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Desde finales del siglo XX, el emblemático oso andino se ha vuelto protagonista de nuevas agendas científicas y políticas de conservación en los Andes colombianos. Este artículo presenta un análisis ontológico, multiespecie e histórico de los encuentros entre diferentes formas de conocer la naturaleza en el páramo de Chingaza, un área protegida al este de la ciudad de Bogotá. Los programas enfocados en la conservación de la única especie de oso descrito por los taxónomos para Sudamérica han generado tensiones con las comunidades campesinas, quienes dan cuenta de la existencia de dos tipos de oso. Sin querer “corregir” a los científicos naturales que descartan esta posibilidad, este artículo pretende abrir posibilidades conceptuales que entienden al oso como una entidad de contacto en un páramo múltiple. Combinando métodos etnográficos e históricos, trazamos las trayectorias más largas y silenciadas detrás de las prácticas que subyacen la conservación del oso andino en Chingaza hoy en día. Observando una reorientación reciente en los diálogos científicos e institucionales con comunidades campesinas, sugerimos un giro hacia una conservación cosmopolítica capaz de articular los mundos campesinos en la alta montaña.

Transition to a post-carbon economy implies changes that are both far-reaching and unprecedented. The notion that a decarbonization transition must encompass multiple forms of justice is gaining ground. In response, the concept of Just Transition has become ever more popular – and confusion about its meaning ever greater. We argue in this paper that the term Just Transition needs a rigorous updating to develop its full conceptual power for the analysis and evaluation of the rapid and extensive energy transitions already underway. After reviewing the different uses of Just Transition in practice and scholarship, we propose that the term be used as an analytical concept for an ongoing process of transition. The Just Transition concept can provide an integrated, whole-system perspective on justice (procedural, distributive, recognition, and restorative) that can help in identifying systemic solutions to address environmental and socio-economic concerns. This would differ from reductionist approaches that derive from legacy silo-sectoral or technologically driven approaches; these too often overlook negative side-effects and wider justice implications of reorganizing economic practice. An examination of COVID-19 pandemic responses illustrates our operationalization of the Just Transition concept, highlighting the importance of designing whole-system policies that are equitable, as well as the pitfalls of pursuing a narrow sectoral approach. Taking seriously the implications of complex systems with hard-to-predict effects also has concrete implications for policy interventions at all levels of governance. In particular, we highlight the importance of attending to multiple social inequalities for ensuring the resilience of whole-system decarbonization in the face of instability, unpredictability, and unprecedented change.Key policy insightsThe transition to net-zero will be neither sustainable nor credible if it creates or worsens social inequalities; a backlash is likely if the transition is not perceived to be just.Pathways forward may only emerge through observation, experimentation, and experience.A range of policy tools exist to address Just Transition concerns. These include addressing social and environmental aspects of economic policy; making sure that interventions are adapted to local contexts; building democratic engagement platforms; and open and transparent communication.Job creation does not guarantee just outcomes, as justice goes beyond employment conditions.

This article proposes a historical, multispecies, and ontological approach to human–wildlife conflict (HWC) in the Colombian páramos. Focusing on the páramos surrounding the capital city of Bogotá, we reconstruct the historically changing relationship between cattle-farming campesino communities and the Andean bear, Tremarctos ornatus. Using ethnographic and historical research methods, we conceptualise this relationship as embedded in localised landscapes and multispecies assemblages, in which scientists, conservation practitioners, water infrastructures, public environmental agencies, and cows participate as well. This article demonstrates that insufficient attention to the practices and relationships of historically marginalised humans and non-humans in the management of HWCs contributes to new dynamics of exclusion and friction, and can reduce the effectiveness of conservation programmes. We conclude that opening up conservation to the interests and knowledges of local communities is imperative in moving towards more historically informed, pluralistic and effective conservation strategies.

Mozambique is a resource-rich energy hub, yet rural community access to electricity remains low, and urban centres suffer poor service quality. Aging transmission infrastructure, consumer growth, erratic generation, and extreme weather events exacerbate power cuts and oscillations that disrupt household activities and damage appliances. Through qualitative critical policy analysis of household (n = 120) and public/private stakeholder (n = 87) interviews in the four largest cities of Mozambique (Maputo, Matola, Beira and Nampula) we assess diverse perspectives on reliability, affordability, and investment/revenue-raising to meet SDG7 to provide clean, modern energy services for all. We find that although electricity tariffs commonly exceed household budgets, they remain politicised and are not cost-reflective – putting the national utility Electricidade de Mocambique E.P. (EDM) into growing debt and imminent insolvency, hindering its ability to ensure reliable, quality and affordable services. We recommend unbundling the electricity sector to enable EDM and the energy regulator (Autoridade Reguladora de Energia – ARENE) to be managed independently, and reducing state-induced inefficiencies that limit their ability to make transparent and fair decisions on tariffs, their institutional capacity and performance, and the development of the power sector.

