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Morals, Materials, and Technoscience: The Energy Security Imaginary in the United States
Abstract
This article advances recent scholarship on energy security by arguing that the concept is best understood as a sociotechnical imaginary, a collective vision for a “good society” realized through technoscientific-oriented policies. Focusing on the 1952 Resources for Freedom report, the authors trace the genealogy of energy security, elucidating how it establishes a morality of efficiency that orients policy action under the guise of security toward the liberalizing of markets in resource states and a robust program of energy research and development in the United States. This evidence challenges the pervasive historical anchoring of the concept in the 1970s and illustrates the importance of the genealogical approach for the emerging literature on energy and sociotechnical imaginaries. Exploring the genealogy of energy security also unpacks key social, political, and economic undercurrents that disrupt the seeming universality of the language of energy, leading the authors to question whether energy security discourse is appropriate for guiding policy action during ongoing global energy transitions.
... Policy-led efforts to develop a renewable energy system and promote rural development through wood-based bioenergy development can be usefully analyzed through the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries, which are powerful cultural resources that support and shape societal efforts to transition to new energy futures [14,17,18,[19][20][21]. In the United States, energy imaginaries entailing energy security and energy independence have long been part of the rhetoric of politicians [22]. This language, which crosses party lines, dates back to the 1960s and 1970s [3,15,22] but intensified in the U.S. after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. ...
... In the United States, energy imaginaries entailing energy security and energy independence have long been part of the rhetoric of politicians [22]. This language, which crosses party lines, dates back to the 1960s and 1970s [3,15,22] but intensified in the U.S. after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. In 2006, George W. Bush lamented the United States' "addiction to oil," while in 2007, Barack Obama promoted freedom from the "tyranny of oil" [23]. ...
... Such complexity includes the extent to which imaginaries and related cultural models are shared [39]; their role as powerful social discourses used by ideologists to influence public opinion [34]; and how cultural models, as elements of imaginaries, appear in and influence the talk and action of everyday people [35]. Recent research on energy imaginaries has explored their complexity, reinterpretation, and contestation [20,22,50,51]. Here we seek to connect the literature on sociotechnical imaginaries to anthropological literature on cultural models as a way of increasing our understanding of the role that imaginaries may play in local places where they have spurred concrete bioenergy development. ...
Bioenergy development in the Southern United States was said to promise a future with renewable energy, energy independence, expanded wood markets, and rural development. We view this vision of wood-based bioenergy as a sociotechnical imaginary involving a future where energy and rural development needs are met using sustainably-harvested local resources. While this vision has led to bioenergy development, it has not been universally shared and counter-narratives have circulated. Local people receive multiple messages and have diverse experiences with bioenergy, which affect how they interpret the imaginary. We use cultural models to examine the extent and ways that elements of the national bioenergy imaginary occurred in everyday talk in three communities where bioenergy plants had recently been developed. We show how local people articulated, responded to, and altered the national bioenergy imaginary while simultaneously drawing on diverse experiences, values, and other important social discourses. While local people had limited opportunities to alter the national imaginary, they contested and diluted it in ways that indicated that they were not fully in support of the imaginary and the development it spurred. Ultimately, this may hinder bioenergy development.
... In this section I discuss the literature that I have drawn on in developing a description of how Durham County Council's postcoalonial vision and Whitehall's national vision for chargescapes could co-exist. Jessica Smith and Abraham Tidwell examined and contrasted the sociotechnical imaginings of North Americans in uranium and coal mining areas with national imaginaries (Tidwell & Smith 2015;Smith & Tidwell 2016). Unlike the early work of Jasanoff & Kim (2009;, they contended that such local imaginings could be distinct from national imaginaries. ...
... Unlike the early work of Jasanoff & Kim (2009;, they contended that such local imaginings could be distinct from national imaginaries. However, in their accounts, Tidwell & Smith (2015;Smith & Tidwell (2016) contend that the subnational imaginings could not transcend their locale and that coal remained 'dirty'. Thus, this was a framing that emphasised conflict. ...
What happens when the various parties involved in constructing decarbonised futures’ infrastructure diverge in their imaginaries? Much of the published research on the sociotechnical imaginaries relating to electric vehicles (EVs) describes the creation of the future of decarbonised transport as a process mired in conflict, with various interested parties represented as strenuously disagreeing in their assessment of the most efficacious solution. The aim of the article is to offer an alternative account, based upon data gathered through participant observation, interviews, and grey literature. It describes the sort of personal transportation futures currently being imagined in the United Kingdom. The focus is specifically on the installation of electric vehicle charge points. The author contrasts Whitehall’s national vision for this infrastructure with the ‘post-coalonial’ vision of officers of Durham County Council in North East England have articulated an alternative, a ‘post-coalonial’ vision, and finds that the vision of both the British civil service and Government of the United Kingdom focused on private ownership and commuting, while Durham County Council envisioned publicly accessible charge points that enabled various types of different journeys. Despite the striking differences the conclusion is that contrary to the findings of previous studies the existence of these divergent infrastructural imaginaries led not to conflict but to co-existence.
... Among the multitude of explanations, scholars have noted the importance of the socio-material reality of the existing infrastructure system and importance of national/international interests (Mutter 2019), actors' access to power and resources (Delina 2018), previous experiences with a given energy source (Schelhas et al. 2018), the importance of collective action frames in making sense of the national imaginaries (Eaton et al. 2014), and the extent to which national narratives co-evolve with the available energy resources (Kuchler and Bridge 2018). Research has also explored the dynamic of sociotechnical imaginaries at different levels of the policy debate by zooming in on, for example, the second-generation bioenergy technology in the global debate (Kuchler 2014), governmentality of shale gas in Europe (Kuchler 2017), or how the mainstream sociotechnical imaginaries of energy can be interpreted differently and contested locally in diverse contexts such as the US (Eaton et al. 2014;Tidwell and Smith 2015) and the Global South (Cloke et al. 2017). Several studies have also investigated in greater detail how sociotechnical imaginaries might embrace or drive innovation in the energy sector. ...
... First, while the innovation dimension is frequently highlighted in research on sociotechnical imaginaries of energy, it is rarely analysed through the prism of the national identity markers that are paramount to understanding what has been accepted as the major security challenge to be managed through innovation. Second, despite certain exceptions, such as the study by Tidwell and Smith (2015), who argued that the very concept of energy security should be understood as a sociotechnical imaginary, the research on sociotechnical imaginaries of energy frequently features the security dimension by default; usually as part of the broadly conceived energy security that can be improved by realising specific energy futures. In contrast, this paper argues that sociotechnical imaginaries must be understood as highly contextual and heavily shaped by a sense of national identity and the security of the Self. ...
Energy security is among the top security concerns of the 21st century requiring technological answers. However, the technological innovations adopted often not only serve to ensure adequate energy access and stable flow of energy, but also foster specific visions of socio-economic and techno-political orders and security. This paper tweaks the analytical lens of sociotechnical imaginaries, in which desired futures are connected to social and technical elements in concrete cases by adding a focus on identity formation and ontological security to the analytical model. Zooming in on the Baltic Sea Region, the paper traces sociotechnical imaginaries tied to the desired future of energy sovereignty through coal and nuclear energy in Poland and the bright future of energy independence through a liquified natural gas terminal in Lithuania. Nationally embedded understandings of how (in)security can be managed through technological innovation and how the desired national energy visions can be attained in the process highlight the importance of ontological security concerns. In tracing those themes, the paper combines a historical view with developments since the mid-2010s in Polish and Lithuanian energy discourse and analyzes the mainstream energy security imaginaries as envisioned by political elites. The study draws on speeches of key political figures, official documents concerning energy planning as well as semi-structured interviews. The analysis highlights how the study of energy innovation in the Baltic Sea Region can contribute to the conversation between critical security studies and science and technology studies.
... The Story of Yew and H is for Hawk are good examples where there is ontology of the posthuman and non-human animal without moving towards children's ideals of anthropomorphised animals [55][56][57]. The writer's perspectivist eye can shine light on the ethics of ecology and energy conservation and how it engages publics that might evade policy experts [22,58]. ...
... With regards to energy policy, this approach helps to define the "who are we?" question in political assemblies of things -paraphrasing Latour -before asserting a sociotechnical imaginary for governance of energy as part of a "collective vision for a good society'' but not, however, "realised through technoscientific-oriented policies" (p687) [27,58]. On a larger, transdisciplinary level, OOO creates a more fertile ground for the arts and humanities to flourish in energy research. ...
This paper takes up the challenge set down by the review work of Hess and Sovacool (2020) and Sovacool et al. (2020) and joins the conversation about future research agendas where STS is aligned towards humanities and social science research of energy solutions. We identified two under-representations in these review papers: 1) New materialism and object-oriented ontological (OOO) approaches and 2) how fictive imaginaries develop the link between OOO and public engagement with energy challenges. We propose that ontology of objects and non-human worlds is central to cocreation work in energy research where there exist assemblages of the Anthropocene. We argue that an ethical, engaged, object-oriented ontology that links with fictive imaginaries is crucial whichever direction STS takes in energy research.
... Imaginaries are collectively shared, but they are not homogenous; they can be contested [8,25,31,32] and they can contradict each other [26]. Although often analysed in reference to powerful actors visible in the public sphere, influencing the media content or strategic policy documents, we know they can emerge from below the "seats of power" [6, p. 185]. ...
... While the first macro-agenda has dominated since the 1980 s, sustainability transitions may require a shift towards the second agenda" [3, p. 499]. Many other studies have provided evidence on the existing "dominant" discourse connected to established institutions and competing counter-discourses providing alternative visions [32,[42][43][44][45][46][47][48]. Discourse theorists also illustrate how discourses struggle for hegemony in the public sphere [19,[49][50][51][52]; however, the distinction line between them can be drawn differently. ...
The discourse on energy transition is probably one of the most visible of all the public policy discourses in the contemporary world. How the world’s energy future is imagined is a significant factor for both implementation of this idea and understanding why the process is slower than one might expect. A promising heuristic for understanding the patterns of collective “future-making” is offered by the idea of sociotechnical imaginaries. This paper draws on the multi-level perspective to offer an in-depth analysis of the sociotechnical imaginaries reflected in pop culture, in particular in selected digital games. The authors analyse serious digital games, considering how the imaginaries of energy reflected in them can shift the energy transition.
... There is also a management aspect, according to which technology is a purposeful application of technical knowledge to solve practical problems in various spheres of social production and any other sphere of society. Over the past decades, authors often turn to ethical issues when considering the implications of technology; some problems of morality and responsibility in various fields of application of technology [6]. ...
... The conclusions of these authors are due to the fact that they view sociality as an external condition for technology. Ethical evaluation of technical sciences and technology, criticism of its consequences from the point of view of humanism [12], moral responsibility [6] and security [17] is also based on this position. ...
In our opinion, the stages of production development: craft, manufacture, machine production are the historical phases of technology formation and the corresponding division of labor. Social interaction and organization of relations between people in society depend on these factors. The stages of genesis of knowledge and cognition from the pre-scientific level to science, from spontaneous empirical to the conscious theoretical knowledge and its practical application also correspond to the stages of production development. This study reveals the technology as a universal principle of human activity unites production and science, practice and theory. Technology connects with each other not only the goal, means and result of activity into single process, but also unites people in certain social groups, communities, collectives. And because of that, the achieved result is an implemented goal. If a person itself, personality and society become a goal of technological progress, then technology serves social self-development
... Methodologically, the paper employs interpretive discourse analysis of governmental policy documents from these societies to understand how they construct and legitimize sociotechnical imaginaries (Sadowski & Bendor, 2019;Tidwell & Smith, 2015). Two main types of documents-AI strategies and tech-related policies, such as smart city blueprints and digital welfare plans-are analyzed to explore institutional framing of AI innovation, regulation, and claims about policy implementation, industry orientation and socio-political conditions (Curran & Smart, 2021). ...
