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This intervention seeks to revivify democratic thinking in political geography, through foregrounding and pluralising its material and temporal dimensions. At the same time, it speaks to a renewed centrality and relevance of infrastructure and infrastructural projects in political discourse. The contributions included here demonstrate how an infrastructural lens can offer new insights into democratic spaces, practices, and temporalities, offering more expansive versions of what it means to act politically. Specifically, these contributions intervene in existing geographical debates by bringing to the fore four underexplored dimensions of democratic governance: (im)materiality, connectivity, performativity, and temporality. In doing so, it develops a research agenda that broadens and regenerates thinking at the intersection of socio-spatial theory and democratic action and governance. Previous title: Intervention: Democratising infrastructure

In 2008, Walker and Devine-Wright published a short article that is now a key way-marker in the field: ‘Community renewable energy: what should it mean?’. A decade on, in this Perspective we revisit Walker and Devine-Wright’s paper to re-examine its central themes and to identify opportunities for the coming ten years of community renewable energy (CRE) studies. Our Perspective takes the form of a series of paired reflections from the authors of the original paper and three early career researchers whose work it has influenced. We present these reflections in three themes. First, despite its title, the 2008 article itself is not centrally concerned with meanings, still less what CRE should mean. CRE is always defined by its context, therefore, we argue for an approach that is alive to these contexts. Second, while the article splits ‘process’ and ‘outcome’ when conceptualising interpretations of CRE, research labelling elements of CRE as either ‘process’ or ‘outcome’ can obscure CRE’s complex and entangled dynamics. Third, the past decade of scholarship emerging in this article’s wake has tended to concentrate on the means by which CRE develops, rather than on its ends. There is a need for greater attention on the impacts of CRE, particularly its role in achieving just transitions. We propose that new approaches could further galvanise the study of CRE to help better understand what CRE does, for whom and in what contexts.

This paper introduces the Heideggerian terms Zuhanden and Vorhanden to studies of community low carbon transitions. It sets apart Zuhandenheit community as involvement: the doing, enacting and belonging aspects of community movements and activism. Vorhandenheit community contrastingly is observed: community as an object at arm's length, to be studied, tasked or used. The article builds on authors, particularly Malpas, who have utilised these concepts in spatial theory by adopting their associated spatialisation of involvement and containment. After introducing this theoretical understanding, the article addresses the case of a Transition initiative in receipt of government funding, where both Vorhanden and Zuhanden subjectivities can be found. Through focusing on this specific Transition project, we can more clearly grasp both the tensions emerging from state-funded community and the limits to, and possibilities for, appreciating community action phenomenologically.

In a 2011 contribution to this journal, Walker examined the ways that community is routinely employed in carbon governance, suggesting the need for more critical approaches. Here, we characterize an emerging, critical approach to researching climate change and community in neoliberal contexts, focusing attention principally on the global north, where this body of research has emerged. This work recognizes communities as sites of contestation, difference, tension, and distinction, in which action on climate change can be designed to meet a range of political and public ends. It aims to uncover the political and social context for community action on climate change, to be alert to the power relations inside and outside of communities, and to the context of neoliberalism, including individualism, the will to quantify, and competition. Furthermore, research in this space is committed to understanding both the lived experience of the messy empirical worlds we encounter, and the potential agency coalescing in community responses to climate change. Much of the work to date, discussed here, has focused on communities working on climate change mitigation in the global north, in which the idea of community as a space for governance is gaining traction. We also comment on the positioning of these arguments in the context of long-standing debates in the fields of ‘community-based’ development, natural resource management, and adaptation in the global South. This discussion establishes a foundation from which to progress learning across fields and geopolitical boundaries, furthering critical thinking on ‘community.’