Date: 28 September
Time: 09.45 - 11.30 and 14.30 - 16.00

Program part I

09.45: Welcome 
09.50: Enacting Energy Citizenship in Social Media, Lucia Liste, NTNU Social Research 
10.05: Don’t call me an energy citizen: Material participation in the energy transition through citizen-financed photovoltaics, Fabienne Sierro, ZHAQ/ETH Zürich 
10.20: Transitions in tension: Understanding sustainability engagements across socio-economic backgrounds, Ulrike Wethal, Centre for Development and the Environment, University of Oslo 
10.35: Suburban energy transitions in the Making: Pathways and barriers for citizen engagement, Jani Petteri Lukkarinen, Finnish Environment Institute 
10.50: When resistance becomes governance – narratives of a need for change in national climate governance, Anke Fischer, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
11.05: Transition Times: Navigating temporalities of knowledge and expertise in Aberdeen’s contested ‘Just Transition’, Annabel Charlotte Pinker,  James Hutton Institute
11.20: Closing remarks 

Program part II

14.30: Comparing sustainability contestations in hydropower development in Norway and Malaysia, Shaua Fui Chen, NTNU
14.45: Co-creation in Practice: exploring social participation and co-creation in the transition to climate neutral cities, Katherine Rose Weir, NTNU  
15.00: Overcoming tensions in the net zero transition: developing governance frameworks through multi-stakeholder participation in decision-making, Piers Patrick Reilly, Anglia Ruskin University
15.15: Justice challenges for smart local energy systems: learnings from Amsterdam South-East, Gijs Van Leeuwen, Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, TU Delft  
15.30: Beyond Normal: Pandemic disruptions on shifting sustainable behaviours and practices, Stephen Axon, Southern Connecticut State University
15.45: A sea of conflict: Relevant Normative Insights on Deep-sea Mining, Rita Vasconcellos D’Oliveira Bouman, SINTEF Ocean 
16.00: Closing remarks 

The restructuration of the production, distribution and consumption of energy towards a low emissions energy system, often labelled as the energy transition, brings along not only considerable technological and economic, but social and political challenges as well. The increased awareness of a need for a rapid but also fair and inclusive energy transition brings the tensions of transitions up to the forefront of the debate and highlights the need to better understand the dynamic, complex and multi-layered interplay between transitions and societal organisation. In the last years, we have thus witnessed a growing interest in understanding the social dimension of the energy transitions (Foulds et al., 2022; Ingeborgrud et al., 2020; Sovacool et al., 2020) and issues of power, agency, inequality, participation have emerged as important focal points for a broad social science agenda for research on transitions.  

This session invites contributions that help to shed light on the tensions of energy transitions.  We are interested in papers that deal with one or several relevant aspects of the interplay between energy transitions and the societies in which they are inextricably rooted.  We envision three areas of particular interest: 

• societal engagement and participation issues across different arenas of society (the publics’ different roles; the various ways in which the public engage beyond open-ended processes; etc.)
• social justice concerns (socially uneven impacts of energy transitions pathways, dynamics of inclusion/exclusion, procedural injustices, uneven distribution of the costs and benefits of different energy pathway, etc.) 
• conflict (active resistance, emerging conflicts and the tensions between democratic governance and the actions deemed necessary for the implementation of energy technologies and policies, etc).  

Understanding the tensions of energy transition requires a multitude of analytical lenses, thus we invite theoretical approaches from several fields and including science and technology studies, social anthropology, political science, geography, development studies, environmental governance, transitions studies, innovation studies etc.  

Organizers

Lucia Liste, NTNU Samfunnsforskning 
Gisle Solbu, KULT, NTNU 

Contact: Lucia Liste