Unruly Energy Frontiers: rethinking power, temporality and governing uncertainty

Keywords: unruliness, socioenvironmental state, intersectionality, environmental governance, climate change, adaptation, energy
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

The need to reduce emissions and adapt to climate change has led to calls for energy transitions. Energy frontiers, however, are entangled in uncertain geopolitics, injustices, environmental change and development efforts, raising the stakes for research on sociomaterial change. This paper articulates an analytic of unruliness, embracing uncertainty and the refusals of both the human and non-human to our efforts at planning and governing the future. Grounded in justice issues, the concept of ‘unruliness’ theorises how to understand the materialisation of power through uncertainties, temporalities, intersectional social relations, (colonialism, racism, class, patriarchy) and governance challenges. Unruliness is concerned with teasing out an analytical basis for democratic debate on the balance between planning, prediction and modelling, and uncertainty, clashing temporalities and plural knowledges. It is underpinned by key questions that arise over the socioenvironmental state: who is authorised to govern change, what knowledges and ontologies are inform energy frontiers, how do clashing temporalities shape who is required to make changes on the ground?