From: EnvironmentalGovernance <environmentalgovernance-boun...@mailman12.u.washington.edu> on behalf of Siddharth Sareen <siddharth.sar...@uib.no> Date: Friday, January 5, 2024 at 6:11 PM To: Siddharth Sareen <siddharth.sar...@uis.no>, Shayan Shokrgozar <shayan.shokrgo...@uib.no>, jamccar...@clarku.edu <jamccar...@clarku.edu>, sa...@cornell.edu <sa...@cornell.edu> Subject: Re: [Environmental Politics & Governance (EPG) Call for abstracts: Workshop in Stavanger and special issue proposal to Geoforum in 2024 Some people who received this message don't often get email from siddharth.sar...@uib.no. Learn why this is important<https://aka.ms/LearnAboutSenderIdentification> CAUTION: EXTERNAL SENDER
Dear colleagues, Happy 2024! As promised, here comes a reminder regarding our open call for applications to a workshop targeted at a special issue, funded by the Research Council of Norway (ASSET project) and scheduled for 21-23 May 2024 in Stavanger, Norway. We have received several expressions of interest, and look forward to the remaining applications prior to the upcoming submission deadline of Monday, 15 January. Details follow: The Dawn of Solar Photovoltaics: Emergent political economies at the solar-agri-land nexus Workshop convenors and special issue guest editors: Siddharth Sareen (Stavanger & Bergen), Shayan Shokrgozar (Bergen), Steven Wolf (Cornell), and James McCarthy (Clark) Socio-cultural and institutional changes focused on rapid decarbonisation combined with cost declines of clean energy production present significant opportunities and risks. On the one hand, there is potential for a significant shift to renewable energy and swift reductions in emissions and reconfiguration of energy build-out. On the other hand, solar photovoltaics (PV) and linked developments in domains such as land and agri-tech can dispossess resource-dependent peoples, reduce habitats for the other-than-human, aggravate inequities, and further weaken democratic controls. Shortly put, unconventional energy sources, such as solar PV, and their impact at the agri-land nexus can enhance or tarnish socio-ecological wellbeing. Rapid declines in the cost of solar energy Solar energy is the most rapidly growing energy source worldwide. It is taking the form of gigaparks stretching over thousands of hectares, changing lifeways and altering relations to land, yet potentially displacing many tonnes of fossil fuel emissions that would have otherwise been mobilised. It is also becoming embedded into landscapes and practices through emergent energy communities and small-scale solar plants installed by local businesses and households, allowing for new and enhanced relations with energy production. This vast range of evolution in energy infrastructure must be unpacked for a fuller understanding of the new energy geographies being constituted through the solar turn. We define this turn as the coming of age of the solar energy transition, driven primarily by the techno-economic logic of rapid low-carbon energy production in novel patterns of organisation, both spatially and socially. Simultaneously, the solar turn is not cultivating emancipatory energy futures. In fact, mounting evidence over the past decade points to just the opposite outcome. Researchers are positioned to analyse changes in inputs to socio-material transitions (investment and regulation), and in material shifts (land use and access, patterns of energy production and consumption). Despite some heartening exceptions, much solar capacity addition is reproducing major spatial and ownership logics of fossil fuels, albeit with political economic discontinuities in the nature of investments and subsidies. Moreover, solar modules have a large land footprint. Driven by the capitalist logic of maximising risk-adjusted returns on investment, investments in the solar turn have had detrimental consequences for social cohesion and ecological well-being. The proliferation of solar plants is squeezing out so-called ‘marginal’ land uses such as subsistence agriculture, pastoral and nomadic relations, and forest cover. It is also becoming a major factor in the global land rush, as solar companies acquire control of land, via either outright acquisition or the signing of multi-decade leases, to host solar plants from megawatts to gigawatts. New transmission lines then connect those plants to rapidly expanding, far-ranging electrical grids, while local residents sometimes struggle with insufficient access to electricity to meet basic needs. Such changes in land tenure, secured via complex mixtures of legal and extra-legal relations and public and private resource mobilisation, are dramatically and rapidly reshaping rural landscapes, ecologies, and social relations at a variety of spatial scales. We invite contributions that shed light on the emergent political economies and scales of environmental governance at the solar-land nexus. We emphasise these empirical objectives over normative conclusions regarding just or unjust energy transitions. Despite sobering trends, not everything is gloom and doom. Whether agrivoltaics that synergistically integrate photovoltaics with agriculture, or solar energy communities that generate savings and wealth for