The proliferation of generative artificial intelligence (AI) has prompted the development of comprehensive AI developmental and governance frameworks globally. Yet, existing literature on AI innovation in non-Western societies often overlooks economically advanced but geographically non-dominant societies, instead focusing on large nation-states like China or developing regions in Global South such as South Africa. This paper examines the variegated sociotechnical imaginaries of AI in three Asian developmental societies - Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan - addressing two research questions: what are the desired forms of AI development and governance in small-size advanced economies? How does this desired form vary according to the historical, institutional, and geopolitical contexts of these societies? Through discourse analysis of policy documents from the early 2010s to 2024, the paper identifies three imaginaries of techno-developmentalism: Singapore’s cybernetic pragmaticism to legitimize its neoliberal authoritarian rule, Hong Kong’s techno-entrepreneurship in refashioning financial capitalism, and Taiwan’s defensive survival modality against internal socio-economic instability and external threats posed by the rivalry of superpowers. Decision-makers in these societies must establish AI developmental frameworks capable of resource allocation, actor coordination, strategic coupling with the global tech economy, and managing uncertainties in specific AI-centric socio-economic reform. By offering comparative case studies of these Asian societies, this paper contributes to understanding the heterogeneous narratives and practices of AI innovation, moving beyond simplistic narratives trapped in the Global North and South binary.
... Energy security immediately calls to mind the nation-state and its ability to obtain and provide reliable, affordable fuel at a broad level (Hughes, 2009;Tidwell and Smith, 2015); this includes, of course, energy infrastructure. And, to be clear: natural gas is the most affordable fuel source for Philadelphia's energy insecure households. ...
This article analyzes public discussions and engagements with Philadelphia’s energy system to highlight the degrees of tension between diverse ethical frames and energy-based strategies of value production. Looking at three different instances and genres of energy-transition planning and expression, we argue that any such tensions or alignments turn on the specific units, categories, and scales of analysis used to construct and understand them. Our first section investigates the spatial and temporal frames of “energy security” embedded in Philadelphia’s infrastructure improvement plan, showing how the meaning and political purchase of the concept of “security” changes across quotidian and infrastructural timescales and across the spatial scale of the household, city, state, and the nation. Section two considers the categories with which the City framed its study of potential decarbonization scenarios, pointing towards the way this schema produced its own seemingly intractable ethical and economic impasses. The third and final section looks at the way diverse members of the public successfully de- and re-constructed the study’s categories, scales, and units of analysis, successfully undermining the study’s “grid of intelligibility” and replacing it with their own more equity-centered alternative. Across these three ethnographic engagements, this article brings the anthropologies of ethics and value together in a novel way, showing their mediated entanglement with and within the sphere of public knowledge production. This, we argue, illustrates the seemingly mundane scalar choices that deeply inform our ethical frames and that, in the end, ultimately allow us to make energy valuable.
... For example, Jasanoff and Kim (2009) argue that nuclear power in the US and South Korea was an integral part of the scientific imaginaries of nationhood in both of these countries. Others, such as Tidwell and Smith (2015), suggest that energy security policy in the US may best be understood as a socio-technical imaginary through its discourse on producing a broad national vision of a society that is expressed through morals, materials, and techno-scientific claims. Berling et al. (2022) similarly contend that the imaginaries are pivotal for energy security in Ukraine and Norway as they form necessary societal narratives. ...
The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor is a featured project of China's Belt and Road Initiative that is creating new resource frontiers in Tharparkar, Pakistan. Centered around coal mining and energy production, these new sites of resource extraction and their infrastructures have sparked dissensus throughout the Desert district of Sindh, Pakistan. Our analysis draws on research on socio-technical imaginaries and Ranci ere's thoughts on political change and aesthetics. In doing so, we examine how political dissensus is represented though graffiti and works in contrast to the socio-technical imaginaries represented by the state in public signage. The differences, we suggest , represent socio-technical counter imaginaries that form a politics that disrupts the established socio-political order embedded within the political goals of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. These counter imaginaries have important implications for the creation of just and equitable opportunities for people impacted by the emerging coal extraction and power generation complex. Our ethnographic approach provides a street-level analysis of the politicization of imagined socio-technical futures in the Tharparkar desert and emerging energy resource frontiers.
... The use of these notions allows us to include in the analysis a variety of factors that are framed by respondents, documents as incalculablemanufactured uncertaintiesor calculablerisks. In doing so, we follow Tidwell and Smith [60], who postulate to consider energy concepts as co-products of socio-political reality. Both authors postulate to consider the notion of co-production by showing how energy security differs in different socio-political contexts. ...
Contemporary societies, aware of the consequences of their actions, urgently need mechanisms to deal with uncertainties. Understanding the diversity of these mechanisms remains critical to answering the question of whether a global energy transition is possible. Our paper responds to the call for a diversification of perspectives on energy transitions and contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the role of uncertainty and risk in public deliberation. In this paper, we use the model of Reflexive Public Reason to explore the mechanisms behind the governance of uncertainties related to the energy future in the People's Republic of China. As a key country in the global response to climate change, China offers a unique model for managing large-scale systemic socio-technical transitions. We show that the model of Reflexive Public Reason, which involves reflection on socio-technical imaginaries (STIs) and civic epistemologies, is helpful in understanding how particular energy futures are imagined and selected. We also show the role that uncertainties and risks play in this process. As a result, we demonstrate the usefulness of flexible experimentation in describing China's energy transition-which may be useful in observing how the Chinese state manages uncertainty by controlling it within a limited experimental space.
... Our understanding of risk and uncertainty is embedded in the resilience perspective, which focuses primarily on unpredictable social, economic and technological variables [51]. We also follow the open-ended perspective, which Szulecki describes as an inductive approach to conceptualising energy security [54], and the co-productionist perspective of [55]. In doing so, we include in the analysis all detected factors that are framed as manufactured uncertainties or risks. ...
Energy transitions around the world are characterised by the general assumption that new technologies for decarbonisation, digitalisation and electrification will provide a solution to slow down climate change. However, Ulrich Beck's work on the risk society and reflexive modernisation theory suggest that the previously assumed linear development model based on techno-scientific achievements is influencing the increasing levels of uncertainty and risk. Taiwan, the leading producer of semiconductors, plays a crucial role in the energy transition. Its complicated geopolitical situation has placed it at the centre of international political disputes. In addition to natural hazards related to Taiwan's geology, social, economic and technological challenges, there are political tensions that make any transition path highly uncertain. As a result, decisions are made in a contingent and highly uncertain environment. This paper aims to propose a new way of understanding energy transition paths through the proposed model of reflexive public reason. We contribute to the understanding of how reasoning for choosing particular futures evolves along with uncertainties and risks, ultimately leading to the emergence of new manufactured uncertainties. We describe the mechanisms behind public reason for the energy transition in Taiwan based on three types of sources: legal documents and policies on energy transition issued between 2005 and 2020 in the Republic of China (Taiwan), 150 press articles, and eight in-depth semi-structured interviews with SSH and STEM researchers working at universities in Taiwan.
... In socio-technical transitions, the struggle between different opinions or beliefs can be understood as a struggle between storylines (Rosenbloom et al., 2016;Rosenbloom, 2018) or imaginaries (Jasanoff and Kim, 2009;Tidwell and Smith, 2015). A storyline is a component of a discourse; it is defined as "a condensed statement summarizing complex narratives, used by people as 'short hand' in discussions" (Hajer, 2006: 69). ...
Volume 16 | Issue 1 Takman, M.; Cimbritz, M.; Davidsson, Å and Fünfschilling, L. 2023. Storylines and imaginaries of wastewater reuse and desalination: The rise of local discourses on the Swedish Islands of Öland and Gotland. Water Alternatives 16(1): 207-243 Takman et al.: Discourses on wastewater reuse and desalination in Sweden 207 ABSTRACT: Increased pressure on existing freshwater resources has given rise to interest in new raw water sources. Wastewater reuse and desalination are two alternatives that are frequently compared and discussed in the literature. In this study, local discourses in the form of storylines and imaginaries were identified on the Swedish islands of Öland and Gotland. These local storylines and imaginaries were then compared to those found in the literature on wastewater reuse and desalination; in the process, overlaps and variations were identified. On Gotland, a controversy over desalination was observed where arguments were raised for and against 'natural' (nature-based and therefore 'good') solutions and 'unnatural' or engineered solutions (desalination). Such a controversy was not observed on Öland. The controversy on Gotland arose out of competing imaginaries of the future. Such discourses can affect the transitions of water systems. Understanding local discourses may thus be crucial to our understanding of the larger transitions underway in the water sector and may figure importantly in the acceptance of new water sources.
... As explained by Pasqualetti and Stremke, the tendency to reify energy as a distinct commodity disassociates it from the material and social conditions of production, erasing "energy landscapes" that encompass "marks, structures, excavations, creations, and supplements that energy developments produce" [19]. According to Tidwell and Smith, however, the logic of security organizing many energy landscapes across nation-states, natural resources, energy technoscience, and markets is antithetical to participatory governance [20]. ...
Energy Democracies for Sustainable Futures explores how our dominant carbon and nuclear energy assemblages shape conceptions of participation, risk, and in/securities, and how they might be reengineered to deliver justice and democratic participation in transitioning energy systems.
... Theories of sociotechnical imaginaries were developed precisely to explain how and why new forms of public imagination emerged around energy technologies [42], how and why they were linked in people's minds to projects of national advancement [4,40], and how they became embedded in the intertwined reconstruction of social, economic, and technological constitutions that occurred as new energy systems were built in the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries [43]. 2 Explorations of sociotechnical imaginaries emphasize the significance of deep-seated forms of social imagination within groups or cultures that tie ideas about technological progress to shared understandings of what it means to live a good life [2]. Sociotechnical imaginaries have been demonstrated to shape the values that different cultures attach to different technologies, leading to divergent patterns of technology innovation. ...
A central challenge for energy policy is to simultaneously accelerate the transition to carbon neutrality to tackle climate change while also addressing diverse forms of energy inequality and injustice. In this article, we argue that the public imagination is central to efforts to successfully confront this dual challenge. Specifically, we argue that theories of sociotechnical imaginaries have the potential to be leveraged both to strengthen public support for and engagement in carbon-neutral energy transitions and to identify and catalyze integrated sociotechnical designs and solutions that deliver on both accelerated technological change and just, equitable, and inclusive transitions. To explore these ideas, we present an in-depth case study of an emergent sociotechnical imaginary surrounding solar energy technologies in Puerto Rico. The results of our case study suggest that new imaginaries have the potential both to create powerful public support for renewable energy technologies that can accelerate energy systems change and, at the same time, help illuminate strategies for deploying energy technologies in ways that create meaningful impact and value in people’s lives in diverse communities and thus contribute to making energy transitions more just and inclusive.
... Es así como Delina (2018), Simmet (2018), Tozer y Kleenk, (2018) Longhurst y Chilvers (2019) estudian la construcción y avance de un imaginario sociotécnico transnacional que pretende guiar a las naciones desarrolladas y en vías de desarrollo a la materialización del trilema energético. Otros estudios se han centrado en la comparación de imaginarios sociotécnicos sobre el desarrollo de proyectos y políticas energéticas nacionales (Skjølsvold, 2014;Engels y Münch, 2015;Korsnes,2016;Pereira, Carvalho y Fonseca, 2016;Kuchler y Bridge, 2018;Karhunmaa, 2019) etc. Continuando en la escala nacional Miller, O'Leary, Graffy, Stechel y Dirks, (2015), Tidwell y Smith (2015) profundizan en las dificultades, objetivos, normas y valores sociales de las políticas energéticas contenidas en los imaginarios sociotécnicos. El descenso de los imaginarios nacionales a las escalas regionales y locales, suele provocar conflictos o controversias, debido a los disensos con los imaginarios sociotécnicos presentes y su visión sobre el futuro de los territorios (Eaton, Gasteyer y Busch, 2013;Kuchler, 2014;Smith y Tidwell, 2016;Schelhas, Hitchner y Brosius, 2018; Trenchera y Heijdenb, 2019; Mutter, 2019) en otros. ...
