NordForsk: Energy Lives! Infrastructural Citizenship in Nordic Energy Transitions

Energy system transitions are high on the political agendas of all countries today. Decarbonization and reduction of climate gases are necessary to have a realistic chance at limiting global warming 1.5 degrees as mandated by the Paris Agreement of 2015. In the green transition, the focus mostly rests on the phase-out of fossil fuels and an electrification of society based on renewable energy sources. The Energy Lives! project argues that an understanding of the history of energy transitions is absolutely necessary in order to achieve the goal of a successful green transition of society. The ambition to phase out fossil fues is not new, nor is the idea and practice of energy transitions. Today’s societies and today’s challenges are shaped and limited by former choices and former conflicts about energy. Energy Lives! examines the conjoined lives of people, energy sources, infrastructures, and energy production in the Nordic countries the last 150 years. We wish to understand how publics and communities emerge and interact around ways of living with and through energy transitions and how these publics shape and constrain energy transitions over long time periods. The project particularly focuses on discussions over oil refineries, district heating, energy-producing buildings, and the afterlives of energy. Energy Lives! will lead to new insights into how democratic participation and citizen involvement contributes to the legitimacy of energy transitions. Such perspectives are necessary in contemporary discussions of just green transitions.

Energy Lives! scrutinizes the conjoined lives of energy and people in the Nordic countries. We seek to understand how publics and communities emerge around ways of living with and through energy transitions and how such publics shape and constrain energy transitions over long time periods. We apply the concept of infrastructural citizenship to uncover mechanisms of agency, appropriation, and resistance in energy transitions, distributed among people, politics, and infrastructures. We study energy transitions through a historical analytical framework that allows us to draw out nuances and complexities of citizen involvement in large-scale infrastructural development over 150 years. At the same time, we are concerned with an urgent contemporary situation that makes history a matter of high relevance. Energy is produced, distributed, used, and disposed of in large sociotechnical infrastructures that result from historical processes, from choices made and technologies available in the past. The energy lives that we study are the outcome of layers upon layers of energy transitions. By centering citizens simultaneously as historical actors whose choices continue to shape the present and as contemporary actors who live within energy infrastructures shaped by the past, the Energy Lives! project will generate new knowledge on how democratic engagement and citizen-involvement in energy transition processes have shaped the legitimacy and efficiency of such processes. Such perspectives are critically needed in contemporary political debates and strategies about environmentally and inter- and intra-generationally just green transitions.