This session explores today's multi-sited movement to frame urban built environments as a central point of intervention for both climate change mitigation and resilience. Today's interventions build on a long history of urban climate change activism and politics that geographers have long been at the forefront of efforts to empirically investigate and theorize (e.g., Bulkeley & Betsill (2005), Rice (2010)). However, the bulk of urban geography continues to neglect the importance of urban materiality in climate activism, even as new calculations of decarbonization (often profit-driven) and climate risk transform core areas of scholarly exploration and engaged praxis. These areas include: urban real estate development and redevelopment, financing, growth machine politics, displacements and injustices. Similarly, critical geographic explorations of climate policy have often been preoccupied with carbon markets, offset politics and policy representations to the exclusion of the embedded materialities of actual decarbonization. As decarbonization unfolds, it becomes necessary to consider the material politics of low carbon transformations, in which retrofitting urban built environments have becoming increasingly central.
This session aims to help fill this gap, building on calls by Bulkeley, Castan Broto & Edwards (2014) to address the material politics of low-carbon transitions, and by Biehler and Simon (2011), Knuth (2016) and Wachsmuth, Cohen, and Angelo (2016) in critiquing urban political ecology's persistent neglect of buildings and the political economy of real estate. Particularly, the session aims to place work on retrofitting for climate change mitigation and resilience more firmly in conversation with critical accounts of "green" urban (re)development (i.e. Greenberg (2015), Cohen (2017), and others) and to consider the material politics of these transformations (Rutherford 2014, Bulkeley, McGuirk and Dowling 2016). Following this work, we aim to support necessary ongoing discussion of green gentrification/displacement as an outcome of urban property transformations for climate change, but also to consider the other multi-scalar political work that building and real estate-led climate interventions may be doing in the political configuration of cities, in national struggles over energy transitions, in transnational accumulation strategies, in transformations of the real estate development industry, in varieties of urban competition, and beyond.
Dwelling on Energy: Exploring social and cultural influences on
domestic energy use in international contexts
Dr. Gary Goggins, National
University of Ireland, Galway
Dr. Frances Fahy, National
University of Ireland, Galway
Reducing residential energy use and
related CO2 emissions is a key policy focus across many
developed countries. Yet, despite ongoing efforts, prevailing market-based and
technological focused approaches have had limited success in bringing about
long-term reductions in domestic energy use. Without adequate consideration for
the social, cultural and contextual influences on residential energy use, it is
highly unlikely that dominant efficiency-driven approaches will deliver the
necessary reductions in energy demand. Social-scientific approaches will need
to play a key role if sustainable energy transitions at the household level are
to be successful. Social practice theory, for example, has been increasingly
utilized by geographers to demonstrate that household energy use varies among
different socio-demographic groups, and across cultures and contexts. But,
despite gaining traction in some academic circles, complex social-scientific
approaches have had limited impact on non-academic stakeholders and public
policy, not least because of the difficulty in translating findings into
concrete policy recommendations.
This session will advance
social-scientific debate through theoretical development and empirical
investigation related to the social and cultural influences on household energy
use. We are particularly interested in papers that deal with cross-cultural
variations in household energy use. Papers may include, but are not limited to,
topics such as:
- Comparing and contrasting energy use across
cultural contexts
- The role of government and intermediary actors
in influencing routine energy use
- Innovative energy reduction initiatives at the
household or community level (including Living Lab approaches)
- International case studies which reflect the
drivers of individual and collective energy choices and energy-related
practices
- Socio-technical innovations and cultural
influences
Ultimately, this session aims to bring
together papers that offer international insights that explore the
significance of socio-cultural perspectives and practices involved with
transitions to a low-carbon society and future. We welcome theoretical and
empirical contributions from a broad geographical spread.
Submission procedure:
If you are interested in joining this
paper session, please submit a 250-word abstract to Dr Gary Goggins (gary.goggins@nuigalway.ie by
October 16th. Please feel free to contact Frances Fahy (frances.fahy@nuigalway.ie)
or Gary Goggins (gary.goggins@nuigalway.ie)
about potential paper topics or with other questions concerning this
call. We will respond to you before October 20th. Please note that
participants are also expected to register and submit their abstracts through
the AAG website themselves by October 25th at latest.
Environmental and
Energy Infrastructure at the Local Level
Jordan Howell, Rowan University
David Baylis, Delta State University
This session builds on recent work in geography and
related fields like anthropology, science & technology
studies, environmental history, and policy studies to
examine emerging trends in the study of environmental and energy infrastructure at
the local and regional level. It is easy for researchers, media, and the
public alike to get caught up in federal and even international-level
media and analysis, but the reality is that infrastructure projects –
while sometimes having far-flung financial and resource linkages –
unfold at the local level. As such, municipal rules, local government
policies and processes, and local stakeholders' support or opposition can
profoundly shape the development and outcome of a given project. The papers
in this session will aim to illuminate the links between scales
shaping a particular project while also contributing to
broader discussions about the roles of local government, economics,
culture, and attitudes towards expertise and the environment
in facilitating or limiting the deployment of environmental and
energy infrastructures.