El artículo es de la redacción de dos investigadores del Centro de Estudios en Agroecología, Educación y Sociedad (NEAES)del Instituto Federal de Educación, Ciencia y Tecnología de São Paulo, Unidad Campinas, São Paulo (Brasil) Erika Batista y Herivelto Fernandes Rocha. La revolución verde en Brasil, que convirtió al país en uno de los mayores exportadores de productos agrícolas, generó un proceso de mercantilización de la naturaleza, con efectos nocivos para la sociedad. Simultáneamente, se observa la búsqueda de modelos alternativos por parte de comunidades tradicionales, indígenas, ribereñas y campesinas. Estos modelos alternativos, utilizando tecnologías sociales, han generado nuevos circuitos productivos y comerciales en una estrategia sociotécnica de contrahegemonía.
... In addition, a significant focus on historical events and narratives is present in the work by Abraham Tidwell and Jessica Smith. The authors reviewed energy security as an American sociotechnical imaginary and stressed the importance of the genealogical approach (Tidwell and Smith 2015). What is more, there are some works by Nathan Kapoor on imaginaries of electricity in Victorian Brittan or by Jennifer L. Liberman and Roland R. Kline on electrical utopian novelists and their imaginaries of energy future (Kapoor 2019;Jennifer and Kline 2017a). ...
While the need and general direction of the energy transition are widely accepted, the implementation has different dynamics throughout the world. Sociotechnical imaginaries concept, bridging the science, policy, and society, seems promising in understanding and explaining the global differences. The present paper analyses 135 abstracts that contain the topic keywords, sociotechnical imaginaries, published in international, peer-reviewed scientific journals during the last 11 years. Further on, the author conducted a qualitative and quantitative analysis of 43 energy-related articles to offer a panoramic overview of sociotechnical imaginaries in energy research out of the more extensive background. The paper aims to present a critical overview of the concept usage in energy studies to identify incoherences and blind spots in concept usage. What is more, this research intents to show the promising direction of using sociotechnical imaginaries. It also proposes new operationalisation and theoretical frame as well as potentially contributes to policymaking.
... b) this messiness and variation can be grasped more effectively by studying 'multivalent' stories in local places [29], though studies of national energy imaginaries may highlight what visions of the public (s) are being employed and acted upon by policy-makers, technical experts and researchers (c.f. Cherry et al. on 'imagined publics') [30]; c) temporality needs to be addressed, for example in connecting multiple, competing or complementary energy imaginaries at different scales to developing energy innovation pathways [20] and in considerations of what 'ought to be' [31]; d) supranational and sub-national phenomena are both promising sites for inquiry; and e) there is insufficient attention to what makes certain configurations of society and energy technology unimagined or unimaginable [32]. ...
The paper highlights shortcomings in the contribution of qualitative social sciences and humanities (SSH) research to tackling challenges connected with energy and climate change. These shortcomings are illustrated based on analysis of data gathered in relation to EU (e.g. Horizon 2020; FP7) and European national research funding and energy policy. The paper finds that a techno-economic energy imaginary continues to dominate European energy systems and governs expectations of energy research and its conduct, the integration of SSH with energy policy-making and the framing and foci of policy. A more nuanced, context-sensitive approach is presented as an alternative ‘practices and cultural change’ energy imaginary. This emphasises attention to social practices relevant to energy use, interdisciplinarity and the coproduction of knowledge with diverse actors. Adoption of such an imaginary can help to enhance policy integration of SSH and the contribution of SSH to ameliorating energy and climate change challenges while providing insight into why gaps occur between (supra)national energy policy and local practices.
... Jasanoff and Kim [27] note that sociotechnical imaginaries play an important role in defining national energy policies and several scholars have followed this lead. Tidwell and Smith [28], for example, describe the energy security imaginary in the USA by tracing the genealogy of energy policies in that country. Eaton et al. [29] analyze how the US national imaginaries of bioenergy development are interpreted differently by local and nonlocal actors, while observing that competition exists between different imaginaries at a given time. ...
Grounded in a social scientific research approach, the present case study traces the shift in the German nuclear regulatory culture from prevention to preparedness, the latter of which builds upon decision support systems for nuclear emergency management. These systems integrate atmospheric dispersion models for tracing radioactive materials released accidentally from nuclear facilities. For atmospheric dispersion modelers and emergency managers, this article provides a critical historical perspective on the practical, epistemic, and organizational issues surrounding the use of decision support systems for nuclear emergency management. This perspective suggests that atmospheric dispersion models are embedded within an entire assemblage of institutions, technologies, and practices of preparedness, which are challenged by the uniqueness of each nuclear accident.
... One approach to imaginaries has been to develop comparative analyses of national imaginaries associated with official government policies related to science and technology such as nuclear energy development [75,78]. Research on national imaginaries tends to examine them historically, and Foucauldian approaches have appeared [79]. This approach to imaginaries can also show how they contribute to the stabilization of an existing sociotechnical regime. ...
Theoretical frameworks associated with science and technology studies (STS) are becoming increasingly prominent in social science energy research, but what do they offer? This review provides a brief history of relevant STS concepts and frameworks and a structured analysis of how STS perspectives are appearing in energy social science research and how energy-related research is appearing in social science STS. Drawing from an initial body of 262 journal articles and books with a stratified sample of 68 published from 2009 to mid-2019, the review identifies four major groups of perspectives: (1) STS-related cultural analysis, especially the study of sociotechnical imaginaries; (2) STS-related policy analysis, such as research on the social construction of risks and standards and on the performativity of economic models; (3) STS perspectives on public participation processes, expert-public relations, and mobilized publics; and (4) the study of sociotechnical systems, including large technological systems, the politics of design, and users and actor-networks. Connections among the perspectives and the value for energy social science research are also critically discussed.
... The concept of sociotechnical imaginaries has been repeatedly applied to the study of energy systems, or some of its features (Jasanoff and Kim 2009, 2015Tidwell and Smith 2015). According to Jasanoff and Kim (2013: 189 f.), analyzing sociotechnical imaginaries helps to explain the "hidden social dimensions of energy systems." ...
This contribution explores the political dimension of TechnoScienceSocieties. We assume that technoscientific knowledge production as well as the governance of technoscience is guided by historically contingent rationales. Such rationales have been conceptualized as „sociotechnical imaginaries“ by STS scholars. However, these imaginaries often remain vague and implicit and it is unclear how they are entangled with mundane STI policies. Against this background, our hypothesis is that one way for sociotechnical imaginaries to become politically explicit is the popular reference to “grand challenges.” To illustrate this, we trace the trajectories of two technoscientific discourses, both of which evolve around specific global problems: energy security and climate engineering. By means of historical discourse analysis, we follow their origin and transformations, as well as their proposed response measures through history and through various social and cultural contexts. The case studies illustrate how historical actors translate (implicit) visions encoded in sociotechnical imaginaries into (explicit) problems framed as “grand challenges.” The contribution concludes by reflecting on how an analysis of “grand challenges” can contribute to a refinement of the sociotechnical imaginaries framework.
... In this essay we argue that the picture of knowledge that emerged during the Obama administration prescribed certain knowledge ways, and we show by what institutional mechanisms, agencies, and actors these were implemented in the government of the United States of America. Science studies has tended to view national epistemic cultures as resilient and has richly described them in case studies of how risks are managed and futures imagined (Ballo 2015;Bouzarovski and Bassin 2011;Felt 2014;Fonseca and Pereira 2014;Jasanoff and Kim 2009;Jasanoff and Kim 2015;Kim 2014;Levenda et al. 2019;Tidwell and Smith 2015). These studies reveal the American civic epistemology to be "contentious" (Jasanoff 2007: chapter 10) when compared to its counterpart in France, UK, Germany, or the European Union. ...
The agencies of the government of the United States of America, such as the Food and Drug Administration or the Environmental Protection Agency, intervene in American society through the collection, processing, and diffusion of information. The Presidency of Barack Obama was notable for updating and redesigning the US government’s information infrastructure. The White House enhanced mass consultation through open government and big data initiatives to evaluate policy effectiveness, and it launched new ways of communicating with the citizenry. In this essay we argue that these programs spelled out an emergent epistemology based on two assumptions: dispersed knowledge and a critique of judgment. These programs have redefined the evidence required to justify and design regulatory policy and conferred authority to a new kind of expert, which we call epistemic consultants.
... A broad justification for dealing with relationships between disciplines in a plural way comes from the observation of widespread phenomena related to energy issues. We often note that the latter are framed according to geopolitical schemes; they are a vital resource for winning wars and assuring the economic development of countries (Tidwell and Smith 2015). The role of energy sources for national security is indeed essential; thus, their exploitation has to be put as a dependent factor of other, more powerful processes. ...
This Crossing Boundary hosts contributions accounting for ex-periences and theoretical perspectives which may look distant for how they address the socio-technical transition in the energy field but, we believe, when put in conversation, help common questions and tentative answers come to the fore. Giorgio Osti, Paul Upham, Paula Maria Bögel and Paula Castro have been engaged in reflecting on their respective disciplines in rela-tion to socio-technical transitions. Recalling and valorising the STS basis of MLP and SPT in connection with other disciplinary approaches may contrib-ute to enrich on one side STS debates and on the other empirical research on socio-technical transition in a historical juncture where such an endeav-our looks definitely urgent.
... The concept of sociotechnical imaginaries has been repeatedly applied to the study of energy systems, or some of its features (Jasanoff and Kim 2009, 2015Tidwell and Smith 2015). According to Jasanoff and Kim (2013: 189 f.), analyzing sociotechnical imaginaries helps to explain the "hidden social dimensions of energy systems." ...
This contribution explores the political dimension of TechnoScienceSocieties. We assume that technoscientific knowledge production as well as the governance of technoscience is guided by historically contingent, implicit and explicit rationales. Such rationales have been conceptualized as "sociotechnical imaginaries" by STS scholars. However, these imaginaries often remain vague and implicit and it is unclear how they are entangled with mundane STI policies. Against this background, our hypothesis is that one way for sociotechnical imaginaries to become politically explicit is the popular reference to "grand challenges." To illustrate this, we trace the trajectories of two technoscientific discourses, both of which evolve around specific global problems: energy security and climate engineering. By means of historical discourse analysis, we follow their origin and transformations, as well as their proposed response measures through history and through various social and cultural contexts. The case studies illustrate how historical actors translate (implicit) visions encoded in sociotechnical imaginaries into (explicit) problems framed as "grand challenges." The contribution concludes by reflecting on how an analysis of "grand challenges" can contribute to a refinement of the sociotechnical imaginaries framework.
... We conducted a long-term ethnographic study of a participatory initiative, Energy Avant-garde, which sought to develop a decentralized renewable energy system in a region in Germany. Tidwell and Smith (2015) and Moore (2013Moore ( , 2018 examined the effects of imaginaries in fields such as energy policy. Moore explores the complexity of locally and globally connected energy systems (the DESERTEC project, founded in 2009, Desertec Foundation) as sociotechnical fields that combine technical aspects with issues of justice, activism, norms and values, regulation and political frameworks. ...
Participation is an important but little understood concept in science and innovation. While participation promises the production of new knowledge, social justice, and economic growth, little research has been done on its contribution to innovation processes at the group level. The concept of imaginaries can provide a window into these processes. Adopting a micro-sociological perspective, we examined the interplay between imaginaries of participation and group development within a long-term ethnographic observation study of an initiative, Energy Avant-garde, as it pursued the development of a decentralized, self-contained, and entirely renewable energy system in one German region. We scaled down the macrolevel concept of imaginaries to the group level. We found that group imaginaries are a resource for bringing order to a group and that a group is a resource for creating, operationalizing, revising, and sustaining imaginaries. We describe a “failure-through-success” story: while imaginaries initially promoted group cohesion, creativity, and productivity, in later stages, these effects were impeded by group dynamics. We therefore distinguish between process imaginaries and outcome imaginaries and conclude that, inherently, participation must be managed and employed at the appropriate stages to make valuable contributions.
