Infrastructures of energy justice: enabling equitable energy transitions in an infrastructural world

Amid dire climate risks new low-carbon energy infrastructures are pioneered across the world, yet energy justice research underlines how renewable energy projects often reinforce gender, race- and class-based inequalities. 

This projects explores how low-carbon energy infrastructures themselves catalyse new social, political and environmental struggles. Infrastructures are never fixed; they are dynamically changing with their construction, repair, maintenance, decay and disturbance, and often exceed planners’ intentions by embodying unequal relations (colonial, capitalist, gendered) despite claims to the opposite. Such dynamism ensnares energy injustices with the built environment in the form of passive infrastructural harm, simultaneously folding resistance and subversion to oppressive power into sociomaterial configurations. 

This project reads infrastructures as emergent configurations of power, and asks: In what ways do low-carbon infrastructures catalyse social inequalities, and how can energy infrastructures be planned to promote just and pro-poor energy transitions in energy-poor regions? 

Building on participatory mapping of energy transition infrastructures in small-scale energy transition initiatives in rural Zambia, the project proposes a new approach to energy justice that centres infrastructures themselves, including their scalar flows and connections, in the struggle for justice amid structural inequalities.