Electricity access is a key aspect of achieving Sustainable Development Goal 7. Alleviating poverty by increasing the availability of grid connections, system reliability and generation capacity is a key driver of economic growth. However, 2.7 billion people still rely upon unsustainable wood fuels (such as charcoal) for heating, lighting and cooking. A sustainable transition to low carbon energy has positive health and social benefits (e.g. reductions in air pollution, deforestation and carbon dioxide emissions); and secondary economic benefits from energy supply service jobs (such as installation and maintenance jobs), market disruption and innovation (from community decentralised systems, for example), and reduced labour and time costs (such as reducing costs associated with mobile phone-charging). However, representing electricity access in terms of numbers of grid connections over-simplifies the energy access challenge—hiding unreliability, community exclusion from planning processes, and potential socio-environmental damage from energy sources (e.g. from coal-use), and complex political-institutional and socio-technical system relationships. This two-part chapter examines first the benefits of electricity access provision for developing countries, and second focuses on resolving these challenges through examination of the case of Mozambique—a low income, high resource abundance nation that is undergoing rapid electrification. The chapter explores the colonial history of Mozambique and its influence upon energy technology socio-technical system development across the diverse physical and cultural geography of the country; the effects of internal political conflict and contestation; and the impact of large-scale foreign investments, especially in extractive resources. We conclude by discussing how the changing political economy of Mozambican energy production, distribution and use at the national and regional level has yet to significantly transform everyday energy practices in rural and urban areas. The majority of the Mozambican population remains dependent on environmentally insecure fuelwood (in rural areas) and charcoal (in urban areas), especially for cooking. The consumption of biomass is of concern to authorities because of rapid deforestation, particularly within the hinterland of major cities. Moreover, fuel supply chains remain disconnected from the electricity generation and distribution systems and the extraction of resources such as coal or natural gas. Recommendations for policy, technology implementation and development practice are discussed throughout.

Energy plays a central role in responding to emergencies such as the COVID-19 pandemic, from ensuring adequate healthcare services to supporting households during lockdowns. Protecting the renewable energy industry and its contribution to providing sustainable energy access for all must be an urgent priority in the current crisis.

We present a British Academy funded Knowledge Frontiers project which brought together an interdisciplinary team of social (Anthropology, Education, Human Geography, Politics) and scientific (Biology, Chemistry, Environmental Science) researchers to explore the implications of bioethanol-from-cellulose reactors, a novel technology that may provide an innovative, partial solution to the global need for sustainable fuels. These reactors utilize ‘waste’ biomass, either residue from crops or that which can be grown on ‘marginal lands’, thus producing (second generation) biofuels while avoiding the “food versus fuel” debate. The team analysed assumptions inherent within this approach and considered how to interact with this innovation/implementation process to maximally address broader social and environmental goals. As a research community we queried the priorities and criteria used in developing new technological solutions and investigated how decisions were made across a range of stakeholders. We focused specifically on a case study of the first large-scale second generation bio-refinery, located in Brazil. Developing ongoing and consistent relationships between social scientists and natural scientists were key to delivering project aims, including documentation of the processes of learning/interacting that we engaged in as a team and ongoing dialogues across research assumptions and expectations within different disciplines. Key components of the interdisciplinary process that appeared to be necessary for success included i) providing sustained and open opportunities for interaction between researchers to develop effective communication across disciplines, ii) explicitly exploring discipline-specific taken-for-granted assumptions and identifying what individuals understand when talking about key terms and processes (in this case these included, for example, ‘sustainable’, ‘development’, ‘methodology’, ‘marginal land’ and ‘research outputs’), iii) creating solidarity within the research community, which is critical for effective interaction between disciplines and cultures. This interplay between disciplines provides an innovative way to influence decision-making in science directly, especially at early stages of development. By directly addressing these requirements, multi/transdisciplinary challenges can be addressed in a manner which is more open, more critical and more able to reveal most effective solutions.