We are looking for
2-3 additional papers to complete our session. Please send proposals to Jordan
P. Howell (howellj@rowan.edu)
and David Baylis (dbaylis@deltastate.edu)
by October 20th, 2017.
Imagining Eurasian
Climate Change
Nino
Antadze, Bucknell University
Jeremy
Tasch, Towson University
From
the broadly physical to the equally extensive political, social, and
cultural, climate change is again catalyzing "transition" across
the broad expanse of Eurasia. Transitions triggered by climate change are
relevant to all nations and territories, whether engaged in fossil fuel
extraction or dependent on fossil fuel use. Physical scientists, for example,
are studying Eurasia's steppe and mountainous regions through focus on the
effect that climate change is having on glacial melt and changing vegetation
patterns. In complement to physical transitions, vast regions' increasingly
accessible resources - which includes but extends beyond natural to incorporate
transit, military base locations, and trade-have been transforming, expanding,
and accelerating competing commercial, national security and environmental
interests, with complementary questions concerning governance and development.
How
climate change is affecting Eurasian spaces is discussed, declared, and
performed in multiple ways, depending on the fluctuating influence of
stakeholder interests, geopolitical attention, and the regions' changing
physical landscapes. In turn, how "we" (insiders/outsiders and those
in-between) conceive of climate change in these multifaceted regions has
enormous impacts on international relations and legal and policy approaches to
sovereignty, self-determination, risk and environmental change. Contestations
among climate change's representations is clearly of great importance to both
local and regional actors, and to the global community, and has uneven
implications for Eurasian political, social, cultural, and economic
systems.
We
welcome submissions from the diversity of theoretical, empirical and
performative research that reveals how and to what end are climate change
"imaginaries"- beliefs, institutions, policies, and symbols-created,
sustained, and reproduced in Eurasia through domestic and international
political and civil discourses, environmental justice, art, literature, social
media, and so forth.
Please
submit an abstract of no more than 250 words, title, author, and key words to
Nino Antadze, na011@bucknell.edu and Jeremy Tasch JTasch@towson.edu,
by October 22nd. Please note that authors of submitted abstracts
will need to register for New Orleans by the October 25th deadline.
The Commodification
of Nature in Latin America: Where are we going?
Beatriz Bustos, Universidad
de Chile
Elvin Delgado,
Central Washington University
Sponsors: Energy and Environment Specialty Group; Latin America
Specialty Group; and Cultural and Political Ecology Specialty Group.
Session Description:
Over the last decades, many Latin American countries have
experienced a considerable shift of power and political ideologies from conservative
neoliberal economic policies to a more center-left political strategy. Indeed,
in the early 2000s Latin America's turn to the left led many scholars
(Perreault & Valdivia, 2010; Radcliffe, 2012; Valdivia, 2008) to reflect
about the broader political transformations in countries such as Bolivia,
Ecuador, and Venezuela that were proposing shifts in development thinking and
new political ideas about nature and resource distribution such as the Sumak
Kawsay or the Socialism of the 21st Century. Yet,
almost twenty years later, other scholars have argued that the region is in
actuality experiencing an intensification of the extractivist economy (Gudynas,
2011; Gudynas, 2012; Yates & Bakker, 2014). This new extractivism has been
the source of contention for many communities, environmental groups, and local
governments due to increasing concern over the impacts of faster modes of
capitalist extraction in the region – a process full of inherent
contradictions. These contradictions can be seen in places like Chile, a clear
neoliberal country, which despite pursuing clean renewable energy projects has
not been able to reduce social conflict associated with energy projects.
Another example can be seen in Argentina's decision to exploit unconventional
energy deposits such as the Vaca Muerta shale formation using hydraulic
fracturing technologies as a strategy to reach energy independence in the
country (Ferrante & Giuliani, 2014) These and other examples in the region
raise questions about the path that Latin America is following in terms of
commodity production and ecological conservation. Drawing on these insights, we
seek papers that advance empirical, conceptual, and theoretical understandings
of the current social, environmental, and political economic moment in the
region. Among questions to consider are: what is the actual role of nature in
the economic and political strategies of Latin American countries? Can we find
examples of actual ecological impacts from the post-neoliberal turn in the
region? Is the commodification of nature a path of no return?
Possible paper topics include, but are not limited to:
- The role of the state in
shaping and legitimizing the new extractivism
- The institutional
arrangements in facilitating or challenging the commodification of nature
- The socio-ecological
contradictions embedded in the commodification of nature
- The way in which the
materiality of nature resources shape their commodification
- The legal framework under
which nature is incorporated into the production process
- The strategies used by
different countries to support new modes of extraction in order to move
forward their political agendas
- The responses and strategies
pursued by communities affected by nature commodification in light of the
post-neoliberal turn.
