Routledge Handbook of Energy Democracy

Andrea M. Feldpausch-Parker, Danielle Endres, Tarla Rai Peterson, Stephanie L. Gomez, Andrea M. Feldpausch-Parker, Danielle Endres, Tarla Rai Peterson, Stephanie L. Gomez

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781032130521
• eBook ISBN: 9780429688560
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Environment & Energy Policy
• Index: Biological Sciences

This handbook offers a comprehensive transdisciplinary examination of the research and practices that constitute the emerging research agenda in energy democracy.

With protests over fossil fuels and controversies over nuclear and renewable energy technologies, democratic ideals have contributed to an emerging social movement. Energy democracy captures this movement and addresses the issues of energy access, ownership, and participation at a time when there are expanding social, political, environmental, and economic demands on energy systems. This volume defines energy democracy as both a social movement and an academic area of study and examines it through a social science and humanities lens, explaining key concepts and reflecting state-of-the-art research. The collection is comprised of six parts:

1 Scalar Dimensions of Power and Governance in Energy Democracy

2 Discourses of Energy Democracy

3 Grassroots and Critical Modes of Action

4 Democratic and Participatory Principles

5 Energy Resource Tensions

6 Energy Democracies in Practice

The vision of this handbook is explicitly transdisciplinary and global, including contributions from interdisciplinary international scholars and practitioners. The Routledge Handbook of Energy Democracy will be the premier source for all students and researchers interested in the field of energy, including policy, politics, transitions, access, justice, and public participation.

1
Energy democracy

An introduction

Andrea M. Feldpausch-Parker and Danielle Endres

DOI: 10.4324/9780429402302-1

As we are writing this chapter, the state of Texas in the United States is in a state of energy disaster. A winter storm intensified by climate change, exposed underlying structural problems in the state’s dependence on fossil fuels, natural gas infrastructure, and an electricity grid designed without consideration of climate change–intensified bouts of extreme weather. This example is just the latest in a series of “unnatural disasters” (de Onís, 2018a) facing the world as a result of the ongoing climate crisis. It joins with the impacts that Hurricanes Irma and Maria had on Puerto Rico’s aging energy system, reliant on fossil fuel imports (de Onís, 2018b), Superstorm Sandy’s devastation to the US East Coast (Feldpausch-Parker et al., 2018), and wildfires in the United States, Australia, and the Amazon. Rather than a dystopian future scenario, climate disaster is happening now and affecting people all over the globe. Climate change acts as a threat multiplier, meaning that we have not seen the end of unnatural disasters and climate chaos.

In the midst of the ongoing climate crisis, energy transition is one of the most important issues facing local, national, and international communities. Although climate change often overshadows energy in public discourse, the ability to affect drastic transformations in the way we conceive of, plan, and use energy is crucial to any efforts to address climate change and create sustainable, equitable, and resilient futures. When viewing energy transition as a sociotechnical phenomenon, focus shifts from determining technical feasibility of particular energy technologies to engaging with the messiness and complexity of social, political, and cultural contestation that must be navigated to actually implement energy system changes at multiple scales. Energy systems will continue to change in the coming years; the consequential question is how they will change. Protests over the continued use of fossil fuels; controversies over where (and whether) to locate solar, wind, hydro, and nuclear energy sites; and activist calls for a just transition remind us that while energy transition is inevitable, the contours of that transition remain uncertain and contested.

Working from the basic premise that an energy transition rooted in democratic principles is our best hope of achieving just, equitable, and culturally appropriate solutions across the many scales of decision making about energy, this handbook unpacks the relationships between energy and democracy in the context of the climate crisis and energy transition. Energy democracy (ED) first emerged as a term used by activists to call for greater levels of participation in decision making about energy transitions, including more localized control over energy production and consumption, distributional and procedural justice in decision making, and promotion of renewable energy sources (e.g., Giancatarino, 2012). To work toward ED—a sociotechnical energy transition infused with democratic practices and ideals—requires that scholars and practitioners engage and experiment with new forms of participation, relations of power, practices of justice, and configurations of energy technologies. As such, there is a profound need to devote scholarly attention to understanding and developing theoretically informed democratic approaches to energy transitions.

Over the several years since we hosted a symposium in 2017 in Salt Lake City, Utah, to build a research agenda for ED, research in this area has grown exponentially (e.g., Burke & Stephens, 2017; Feldpausch-Parker et al., 2019; Hess, 2018; Szulecki & Overland, 2020; van Veelen & van der Horst, 2018). While Reinig and Sprain (2016) note that ED is not sufficiently addressed in interdisciplinary energy scholarship, four years later Szulecki and Overland (2020) characterize ED research as a nascent interdisciplinary field, with a growth spurt in publications starting in 2017. This growing area of research provides many opportunities to contribute to understanding ED as movement, concept, and practice through varied theoretical, conceptual, and empirical lenses.

