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The introduction to this special issue, Contesting Transitions: New Directions in the Anthropology of Energy, Climate Justice, and Resource Imaginaries, takes stock of the current state of debate within anthropology and allied fields over the contradictions, slippages, and inequalities at the centre of the global energy transition. Across a wide range of critical case studies, the contributions underscore the importance of attending to what is being elided by dominant discourses and forms of production, such as alternatives to socio-material understandings of energy and resistance to the inevitability of extractivism as the basis for new ways of living. Even more, the collection takes up and problematizes the concept of 'transition' itself on historical, ethnographic, and epistemological grounds. After describing the themes that emerge from the special issue, and explaining how these themes point toward new configurations of research, theory-building, and critical intervention, the introduction concludes with a broader argument about the indispensable place of a critical anthropology in debates over energy and Anthropocenic harm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Afterword to "Contesting Transitions" special issue, eds. Mark Goodale and Zeynep Oguz. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within days of taking office in January 2021, President Biden signed an executive order establishing the Justice40 initiative, which directed federal agencies to ensure that at least 40% of the benefits of federal investments flow to historically marginalized communities. This article traces how Justice40, as interpreted and enacted by government bureaucrats, academics, industry researchers, and activists, intervenes in the governance of the energy transition it seeks to put into motion. Drawing from ongoing critical participation in energy research and development arenas and taking inspiration from Kim Fortun's notion of the "informating of environmentalism," this article argues that Justice40 can be understood as an attempt to informate justice, rendering it into problems that can be understood, manipulated, and audited through information systems. Scrambling to manage their accountabilities to the executive branch, Congress, and the American taxpayers footing the bill for massive infrastructure investments, Department of Energy programs are rolling out intricate systems of quantification, whose objectives of commensurability obscure local conceptions and prioritizations of justice. While Justice40 articulates lofty goals of energy transition enhancing the wellbeing of people who have otherwise been harmed by or excluded from the country's existing energy infrastructure, its everyday practice has the ironic effect of undermining both epistemic and procedural justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the practices associated with technical solutions to energy transitions. In particular, it considers the role of 'problem solving' as a partial view on the world with extraordinary influence. As the core epistemological practice of engineers, problem solving starts with selective framings of problems in which social or political conditions are taken as given. Engineering, as a form of applied science, therefore offers ethical choices that may be eclipsed by technical framings. This article highlights the reflexive practices of engineers engaged in modelling practices for energy transitions, who are addressing socio-technical problems in formally constrained ways that both enable and limit the thinkability of different future horizons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses the ethnography of the prelives of lithium industrialization in Bolivia to contribute to wider debates – in anthropology and beyond – about the essentially contested nature of the green energy transition. Based on research conducted between 2019 and 2023, the article examines the topographies of production and sociopolitical mobilization that are entangled with Bolivia's state-controlled lithium project but which resist the various pressures to reorient social and productive worlds around arguably the most important 'critical' mineral for climate policy-making. The article develops a theoretical framework for understanding these localized counter-futurities, one in which the image of scale-making takes on both vertical and horizontal dimensions. An anthropology of energy, climate justice, and resource imaginaries that is critically attuned to these inter-scalar frictions is one that must also be able to project itself through the kaleidoscope of competing energy narratives as a form of both demystification and ethnographic truth-telling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sharp increase in and volatility of fossil fuel prices, due in particular to the Russian–Ukrainian conflict, is a powerful incentive for cities to accelerate their energy transition. Yet urban authorities have limited power over the construction of energy policies and the management of networks, and they remain dependent on remote and mainly carbon-intensive imported sources of energy. The recovery of waste heat from waste incineration or industrial emissions and its use in heating networks represents a solution for cities to control part of their energy supply, to develop their own capacities for action and to implement local transition strategies, in addition to the development of renewable energies. Based on the analysis of four case studies in France between 2019 and 2022, in the context preceding the current energy crisis, this article examines how cities are trying to develop waste heat recovery and the role this energy resource plays in the decarbonisation of urban energy systems. The analysis highlights that the emergence of these projects is more broadly part of the renegotiation dynamics of energy, ecological and economic relationships between cities and industries, and that their implementation results in the construction of new urban energy nexuses. The use of waste heat makes it possible to improve the energy efficiency of industrial and urban energy systems, sometimes significantly, but it must be seen as a transitional solution because it can temporarily increase cities' dependency on high-carbon and energy-inefficient industrial activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article critically interrogates the over-emphasis upon urban solutions when considering complex and multi-scalar energy infrastructures that must transition to low-carbon intensity for a sustainable future. While urban actors can play an important role in energy transition, their interventions are riven with difficulties, and at times failure, as they encounter challenges of politics, capacity and agency in a broader and multi-scalar governance landscape. Drawing upon the comparative and variegated political economies of energy infrastructure governance in Germany and the UK, this article makes three critical arguments. Firstly, it contends that patterns of ownership of key infrastructures, particularly in the highly privatised context of the UK but also in Germany’s more diversified energy market, trouble urban-level interventions. Secondly, against a backdrop of post-financial crash austerity, we raise the issue of capacity at an urban level, principally concerning the financing and technical administration of urban infrastructural ‘solutions’. Thirdly, the entrenched politics of neoliberalisation, its multi-scalar articulations and in particular discourses of marketisation and competition, while distinct across the two contexts, shape the possibilities, imaginaries and support available for local-level change in complex infrastructures. The article points to differential urban capacities and governance conditions that require a greater degree of nuance in sustainability narratives, and a critical conversation around the need for multi-scalar coordination in energy transitions, in order to avert catastrophic climate breakdown. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to examine how a metropolis like Seoul could be resilient to imminent environmental crisis in the era of climate change. To do so, it conducts a case review of the 'One Less Nuclear Power Plant' (OLNPP) policy adopted under the progressive leadership of Mayor Park Won-soon (2011–). The policy was launched in April 2012, with a target of cutting energy use by 2 million tons of oil equivalent (TOE), which is equivalent to the capacity of one nuclear power plant. The target was accomplished in June 2014, six months ahead of schedule. The second phase of OLNPP has been in progress since August 2014 (and is due to complete in 2020). Focusing on its first phase (2012–2014), the article looks into the OLNPP as an experiment for the city's transition to a resilient energy regime. Following the Introduction, the article reviews the conceptual relationships between risk, resilience and governance in an urban context. This is followed by examination of the background of the OLNPP policy, which was adopted by a progressive leader, and of how the OLNPP as an energy transition project is formulated as geared to enhancing resilience in the city's energy regime. The next section addresses the progressive mode of governing the implementation of the OLNPP, which leads to resilient energy life, giving rise to a progressive form of city. The conclusion characterises the relationship between the progressivity and resiliency of a new energy system by locating it in a framework of conceptualising a progressive city, while outlining the future of the OLNPP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Britain’s gas system developed in the early 1800s. Over the past two centuries the system and its local, national and international networks have experienced much socio-technical innovation, governance changes and six key transitions. Since the Climate Change Act of 2008, it faces a seventh challenging transition as the UK moves uncertainly towards a low-carbon energy system, including decarbonising electricity, heat and transport. The paper explores: the origins of the system by Murdoch, Boulton and Watt; the early 19th century development of local gas networks; innovative responses to, inter alia, the challenge of incandescent electric light from the 1880s, including the expansion of the customer base and the development and active promotion of cooking and heat services – the growth, fragmentation and incoherence of the industry between the two World Wars; the post-war period that saw the industry nationalised in 1948, as the multi-fuel economy developed; the institutional, technical and social challenges associated with the conversion to North Sea natural gas in the 1960s; and innovation and change in response to the challenges that flowed from the privatisation of British Gas in 1987. The paper shows how examining past processes of innovation, transition and transformation through the lens of institutional ‘governance logics’ helps appreciate the challenges faced by system actors, technologies, institutions and regulators in the past and offers insights into the issues posed by the low-carbon transition. The paper begins by outlining some analytical concepts used in the analysis. We then examine the regime’s six past transitions. The paper concludes by considering what insights these past experiences suggest for a seventh transition towards a low-carbon economy, for the future governance of the UK gas system and its networks and particularly for natural gas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given that in-depth place-specific studies are needed for a better understanding of the role of cities in coping with climate change and implementing the energy transition, this paper, based on the case of Lyon (France), brings empirical evidence of how climate and energy are being governed at a city level. A comprehensive understanding of this is achieved with emphasis put on the modes of governing enacted by the local authority, as well as the positioning of the city at broader scales. The framing and localising processes involved in the policy-making process are at the core of this analysis, with a particular focus on two interrelated questions: how are climate and energy making their way as new urban issues that call for specific responses, and how do they reinforce – and are they also reinforced by – metropolitan-wide governance in a context of institutional change? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global society’s goal is to transition to more sustainable forms of energy production and consumption. How is the religious factor supporting this transition to sustainable energy models and renewable energy? This is a question that social scientists are only just beginning to respond to. In Latin America, it has hardly been raised. This article is an effort to answer this question, taking into account the complex nature of the definition of religion and religiosity. Building on a mixed methodology, the author analyses a national survey of Chilean university students. He observes the relationship between religiosity or declared religious choice and certain aspects of the energy transition – energy efficiency, renewable energy and social patterns of sustainable energy consumption – and finds that religion does play a role, but that this is heterogeneous: many trends indicate that Catholics, evangelicals and members of missionary churches do not support the energy transition, while non-believers do, but the trends are weak. The author analyses these and other trends, ponders their meanings and provides an interpretation and typology. His interpretation points to the need for further study of the relationship between religion and changing lifestyles towards more sustainable forms of energy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Awareness of global warming has been widespread for two decades, yet the American political system has been slow to respond. This essay examines, first, political explanations for policy failure, focusing at the federal level and outlining both short-term partisan and structural explanations for the stalemate. The second section surveys previous energy regimes and the transitions between them, and policy failure is explained by the logic of Thomas Hughes’s ‘technological momentum’. The third section moves to an international perspective, using the Kaya Identity and its distinction between energy intensity and carbon intensity to understand in policy terms ‘technological fixes’ vs. low-carbon alternatives. The final section reframes US energy policy failure and asks: (1) Why, between 1980 and 1999, was America’s actual performance in slowing CO2 emissions better than its politics would seem capable of delivering? (2) How and why has the United States since c. 2007 managed to reduce per capita CO2 emissions? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Metropolitan authorities and local business elites are often seen as major players in the energy transition in the city. Such energy transitions are mostly conceived of as low carbon technologies, which permit the retrofitting of urban infrastructure and the rebundling of metabolic circuits. This article contests these views by highlighting the major role of non-urban energy sector institutions and actors. By examining the connections between technology, space and energy politics, and by using a relational understanding of the urban, this article explores the case of Amman’s energy transition. The growth of consumption coupled with new energy practices face a problematic supply because of shifts in regional geopolitics. This situation has prompted energy transition policies, among which are a green growth programme and the building of a nuclear power plant at the edge of the city. The article analyses the socio-political assemblages that shape those policies and unravels the competing interests at stake. It demonstrates the political and highly unruly nature of energy transitions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]