residents, prefigurative practices and politics are at work towards inclusive, equitable and efficient clean energy futures. Regulations are finally cropping up and being translated into models to integrate solar into urban and peri-urban landscapes, to generate low-carbon electricity close to demand centres. Some farmers with strong property rights see solar leases as ways to keep their farms viable and in the family. With cost declines in battery storage and cross-sectoral scope for energy flexibility, for instance by smart-charging electric vehicles, value addition prospects for smart local energy systems powered by solar production are emergent. Yet despite all these high-stakes investments, social innovation, shifts in land use, and the proliferation of business models with a range of user-centric logics or not, research on environmental governance at the solar-agri-land nexus remains scarce. This workshop directed at a special issue seeks to address this gap, and to articulate the changing political economies and scales of environmental governance that flow from the solar turn. We identify some established trends in recent scholarship on solar energy transitions. It is evident that large-scale projects are prioritised by path dependence, incumbency, and energy sector financialisation, leading to sub-optimal outcomes for residents, habitat, energy system efficiency, control over land and resources, and the potential to engender an emancipatory energy transition. Scholars have also brought out how these trends can be mitigated by promoting solar adoption at lower spatial scales, such as through solar energy communities in the tens and hundreds of kilowatts, or even a few megawatts (each megawatt constituting an investment in the range of a million dollars). They have also indicated that legislative and regulatory changes have paved the way for such initiatives to emerge in increasingly more contexts worldwide. Yet the sheer speed of large-scale solar capacity addition creates market disincentives for small-scale solar projects to come on-grid some years down the line, as without energy flexibility, these will encounter electricity grid prices that make prosumption (selling electricity to the grid) unattractive, and limit adopters to local solar self-consumption. Outright public ownership of renewable energy production and distribution may provide another alternative to the well-greased rails of capitalist development, and there are many precedents for public construction, ownership, and management of utilities. Yet the ideological and practical challenges to such an approach on national and global scales are formidable. Hence, there is a need to consider the value of the fuller ecosystems that solar plants are being ‘monocultured’ into. What forms of value are being created, and what lost, for whom at various spatial scales? Moreover, what are the implications of appropriating land for solar rollouts some decades in the future in terms of cultivability? These questions can be addressed in a multitude of ways. We are particularly keen to invite contributions that analyse a novel nexus (such as various intersections between agriculture and solar energy, extending beyond agrivoltaics); address a diversity of nodes in value chains, for example clean-tech venture capital (entrepreneurial innovation ecosystems) and sourcing and disposal of solar energy production materials; employ innovative methods in their study (for instance combining temporalities of solar energy systems with diverse actor roles and sectors); combine empirical depth with theoretical grounding in environmental governance issues; or mobilise analysis of rapidly unfolding energy geographies within the solar turn, to name a few. We are open to theoretically innovative and experimental contributions that take on questions of future evolution (such as solar waste and land lease futures) beyond regular empirical study. We will follow this timeline to select abstracts and contributors, pitch and confirm a special issue with Geoforum as our journal of choice, and host an in-person workshop in beautiful springtime Stavanger to ensure development of a high-quality thematic collection and convivial scholarly exchange: 15 January: Deadline for applications with abstracts, author bios and statement of intent regarding workshop participation (to siddharth.sar...@uis.no) 31 January: Feedback to authors and requests to update abstracts if needed 15 February: Deadline for authors to confirm in-person workshop participation 28 February: SI proposal submission with up to 15 abstracts to Geoforum (https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/geoforum/publish/guide-for-authors) 27 March: Targeted confirmation from Geoforum on SI proposal acceptance 30 April: Full first draft manuscripts submitted to editors for pre-workshop circulation 21-23 May: workshop in Stavanger (travel costs to be borne by participants, board and lodging sponsored by the Research Council of Norway project Accountable Solar Energy TransitionS (ASSET, see https://prosjektbanken.forskningsradet.no/en/project/FORISS/314022) for 15 invitees, 3 nights at Ydalir Hotel at the University of Stavanger 15 July: revised post-workshop manuscripts submitted to the journal for external peer review 1 October: first round of reviews completed for all manuscripts 20 December: final decisions rendered for all manuscripts Early 2025: Publication of special issue in Geoforum (or a comparable journal) ________________________________ From: Siddharth Sareen Sent: Wednesday, December 6, 2023 11:53 PM To: Siddharth Sareen <siddharth.sar...