- The political alliances or
oppositions derived from the commodification of nature.
- In what ways the emergence
of the "green economy" has pushed new frontiers of nature
commodification in the region.
- Connections and effects of
global discourses on climate change on nature commodification in Latin
America.
Please email abstracts of 250 words or less by Friday,
October 20th to Beatriz Bustos (bibustos@uchilefau.cl)and
Elvin Delgado (Elvin.Delgado@cwu.edu) .
References:
Bebbington, A. and J. Bury. (2014). Subterranean
Struggles: New Dynamics of mining, oil and gas in Latin America. The
University of Texas Press. Austin Texas; Ferrante, S. and A. Giuliani. (2014).
Hidrocarburos no convencionales en Vaca Muerta (Neuquén): ¿Recursos
estratégicos para el autoabastecimiento energético en la Argentina del siglo
XXI? Revista Estado y Políticas Públicas, N°3: 33-61; Gudynas, E.
(2011). Alcances y contenidos de las transiciones al post-extractivismo. Ecuador
Debate(82), 61-79; Gudynas, E. (2012). Estado compensador y nuevos
extractivismos. Las ambivalencias del progresismo sudamericano. revista
Nueva Sociedad, 237(ISSN: 0251-3552); Perreault, T., & Valdivia, G.
(2010). Hydrocarbons, popular protest and national imaginaries: Ecuador and
Bolivia in comparative context. Geoforum, 41(5), 689-699.
doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2010.04.004; Radcliffe, S. A. (2012). Development for a
postneoliberal era? Sumak kawsay, living well and the limits to decolonisation
in Ecuador. Geoforum, 43(2), 240-249.
doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2011.09.003; Valdivia, G. (2008). Governing relations
between people and things: Citizenship, territory, and the political economy of
petroleum in Ecuador. Political Geography, 27(4), 456-477; Yates,
J. S., & Bakker, K. (2014). Debating the 'post-neoliberal turn' in Latin
America. Progress in Human Geography, 38(1), 62-90.
doi:10.1177/0309132513500372.
Energy Ethnographies: Foregrounding the
social, cultural, and political aspects of ‘energy access’ and ‘energy
transitions’ in the Global South
Session organizers: Jonathan
Balls, University of Melbourne and Deepti Chatti, Yale University
Discussant: Gregory Simon, University of Colorado, Denver and
Jenn Baka, Penn State.
This
session calls for papers that draw on ethnographic and other qualitative
engagements with energy users in the Global South - centering their
experiences, values, politics, preferences, and epistemologies. By examining
the everyday entanglements of culture, politics, environment, and society in
energy use, this session aims to explore how the insights from critical
qualitative social sciences can enrich our current understanding of energy
access and energy transitions in developing countries.
In the
context of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the Paris
Climate Agreement, and the Sustainable Energy For All (SE4All) initiative,
scholars and practitioners alike have turned their focus to ‘energy access’ and
‘energy transitions’. The extension of energy services such as electricity and
‘clean’ cooking energy to low income households in the Global South is broadly
described under the rubric of ‘expanding energy access’, while the substitution
of currently used technologies in favour of ‘modern’ renewable energy services
is broadly described under the umbrella of ‘energy transitions’. Both these
terms have attracted theoretical attention by critical geographers and allied
scholars. In recent years, researchers have focused extensively on
decentralized energy infrastructures and programs - such as for off-grid solar
power, or improved cookstoves - highlighting their promise for extending energy
access, and their role in energy transitions (Bailis et al., 2009, Cross 2013,
Simon et al., 2014). Additionally, researchers have looked at centralized
infrastructure to reach energy users who were previously unserved (Dabadge et
al., 2016). Much of the existing literature is concerned with the technical,
financial, and economic aspects of efforts to extend energy access or to
facilitate the diffusion of energy technologies. When attention is paid to
energy users, it is typically through survey based empirical studies, focusing
on technological or economical aspects.
In
parallel, there is a growing recognition by socio-cultural anthropologists of
the importance of understanding the cultures and politics of infrastructure
(Larkin 2013, Kale 2014, Anand 2017). Energy infrastructures are worthy of
social, cultural, and political study in addition to being objects of enquiry
from a technological and economic lens. Infrastructures entail newly negotiated
relationships between state actors, businesses, civil society actors, and
energy users (Button, 2017; Meehan, 2014). With new energy infrastructures
comes new knowledge, practices, and cultures (Strauss et al., 2016, Gupta,
2015, Kumar, 2015). New technologies can reinforce existing socio-political
hierarchies, or upset them (Jacobson, 2007). Ethnographic studies that focus on
users and the seemingly ordinary or mundane everyday uses of energy can bring
rich empirical insights on how energy access and transitions are unfolding
(Chatti et al., 2017). This scholarship can improve our understanding on how
energy technologies, infrastructures, and programs are mediated, shaped, and
accommodated, while simultaneously paying close attention to how lives are
changed to accommodate new forms of infrastructures.