Our vision is to offer a comprehensive transdisciplinary examination of the research and practices that constitute ED, or, as Chilvers and Pallett (2018) argue, the multiple energy democracies. While no one handbook can offer a fully comprehensive rendering of an emerging research area, we deliberately curated this collection to offer readers an introduction to ED that represents the many disciplines, regions of the world, and forms of social scientific and humanities research that make up this interdisciplinary area of study. Entries from leading international scholars and practitioners highlight various facets of ED and span a variety of theoretical, conceptual, critical, and empirical forms of research. The handbook includes six parts: scalar dimensions, discourses, grassroots and critical modes of action, democratic and participatory principles, energy resource tensions, and energy democracies in practice. Chapters across these parts explain key concepts, reflect state-of-the-art research, and elaborate on the broad range of actors, democratic values, democratic functions, and governance sites that are involved in ED. The handbook contributes to growing efforts to study examples of energy democracies in practice (e.g., Becker et al., 2020; Bloem et al., 2021; Gunderson & Yun, 2021; Hess, 2019; MacEwen & Evensen, 2021; Morris & Jungjohann, 2016; Stephens et al., 2018; Williams & Sovacool, 2020), as well as to engage with theoretical and conceptual perspectives toward ED (e.g., Burke & Stephens, 2017; Cantarero, 2020; Feldpausch-Parker et al., 2019; Sorman et al., 2020; Szulecki & Overland, 2020). The chapters in this handbook not only extend a growing field’s understanding of ED but also, in recognition of its roots in social activism, contribute to the ongoing ED movement by offering research-informed insights into best practices and lessons learned from energy democracies in practice.

In the remainder of this introduction, we begin by defining ED as a composition of energy and democracy. Then we will introduce a framework for examining ED at the intersections of justice, participation, power, and technology. This is followed by a preview of the parts of the handbook and a brief conclusion.

Energy democracy as composition

Energy democracy is a composition, or a putting together, of energy and democracy for a specific sociotechnical purpose: a democratic energy transition in the face of the climate crisis. Bruno Latour (2010) offers the concept of composition to highlight that “things have to be put together (Latin, componere) while retaining their heterogeneity” (pp. 473–474). In response to growing ecological crises, Latour offers composition as an alternative to the forms of critique and deconstruction that commonly guide academic inquiry. Focusing primarily on putting things together turns attention to building alternatives and solutions that can have impact on addressing real-world problems, as opposed to the tendency of critique and deconstruction to stop at identifying problems. Composition works on two levels as a framing tool for this handbook’s focus on ED: (1) It focuses attention on how seemingly disparate things—like energy and democracy—can be put together in a variety of ways, or energy democracies (Chilvers & Pallett, 2018); (2) it focuses attention on developing research programs that go beyond identifying what is wrong by offering immediate, yet thoughtful compositions of new solutions, imaginaries, and futures that respond to the many exigencies faced by society, such as the climate crisis. Composing is difficult but may provide an elemental framework for the energy exigencies at hand. In keeping with the obligation to put together while retaining heterogeneity, we will begin by defining energy and democracy.

Energy

While there are many ways of thinking about energy—from capacity to act, to spiritual essence, to power, to vigor—here energy refers to the forms of power, such as electricity, that are used to enable human technologies. Endres et al. (2016) define energy as:

power that may be used to operate the infrastructures of the human-built environment. Humans derive that power from resources such as fossil fuels, solar, wind, hydroelectric, nuclear, biofuels, and geothermal sources that are extracted and harnessed, prepared, and distributed in a cycle of energy production. We use the term energy resources to discuss sources of energy, energy production to describe the cradle-to-grave process whereby energy is supplied to human-built infrastructures, and energy consumption to refer to the processes wherein people use energy resources to power infrastructure, technology, and other activities.

(p. 420)

In this way, energy is an essential but often unseen and not reflected upon component of human society (e.g., Szeman & Boyer, 2017). Yet, while some form of energy is foundational to human society, there are significant choices to be made about which energy resources and forms of production and consumption to use. With the alarming present and future realities of climate change and inequities in the distribution of harms, we find ourselves in a time of energy transition with a complex matrix of contestation over what choices to make across scales of participation and governance.

Inherent to our definition of energy is the notion that energy resources, production, consumption, and transition work at the intersection of the technical and social. Energy, then, is also a composition. While many still overwhelmingly consider energy as a technical phenomenon that requires the work of innovative scientists and engineers, it would be a mistake to ignore its social ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Energy democracy: an introduction
• Part I Scalar dimensions of power and governance in energy democracy
• Part II Discourses of energy democracy
• Part III Grassroots and critical modes of action
• Part IV Democratic and participatory principles
• Part V Energy resource tensions
• Part VI Energy democracies in practice
• Index