@uis.no>; Shayan Shokrgozar <shayan.shokrgo...@uib.no>; jamccar...@clarku.edu <jamccar...@clarku.edu>; sa...@cornell.edu <sa...@cornell.edu> Subject: Call for abstracts: Workshop in Stavanger and special issue proposal to Geoforum in 2024 The Dawn of Solar Photovoltaics: Emergent political economies at the solar-agri-land nexus Workshop convenors and special issue guest editors: Siddharth Sareen (Stavanger & Bergen), Shayan Shokrgozar (Bergen), Steven Wolf (Cornell), and James McCarthy (Clark) Socio-cultural and institutional changes focused on rapid decarbonisation combined with cost declines of clean energy production present significant opportunities and risks. On the one hand, there is potential for a significant shift to renewable energy and swift reductions in emissions and reconfiguration of energy build-out. On the other hand, solar photovoltaics (PV) and linked developments in domains such as land and agri-tech can dispossess resource-dependent peoples, reduce habitats for the other-than-human, aggravate inequities, and further weaken democratic controls. Shortly put, unconventional energy sources, such as solar PV, and their impact at the agri-land nexus can enhance or tarnish socio-ecological wellbeing. Rapid declines in the cost of solar energy Solar energy is the most rapidly growing energy source worldwide. It is taking the form of gigaparks stretching over thousands of hectares, changing lifeways and altering relations to land, yet potentially displacing many tonnes of fossil fuel emissions that would have otherwise been mobilised. It is also becoming embedded into landscapes and practices through emergent energy communities and small-scale solar plants installed by local businesses and households, allowing for new and enhanced relations with energy production. This vast range of evolution in energy infrastructure must be unpacked for a fuller understanding of the new energy geographies being constituted through the solar turn. We define this turn as the coming of age of the solar energy transition, driven primarily by the techno-economic logic of rapid low-carbon energy production in novel patterns of organisation, both spatially and socially. Simultaneously, the solar turn is not cultivating emancipatory energy futures. In fact, mounting evidence over the past decade points to just the opposite outcome. Researchers are positioned to analyse changes in inputs to socio-material transitions (investment and regulation), and in material shifts (land use and access, patterns of energy production and consumption). Despite some heartening exceptions, much solar capacity addition is reproducing major spatial and ownership logics of fossil fuels, albeit with political economic discontinuities in the nature of investments and subsidies. Moreover, solar modules have a large land footprint. Driven by the capitalist logic of maximising risk-adjusted returns on investment, investments in the solar turn have had detrimental consequences for social cohesion and ecological well-being. The proliferation of solar plants is squeezing out so-called ‘marginal’ land uses such as subsistence agriculture, pastoral and nomadic relations, and forest cover. It is also becoming a major factor in the global land rush, as solar companies acquire control of land, via either outright acquisition or the signing of multi-decade leases, to host solar plants from megawatts to gigawatts. New transmission lines then connect those plants to rapidly expanding, far-ranging electrical grids, while local residents sometimes struggle with insufficient access to electricity to meet basic needs. Such changes in land tenure, secured via complex mixtures of legal and extra-legal relations and public and private resource mobilisation, are dramatically and rapidly reshaping rural landscapes, ecologies, and social relations at a variety of spatial scales. We invite contributions that shed light on the emergent political economies and scales of environmental governance at the solar-land nexus. We emphasise these empirical objectives over normative conclusions regarding just or unjust energy transitions. Despite sobering trends, not everything is gloom and doom. Whether agrivoltaics that synergistically integrate photovoltaics with agriculture, or solar energy communities that generate savings and wealth for residents, prefigurative practices and politics are at work towards inclusive, equitable and efficient clean energy futures. Regulations are finally cropping up and being translated into models to integrate solar into urban and peri-urban landscapes, to generate low-carbon electricity close to demand centres. Some farmers with strong property rights see solar leases as ways to keep their farms viable and in the family. With cost declines in battery storage and cross-sectoral scope for energy