This
session invites participants to present research conducted with energy users in
the developing world to explore the social, cultural, and political dimensions
of ‘energy access’ and ‘energy transitions’. While we hope to center
ethnographic and deep qualitative research, we welcome a broad range of
scholarly engagements that foreground the social, cultural, and political
aspects of energy use.
Potential
paper themes could include, but are not limited to:
How is
the use of energy mediated by cultures, politics, and practices, and how does
this relate with our current understanding of ‘energy access’, and ‘energy
transitions’?
What
insights are gained from ethnographic studies that center the experiences and
practices of users?
How are
accounts that detail the politics and governance of decentralised energy
infrastructures, and emergent relationships between government actors,
businesses, civil society, and users enriching understandings of energy
transitions in the developing world?
How are
contestations over technical and economic aspects of energy infrastructure
negotiated? How does this affect the end user?
Please
email paper titles and 250 word abstracts to Jonathan Balls
(jonathan.balls@unimelb.edu.au) and Deepti Chatti (deepti.chatti@yale.edu) by October 15, 2017. Potential panelists
will need to register for the AAG by October 25, 2017, and submit their
abstracts directly.
References:
Anand, Nikhil. 2017. Hydraulic City: Water and the
Infrastructures of Citizenship in Mumbai. Duke University Press; Bailis, Rob, et al. 2009. "Arresting the
killer in the kitchen: the promises and pitfalls of commercializing improved
cookstoves." World Development 37 10: 1694-1705; Button, C. 2017.
The co-production of a constant water supply in Mumbai’s middle-class
apartments. Urban Research & Practice, 10, 102-119; Chatti,
D., Archer, M., Lennon, M. & Dove, M. R. 2017. Exploring the mundane:
Towards an ethnographic approach to bioenergy. Energy Research & Social
Science, 30, 28-34; Cross, Jamie. 2013. "The 100th object:
Solar lighting technology and humanitarian goods." Journal of Material
Culture 18 4: 367-387; Dabadge, Ashwini, et al., “From LPG Connections to
Use: Realising Smokeless Kitchens for All” Economic and Political Weekly,
Vol L1 No. 16, April 16, 2016; Gupta, Akhil. 2015. ‘An Anthropology of
Electricity from the Global South’. Cultural Anthropology, 30,
555-568; Kale, Sunila S. 2014. Electrifying India: regional political
economies of development. Stanford University Press; Kumar, Ankit. 2015.
‘Cultures of lights’. Geoforum, 65, 59-68; Jacobson, A. 2007.
Connective power: Solar electrification and social change in Kenya. World
Development, 35, 144-162; Larkin, Brian. 2013. "The politics
and poetics of infrastructure." Annual Review of Anthropology 42:
327-343; Matinga, Margaret Nijrambo. 2010. "We grow up with it":
an ethnographic study of the experiences, perceptions and responses to the
health impacts of energy acquisition and use in rural South Africa.
University of Twente; Meehan, K. M. 2014. ‘Tool-power: Water infrastructure as
wellsprings of state power’. Geoforum, 57, 215-224; Simon,
Gregory L., et al. 2014. "Current debates and future research needs in the
clean cookstove sector." Energy for Sustainable Development 20:
49-57; Strauss, Sarah, Stephanie Rupp, and Thomas Love, eds. 2016. Cultures
of energy: power, practices, technologies. Routledge.
Innovation, Sustainability, and
Policy: How Resource Based Communities Respond to Improve Their Long-Term
Resiliency
Leith Deacon, University of Alberta
Resource based communities, also referred to as single industry
towns, boom/bust towns, and/or resource dependent regions, have experienced
significant change due to social, political, and economic variation over the
last several decades. Research highlights how these regions have responded to
change often with a range of legislative responses in an attempt to improve
their long-term resiliency (Deacon et al. 2016; Van Assche et al 2016, 2017).
The purpose of this session is to bring together researchers who
are interested in resource based communities to highlight relevant exploration
in the area. There are three objectives of this session: 1) To highlight the
types and variation in responses to the challenges resource based communities
face; 2) To provide an international comparison of responses; 3) To begin a
dialogue on best practices for resource communities who continue to experience
hardship and difficulty in maintaining their importance and resiliency.
If you are interested in participating in this session, please
send a draft of your abstract to deacon1@ualberta.ca on
or before November 1st, 2017. If you have any questions, please contact
the session organizer: Leith Deacon, University of Alberta; E-mail: deacon1@ualberta.ca
Integrative modeling for coupled natural-human
systems: functional models of human decision-making and environmental response
feedback loops.
