Provincializing energy transitions

Abstract

The colonialism inside today's practices of energy transition becomes evident both from experiences of close listening to participants in grassroots struggles over extractivism and livelihood and from an engaged examination of the histories of energy and transition. In turn, greater awareness of the colonial nature of energy transition can fruitfully feed into movement-building around climate change. One key to the process is slow, respectful translation and continual, collaborative re-translation back and forth among communities with radically varying understandings of energy and time, whether those communities are contemporaries of one another or not.

Keywords

• energy
• colonialism
• thermodynamics
• translation
• time
• labour