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 

Lea Marie Sasse 

The global electric vehicle (EV) market is developing dynamically, with rapid growth in EV penetration and concomitant ethical and geopolitical supply chain concerns. Particularly in Europe and the US, an increase in commitment and industrial strategies to support the domestic EV industry is observable. While there is a clean and green narrative surrounding EVs, the social and ecological implications of the electrification of the road transport sector are still associated with significant uncertainties.

In the case of the Tesla Gigafactory in Grünheide, Germany, the establishment revealed various interests and conflicts, including hopes for regional development with green job creation and innovation. At the same time, Gigafactory opponents, such as environmental groups and local residents, raised concerns against the environmental and social impacts and criticised the expedited approval process.

Date: 28 September
Time: 12.30 - 14.00

Landscapes are woven by the experiences of their inhabitants and visitors, human and more-than-human. And yet, even as there is a deepening recognition that humans must transform their relationship with nature in response to the devastation wrought by climate change and species extinction, all too often, visions for the future are dominated by the same limited logics that generated the damage.    

Transition is often imagined in government and policy circles as a strategic and large-scale process, demanding interventions that are planned at regional or national levels. In this kind of vision, particular places and landscapes can be reduced to opportunity sites for development on a map.  

It is with mapping in mind that we present “Tender Cartographies”, an exercise exploring our felt relationship to place, with the intention of opening up discussion around how just transitions might be led by place, rather than by overcoming it in favour of industrial developments designed to radically transform it.  

After presenting an example from our research, we will ask participants to reflect on their relationship with place by creating their own sensory and experiential maps.  

The session will explore questions such as: 

• What does it mean to know and be connected to a place, and to map it from our felt experience of relationship with the human and non-human beings that inhabit and move through it?
• What might just transition look and feel like if its starting point were place and the beings that compose it?
• What does it mean to be placed in the world?
• What and whose knowledge is valued and taken into account in transition processes? 

We invite researchers interested in alternative methods as well as other participants interested in sustainable transitions to do this exercise in a green space near the conference venue. 

Organizers

Annabel Pinker (1) and Kornelia Johansson (2) 

(1) Social, Economic and Geographical Sciences, James Hutton Institute , Aberdeen, UK , (2) Divison of Environmental Communication, Department of Urban and Rural Development, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences , Uppsala, Sweden