Gabriel
Granco, Stroud Water Research Center
The Anthropogenic
era highlights the need for understanding feedback loops in coupled nature and
human (CNH) systems. However, the theoretical and empirical examination of CNH
imposes the challenge of integrating diverse modeling traditions from the natural
and social sciences. Without functioning integrated models, policy makers and
scientists cannot simulate regulatory, incentive, management and educational
options to identify viable pathways to sustainability. The goal of this session
is to stimulate the advancement of this field through the discussion of
functioning integrative modeling approaches used for CNH systems. We invite
contributions on the topics of:
· Case studies showing model integration in CNH systems
· Procedures to overcome the data integration issue
· Demonstration of innovative decisions and updates
rules for agents (i.e. agents decisions based on cultural values theory)
· Modeling Human decision-making and environmental
response feedback loops
· Discussion of implementation of Agent-based models,
cellular automata models, and other techniques
Abstract online submission is due Oct. 25, on the AAG website
(http://annualmeeting.aag.org/). After submitting your abstract, please email
(i) your name, presentation title, and abstract, (ii) the Participant Number
(PIN number) associated with your abstract, to Dr. Gabriel Granco
(ggranco@stroudcenter.org, Stroud Water Research Center), before Nov. 06. For
more information, please contact ggranco@stroudcenter.org.
Paper Session: Sustainability in Challenging Environments:
Building International Connections
Organizer: Luis Suter, The
George Washington University
Discussant: Jessica Graybill,
Colgate University
All over the world - from the Arctic, to deserts, to isolated
islands – humans live in environments considered severe or challenging to
sustainability. In the Arctic, these challenges include extreme temperatures,
inaccessibility, as well as the impacts of climate-change. These challenges are
not unique to the Arctic region; for example, small island nations also face
challenges related to their environment, remoteness, and changing climate.
While some specifics of sustainable development within these regions are
unique, there are also some aspects of sustainable development that are
analogous between the regions. Successes and failures in designing, promoting,
and carrying out sustainability policy should be shared between these actors,
to promote global sustainability capacity.
This paper session responds to calls for regional specialty
groups to engage with groups outside their specialty. Papers may engage in
discussions of strategies for or lessons from sustainable development efforts
within communities that live in challenging environmental, societal, economic,
or political conditions. Specific consideration should be given to how these
lessons could be valuable for other regions. Depending on respondent interest,
these topics can be broken into multiple sessions.
Topics may include,
but are not limited to:
· Addressing
Climate Change Impacts
· Urban
Sustainability
· Sustainability
Policy Promotion
· Building
International Partnerships for Sustainability
· New
Technologies for Climate-Adaption
· Sustainable
Agriculture
· Traditional
and Alternative Energy Resources
· Interregional
Comparison Studies
· Resilience
and Adaptive Capacity
Interested
applicants should send abstracts of no more than 250 words Luis Suter (lsuter@gwu.edu)
by October 20th. Accepted applicants will be notified
by October 25th.
Groups Co-Sponsoring the
Session: Polar Specialty Group,
Human Dimensions of Global Change
Alternative Fuels and Autonomous Vehicles: Transportation Transitions
and the Impact on Cities, Regions, and Sustainability
Scott Kelley, University of Nevada - Reno
Bradley Lane, University of Kansas
In early 2016,
transportation became the primary source of domestic CO2 emissions
across all U.S. economic sectors, due to steady increases in vehicle miles
traveled (VMT) by commercial and personal vehicles operating almost entirely on liquid petroleum
fuels, making it a priority research area.
The development of connected and automated vehicle (CAV) technology and
continued innovations in alternative fuel vehicles (AFVs) offer potentially
dramatic changes for the future of transportation, as cities and regions continue
to address a host of long-term environmental, social, and economic issues
inherent in the present-day transportation sector. Of long-term importance as
these technologies mature is a need to understand the likely feedbacks that
will impact the form of cities and regions, their impact on the sustainability
of transportation, and the arrangement of residences and employment. Geographers are uniquely situated to how
people currently use and consider these emerging transportation technologies,
and the implications of future and more widespread adoption.
This session welcomes all
geographers that are considering the role of connected and automated vehicles
and/or alternative fuel vehicles in the transportation sector. A sample of
topics that could contribute to this includes (but is not limited to):
·
Charging/driving/purchasing/refueling behavior
·
Confluence of AFVs and CAVs
·
Diffusion of technologies and vehicles
·
Education, knowledge, and perception
·
Environmental impacts, benefits, well-to-wheel analyses
·
Equity impacts, issues, and vulnerability analyses
·
Facility location and network design
·
Impacts on electricity grid
·
Impacts on land-use and development
·
Interaction with public transportation
·
Inter-urban and intra-urban comparisons
·
Policies and incentives
·
Smart cities and connected mobility
·
Social and cultural implications
·
Technology choice and tradeoffs
·
Time-space and activity-travel based analyses
·
Transition trajectories and economics
We welcome submissions from
geographers addressing this priority research area using a variety of methods.
If there is enough response, we would be delighted to host multiple sessions.
If interested in
participating in these sessions, please submit a title and abstract of 250
words or fewer to Scott Kelley (scottkelley@unr.edu)
and Bradley Lane (bwlane@ku.edu)
by Monday, October 23rd, 2017. All participants will need register
online at the AAG website by the AAG deadline of Wednesday, October 25th, 2017.
Renewing accumulation: Strategies and
geographies of energy transition
Ingrid Behrsin, UC
Davis
Conor Harrison, University
of South Carolina
Sarah Kelly-Richards,
University of Arizona
Sarah Knuth, Durham
University
James McCarthy, Clark
University
Recent work in economic geography and political ecology
has analyzed energy transitions as fundamentally geographical processes, ones
with the power to transform the capitalist space economy in myriad ways (Bridge
et al. 2013). Critical energy geographers have begun to explore how the rapid
uptake of solar, wind, hydropower, and other renewable and ‘clean’ energy
technologies in recent years is introducing new competition for land and
resources and raising a host of environmental and social concerns across a
variety of spaces, from rural lands and Indigenous territories to dense urban
areas (Bridge et al., 2013; Calvert, 2015; Kelly-Richards et al., 2017;
McCarthy, 2015; Huber and McCarthy, 2017). Energy geographers are likewise
investigating energy efficiency as another accumulation frontier within today’s
energy transition, as established conservation programs intersect with new
schemes for making energy efficiency a valuable ‘resource’ within urban real estate
markets (Knuth 2016), regional energy portfolios (Thoyre 2015), and smart
metering initiatives (Levenda et al. 2015). Energy geographers studying the new
accumulation sites and strategies above are increasingly attempting to situate
them within broader trajectories of capitalist environmental-economic crisis
and resolution, as energy transitions take center stage within the green
economy’s imaginary of technological ‘disruption’ and renewal (Knuth 2017) and
its promise of socioecological fixes to crisis tendencies (McCarthy 2015).
Electric utilities are key actors in these dynamics,
sometimes embracing and sometimes resisting transitions to renewable energy
sources. The industry is undergoing a period of tremendous technological change
and turmoil across many national and regional contexts. In the face of the
falling price of renewable energy, energy efficiency initiatives, and a variety
of ‘smart’ technologies, tech firms, energy entrepreneurs and investors, and
some policy makers view the industry as ripe for disruption and are deploying
new accumulation strategies. With new accumulation strategies come new
actors, dynamics, and uncertainties in renewable energy development, as
market-based de- and reregulation continues to transform established electric
utility regimes and large-scale electric grids. At the same time, these
would-be ‘disruptors’ confront obdurate socio-technical systems and
entrenched political interests. Many incumbent utilities are attempting to
use their amassed political economic strength to withstand changes to
accumulation strategies that have changed little since the early 20th century,
and are thus investing heavily in centralized natural gas and nuclear
generation while undermining distributed energy initiatives at every turn.
Meanwhile, the expansion of electric grids is becoming a point of conflict
in energy transitions in many developing contexts, as managers struggle to
grow centralized transmission and distribution grids capable of
handling variable renewable energy generation sources, while new competitors
market distributed infrastructural and accumulation alternatives.
In the two paper sessions and associated panel session
described below, we seek to explore the ways in which these transformations are
unfolding, and being contested, across diverse-but-interconnected geographical
and sectoral contexts, ones that present multiple sites for critical analysis
and intervention. Our intent is to assemble one paper session focused on the
political ecology of renewable energy projects and transitions broadly
understood; a second paper session focused on the electric utility industry in
the context of those transitions; and a panel session that will integrate the
themes of both. We invite papers that build on recent work in economic
geography/geographical political economy and political ecology in order to
examine the strategies present in the renewable energy and electricity
industries to ‘renew’ accumulation, and correspondingly, how these strategies
articulate and conflict with existing land uses , territorial logics, and utility
industry structures.
Potential topics of interest may include:
· The politics of renewable and ‘clean’
energy planning and deployments: e.g., what are the techniques and
justifications used to plan and legitimate such projects?
· Displacements and dispossessions
associated with planned or enacted renewable energy projects.
· Flows of investments into the
renewable energy sector and specific territories and/or projects.
· The increasing role of tech firms in
the electricity industry.
· Competing tech paradigms,
accumulation strategies, and visions for long-term accumulation.
· Regulation, deregulation,
re-regulation, and the changing structure of utility industries regionally,
nationally, and transnationally.
· Increases in renewable energy
generation and land use implications.
· Utility strategies to resist
distributed energy projects in the Global North and South.
· Material and technological politics
(e.g., interactions between renewable energy growth and grid innovations, new
proposals for energy efficiency and storage).
· Conflicts and environmental
governance implications of the transition to renewable energy.
· Contradictions in the private-sector-led
development of renewable energy.