flexibility, for instance by smart-charging electric vehicles, value addition prospects for smart local energy systems powered by solar production are emergent. Yet despite all these high-stakes investments, social innovation, shifts in land use, and the proliferation of business models with a range of user-centric logics or not, research on environmental governance at the solar-agri-land nexus remains scarce. This workshop directed at a special issue seeks to address this gap, and to articulate the changing political economies and scales of environmental governance that flow from the solar turn. We identify some established trends in recent scholarship on solar energy transitions. It is evident that large-scale projects are prioritised by path dependence, incumbency, and energy sector financialisation, leading to sub-optimal outcomes for residents, habitat, energy system efficiency, control over land and resources, and the potential to engender an emancipatory energy transition. Scholars have also brought out how these trends can be mitigated by promoting solar adoption at lower spatial scales, such as through solar energy communities in the tens and hundreds of kilowatts, or even a few megawatts (each megawatt constituting an investment in the range of a million dollars). They have also indicated that legislative and regulatory changes have paved the way for such initiatives to emerge in increasingly more contexts worldwide. Yet the sheer speed of large-scale solar capacity addition creates market disincentives for small-scale solar projects to come on-grid some years down the line, as without energy flexibility, these will encounter electricity grid prices that make prosumption (selling electricity to the grid) unattractive, and limit adopters to local solar self-consumption. Outright public ownership of renewable energy production and distribution may provide another alternative to the well-greased rails of capitalist development, and there are many precedents for public construction, ownership, and management of utilities. Yet the ideological and practical challenges to such an approach on national and global scales are formidable. Hence, there is a need to consider the value of the fuller ecosystems that solar plants are being ‘monocultured’ into. What forms of value are being created, and what lost, for whom at various spatial scales? Moreover, what are the implications of appropriating land for solar rollouts some decades in the future in terms of cultivability? These questions can be addressed in a multitude of ways. We are particularly keen to invite contributions that analyse a novel nexus (such as various intersections between agriculture and solar energy, extending beyond agrivoltaics); address a diversity of nodes in value chains, for example clean-tech venture capital (entrepreneurial innovation ecosystems) and sourcing and disposal of solar energy production materials; employ innovative methods in their study (for instance combining temporalities of solar energy systems with diverse actor roles and sectors); combine empirical depth with theoretical grounding in environmental governance issues; or mobilise analysis of rapidly unfolding energy geographies within the solar turn, to name a few. We are open to theoretically innovative and experimental contributions that take on questions of future evolution (such as solar waste and land lease futures) beyond regular empirical study. We will follow this timeline to select abstracts and contributors, pitch and confirm a special issue with Geoforum as our journal of choice, and host an in-person workshop in beautiful springtime Stavanger to ensure development of a high-quality thematic collection and convivial scholarly exchange: Early December 2023: Workshop and SI call circulated on various listservs 8 January 2024: Reminders issued about impending deadline for abstracts 15 January: Deadline for applications with abstracts, author bios and statement of intent regarding workshop participation (to siddharth.sar...@uis.no) 31 January: Feedback to authors and requests to update abstracts if needed 15 February: Deadline for authors to confirm in-person workshop participation 28 February: SI proposal submission with up to 15 abstracts to Geoforum (https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/geoforum/publish/guide-for-authors) 27 March: Targeted confirmation from Geoforum on SI proposal acceptance 30 April: Full first draft manuscripts submitted to editors for pre-workshop circulation 21-23 May: workshop in Stavanger (travel costs to be borne by participants, board and lodging sponsored by the Research Council of Norway project Accountable Solar Energy TransitionS (ASSET, see https://prosjektbanken.forskningsradet.no/en/project/FORISS/314022) for 15 invitees, 3 nights at Ydalir Hotel at the University of Stavanger 15 July: revised post-workshop manuscripts submitted to Geoforum for peer review 1 October: first round of reviews completed for all manuscripts 20 December: final decisions rendered for all manuscripts Early 2025: Publication of special issue in Geoforum -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "gep-ed" group. 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