Time, history and meaning-making in research on people's relations with renewable energy technologies (RETs) – A conceptual proposal

The research field of the social acceptance of renewable energy technologies (RETs) has shown that people as central actors in current low-carbon energy transitions relate to RET projects and associated processes and infrastructures in diverse ways. These relations depend on the local context and history in which RET projects are deployed. Despite being an everyday reality for all actors involved, the experience of time has not been of central concern for this research field. References to temporality in social acceptance work are both omni-present and frequently vague, used as a mere backdrop to the main story; most research has examined local residents' responses at a specific moment in a project's life cycle; some consider RET projects as independent from histories of infrastructure and place and people's relations with RETs as void of past experience. This paper advocates for a deeper engagement with time in the field. Based on a milestone literature review highlighting how time and history have been tackled in analyzing local residents' relations with RET projects in specific case contexts so far, we propose differentiating physical from historical time dynamics and by developing this distinction we offer a first conceptual framework for considering time in people's relations with RET projects. Through this, our proposal contributes to recent critical work in social acceptance research of RETs and provides analytical tools for researchers who intend to approach the temporal embeddedness of people's relations to RET projects.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Politicizing hydroelectric power plants in Portugal: Spatio-temporal injustices and psychosocial impacts of renewable energy colonialism in the Global North

The extent to which infrastructures being deployed for a postcarbon transition can be considered sustainable has been increasingly scrutinized within the critical turn in energy justice research. However, the focus therein tends to be on how new megaprojects still reveal Global North–Global South colonial relations and energy-related injustices. In this paper, we aim to contribute to widening critical energy justice research by illustrating how it needs to also consider the spatio-temporalities of renewable energy colonialism in the Global North. To that end, we undertake a psychosocial historiography of selected large-scale hydroelectric power plants in Portugal, from the twentieth century to the present day. This historiography is undertaken via archival data and interviews. Our analysis illustrates how hydrocolonialism has been enacted–discursively, infrastructurally, and psychosocially–in rural areas in Portugal, across different socio-political regimes; and also how it can be contested, by identifying some examples of resistance.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio