Provincializing Energy Transitions

The colonialism inside today’s practices of energy transition becomes evident both from experiences of close listening to participants in grassroots struggles over extractivism and livelihood and from an engaged examination of the histories of energy and transition. In turn, greater awareness of the colonial nature of energy transition can fruitfully feed into movement-building around climate change.

One key to the process, argues this article in the Journal of Political Ecology, is slow, respectful translation and continual, collaborative re-translation back and forth among communities with radically varying understandings of energy and time, whether those communities are contemporaries of one another or not.

Also available above is a short powerpoint presentation on the same theme.

The location for the journal article is https://journals.librarypublishing.arizona.edu/jpe/article/id/5602/.

For more on energy, see http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/resources/results/taxonomy:22.