© 2018 The Authors This paper advances the debate on energy justice by opening up a dialogue with postcolonial critiques of development. There is an imperative to develop energy justice theory fit to address the complex demands of a global energy transitions in poorer countries of the Global South. Delivering transformative change in contexts where energy systems are underdeveloped requires assessing energy justice principles from multiple situated perspectives, adjusted to the conditions that shape the possibilities for action. However, current theorizations of energy justice tend to build upon universalist notions of justice within a western tradition of thought which may not be entirely appropriate to deliver policy in postcolonial contexts. This paper offers a situated, particularistic analysis of energy transitions in Mozambique - a country which faces massive energy access challenges - to open a dialogue between theories of energy justice and postcolonial critiques. The paper focuses on three aspects of the energy transition occurring in Mozambique: the logics and impacts of off-grid innovation, the situated transformations occurring in the electricity network, and how transitions in energy fuels shape household experiences of energy access. The conclusion proposes two recommendations as key agendas for future research. The first is a methodological need for research methods to examine energy justice challenges from within specific, situated understandings of energy delivery. The second entails a call for emancipatory notions of energy justice that integrate concepts such as energy sovereignty at their core to emphasise the dimension of self-determination as a complementary aspect of energy justice.

This paper explores the role of electricity infrastructures in helping to create, expand or limit the contours of the state in post-colonial Mozambique. Through a focus on recent electrification campaigns and attempts to improve sustainable energy access, we argue that the extension of electricity infrastructures helps to counter the state’s ‘blindness’ and to provide a more permanent visibility for the state whilst potentially enhancing its capacity to order, arrange and ‘read’ its territory and citizenry (particularly in contested rural peripheries). We argue that the material and symbolic work of large-scale infrastructural works around rural electrification and grid extension constitute an important means through which the state performs and narrates its presence and role in order to gain meaning and importance in the lives of rural residents and to forge connections with them. Aside from extending the power and reach of state institutions and their territorial authority, we contend that the development of electricity infrastructures also helps to create neoliberal subjectivities and advance neoliberalisation whilst creating lucrative opportunities for elite accumulation. We examine the different forms of institutional, material and discursive power that influence why some ways of organising energy are privileged over others and reflect on the resulting implications for energy access inequalities and state–citizen relations.

Energy access is typically viewed as a problem for rural areas, but people living in urban settings also face energy challenges that have not received sufficient attention. A revised agenda in research and practice that puts the user and local planning complexities centre stage is needed to change the way we look at energy access in urban areas, to understand the implications of the concentration of vulnerable people in slums and to identify opportunities for planned management and innovation that can deliver urban energy transitions while leaving no one behind. Here, we propose a research agenda focused on three key issues: understanding the needs of urban energy users; enabling the use of context-specific, disaggregated data; and engaging with effective modes of energy and urban governance. This agenda requires interdisciplinary scholarship across the social and physical sciences to support local action and deliver large-scale, inclusive transformations.

Rather than an integrated project of modernity, the provision of energy in Mozambique is characterized by social and territorial fragmentation. Our concern in this article is with spatial-political projects that enlist energy-related infrastructure as a means of furthering national unity across the national territory. We argue that the Mozambican state’s efforts to knit together its territory through energy provision have heightened divisions, such as between urban and rural areas, subnational regions and socioeconomic groups. We draw on geographical political economy and landscape research to consider the space and territoriality of Mozambique’s energy systems. We use the lens of energy landscapes to examine the spatialities and historical legacies of energy-related infrastructural state projects, and how such spatialities and legacies shape new energy projects. These landscapes are material expressions of the social, political and institutional relations bound up in energy extraction, distribution and consumption. They reflect historical legacies, revealing traces of successive developments. While previous studies have focused on local energy landscapes in a variety of settings, our aim is to examine how such landscapes connect with wider nation-building projects and the operation of political economies. To elucidate these points, we examine two energy-related projects and their landscapes in Mozambique: Cahora Bassa hydropower dam and the Moatize coal extraction zone. The article concludes by reflecting on the ways in which energy landscapes can be used to interrogate the dynamics of power inherent in energy systems, the evolving links between state power and electric power, and the interests being served by these developments.

In a world in which rising powers are reconfiguring global development trajectories with significant implications for their sustainability, it becomes increasingly important to understand whether and how low carbon energy transitions might be enabled or frustrated by this new global geography of power. Towards this end, this paper makes the case for bringing together insights from three broad sets of literature on: (1) socio-technical transitions; (2) the rising powers as (re)emerging development donors and; (3) energy geographies. In building bridges between these three bodies of scholarship we seek to develop an alternative analytical framework that attends more effectively to the global and domestic political economy of transitions and whose value is illustrated empirically in relation to the growing involvement of Brazil, India and China in the energy systems of Mozambique and South Africa. We argue that this alternative framework provides a better understanding of how the rising powers are influencing the changing relationships between low carbon and fossil-fuel based energy pathways and of the multiple roles they are playing in the development and transformation of energy systems, through the development of 'niches' where innovation can emerge, or in reinforcing or challenging existing 'regimes' or dominant ways of providing energy services.

Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia has in the past half century transformed from an isolated frontier town to the center of the country’s agro-industrial production zone. By the 1990s, Santa Cruz (as the city is often abbreviated) had largely overtaken La Paz as Bolivia’s financial capital and most important economic pole, and its political influence is growing. Regional economic growth in eastern Bolivia has attracted—and resulted from—labor migration from poorer Andean regions over the past four decades. Santa Cruz is also the flashpoint of a regionalist movement, expressed in claims for ‘departmental autonomy’ as a means for regional governments to play a greater role in public decision-making, a campaign supported by the recent intensification of place-based identity politics. This profile examines the history and dynamics of planned and unplanned urban growth in Santa Cruz. I examine modernist planning initiatives in the 1960s and early 1970s and suggest these efforts overlooked the needs created by large-scale migration and rapid urban growth since the 1980s. Against this background, I consider recent patterns of spatial segregation, social inequality, intercultural tensions and conflicts over public space.

This article seeks to shed light on the May 2008 violence against foreign Africans living in South Africa, and the issue of xenophobia more broadly, by examining the case of Khutsong, a poor township on the edge of Johannesburg that did not experience xenophobic attacks. Arguing against prevailing explanations that link xenophobia with poverty and deprivation, this study examines the opposition to xenophobia that developed in Khutsong. It highlights the centrality of a community-based organization, the Merafong Demarcation Forum (MDF), in halting the spread of violence. In its recent struggle against municipal demarcation, the MDF nurtured a collective sense of place that granted primacy to provincial boundaries while downplaying ethnic and national divisions. The article argues for the need to examine local social struggles and their intersections with broader political-economic trends when accounting for the presence or absence of violent xenophobia.

The regional autonomy movement based in Santa Cruz draws on long-standing regional divisions, and it has solidified amid the breakdown of the elite-led political party system and the national election of Evo Morales and the Movimiento al Socialismo (Movement Toward Socialism—MAS). Critics and national government supporters view regional autonomy as a defensive stance taken by elites against the redistributive policies, expansion of indigenous sovereignty, and widening popular democracy under the MAS. But lowland regional leaders and elites have begun to present autonomy as inclusive and popular in order to broaden support and challenge the Morales government. Largely removed from debates over autonomy are migrants to the rapidly urbanizing city of Santa Cruz who in many cases experience uneven integration into host communities. Despite the autonomists’ efforts at fostering inclusion and popular buy-in, highland migrants’ support for autonomy is weak, while lowland migrants generally favor autonomy and skilled highlanders—more integrated into Santa Cruz—tend to support it conditionally. Migrants of all three groups perceive class disparities within the city to be as salient as regional and ethnic divisions.

This article seeks to shed light on the conditions under which labor unions can include immigrants in their ranks as a means to regain their strength. It does so by focusing on the example of Brazilian immigrants in Boston and compares the approaches of three union locals in Boston toward organizing Brazilian workers, the Painters, the Teamsters, and the United Food and Commercial Workers Union. While previous studies argue that ethnicity and social networks can account for immigrants’ receptivity to unions, this article highlights strategic choice on the part of union officials as an important factor in facilitating unionization of Brazilian workers.

Mozambique has attracted international attention in recent years following the discovery of huge reserves of coal and gas deposits. A major focus of Mozambique’s extractives boom is the province of Tete, once a remote outpost but now a hub of power generation for the southern African region and an emerging centre of global investment in coal extraction. Some of the world’s largest mining firms from both established and emerging economies have descended on Tete, investing billions of dollars in developing concessions to extract some of the world’s largest untapped coal reserves with wide-ranging implications for the region’s political economy and effecting significant shifts in relations between state, capital and territorial control. At the urban scale, Tete city and its expanding periphery are increasingly characterised by enclaves and spaces of enclosure, as some groups benefit from and are integrated into global circuits of production whilst others suffer displacement and dispossession. In seeking to trace the emergence of Tete’s resource economy, the paper contends that three distinctive spatialities have resulted from these developments, including the infrastructure networks being constructed around the extractive industries, the enclave spaces arising from the coal boom (and the particular labour geographies that shape them) and the new and distinctive urban geographies that are the product of Tete’s rapid urbanisation. The paper seeks to assess the impacts, stakes and challenges linked to investments in extractive activities and looks at how the costs and risks are being differentially distributed within and between the affected communities.