Energy materiality : a conceptual review of multi-disciplinary approaches

This jointly authored essay reviews recent scholarship in the social sciences, broadly understood, that focuses on the materiality of energy. Although this work is extraordinarily diverse in its disciplinary and interdisciplinary influences and its theoretical and methodological commitments, we discern four areas of convergence and divergence that we term the locations, uses, relationalities, and analytical roles of energy materiality. We trace these convergences and divergences through five recent scholarly conversations: materiality as a constraint on actors’ behavior; historical energy systems; mobility, space and scale; discourse and power via energy materialities; and energy becoming material.Peer reviewe

“The Most Eastern of the West, the Most Western of the East”: Energy-Transport Infrastructures and Regional Politics of the Periphery in Turkey

The construction of railroads, highways, pipelines, tunnels, and bridges is a result of an imagined construction of regions and in return helps solidify such imaginations. Critics of the role of technological advancement in fostering social, economic, political, and cultural integration between centers and peripheries argue that many such projects remain as political dreamscapes instead of serving as successful examples of transregional integration. Nevertheless, new political dreamscapes give way to new client networks from the European peripheries, solidified by real material networks of energy and transport. Currently promoting itself as a bridge and energy hub between Europe and Asia, Turkey champions such infrastructural developmentalism. This article examines how some political dreamscapes of energy-transport infrastructures, which are imagined to connect Eurasia to Europe via Turkey, relate to their actual construction. At a time when hopes for Turkey’s political integration with its surrounding regions have waned, I critically interrogate whether economic integration by means of material infrastructures for energy and transport can substitute for political forms of integration

Sociotechnical agendas: reviewing future directions for energy and climate research

The field of science and technology studies (STS) has introduced and developed a “sociotechnical” perspective that has been taken up by many disciplines and areas of inquiry. The aims and objectives of this study are threefold: to interrogate which sociotechnical concepts or tools from STS are useful at better understanding energy-related social science, to reflect on prominent themes and topics within those approaches, and to identify current research gaps and directions for the future. To do so, the study builds on a companion project, a systematic analysis of 262 articles published from 2009 to mid-2019 that categorized and reviewed sociotechnical perspectives in energy social science. It identifies future research directions by employing the method of “co-creation” based on the reflections of sixteen prominent researchers in the field in late 2019 and early 2020. Drawing from this co-created synthesis, this study first identifies three main areas of sociotechnical perspectives in energy research (sociotechnical systems, policy, and expertise and publics) with 15 topics and 39 subareas. The study then identifies five main themes for the future development of sociotechnical perspectives in energy research: conditions of systematic change; embedded agency; justice, power, identity and politics; imaginaries and discourses; and public engagement and governance. It also points to the recognized need for pluralism and parallax: for research to show greater attention to demographic and geographical diversity; to stronger research designs; to greater theoretical triangulation; and to more transdisciplinary approaches

Red Gas : Russia and the Origins of European Energy Dependence

This book provides an alternative approach to analyzing Western Europe's much-debated dependence on Russian natural gas. The actual and potential consequences of this dependence have in recent years become a growing concern both in individual importing countries and at the level of the European Union. Russian gas exports have come to decisively influence EU-Russia relations and there is nowadays hardly any aspect of these relations that can be discussed without, directly or indirectly, taking into account natural gas. But despite the central importance of Russian natural gas exports in present-day European and Russian affairs, little attention has been paid to the political and economic decisions that – starting in the late 1960s – paved the way for large-scale imports of Russian gas. Applying a systems and risk perspective on international energy relations, author Per Högselius investigates how and why governments, businesses, engineers and other actors sought to promote – and oppose– the establishment of an extensive East-West natural gas regime that seemed to overthrow the fundamental logic of the Cold War.QC 20130114</p

The Dynamics of Innovation in Eastern Europe -Lessons from Estonia

The overall interest pursued in this thesis is how the former socialist economies of Central and Eastern Europe can build strong and dynamic systems of innovation. The purpose of the thesis is to investigate the dynamics and evolution of the telecommunications system of innovation in Estonia from the late Soviet period to Estonia's EU accession, and to provide an in-depth explanation of how innovation has been enabled to occur in the system. Underlying the study is the empirical observation that the transition from socialism to capitalism in Central and Eastern Europe is a simultaneous process of, on the one hand, a transformation of the old Soviet-era structures into something new, and on the other hand, a reorientation from being deeply integrated economically with other Central and East European countries towards a new integration with the global capitalist system. From a systems-theoretical perspective these two processes can be expected to be closely interrelated. In order to understand and explain the emergence of new East European systems of innovation, the thesis therefore takes into account both system-internal processes of change in Estonia as well as the relationships between the Estonian system and its foreign environment. Based on a case-study methodology and recent theorizing on systems of innovation, the thesis shows that the socialist historical heritage, and in particular inherited competencies, have been used in highly creative ways for generating dynamic innovation in post-socialist Estonia. The thesis also uncovers the complex and multifaceted ways in which the geographical and cultural proximity to Sweden and Finland has been creatively used as a powerful resource in the pursuit of building the Estonian system of innovation in telecommunications. Moreover, the thesis demonstrates that it has been possible for an East European system of innovation to develop highly creative domestic dynamics without necessarily imitating Western system trajectories or styles of innovation. The results are also shown to have important theoretical implications for the study of systems of innovation