... In trying to define "energy dominance, " the Zinke speech covers a lot of complicated territory, chaotically jumping from domestic to international policy, making unexplained and unsupported claims about jobs and energy markets, and offering contradictory visions of regulation. It attempts to mark how energy dominance differs from "energy security" (or its close cousin, "energy independence")-the reigning energy discourse of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (Tidwell and Smith, 2015). It not only carves out a significant and increasing role for the DOI in setting national energy policy but also makes claims about foreign policy more suited to the State Department than Interior: Zinke argues that America is both one of the greatest nations on earth and the most under siege by foreign players who have attempted to manipulate the United States, such as through the Iran nuclear deal. ...
The Trump Administration has adopted “energy dominance” as its guiding ideology for energy policy, marking a notable shift from decades of “energy security” rhetoric. This paper analyzes how Secretary of Interior Ryan Zinke, one of the administration’s key spokespeople for energy dominance, uses “energy covenant renewal” to frame the importance of energy dominance for the conservative base. Covenant renewal is a modified form of the jeremiad; Zinke uses it to unite conservative identities around energy politics and policies. Energy dominance thus invites those who feel aggrieved under Obama administration regulatory policy and the multicultural identity politics of the left to renew their commitment to fossil fuels, American exceptionalism, and a restored social order and privilege.
... As STS scholars argue, technoscientific projects both explicitly and implicitly embody the moral and political choices of their promoters. The sociotechnical imaginaries concept has built on this tradition by highlighting the visions for "good and attainable" futures that accompany technology development agendas, and how they help legitimize the material, social, and environmental costs of their development and accompanying policy frameworks (Jasanoff and Kim, 2015;Pesch, 2015;Tidwell and Smith, 2015). This literature initially focused on the dominant imaginaries of powerful actors that resonate at national levels (Jasanoff and Kim, 2009). ...
As part of a transition to lower carbon energy systems, bioenergy development is often assumed to follow a uniform pathway. Yet the design, organization, and politics of bioenergy production in specific regional contexts may be contested. This study examines contestation within an emerging perennial crop bioenergy sector in the U.S. Northeast. Synthesizing conceptual contributions from the multi-level perspective on the significance of niches and sub-niches in sustainability transitions and from science and technology studies on the material and moral implications of sociotechnical imaginaries and object conflicts, this paper analyzes the politics of bioenergy sub-niche imaginaries. It identifies two main bioenergy sub-niches centered on (1) regional production and (2) community energy. Examining proposed and current production of perennial energy crops on marginal land, the study draws on 42 semi-structured interviews with bioenergy actors (e.g., scientists, industry representatives, policymakers, farmers/landowners) and secondary documents. The two bioenergy sub-niche imaginaries revealed political contestations around scale of operations, control and beneficiaries, and about definitions and uses of marginal land relative to livelihoods and community. This study highlights the potency of rival imaginaries within a developing sociotechnical niche and implications for sustainability transitions. Tracing the contours and emphases of, as well as conflicts between, bioenergy sub-niche imaginaries can clarify which pathways for transition to a lower carbon energy future could garner political and public support. The paper concludes by considering how disagreements between sub-niche actors could lead to productive mutual learning and the possibility of forging solutions contributing to more robust and equitable sustainability transitions.
... The concept of "sociotechnical imaginaries," for instance, stresses the importance of "collectively imagined forms of social life and social order reflected in the design and ful- fillment of nation-specific scientific and/or technological projects" (Jasanoff and Kim 2009, 120), and has been fruitfully applied to several nation-specific "energy systems" (Jasanoff and Kim 2009;Jasanoff and Kim 2013;Tidwell and Smith 2015). Another, equally important, reference is Bruno Latour's Actor-Network-Theory (ANT), which figures prominently in Timothy Mitchell's "Carbon Democracy," where Mitchell explores the simultaneous rise of fuels and democratic institutions (Mitchell 2009(Mitchell , 2011. ...
Recent contributions to a sociological analysis of energy and society focus mostly on its political, economic and technological organization. Yet contrary to other parts of nature, little social scientific attention has been paid to how politics, economics and technology have come to produce and stabilize the concept of energy in the first place and how different natural materials were transformed into “sources of energy.” Drawing from insights of the sociology of comparison, quantification and commensuration, “energy” in this paper is conceived as a “statistical object,” around which a public discourse develops in which comparisons between resources are drawn. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, this discourse has been more and more stabilized by the regular, public production and ever tighter net of elements of comparison, the creation of a highly abstract, potentially quantified point of comparison, and the definition of various criteria tying the compared entities together with more general models and narratives. This theoretical framework is put into practice by an explorative analysis of coal classification in the first quarter of the twentieth century. In this empirical analysis, three fields are identified where coals were “made the same”: engineering, economics and resource statistics. It is shown that the “calorific value” plays an important role for classification in all three fields and, furthermore, constitutes a measure that links coal to other fuels.
This article analyses the transformation of information security induced by the Jericho Forum, a group of security professionals who argued for a new ‘de-perimeterised’ security model. Having focused on defensive perimeters around networks, early 2000s information security faced a growing set of pressures: the maintainability of firewalls given increasing traffic volume and variety, the vulnerability of interior network domains, and the need to cope with and enable new working arrangements and ways of doing business. De-perimeterisation was a radical rethinking of the nature of security and created the conditions for the rise of ‘Zero Trust’ architectures. This shift has radical implications for the architectures of digital infrastructures that undergird many aspects of contemporary life, the risks to which people and societies are exposed, and the nature of work and business in a digital economy. We develop a semiotic analysis of the Jericho Forum’s interventions. Using insights from material semiotics, security theory and the theory of narrativity, we argue that de-perimeterisation can be understood as a shift in security logic, or, a shift in how security can (be made to) make sense. We examine a cluster of images used by the Jericho Forum, and analyse how they challenged the coherence of perimeter-based thinking and provided the materials for constructing a new model. We argue that a focus on the narrative dimension of security provides a window into fundamental semantic transformations, reciprocal historical relations between semantics and technical change, the agencement of security technologies, and determinations of value (what is worth securing).
In this article, we study the coproduction of anticipatory knowledge and its political sensemaking during a set of participatory scenarios-building exercises. Based on interviews with organizers and participants, and analysis of reports produced by an energy scenarios platform in Argentina (the Plataforma Escenarios Energéticos), our investigation shows that the scenarios produced, as well as the calculations and models on which they are based, build anticipatory knowledge that denies contingency and translates the vision of the future of the energy sector of each scenarist into a straight and well-drawn path. Bringing these scenarios together in a single exercise that legitimizes and builds consensus through the participatory process and the use of technical expertise is a way of locking in the future – that is, a way of ensuring that the future can be known and controlled, setting aside other possible futures. In this sense, the objective of the scenario-building exercise is to simplify the complex process of transforming the energy matrix into predictable trajectories, thus convincing investors and the public administration.
European countries are facing a dual challenge in 2022 with regard to how to reimagine energy security after cutting ties to Russian energy, but without undermining the imperative for a continent-wide energy transition. In this article, a sociotechnical imaginaries framework is utilised to capture the broader sociotechnical dynamics beyond the typical connotation of energy security through supply-side economics. This is implemented by situating discursive struggles over the framing of the global energy transition and energy dependence on Russia vis-à-vis predominant visions of energy security in Finland. By utilising argumentative discourse analysis based on interview and documentary data focusing on debates in Finland during 2015–2019, the article uncovers predominant sociotechnical imaginaries connected to energy security and discursive struggles over potentially reframing them. The identified tensions focused on 1) how future energy security should be governed, 2) whether Russia is a threat or reliable trading partner and supplier of energy, and 3) how to approach the energy transition in relation to energy security. While the focus is on controversies, the analysis also identifies increasing coherence in attaining both security and sustainability goals. There are attempts to imagine energy futures in a more sociotechnical fashion that would capture the societal dynamics more broadly. The predominant ways of imagining societal development coproduced with energy technologies tend to be constrained by techno-economic rationality. Up to the early months of 2022, this typically undermined societal and political risks in favour of interdependence and market-driven liberalism, also widely shared across the European Union.
En 2014 Argentina firmó con China un convenio para construir nuevos reactores nucleares en el país. En ese marco, se planificó la construcción de un reactor CANDU en manos de una empresa local. Esa elección generó consenso entre los expertos argentinos en material nuclear debido a la experiencia local en el manejo de esa tecnología y de su combustible. Ahora bien, tras la crisis económica y financiera de 2018, esa opción se dejó de lado y se decidió adquirir, llave en mano, un reactor de distinta tecnología. Los expertos cuestionaron esa decisión argumentando contra la discontinuidad del patrón tecnológico en Argentina. Este texto analiza, primero, qué argumentos sobre el desarrollo de tecnología nuclear articulan la discusión actual sobre reactores, qué sentidos movilizan y cómo éstos conectan pasado y presente y, segundo, qué activa el uso del pasado en una discusión sobre reactores en esta coyuntura específica.
Energia wyobrażeń, w: Jasikowska, K., Pałasz, M. (red.), Za pięć dwunasta koniec świata. Kryzys klimatyczno-ekologiczny głosem wielu nauk. Kraków: Uniwersytet Jagielloński w Krakowie, Biblioteka Jagiellońska, s. 377-414. za512.uj.edu.pl Tekst powstał dzięki wsparciu Narodowego Centrum Nauki finansującego badania pod na-zwą "Tempus Fugit-wizje przyszłości w politykach energetycznych w Polsce po 1989 roku i ich znaczenie dla procesu transformacji energetycznej" na mocy umowy nr UMO-2016/21/B/ HS6/03706. Wykorzystuje także wyniki badań "Anatomy of Disbelief: Explaining Polish Climate Scepticism", projektu finansowanego przez the Noble Foundation's Programme on Modern Poland (pomp.com.pl/en), realizowanego od października 2018 do czerwca 2020 r.
Este artículo aborda las políticas de producción de energía eléctrica en Argentina en las últimas dos décadas a partir del rastreo de los argumentos expertos utilizados para describir, evaluar, justificar o criticar esas políticas. El análisis distingue tres imaginarios sociotécnicos que modelaron y orientaron las decisiones tecnológicas en materia de energía eléctrica en Argentina: el imaginario mercantil, el imaginario desarrollista y el imaginario de la justicia socioambiental. La noción de imaginario sociotécnico permite analizar y comparar los diferentes modelos energéticos deseables tal como se proyectan por los actores involucrados, teniendo en cuenta las especificidades de las culturas políticas nacionales. Profundizamos el análisis comparativo en base a tres criterios (los principales actores involucrados, las misiones que éstos atribuyen a la política pública y la identificación y gestión de los riesgos) y discutimos dos resultados que emergen de la comparación y condensan las principales diferencias y tensiones que atraviesan los tres imaginarios: la escala territorial considerada pertinente para definir el interés común y los parámetros de evaluación comparativa de las tecnologías.
In the post-WWII era, concerns over Earth’s finite resources and technology’s destructive capacity shaped ideas of a global environment. This dissertation focuses on transnational grassroots social movements that attempted to find solutions to earthly vulnerability. It looks at women’s nuclear disarmament campaigns in the early 1960s, the Appropriate Technology movement of the 1970s, Canada’s conserver society program, and the emergence of feminist technoscientific critique and ecological activism in the early 1980s. In each case study, it shows how the ability to critique and produce technoscientific knowledge expanded women’s political identities, what I call technoscientific citizenship. Simultaneously, these groups promoted ecological domesticity, or the construction of white, middle-class, heteronormative domesticity as the correct way to care for a threatened earth. The tension between technoscientific citizenship and the privatization of care as represented in ecological domesticity forms the core of this work. The dissertation begins with a study of the Voice of Women’s anti-radiation activism, arguing that these women produced technoscientific knowledge for political ends. It then turns to the Appropriate Technology movement, which advocated for small-scale, ecologically-benign, participatory technologies. Women in AT claimed technoscientific acumen and formed activist communities to support their political work. At the same time, AT promoted its work through gendered images that reified white, heteronormative, middle-class domesticity. This construction of home facilitated the spread of ecological living into mainstream culture and assured people that inviting nature into homes would not overturn existing gendered social hierarchies. Black feminists, however, critiqued this construction of domestic care. Finally, it turns to feminist technoscientific critiques of AT and the emergence of ecofeminism, ending with a discussion of the Women and Life on Earth Conference. By linking the construction of specific kinds of homes to women’s expanding political power, this dissertation complicates conventional narratives of both feminism and environmentalism. Throughout, it blurs the boundaries between earth and home, feminism and environmentalism, ecology and technology. It asks how women’s political power can expand at the same time as it is limited by the continuation of specific domestic ideologies.
