Designing liveable fossil-free futures for all? In search for justice in democratised imagination, knowledge and governance  

Abstracts

Technological optimism and its effect to the sense of justice in futures horizons 

by Johanna Ahola-Launonen, Aalto University

In this paper, I aim to conceptualize the difference between harmful and beneficial technological optimism, and the specific effect that they have futures horizons. I propose that there is a normative interaction between beliefs on technological development and the sense of justice. This interaction can be explained with the social, political, and technological concept of sociotechnical imaginaries. 

Two sides of a private transport transition: A Norwegian experience 

by Davood Qorbani, NTNU; with Stein-Erik Fleten, NTNU; Hubert Korzilius, Radboud University

Norway is known to be the leading country in the adoption of electric vehicles. Most of the newly bought private vehicles in the country are electric nowadays – 2020 was the year that the sales of electric passenger vehicles exceeded the sales of all other fuel types of passenger vehicles. The Norwegian government and regional communes have implemented various policies to accelerate the transition – such as a reduced tax on vehicle purchase, free parking spaces, access to public transport lanes on the streets, and reduction or exemption from road tolls. Such policies appear to promote a sustainable transition in passenger vehicles. On the contrary, an empirical analysis resonates that a significant part of the society has been excluded from the privileges of the Norwegian strategy – those without private vehicles. This research provides a picture of the ongoing “Norwegian Experience” transition and discuss how it may deviate from a genuine transition in private transport and mobility. 

Sociotechnical Imaginaries of Heat Mining: Imagining an easier future for women in rural Kenya 

by Julia Caroline Wummel, University of Cologne

Visions of the future of many women who work in geothermal energy in Kenya revolve around mining hot water to increase food security and lessen the burden on women and children in rural areas, even more than by their parastatal employers’ mandate of generating “power for the nation”. Geothermal resources can be utilized to generate electricity by drilling deep into the Earth and using the energy of the resulting hot fluids to drive turbines and heat exchangers. The potential uses of the mined matter depend on the temperature of the geothermal reservoir: Even if the well-produced fluid is too cool for power generation, it can still be used to f. e. heat greenhouses, dry grains, pasteurize milk or pursue aquaculture. In Kenya, women and children are traditionally responsible for gathering biomass, water and food. Many women who are now working in parastatal electricity generating or steam producing agencies as engineers, scientists or project managers have vivid memories of their mother’s labor and tell stories about performing these tasks themselves during their childhood. Their visions of a geothermal future include direct uses of hot water since this can directly impact lives of Kenyans who live close to the geothermal heat mining sites, while power lines mainly pass over villages on their way to bigger cities. Thereby, these women are aiming on increasing energy justice. This article employs ethnographic observations and in-depth interviews with Kenyan women working in the geothermal sector to explore the design process of a more equitable energy future. 

Presentist imaginaries for a low emission society: The case of CCS governance in Norway 

by Hedda Susanne Molland, University of Bergen

In this paper I will investigate the impact of temporal tension in visions of technological climate measures. I ask what the Norwegian government’s vision of carbon capture and storage has done to imagination of temporal horizons for climate change mitigation and societal development. In my research, I have a found a presentist orientation (Hartog 2015) in the articulations of the carbon capture and storage imaginary, which both activates and negotiates tensions between societal change and stability. These tensions are present in interesting ways in the Norwegian government’s plans for carbon capture and storage innovation. Plans of the last decade have faced repeated postponements and new deadlines, justified in part by expert reports but also through financial concerns and temporalities of innovation and climate change. A focus of this paper is therefore how postponement and urgency are aligned and in conflict with each other and with different visions of the future. The paper is based on parts of my PhD project, which explores the Norwegian government’s effort, from 2014 to 2020, to launch what eventually became the carbon capture and storage project Langskip. I study the climate measure, which in Norwegian politics is known as “CO2 handling”, as a temporally organized imaginary, expressed through document practices – from parliamentary debates and white papers to regulations and expert reports. My approach combines Sheila Jasanoff’s theory of sociotechnical imaginaries (2015) with Kristin Asdal and Hilde Reinertsen’s work on document practices (2020) and Laclau and Mouffe’s theories on the organizing effects of discursive signifiers (1985). 

Catalyzing industrial decarbonization? 

by Veronica Brodén Gyberg, Linköping University, with Eva Lövbrand

In this paper, we study the powerful imaginative space of the fossil-free society in Swedish climate policy discourse taking shape in collaboration between the Swedish government and industry actors. In 2017, the Swedish parliament decided that Sweden should arrive at net zero emissions of greenhouse gases by the year 2045, and an ambitious climate policy framework was adopted. We trace the promise attached to the sociotechnical imaginary of the fossil-free society as it is mobilized by the government initiative fossil-free Sweden (FFS) to gain support for industrial decarbonization. We build on analyses of roadmaps produced by FFS together with the Swedish steel, cement and petroleum industries, as well as semi-structured interviews with selected industry actors. We find that the roadmaps work as powerful ‘techniques of futuring’ which enable industry actors to anticipate the risks and opportunities attached to the fossil-free society while also contributing to shaping that society. The roadmaps effectively involve the industrial actors in the political project of decarbonization, but they also consolidate around an imagined future that is a techno-optimistic extension of the fossil-intensive present. 

Who gets to imagine a just transformation towards a fossil-free future? Co-production of power, knowledge and governance in transdisciplinary sustainability research 

by Tatiana Sokolova, Södertörn University

Just green transitions predominantly focusing on the technological aspects have been criticised for being insufficiently ‘green’ or ‘just’. Effective climate governance which is perceived as just by a variety of actors demands structural transformations affecting the entire fabric of modern societies. This paper argues that such transformations can be generated at democratic interfaces between knowledge and governance. The paper uses two distinct approaches to power to analyse how researchers at one such knowledge-governance interface attempt to bridge two opposing political ontologies of ‘green modernity’ and ‘resistance’ through a third – that of ‘planetary boundaries’. The paper shows how interactions between political ontologies, understandings of justice and transformation, climate governance strategies and knowledge-action models inform a constitution of a knowledge-governance interface created with the aim to advance democratic legitimacy of ‘green transitions’. 

Life-style changes or technological fixes? To develop a fossil-free transportation system 

by Göran Sundqvist, Gothenburg University

The IPCC as well as the Swedish Government talk about a needed transformation of the society in order to reach the target of the Paris Agreement, i.e. to keep global warming well below 2 degrees Celsius. The Swedish ambition of being the first welfare society in the world to reach net zero emissions to the year 2045 includes an intermediate target of a fossil-free transportation system to the year 2030. From a government perspective it seems like the ambition is to switch from fossil fuels to renewables, including negative emission technologies and nuclear power. Not much is said about changes of economic systems, investments, regulations, and lifestyle changes. In this paper the relationships between a system transformation, of for instance the energy system or the transportation system, and a transformation of lifestyles are analysed. The ambition is to develop a more nuanced theoretical understanding of how system transformations communicate with individual consumers and citizens since technological solutions and life styles are simultaneously changing. In short, technological fixes are not that fixed. The empirical focus is on the transformation of the Swedish transportation system. The year 2030 is not far away. The empirical results are used as a resource to further develop a theoretical understanding of so called technological fixes. 

Organizers

Tatiana Sokolova and Ekaterina Tarasova, Södertörn University