Please email abstracts of 250 words or less to Sarah
Kelly-Richards (shkelly@email.arizona.edu) or Conor Harrison (cmharris@mailbox.sc.edu)
by Wednesday, October 25.
Locating socially-just energy transitions
Nikki Luke, University of Georgia
Carlo Sica, Syracuse University
Sponsored by the Cultural and Political Ecology
Specialty Group, the Energy and Environment Specialty Group, and the Geographic
Perspectives on Women Specialty Group
In June 2017, President Trump withdrew from the
Paris climate accords, citing the need to cut "job-killing
regulations" that impair the coal industry (Battistoni 2017; White House
2017). In our view, Trump's political rhetoric pits economic well-being against
action on climate change and belies the hard work of activists, unions,
utilities, energy companies, and progressive politicians to forge a socially
just transition to cleaner energy. Geographers have a role to play in these
discussions. Recent years have witnessed a turn in geographic research toward
the intersection of renewable energy systems and social justice (Healy and
Barry 2017), politics of energy demand (Shove and Walker 2014), energy poverty
(Baker et al. 2014; Hilbert and Werner, 2016), and energy system transformation
(Juisto 2009). Energy geography (Calvert 2016; Huber 2015) and research on
energy transitions (Bridge et al. 2013; Lawhon and Murphy 2012; Newell and
Mulvaney, 2013; Shove and Walker 2007) gesture to the political decisions that
initiate energy system change and begin to grapple with the class-based,
racialized, and gendered dynamics that intersect with transitional politics.
The goal of this session is to generate a
dialogue on energy transitions from a distinct set of places and methodological
and theoretical perspectives. We seek to push the boundaries of energy
geographies toward questions about who or what will bear the costs of slowing
climate change along intersecting lines of class, gender, race, nation, and
species.
We invite scholarship on the topic of locating
socially-just energy transitions, which may focus on, but are not limited to
the following themes:
- role of the state, civil
society, and social movements
- resistance from fossil
capital
- green collar jobs, labor
organizing, and the future of work in a clean-energy economy
- energy poverty, energy
affordability, and its subjectivities
- historical and
counterfactual perspectives on energy transition(s)
Please
send abstracts of ≤ 250 words to Nikki Luke, knluke@uga.edu, and Carlo
Sica, cesica@syr.edu, by Friday,
Oct. 20 to express interest.
Works cited:
Baker, Lucy, Peter Newell and Jon Phillips 2014
"The political economy of energy transitions: the case of South
Africa" New political economy 19 (6) pp.791-818;Battistoni, A. 2017.
Living, Not Just Surviving. Jacobin 26, 68–74; Bridge,
Gavin, Bouzarovski, Stefan, Bradshaw, Michael, and Eyre, Nick 2013
"Geographies of energy transition: Space, place and the low-carbon economy"
Energy policy 53 pp.331–340; Calvert,
Kirby 2016 "From "energy geography" to "energy
geographies": perspectives on a fertile academic borderland" Progress
in Human Geography 40 (1) pp.105–125; Fry,
Matthew 2013 "Cement, carbon dioxide, and the 'necessity' narrative: a
case study of Mexico" Geoforum 49 pp.127-138; Healy, Noel and John Barry
2017 "Politicizing energy justice and energy system transitions: fossil
fuel divestment and a 'just transition'" Energy Policy 108 pp.451-459; Hilbert,
Anthony and Werner, Marion 2016 "Turn up the heat! Contesting energy
poverty in Buffalo, NY" Geoforum 74 222-232; Huber, Matt 2015 "Theorizing energy geographies: theorizing
energy geographies" Geography Compass 9 (6) pp.327–338; Juisto, Scott 2009
"Energy transformations and geographic research" in A companion to
environmental geography Noel Castree, David Demeritt, Diana Liverman and Bruce
Rhoads eds. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell pp.533-551; Lawhon, Mary and Murphy, James
2012 "Socio-technical regimes and sustainability transitions: insights
from political ecology" Progress in Human Geography 36 (3) pp.354–378; Newell,
Peter and Mulvaney, Dustin 2013 "The political economy of the 'just
transition'" The Geographical Journal 179 (2) pp.132–140; Shove,
Elizabeth, and Gordon Walker 2007 "CAUTION! Transitions ahead: politics,
practice, and sustainable transition management" Environment and Planning
A 39 (4) pp.763-770; Shove, Elizabeth and Gordon Walker 2014 "What is
energy for? Social practice and energy demand" Theory, culture &
society 31 (5) pp.41-58; The White House, Office of the Press Secretary,
Statement by President Trump on the Paris Climate Accord 2017 www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/06/01/... (Accessed
9/12/17)
Recycling Energy
Landscapes in a Crowded World
Dr. Stanislav Martinat, Institute of Geonics, The Czech
Academy of Sciences
Prof. Martin J. Pasqualetti, Arizona State University,
Tempe
Over the centuries, energy development has largely been a linear
enterprise, ending in landscapes disrupted, abandoned, poisoned, and forgotten.