Energy security as a concept is void of meaning if not related to specific sociotechnical settings, this article argues. By bringing in insights from science and technology studies and national identity-making, we focus on how sociotechnical imaginaries of energy security in Norway and Ukraine are formative and productive for both technological development and societal discourses. This leads to diverse national narratives and strategies for providing energy security. In Norway, the imaginary transcends technical reasoning and day-to-day administration and has created a highly stable discourse seldom politicised. In Ukraine, the sociotechnical imaginary is in flux and highly politicised – if not securitised – as a new Ukrainian identity is under construction with and against energy technology and the Russian other. The article shows the benefits of understanding energy security as an interplay between societal discourses, technologies and natural resources rather than a stable end goal to be pursued.
In this article, we analyse the mechanisms by which family farming established itself in Argentina over the 2004–2016 period as a legitimate solution to the food security challenge. We show that this process has played a role in the emergence of an alternative sociotechnical imaginary built as a counter-model to the one associated with industrial agriculture. We highlight the importance of the processes of demarcation and detachment at the heart of this shift, in the political, techno-scientific and agricultural spheres. The actors involved in the promotion of family farming associate this alternative approach to the development of the agricultural sector with the implementation of an alternative practice and organisation of science and technology. These shifts correspond to a narrative and mode of political action that put the emphasis on the production of a national future liberated from the mistakes and injustices of the past, in which science and technology play a central role. By highlighting the tensions at the heart of this dynamic, between the establishment of new boundaries and the challenging of existing ones, the article contributes to the analysis of the formation of alternative sociotechnical imaginaries, and in particular the underlying mechanisms of co-production between science and politics.
The purpose of the article is to reveal technology as a human activity in which people engage in such interaction with each other and build such relationships and social ties that are mediated by technical means and ensures success in the process of realizing a common goal. To overcome the limitations of narrowly specialized ideas about technology, the research is based on the scientific methods and theoretical principles of social philosophy. This approach allows us to understand technology as a universal principle of social practice, not just production. The need for a philosophical reflection of the immanent connection that exists between technology and sociality is proved by the author. Therefore, the author offers understanding of technology as unity of scientific and technical means and forms of social interactions in subjective practice and objectification human intentions and goals. The results of such research contribute to the establishment of the scientific and theoretical foundations of the practice of management of innovations and technologies with the purpose of conscious humanistic direction of scientific and technological progress.
This essay explores how rank‐and‐file producers of energy evaluate the ethics of energy exchanges, which sheds light on some of the unexamined assumptions animating anthropological studies of energy and ethics. Exploring how coal miners experience a massive downturn in Wyoming, the centre of US coal production, reveals differing logics of exchange between the producers and consumers of electricity. Most Americans engage with electricity as consumers through a commodity framework, paying utility companies a fee to purchase kilowatt hours that are abstracted from their productive origins. In contrast, the miners experience energy as more of a gift exchange, keeping in view the network of the ultimate consumers of the coal they produce. These differing logics of exchange entail different ethical obligations in the face of the termination of those relationships as the country moves away from coal‐fired electricity, helping to explain the outrage that was felt in ‘coal country’ – an outrage that Donald Trump exploited for political purposes during the 2016 US presidential election.
The world’s largest deposits of lithium lie in brines found underneath salt flats in the desert between Chile, Argentina and Bolivia. Globally, lithium may reduce fossil fuel use by making batteries for cars and renewable energy storage more affordable. This article analyzes ongoing debates about lithium in these three countries to identify what hopes, fears and expectations different stakeholders are bringing to debates about lithium. My approach builds on the idea of resource imaginaries, particularly the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries that highlights the importance of science and technology to projections of desirable futures. I analyze the tensions, visions and metaphors used by different stakeholders, including activists, the media, and state and industry officials, to imagine and thus legitimate lithium extraction. This study finds three co-existing positions in these debates: lithium as a commodity, as a strategic resource or as the subject of a sociotechnical imaginary. Chile, Argentina and Bolivia are converging on the last of these, best described as a reimagining of the relationship between mining and development in which lithium, through innovation and industry, will redefine the relationship between Latin American economies and global markets. This imaginary projects a binary between raw and industrial materials and deterministically assumes that science and technology will transform the former into the latter. Disagreements and challenges notwithstanding, the article argues that this imaginary is evidence of a crisis of confidence in development that is creating space for a more dynamic debate about the social value of mining and the proper role of the state in development. This convergence will have also implications for how sustainable, equitable and reliable lithium production will be.
This article argues for engaging with the smart city as a sociotechnical imaginary. By conducting a close reading of primary source material produced by the companies IBM and Cisco over a decade of work on smart urbanism, we argue that the smart city imaginary is premised in a particular narrative about urban crises and technological salvation. This narrative serves three main purposes: (1) it fits different ideas and initiatives into a coherent view of smart urbanism, (2) it sells and disseminates this version of smartness, and (3) it crowds out alternative visions and corresponding arrangements of smart urbanism. Furthermore, we argue that IBM and Cisco construct smart urbanism as both a reactionary and visionary force, plotting a model of the near future, but one that largely reflects and reinforces existing sociopolitical systems. We conclude by suggesting that breaking IBM’s and Cisco’s discursive dominance over the smart city imaginary requires us to reimagine what smart urbanism means and create counter-narratives that open up space for alternative values, designs, and models.
This article studies the production of a power grid across six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, known as ‘the backbone,’ which has been conceptualized as an answer to power outages. First it analyzes how experts working with and around the GCC Interconnection Authority (GCCIA) advance claims to a regional territorial imagination. Second, it shows that the construction of the grid not only indicates a shift in the material arrangement of wires and substations, but also necessitates new understandings of transparency and a new formula for the electricity price, facilitating the cutting of government subsidies along with additional price increases. Third, it interrogates how electricity is consumed in the region. Policy-makers expected that electricity price increases would lead to lower rates of consumption. Yet after price hikes were instituted, analysts reported how they had no impact. Users behaved in ways that the grid’s engineers did not anticipate. Overall the article shows how various actors conduct ‘boundary work,’ that is, how they set limits between the political, the financial and the technical while producing the backbone. The article explores how this boundary work helps stabilize a particular sociotechnical imaginary of energy security in the GCC, masking anxieties associated with a future beyond oil.
This article uses the case of drinking water utility managers in California to understand uses of climate-change information in resource management. A dominant narrative suggests that producing management practices best adapted to climate-change impacts is a matter of reconciling the supply of scientific knowledge with the demand signals of resource managers. We question this narrative with reference to the diverse cultural and socio-technical structures in which the future climate takes on meaning in water management. Using interviews (n = 61), we analyze three ideal-typical ‘social temporalities’ of climate change: modeled futures, whose future?, and truncated futures. We define social temporalities as alternative constructions of the future built into socio-technical engagement with water and into collective orientations to climate change. Of the three ideal types, we found that only one (modeled futures) closely aligns with the supply-demand relationship as constructed in scholarly literature and climate adaptation-related policy. This leaves nonconforming types without guidance that resonates with their relationship to climate change information. Consideration of sociological dimensions of climate knowledge may warrant a revised or additional approach to climate service programs or related assistance efforts.
Purpose. The article, based on the analysis of actual materials, highlights the importance of taking into account the influence of the human factor in occurrence of emergency situations in terms of transport infrastructure. Methodology. The research is based on the interdisciplinary system analysis. It was comprehended how the service technicians of high-tech systems can create latent unsafe conditions that combined with other hazardous activities can cause an emergency and injury. The authors attempt to dramatize the issue in order to find a solution – on the one hand, man is the most crucial part of a complex technological system, on the other hand – he is the most unreliable part of the system, especially in terms of the extreme power of modern vehicles and their speeds. The above situation demonstrates the need for a new level of anthropic comprehension of the high-tech systems in the schematic set "human-system-environment". Originality. The paper analysed the problems and conditions of human factors that allow detecting the causes of technicians’ errors. The authors highlighted proposals for psychocorrective work among the personnel of the facilities. The problem of further development of continuous improvement of the equipment maintenance systems, based on integrated approach taking into account the human factor, is also not overlooked. Conclusion. In the course of understanding the human factor and its influence on the processes, the most urgent tasks are as follows: implementation of new system software, automation of vehicles and development of high production culture based on moral qualities of experts.
This introductory chapter begins with a review of the academic discussion on the way 'energy security' should be understood. After presenting the most conventional definition, I distinguish between three main approaches to elaborating and (re)defining that notion, and argue for the importance of an analytical concept of 'energy security', allowing to distinguish it properly from other areas of security and other policy fields. Defining energy security as 'low vulnerability of vital energy systems' (Cherp and Jewell 2014), allows for the operationalization of the general research problem posed earlier. I then present the rationale of the two parts of the book, and the research questions they try to answer, and conclude with an overview of the chapters.
Mettre à contribution les sciences et les technologies pour le développement de la société, en particulier celui des groupes sociaux les plus vulnérables. C’est ainsi que peut se résumer en quelques mots le mouvement initié en Argentine au début des années 2000 en faveur de sciences et de technologies pour l’inclusion sociale. A la confluence d’un interventionnisme fort de l’Etat et de l’engagement d’agents des institutions publiques de recherche et développement, une tentative originale de rapprochement entre sciences et sociétés a ainsi vu le jour dans un pays encore convalescent de la crise politique et économique qui l’a secoué en 2001. Si divers types de publics vulnérables ont été visés par ces politiques, l’un d’entre eux s’est distingué par la précocité et la densité des initiatives mises en place : l’agriculture familiale. Cette expression, qui désigne les petits producteurs vivant principalement du travail fourni sur leur exploitation agricole, a notamment fait l’objet de la création d’un Centre de Recherche pour la Petite Agriculture Familiale au sein de l’INTA, l’Institut national argentin de recherche et développement agricole.
Ce nouveau partage du monde au sein des politiques et des organisations technoscientifiques suscite des interrogations à même de nourrir une sociologie des sciences et des techniques attentive à leurs ancrages politiques et moraux. Qu’est-ce qu’une science pour les plus vulnérables ? Sur quels collectifs, quelles pratiques, quels positions épistémiques repose-t- elle ? Quels sont les ressorts et les instruments de l’action publique pour orienter les activités technoscientifiques vers la résolution de grands défis sociétaux ? En suivant le développement en Argentine d’une recherche agronomique pour l’agriculture familiale, cette recherche vise à proposer une contribution à l’étude des relations entre sciences, technologies et action publique.
Cette contribution passe plus précisément par la proposition d’un cadre d’analyse permettant de mettre en lumière l’importance des mécanismes de démarcation (boundary-work) dans la conduite des activités scientifiques et techniques, et dans l’émergence de nouveaux imaginaires sociotechniques. Ces derniers sont entendus, au sens de Jasanoff et Kim, comme des visions stabilisées de futurs souhaitables pour des espaces sociaux tels qu’une Nation ou une organisation, et atteignables par le développement des sciences et technologies. Si cette approche considère les activités technoscientifiques et les ordres macrosociaux comme inextricablement liés, nous montrons comment l’émergence d’imaginaires, ou de projets sociotechniques alternatifs, procède d’une volonté d’émancipation systématique vis-à-vis des imaginaires et des agencements en place ou passés. Ou en d’autres termes, que si science et politique se font et évoluent ensemble, sont le fruit d’une coproduction, c’est notamment en défaisant et en contestant d’autres façons de faire politique et de faire science. L’agriculture familiale émerge ainsi par exemple, dans le référentiel politique des gouvernements péronistes défendant entre 2003 et 2015 l’existence d’un Etat fort et planificateur, comme une alternative à un modèle agro-exportateur basé sur la production intensive de commodities comme le soja, ancré dans une économie de marché et un libéralisme globalisés. Les recherches conduites au sein des collectifs de recherche dédiés à l’agriculture familiale sont dans le même esprit pensées comme une alternative à un modèle scientifique internationalisé, tourné vers l’excellence académique, compartimenté en spécialités disciplinaires, et opposant le plus souvent science et action.
