resolution. This article converges scholarship on metrics – which problematises the act of measurement – and on energy poverty – which apprehends socio-political and techno-economic particulars. Scholarship on metrics suggests that any basket of indicators risks silencing significant but hard to measure aspects, or unwarrantedly privileging others. State-of-the-art energy poverty scholarship calls for indicators that represent contextualised energy use issues, including energy access and quality, expenditure in relation to income, built environment related aspects and thermal comfort levels, while retaining simplicity and comparability for policy traction. We frame energy poverty metrology as the socially shaped measurement of a varied, multi-dimensional phenomenon within historically bureaucratic and publicly distant energy sectors, and assess the risks and opportunities that must be negotiated. To generate actionable knowledge, we propose an analytical framework with five dimensions of energy poverty metrology, and illustrate it using multi-scalar cases from three European countries. Dimensions include historical trajectories, data flattening, contextualised identification, new representation and policy uptake. We argue that the measurement of energy poverty must be informed by the politics of data and scale in order to institutionalise emerging metrics, while safeguarding against their co-optation for purposes other than the deep and rapid alleviation of energy poverty. This ‘dimensioned’ understanding of metrology can provide leverage to push for decisive action to address the structural underpinnings of domestic energy deprivation.
•Converges scholarship on metrics and measurement with energy poverty research.•Frames energy poverty metrology as socially shaped measurement of complex phenomenon.•Proposes an analytical framework with five dimensions of energy poverty metrology.•Illustrates framework using multi-scalar cases from three EU countries: Portugal, Spain, UK.•Dimensions: historical trajectories, data flattening, contextualised identification, new representation and policy uptake.
The threats climate change poses require rapid and wide decarbonization efforts in the energy sector. Historically, large-scale energy operations, often instrumental for a scaled and effective ...approach to meet decarbonization goals, undergird energy-related injustices. Energy poverty is a multi-dimensional form of injustice, with relevance to low-carbon energy transitions. Defined as the condition of being unable to access an adequate level of household energy services, energy poverty persists despite the emergence of affordable renewable energy technologies, such as solar photovoltaics (PV). Historical injustices and the modularity of solar PV combine to offer new possibilities in ownership, production and distribution of cost-competitive, clean and collectively scalable energy. Consequently, emerging policy priorities for positive energy districts call into question the traditional large-scale modality of energy operations. We report from a case study of solar power in Lisbon, a frontrunner in urban energy transitions while also home to high energy poverty incidence. The study focuses on scalar aspects of justice in energy transitions to investigate whether and how solar PV can alleviate urban energy poverty. It features 2 months of fieldwork centered on community and expert perspectives, including semi-structured interviews and field observations. We mobilize a spatial energy justice framework to identify justice aspects of multi-scalar solar PV uptake. By showing how energy justice is shaped in diverse ways at different scales, we demonstrate ways in which scale matters for just urban energy transitions. We argue that small- and medium-scaled approaches to electricity distribution, an integral component of positive energy districts, can address specific justice concerns. However, even as such approaches gain attention and legitimacy, they risk structurally excluding socio-economically vulnerable users, and proceed slowly relative to large-scale solar rollout.
Available open access digitally under CC-BY licence. Portugal is among the best-placed European countries to take advantage of solar power, having achieved a five-fold increase in installed capacity ...during 2017-2023 despite financial constraints. In 2023, its National Energy and Climate Plan set an ambitious target for a further eight-fold increase from 2.5 GW to 20.4 GW by 2030. How can such fast-paced deployment secure sociospatial justice? What insights do political economic dynamics hold for future transitions? Drawing on long-term, multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork, this book is a one-stop resource for policymakers, practitioners, scholars, and anyone interested in just solar energy transitions. Siddharth Sareen won the 2024 Nils Klim Prize, recognising his exemplary work in the search for renewable and sustainable sources of energy.
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