This approach is no longer viable. The ongoing "third energy
transition" (Whipple, 2011) – a transition from fossil fuels that
underpinned the industrial age – to a post-industrial era characterized by
increasing competition between the land used for energy development and the
land needed for cities, farms, recreation, and contemplation. In many
countries, there is increasing pressure to regenerate, reclaim, and redevelop
the abandoned, derelict and contaminated areas left behind. These include
abandoned mines, processing equipment, waste heaps, disused oil and gas wells,
and other traditional energy landscapes. The repurposing of these landscapes –
and often disused buildings that rest on them – has become increasingly
imperative and economically sensible in the last two decades as competition for
land has increased and as emerging policies and economic instruments have grown
to support the regeneration processes (e.g., the Re-powering America´s land
Initiative, EPA, 2013). We have now reached a period when
"recycling" energy landscapes is occurring with increasing frequency.
Examples of this new stage in land use include converting opencast mines to
recreational lakes, power plant buildings into museums, sites of mountain-top
removal into golf courses, ash disposal piles into the solar farms, canals
paths into bike paths, and a wide assortment of energy infrastructure into
destinations for „energy tourism" (Frantál & Urbánková, 2017).
This session is intended to identify the need, forms, incentives, and barriers
to recycling energy landscapes.
Interested
participants should send abstracts to martinat@geonika.cz by
October 30. Participants will be notified of acceptance and inclusion into the
session by turn.
Socio-Economic Parameters in the Public Acceptance
of Renewable Energy Landscapes
Dr. Bohumil Frantal, Palacky
University, Olomouc, Czech Republic
Prof. Martin J. Pasqualetti, Arizona
State University, Tempe, USA
One of the first articles dealing with public perceptions of
emerging renewable energy landscapes was by a geographer (Pasqualetti &
Butler 1987). Although subsequent research has suggested that aesthetic
preferences concerning landscape impacts best predict the local acceptance of
renewables (e.g., Pasqualetti 2012; Wolsink 2007), recent studies proved that
the impact of visibility on acceptance is not linked just to the physical
landscape context but also to socio-economic parameters of projects. Others
even emphasized that not a visual impact, but perception of health risks,
appraisal of community benefits, general community enhancement, and preferences
for renewable-generated electricity are the key predictors of local support for
renewables (Baxter et al. 2013). While an adaptation to changed landscape
character turned out to be a common phenomenon, the negative perceptions
concerning increasing electricity prices due to the feed-in tariffs and other
subsidies, the noise annoyance from wind turbines or a smell from biogas
stations, and uncertainties surrounding the long term effects and health risks
of these facilities seem to persist years after construction was completed
(Groth & Vogt 2014, Martinat et al. 2017). After three decades of our
co-existence with renewable energy landscapes, there are still many unanswered
questions regarding public perceptions and a wider diffusion and adoption of
renewables, and there are other concepts besides the invalid NIMBY theory that
need to be revised and/or adapted in the light of the latest developments, such
as the U-curve theory, the proximity hypothesis, the spatial and distributional
justice, the resource curse, et cetera. These and other issues will be
discussed in this paper session.
Interested participants should send abstracts to frantal@geonika.cz by October
30. Participants will be notified of acceptance and inclusion into the session
by turn.
Small hydroelectric
power (SHP) in policy and practice
Thomas Ptak,
University of Idaho, tptak@uidaho.edu
Arica Crootof, University of Arizona, acrootof@email.arizona.edu
Sponsored by the Energy and
Environment Specialty Group
We invite individuals to join us in assessing the current state of small
hydroelectric power (SHP) in policy and practice. As the development of large
and medium sized hydroelectric infrastructure continues to face increased
social, political and environmental pressure, proliferation of small
hydroelectric operations rapidly increases throughout many parts of the world.
While a rich body of literature examining a range of biophysical and human
dimensions of large hydropower development exists, research on SHP, is limited
by comparison and lacks a comprehensive multi-regional study. Assessing
empirical research from a range of geographic regions is needed to critically
analyze and understand the nuanced, complex and idiosyncratic nature of SHP in
policy and practice.
In order to address this gap in current knowledge, we
invite field-based research on SHP from all geographic locations. This session
has two aims. First, to connect researchers and establish aSHP network/working
group. Second, to develop the foundation of a comparative analysis of SHP in
policy and practice that can be developed into a formal publication. The
session format will be mildly unorthodox but progressive. Our forum will
offer a space to connect SHP researchers and share empirical research. Working
together, we will focus on detailing the global SHP movement to outline
challenges, illustrate complexities, identify research needs, critique
current trends and suggest future directions with case-specific examples.
Please contact the session organizers if you would
like to be involved in this session. Submission of a 250 word abstract is due
by October 24.