A partir de l’enquête de terrain, nous identifions dès lors trois dimensions du travail de démarcation conduit par les acteurs pour installer ce nouveau public et cette nouvelle façon de conduire les activités technoscientifiques. La première relève de l’épaisseur historique et temporelle du travail de démarcation, rendue particulièrement visible dans un pays comme l’Argentine, marqué par une instabilité politique et économique chronique. Si en effet la construction d’un nouvel imaginaire relève de la définition d’un futur souhaitable, nous avons mis en évidence l’intense activité critique à laquelle se livrent les acteurs, vis-à-vis de périodes plus ou moins récentes de l’histoire nationale, et de leur conception des sciences et des technologies. Les politiques néolibérales des années 1990, la dictature militaire (1976- 1983), ou encore la colonisation européenne du pays, sont ainsi dénoncées pour les dommages qu’elles auraient infligés à certaines couches de la société, et pour le type de savoirs ou de technologies qu’elles auraient privilégiés. C’est dans cet esprit que le Congrès Argentin a par exemple voté en 2015 une loi plaçant les technosciences pour l’agriculture familiale entre un futur souhaitable et un passé à conjurer : la « Loi de Réparation Historique de l’Agriculture Familiale pour la Construction d’une Nouvelle Ruralité ».
La deuxième dimension de ces processus de démarcation renvoie au traitement catégoriel qui a été fait de l’agriculture familiale au sein de l’action publique et des institutions de recherche. Plutôt que par le déploiement de programmes transversaux, la mise à l’agenda de ce nouveau public est en effet passée par le développement d’institutions à part – Secrétariat d’Etat, Centres de recherche, organisme de contrôle sanitaire, etc. – au sein des institutions existantes. Dans la lignée des travaux sociologiques analysant les activités de catégorisation, insistant sur leur caractère dual entre regroupement et séparation, nous avons mis en évidence l’engagement des acteurs dans la définition de nouvelles frontières au sein des organisations et dans leurs activités professionnelles. Alors que l’objectif des initiatives engagées est de favoriser l’inclusion de publics vulnérables comme les agriculteurs familiaux, nous montrons que c’est paradoxalement une séparation et une démarcation des institutions et collectifs appelés à œuvrer à leur service qui ont été actées.
La troisième dimension renvoie enfin aux processus de démarcation qui animent les sphères académiques, dès lors qu’il s’agit de différencier les activités scientifiques des activités non- scientifiques (T. Gieryn), ou encore les sciences fondamentales des sciences appliquées (J. Calvert). Nous montrons en effet qu’avec l’émergence de la catégorie d’agriculture familiale, ce sont les relations parfois conflictuelles entre activités de recherche et de développement qui ont trouvé un espace renouvelé d’expression au sein de la recherche agronomique. Plus précisément, alors que l’agriculture familiale était jusqu’alors abordée principalement par les métiers du développement, l’essor d’une science qui lui serait dédiée a consisté à faire une place à ces derniers dans le monde de la production des connaissances scientifiques. Une place fondée cependant sur la défense d’une science à part, conduite de façon alternative à celle pratiquée au sein des laboratoires traditionnels, contestant par exemple les frontières existantes entre disciplines, entre recherche et développement, ou plus largement entre science et société.
Ces processus de démarcation et de déconstruction des ordres existants génèrent des controverses et des résistances auprès des acteurs qui voient leurs pratiques ou leurs positions contestées. En suivant le positionnement des scientifiques « traditionnels » mis en cause par ces dynamiques, nous mettons en évidence le faible effet d’entrainement que génère ce projet de sciences pour l’inclusion sociale au sein des institutions de recherche agronomique, au- delà des cercles professionnels du développement et de la vulgarisation. Alors que les formes contemporaines de gouvernement des technosciences privilégient l’énoncé de grands défis sociétaux pour renforcer l’impact des activités scientifiques, nous questionnons donc la capacité de ces instruments à orienter les pratiques des chercheurs, et plus spécifiquement et à renouveler des débats déjà anciens sur la séparation entre recherche et développement. Cette recherche contribue ainsi plus largement à éclairer les transformations actuelles des agencements entre les agendas politiques et scientifiques, et la façon dont celles-ci participent d’une reconfiguration des collectifs, des activités et des identités professionnelles au sein du champ scientifique et technique.
There has been considerable work on the politics of climate change and energy security as separate issues, but much less on the relationship between energy security and climate change. From studies of the relationships between these concepts in individual states and a comparison of media coverage of energy security in differing states, there appears to be little consistent connection between discourses on and policies for energy security and climate change. Climate change considerations appear to be constructed to promote elite and special-interest interpretations of energy security. It is concluded that efforts at a local, national, and global level should be oriented towards promoting climate change objectives to capture energy policy. Otherwise, nationally based conceptions of energy security are likely to predominate over climate-change objectives.
Eurasian Geopolitics as explained in the Heartland model has been reincarnated as Energy Geopolitics. Germany and India are the two strategic economies of the Inner Crescent of Mackinder's 'Heartland' Model and are largely similar in geopolitical focus to the rest of Eurasia. The article argues that in the coming decades at least, Russia will play an important role in these countries' energy vision. A similar unique convergence of goals regarding energy technology requirements will also be seen in the coming decades. India cannot abandon the developmental needs of its one billion plus people to the energy monopolies. Neither does Germany as a significant global economy wish to hang its globalisation efforts on similar energy uncertainties. Both countries therefore seek to spread their energy security through technology-centred geopolitical pluralism. Central Asian energy resources thus seem to be a geopolitical temptation that both nations find hard to ignore. Geopolitical contingencies, it is argued, might bring them together to explore a mixed set of options under some kaleidoscopic combination of an altogether new energy vision.
South Asia has witnessed a growing imbalance between energy demand and its supply from indigenous sources resulting in increased import dependence. Energy endowments differ among the South Asian countries. However, access to the significant energy resources in the neighboring countries is denied, which increases the cost of energy supply and reduces energy security of the individual countries and of the region as a whole. The countries in the region could benefit significantly only by strengthening the mechanism of energy trade through improved connectivity. Therefore, greater cooperation within South Asia could be one of the most effective ways to deal with this Regional Energy deficit and ensure Energy Security of the Region.
Full text open access available at: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10584-013-0931-0
This paper discusses the role and relevance of the shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs) and the new scenarios that combine SSPs with representative concentration pathways (RCPs) for climate change impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability (IAV) research. It first provides an overview of uses of social–environmental scenarios in IAV studies and identifies the main shortcomings of earlier such scenarios. Second, the paper elaborates on two aspects of the SSPs and new scenarios that would improve their usefulness for IAV studies compared to earlier scenario sets: (i) enhancing their applicability while retaining coherence across spatial scales, and (ii) adding indicators of importance for projecting vulnerability. The paper therefore presents an agenda for future research, recommending that SSPs incorporate not only the standard variables of population and gross domestic product, but also indicators such as income distribution, spatial population, human health and governance.
Scholarly discourses on energy security have developed in response to initially separate policy agendas such as supply of fuels for armies and transportation, uninterrupted provision of electricity, and ensuring market and investment effectiveness. As a result three distinct perspectives on energy security have emerged: the 'sovereignty' perspective with its roots in political science; the 'robustness' perspective with its roots in natural science and engineering; and the 'resilience' perspective with its roots in economics and complex systems analysis. At present, the energy security challenges are increasingly entangled so that they cannot be analyzed within the boundaries of any single perspective. To respond to these challenges, the energy security studies should not only achieve mastery of the disciplinary knowledge underlying all three perspectives but also weave the theories, methods and knowledge from these different mindsets together in a unified interdisciplinary effort. The key challenges for interdisciplinary energy security studies are drawing the credible boundaries of the field, formulating credible research questions and developing a methodological toolkit acceptable for all three perspectives.
Building on research in anthropology and philosophy, one can make a distinction between type I and type II energy ethics as a framework for advancing public debate about energy. Type I holds energy production and use as a fundamental good and is grounded in the assumption that increases in energy production and consumption result in increases in human wellbeing. Conversely, type II questions the linear relationship between energy production and progress by examining questions of equity and human happiness. The type I versus type II framework helps to advance public debates about energy that address broad questions of profitability, regulation, and the environment, and in the process poses fundamental questions about the reverence for energy growth in advanced technological societies.
The relationship between energy systems, on the one hand, and narratives and practices of identity building at different scales, on the other, has received little attention in the mainstream human geography and social science literature. There is still a paucity of integrated theoretical insights into the manner in which energy formations are implicated in the rise of particular cultural self-determinations, even though various strands of work on energy and identity are frequently present throughout the wide-and rather disparate-corpus of social science energy research. Therefore, this article explores themanner in which the exploitation and management of energy resources is woven into discourses and debates about national identity, international relations, a nation's path of future development, and its significance on the global arena using the case of Russia. We investigate some of the policies, narratives, and discourses that accompany the attempt to represent this country as a global "energy superpower" in relation to the resurrection of its domestic economy and material prosperity, on the one hand, and the restoration of its global status as a derzhava (or "Great Power"), on the other. Using ideas initially developed within the field of critical discourse analysis, we pay special attention to the national identity-building role played by geographical imaginations about the country's past and present energy exports to neighboring states. We argue that they have created a hydrocarbon landscape in which the discursive and material have become mutually entangled to create an infrastructurally grounded vision of national identity. © 2011 by Association of American Geographers Initial submission, March 2010.
STS research has devoted relatively little attention to the promotion and reception of science and technology by non-scientific actors and institutions. One consequence is that the relationship of science and technology to political power has tended to remain undertheorized. This article aims to fill that gap by introducing the concept of “sociotechnical imaginaries.” Through a comparative examination of the development and regulation of nuclear power in the US and South Korea, the article demonstrates the analytic potential of the imaginaries concept. Although nuclear power and nationhood have long been imagined together in both countries, the nature of those imaginations has remained strikingly different. In the US, the state’s central move was to present itself as a responsible regulator of a potentially runaway technology that demands effective “containment.” In South Korea, the dominant imaginary was of “atoms for development” which the state not only imported but incorporated into its scientific, technological and political practices. In turn, these disparate imaginaries have underwritten very different responses to a variety of nuclear shocks and challenges, such as Three Mile Island (TMI), Chernobyl, and the spread of the anti-nuclear movement.
Sudden, short-term disruptions seriously endangering energy security can be triggered by a variety of events--among them attacks by terrorists. This study investigates terrorist attack practices against energy infrastructures and discusses how we may understand them. Our results indicate that attacks against energy infrastructures are comparatively few. Also, we find no strong connection between the ideologies of various terrorist groups and their proclivity to attack. In addition, the highly disproportionate number of attacks in a handful of countries highlights the strong geographic concentration of attacks. To explain these findings, we analyze terrorist targeting incentives including intimidation levels, symbolism, attack feasibility, and concerns for stakeholders. We argue that terrorists in general have comparatively few incentives to attack energy supply infrastructures based on our assessment of these factors. Moreover, higher levels of terrorist incidents in states more prone to internal violent conflict may suggest stronger incentives to attack energy infrastructures. When outlining energy security policies, the low frequency of worldwide attacks coupled with the high concentration of attacks in certain unstable countries should be taken into consideration. Energy importing countries could benefit from developing strategies to increase stability in key energy supply and/or transit countries facing risks of internal instability.
A variety of forces aligned at the turn of the last century to make ethyl alcohol--what is today known as ethanol--inefficient and uneconomical as a fuel alternative. Rather than a case of inevitable technological unfolding, the transition from King Coal to Big Oil was a sociologically contingent event. As a controversy study, this paper seeks to avoid the reductionist tendencies of past historical analyses of fuel. The author also seeks to redress a fundamental gap within the STS literature on the subject of automobile/fuel socio-technical systems, where the story of ethyl alcohol remains conspicuously absent. Among studies that examine how/why the automobile became locked in, little is said about ethyl alcohol, even though, as this paper details, it remained part of the fuel landscape well into the 20th century. The paper begins with an overview of the landscape developments of fuel during the later decades of the 19th century. Attention then turns to examining the various factors that went into shaping the automobile/fuel socio-technical system within the US during the first half of the 20th century.
The impact of energy on global security and economy is clear and profound, and this is why in recent years energy security has become a source of concern to most countries. However, energy security means different things to different countries based on their geographic location, their endowment of resources their strategic and economic conditions. In this book, Gal Luft and Anne Korin with the help of twenty leading experts provide an overview of the world's energy system and its vulnerabilities that underlay growing concern over energy security. It hosts a debate about the feasibility of resource conflicts and covers issues such as the threat of terrorism to the global energy system, maritime security, the role of multinationals and non-state actors in energy security, the pathways to energy security through diversification of sources and the development of alternative energy sources. It delves into the various approaches selected producers, consumers and transit states have toward energy security and examines the domestic and foreign policy tradeoffs required to ensure safe and affordable energy supply. The explains the various pathways to energy security and the tradeoffs among them and demonstrates how all these factors can be integrated in a larger foreign and domestic policy framework. It also explores the future of nuclear power, the complex relations between energy security and environmental concerns and the role for decentralized energy as a way to enhance energy security.
The impact of energy on global security and economy is clear and profound, and this is why in recent years energy security has become a source of concern to most countries. However, energy security means different things to different countries based on their geographic location, their endowment of resources their strategic and economic conditions. In this book, Gal Luft and Anne Korin with the help of twenty leading experts provide an overview of the world's energy system and its vulnerabilities that underlay growing concern over energy security. It hosts a debate about the feasibility of resource conflicts and covers issues such as the threat of terrorism to the global energy system, maritime security, the role of multinationals and non-state actors in energy security, the pathways to energy security through diversification of sources and the development of alternative energy sources. It delves into the various approaches selected producers, consumers and transit states have toward energy security and examines the domestic and foreign policy tradeoffs required to ensure safe and affordable energy supply. The explains the various pathways to energy security and the tradeoffs among them and demonstrates how all these factors can be integrated in a larger foreign and domestic policy framework. It also explores the future of nuclear power, the complex relations between energy security and environmental concerns and the role for decentralized energy as a way to enhance energy security.
In the political economy of energy, World War II was a significant watershed: it accelerated the transition from dependence on coal to petroleum and natural gas. At the same time, mobilization provided an unprecedented experience in the management of energy markets by a forced partnership of business and government. In this 1985 book, Vietor covers American policy from 1945 to 1980. For readers convinced that big business contrived the energy crisis of the 1970s, this story will be disappointing, but enlightening. For those committed to theories of regulatory capture or public interest reform it should be frustrating. More than a history of government policy making, this book provides us with an innovative and insightful approach to the study of business-government relations in modern America. For managers, bureaucrats, and anyone interested in seeing a more effective national industrial policy, this history should put the relationship of business and government in a critical new perspective.
Oil is a curse, it is often said, that condemns the countries producing it to an existence defined by war, corruption and enormous inequality. Carbon Democracy tells a more complex story, arguing that no nation escapes the political consequences of our collective dependence on oil. It shapes the body politic both in regions such as the Middle East, which rely upon revenues from oil production, and in the places that have the greatest demand for energy. Timothy Mitchell begins with the history of coal power to tell a radical new story about the rise of democracy. Coal was a source of energy so open to disruption that oligarchies in the West became vulnerable for the first time to mass demands for democracy. In the mid-twentieth century, however, the development of cheap and abundant energy from oil, most notably from the Middle East, offered a means to reduce this vulnerability to democratic pressures. The abundance of oil made it possible for the first time in history to reorganize political life around the management of something now called "the economy" and the promise of its infinite growth. The politics of the West became dependent on an undemocratic Middle East. In the twenty-first century, the oil-based forms of modern democratic politics have become unsustainable. Foreign intervention and military rule are faltering in the Middle East, while governments everywhere appear incapable of addressing the crises that threaten to end the age of carbon democracy-- the disappearance of cheap energy and the carbon-fuelled collapse of the ecological order. -- Book jacket.
The US needs to adopt a strategy, to help medium-income households invest in energy-efficient vehicles, appliances, and home retrofits. It is suggested that such a strategy will help medium-income households, to overcome the challenges of economic recession in the country. The Energy Security for American Families (ESAF) initiative is proposed as one such strategy that will help these households, to control their long-term energy costs. These households can control their energy costs by improving household energy efficiency. The initiative will offer a combination of vouchers, low-interest loans, and market-based incentives. These incentives will encourage medium-income households, to invest in energy-efficient vehicles, homes, and home retrofits. These investments will also help workers in realizing long-term savings and gaining financial security.
Neoliberalism is commonly viewed as an economic doctrine that seeks to limit the scope of government. Some consider it a form of predatory capitalism with adverse effects on the Global South. In this groundbreaking work, Aihwa Ong offers an alternative view of neoliberalism as an extraordinarily malleable technology of governing that is taken up in different ways by different regimes, be they authoritarian, democratic, or communist. Ong shows how East and Southeast Asian states are making exceptions to their usual practices of governing in order to position themselves to compete in the global economy. As she demonstrates, a variety of neoliberal strategies of governing are re-engineering political spaces and populations. Ong’s ethnographic case studies illuminate experiments and developments such as China’s creation of special market zones within its socialist economy; pro-capitalist Islam and women’s rights in Malaysia; Singapore’s repositioning as a hub of scientific expertise; and flexible labor and knowledge regimes that span the Pacific.Ong traces how these and other neoliberal exceptions to business as usual are reconfiguring relationships between governing and the governed, power and knowledge, and sovereignty and territoriality. She argues that an interactive mode of citizenship is emerging, one that organizes people—and distributes rights and benefits to them—according to their marketable skills rather than according to their membership within nation-states. Those whose knowledge and skills are not assigned significant market value—such as migrant women working as domestic maids in many Asian cities—are denied citizenship. Nevertheless, Ong suggests that as the seam between sovereignty and citizenship is pried apart, a new space is emerging for NGOs to advocate for the human rights of those excluded by neoliberal measures of human worthiness.
Edited by Michel Senellart ; translated by Graham Burchell.
ISBN 978-1-403-98654-2
This article traces how miners in Wyoming's Powder River Basin, a region that currently produces a majority of the coal mined in the United States, were able to constrain and counter the individualization of workplace risk, a troubling and key technology of neoliberal governance. Onsite research at four surface mines suggests that miners affirm the crew's collective responsibility for mitigating risk by reframing official safety programs in terms of kinship, specifically the ties of relatedness crew members create with each other over the course of everyday work practices. Management eventually adopted this framing as well in order to distance themselves from an industry blighted by conflict, encourage employees to stay in the midst of a labor shortage, and maintain enviable safety records. The article concludes by evaluating the performance of the new safety programs and pointing to the larger lessons to be learned form this fieldsite about neoliberalism, workplace safety and risk.
The institutions and policies that were set up after the 1973 Arab oil embargo can no longer meet the needs of energy consumers or producers. The definition of energy security needs to be expanded to cope with the challenges of a globalized world.
This article introduces to policy studies the concept of valence, which we define as the emotional quality of an idea that makes it more or less attractive. We argue that valence explains why some ideas are more successful than others, sometimes gaining paradigmatic status. A policy idea is attractive when its valence matches the mood of a target population. Skilled policy entrepreneurs use ideas with high valence to frame policy issues and generate support for their policy proposals. The usefulness of the concept of valence is illustrated with the case of sustainability, an idea that has expanded from the realm of environmental policy to dominate discussions in such diverse policy areas as pension reform, public finance, labor markets, and energy security. As the valence of sustainability has increased, policy entrepreneurs have used the idea to reframe problems in these various policy areas and promote reforms.
This articles undertakes a genealogy of security: its integral place in the philosophic justification of settler-colonial processes, its constitutive role in the genesis of the modern state and capitalist mode of production, its intellectual and political history in the twentieth- and twenty-first-century United States. I contend that the current-day expressions of security governance – neoliberal technologies of accumulation by dispossession; the prosecution of a boundless and interminable War on Terror – reveal with a particular clarity the essential tensions and contradictions of the security project over the longue durée. And inversely, I argue, reflecting upon the longer history of the modern security project deepens our insight into the contemporary manifestation of security discourse and practice. My analysis of security is divided into three parts: security and property, security and race, and security and emergency. Property is the principal object of security governance, race delimits and structures the security state, and emergency is one governmental tactic through which a multifarious politics of security is legitimated and enforced.
This article examines an on-going socio-technical transition of the Israeli energy regime. This transition includes a shift away from a discourse about the scarcity of energy to a discourse on its abundance. The emerging regime is centred on natural gas, oil shale, nuclear energy and solar energy as alternatives to coal and oil. Despite the uncertainties and complexities that still constrain these new energy alternatives, per-ceived abundance of energy has several ramifications for the socio-technical transition of the Israeli energy regime, including its future pathways, technological trajectories and institutional arrangements. We examine these ramifications by analysing the transition through the analytical lens of discursive institutionalism in order to highlight the less visible aspects of the transition, such as conflicting values, hidden interests, restricted pathways, social unease and compromised sustainability.
Energy security has received remarkably little conceptual attention, despite an abundant literature in which various meanings of the term proliferate, together with a copious proxy terminology. This article attempts to clear this conceptual underbrush and to address the question, in what sense is energy a security issue? Drawing on academic and policy-related sources, the article demonstrates that three distinct logics of energy security are currently in circulation: a logic of war, a logic of subsistence and a ‘total’ security logic. These distinct logics carry different meanings of energy and security, embed political hierarchies, and have distinct vocabularies, policy vehicles and normative consequences. Yet, affixing energy to security affects not only energy policy but also the manner in which we understand security itself. At least potentially, the ubiquity of energy as a ‘prime mover’ makes security ubiquitous, thus blurring the boundaries that have made it a domain of specialist knowledge and practice. By making security politically unexceptional and ‘total’, energy can thus strip security of its precise meaning, rendering it banal and vacuous. Taking a contextual perspective that emphasizes conceptual variation and the participation of lay actors in producing the meaning of security, the article rejects the banalization of security, and discusses the normative and political problems inherent in any totalizing view of the kind latent in energy security.
Over the past decade UK government policy has been promoting bioenergy innovation in the name of the public good. This has been envisaged through sociotechnical imaginaries – feasible, desirable future visions dependent upon technoscientific advance. UK bioenergy has had three major imaginaries: localisation, agri-diversification and oil substitution. Through these imaginaries, technoscientific innovation is promoted as an essential means to gain societal benefits, to avoid harm and/or to overcome obstacles. Each imaginary combines specific models of environmental sustainability and economic advantage. These models arise from discursive resonances among research managers, government departments and other public-sector bodies.While such imaginaries have a decade-long history, they have been elaborated more persuasively for specific innovation pathways. Some linkages between imaginaries and innovation pathways have been consolidated more strongly than others; key bodies have been convinced to provide a stronger policy commitment and material support. Warnings about unsustainable biomass have been discursively accommodated via prospects for future innovation which will enhance sustainability, alongside R&D funds to realise those prospects. Meanwhile bioenergy policy attempts to leave open future options which may generate more benefits. In such ways, UK bioenergy policy links epistemic claims for future sustainability with political authority for targets, subsidy and other incentives.
This article examines the impact of imprecise terminology on the energy policymaking process in US, focusing on the manipulation of discourse by different political–economic interests seeking to sway popular opinion. Using the 2012 US Presidential Elections as a backdrop, the analysis highlights the cooption of the concepts “security,” “independence,” and “sustainability” in energy debates by different and often opposing interest groups. The article’s first section traces the malleability of energy terminology to the vagueness of the term “energy” itself and notes how qualifying words like security, independence, and sustainability have been selectively exploited to introduce further ambiguity to an already fungible concept. The second section notes that while energy is a critical and complex factor of macroeconomic production, its main public visibility comes via a few partially representative numbers, like gasoline prices. This mismatch of broad social importance and piecemeal public understanding enables organized interests to leverage vague terminology in support of particular policy ideas. The third section examines three policymaking tools (1) taxation, (2) regulation, and (3) technology promotion and compares these administrative instruments. Ultimately, the article concludes that loosely defined terminology inhibits energy policy discussion and stifles meaningful public debate over and action on energy issues.
This study provides an index for evaluating national energy security policies and performance among the United States, European Union, Australia, New Zealand, China, India, Japan, South Korea, and the ten countries comprising the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Drawn from research interviews, a survey instrument, and a focused workshop, the article first argues that energy security ought to be comprised of five dimensions related to availability, affordability, technology development, sustainability, and regulation. The article then breaks these dimensions down into 20 components and correlates them with 20 metrics that constitute a comprehensive energy security index. We find that the top three performers of our index for all data points and times are Japan, Brunei, and the United States and the worst performers Vietnam, India, and Myanmar. Malaysia, Australia, and Brunei saw their energy security improve the most from 1990 to 2010 whereas Laos, Cambodia, and Myanmar saw it decline the most. The article concludes by calling for more research on various aspects of our index and its results.
This article provides a synthesized, workable framework for analyzing national energy security policies and performance. Drawn from research interviews, survey results, a focused workshop, and an extensive literature review, this article proposes that energy security ought to be comprised of five dimensions related to availability, affordability, technology development, sustainability, and regulation. We then break these five dimensions down into 20 components related to security of supply and production, dependency, and diversification for availability; price stability, access and equity, decentralization, and low prices for affordability; innovation and research, safety and reliability, resilience, energy efficiency, and investment for technology development; land use, water, climate change, and air pollution for sustainability; and governance, trade, competition, and knowledge for sound regulation. Further still, our synthesis lists 320 simple indicators and 52 complex indicators that policymakers and scholars can use to analyze, measure, track, and compare national performance on energy security. The article concludes by offering implications for energy policy more broadly.
How, and when, does it become possible to conceptualize a truly planetary crisis? The Cold War nuclear arms race installed one powerful concept of planetary crisis in American culture. The science enabling the US nuclear arsenal, however, also produced unintended byproducts: notably, a radical new investment in the earth sciences. Cold War nuclear science ultimately produced not only bombs, but also a new understanding of the earth as biosphere. Thus, the image of planetary crisis in the US was increasingly doubled during the Cold War – the immediacy of nuclear threat matched by concerns about rapid environmental change and the cumulative effects of industrial civilization on a fragile biosphere. This paper examines the evolution of (and competition between) two ideas of planetary crisis since 1945: nuclear war and climate change. In doing so, the paper offers an alternative history of the nuclear age and considers the US national security implications of a shift in the definition of planetary crisis from warring states to a warming biosphere.
Changing the patterns of energy use requires investigating how energy consumers – not experts – conceive of energy challenges. This article explores the varying beliefs, attitudes, and views on energy security in the United States among experts and residents. Based primarily on an academic literature review to distill expert views, and a survey distributed to hundreds of residents in the U.S. to capture consumer views, the study begins by explaining its methodology before identifying seven suppositions related to energy security. These suppositions involve security of fuel supply, energy democracy, energy research and development, affordability of energy services, environmental pollution, and climate change adaptation and mitigation. The second section of the study tests these suppositions with a survey distributed to 427 respondents in the United States. Three suppositions are supported, two are unsupported, and two are neither supported nor unsupported. The final section of the study offers implications for U.S. energy policy and scholarship.
This article traces how the US Navy crafted policy from the expert advice of American geologists. Between 1898 and 1924, the US Navy metamorphosed from a slow, coal‐burning fleet to a swift, oil‐burning one. The decision to convert naval vessels to oil consumed years of wrangling at the highest levels of the Department's bureaucracy. Central to this struggle was the guarantee of a secure petroleum supply in the face of perpetually bleak predictions by geologists suggesting that US oilfields might someday soon run dry. The Navy–geologist interaction influenced the Navy's decision to burn oil, as well as American land policy and tax law. The partnership led to increased government involvement in the oil industry and a prominent role for geologists in shaping federal oil policy.
The author challenges the validity of linking energy consumption and civilization levels and suggests that it might be wise to discard the equation. Variations in how individuals choose to use energy invalidate any strict linkage. The confusion caused by equating physical energy with moral, religious and other types of energy is a result of mixing definable sciences with indefinable values. The energy-civilization equation dates to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, when new energy sources transformed social and economic life and were credited with enhancing civilization. The pessimistic view can also be taken, but the author questions whether declining energy use will lead to the decline of civilization as quotes from 18th - 20th Century thinkers indicate. 14 references.
Economic experiments, or attempts to shape national and local economies with the help of economic theory, have been typical of post-war development efforts. Economic sociologists have explored the role of such experiments to demonstrate how economics - as a set of practices, ideas and technologies - enacts its worlds. This paper examines one such case of high-powered economic theory and its enactment in an emergent West African oil economy by focusing on economist Jeffrey Sachs's advisory project in São Tomé and Príncipe. It pivots on the resource curse', an economic device that has recently gained purchase in global policy circles. This paper argues that economic devices are not simply imposed on pre-arranged worlds. Instead, they collide with and adjust to already existing politico-economic and socio-cultural conditions, resulting in complex articulations. Drawing on ethnographic material, I critique the ability of the resource curse to make sense fully of apprehensions of the past, present and future consequences of extractive industry developments. Contrasting economic accounts of an incipient curse with competing and complementary local accounts of the effects of oil wealth, I propose a new model for the sociological analysis of the variety of articulations into which an economic device, such as the curse, may enter.
Public Culture 12.1 (2000) 115-144
Indonesia's profile in the international imagination has completely changed. From the top of what was called a "miracle," Indonesia fell to the bottom of a "crisis." In the middle of what was portrayed as a timeless political regime, students demonstrated, and, suddenly, the regime was gone. So recently an exemplar of the promise of globalization, overnight Indonesia became the case study of globalization's failures.
The speed of these changes takes one's breath away -- and raises important questions about globalization. Under what circumstances are boom and bust intimately related to each other? If the same economic policies can produce both in quick succession, might deregulation and cronyism sometimes name the same thing -- but from different moments of investor confidence? Such questions run against the grain of economic expertise about globalization, with its discrimination between good and bad kinds of capitalism and policy. Yet the whiggish acrobatics necessary to show how those very economies celebrated as miracles were simultaneously lurking crises hardly seem to tell the whole story. A less pious attitude toward the market may be necessary to consider the specificities of those political economies, like that of Suharto's Indonesia, brought into being together with international finance.
This essay brings us back to the months just before Indonesia so drastically changed, to canoe at the running edge of what turned out to be a waterfall, and thus to think about a set of incidents that can be imagined as a rehearsal for the Asian financial crisis as well as a minor participant in the international disillusion that led to the Suharto regime's downfall. In 1994 a small Canadian gold prospecting company announced a major find in the forests of Kalimantan, Indonesian Borneo. Over the months, the find got bigger and bigger, until it was the biggest gold strike in the world, conjuring memories of the Alaskan Klondike and South Africa's Witwatersrand. Thousands of North American investors put their savings in the company, called Bre-X. First-time investors and retired people joined financial wizards. Whole towns in western Canada invested. The new world of Internet investment blossomed with Bre-X. Meanwhile, Bre-X received continuous coverage in North American newspapers, especially after huge Canadian mining companies and Indonesian officials entered the fray, fighting over the rights to mine Busang, Bre-X's find. The scandal of Indonesian business-as-usual, opened to public scrutiny as corruption, heightened international attention and garnered support for Bre-X. But, in 1997, just when expectation had reached a fevered pitch, Busang was exposed as barren: There was nothing there. Gasps, cries, and law suits rose from every corner. Even now, as I write two years later, the drama rumbles on. The Toronto Stock Exchange is changing its rules to avoid more Bre-Xs. Bre-X law suits set new international standards. Bre-X investors still hope and complain across the Internet, as they peddle the remains of their experiences: jokes, songs, and stock certificates (as wallpaper, historical document, or irreplaceable art, ready to hang). Meanwhile, Indonesian mining officials and copycat prospecting companies scramble to free themselves from the Bre-X story, even as they endlessly reenact its scenes, hoping to rekindle investor enthusiasm. Hope's ashes are inflamed even by ridiculous claims; recently the Bre-X chief geologist, named in many lawsuits, says there is gold at Busang. Who is to prove him wrong?
The Bre-X story exemplifies popular thinking about the pleasures and dangers of international finance and associated dreams of globalization. The story dramatizes North-South inequalities in the new capitalisms; it celebrates the North's excitement about international investment, and the blight of the South's so-called crony capitalisms: business imagined not quite/not white. Painting Southern leaders as rats fighting for garbage, the story also promises new genres of justice for the Northern investor who dares to sue. Finance looks like democracy: The Internet, they say, opens foreign investment to the North American everyman. But the Bre-X story also narrates the perils of the downsized, overcompetitive economy: the sad entrepreneurship of selling worthless stock certificates on-line. As one writer put it, mixing metaphors...
An overview is given of the relevance of "hegemony" to the study of international environmental politics and United States environmental diplomacy. First, the concept of hegemony is examined within the study of international environmental politics. Second, it is argued that in explaining US involvement in the global environmental agenda, hegemony provides an important, albeit incomplete, perspective and needs to be supplemented with other, nonstructural dimensions. Third, the variation in the conduct of US foreign environmental policy with reference to domestic factors is explained. Against this backdrop, an interpretation of US foreign environmental policy and multilateralism's problematic place within it is given.
Twenty-first century access to energy sources depends on a complex system of global markets, vast cross-border infrastructure networks, a small group of primary energy suppliers, and interdependencies with financial markets and technology. This is the context in which energy security has risen high on the policy agenda of governments around the world and the term ‘energy security’ has quietly slipped into the energy lexicon. The limited discourse about the nature of the term or its underlying assumptions has been totally eclipsed by an almost overwhelming focus on securing supplies of primary energy sources and geopolitics. An examination of explicit and inferred definitions finds that the concept of energy security is inherently slippery because it is polysemic in nature, capable of holding multiple dimensions and taking on different specificities depending on the country (or continent), timeframe or energy source to which it is applied. This ‘slipperiness’ poses analytical, prediction and policy difficulties but if explicitly recognised through definitional clarity, new levels of understanding will enrich the policy debate to deal with obstacles impacting on the constantly evolving nature of energy security.
Energy can be a confusing issue to the general public, policymakers, and politicians. Adding energy security to the lexicon has not provided any clarification. To assist in explaining some of the concepts associated with energy security and to show how an individual or organization can improve energy security, this paper introduces the “four ‘R's of energy security”: review (understanding the problem), reduce (using less energy), replace (shifting to secure sources), and restrict (limiting new demand to secure sources).
The U. S. policies in the economic, national security, research and
development, and environmental areas were formulated prior to the 1973 energy
crisis. The establishment of an energy policy that is consistent with other
existing national Policies will be difficult, when the inconsistencies already
existing are considered. Heavily funded breeder reactor development exemplifies
the type of inconsistency existing. It is suggested that a reasonable energy
policy involves nuclear fission playing a minor role, clean-burning fossil fuels
decreasing in importance, and geothermal or solar energy sources becoming
dominant. (68 references) (MCW)