Pathways to Decarbonisation: advancing new political and geographical perspectives

Call for Papers, AAG 2015, Chicago April 21 – 25

Convenors: Harriet Bulkeley, Andrés Luque-Ayala, Simon Marvin (Durham), Matthew J. Hoffmann  and Stephen Bernstein (Toronto)

As we enter a Post-Kyoto era, scholars and practitioners working on the governance of climate change agree on the painful and growing mismatch between what is needed in order to get on the path to decarbonization and what the world has agreed to do. Yet, whilst formal pathways to decarbonisation appear elusive, there is a growing set of dispersed initiatives experimenting with innovative ways of ‘becoming low carbon’. Analysing these initiatives has revealed that decarbonisation is largely a political —rather than technical— process, which is not likely to be achieved through individual agency alone but through strategies that alter larger socio-political-economic structures and socio-technical systems. Taking pathways to decarbonisation seriously means a shift from an ‘extractive’ model of low carbon transitions (reducing emissions/point source pollution) to an ‘embedded’ model of decarbonisation as requiring systemic change. It also means an acknowledgment of decarbonisation as contingent and often unplanned, non-linear and uncertain, yet with an understanding of the need to foster supportive conditions and specific policies that facilitate imagining and implementing a low carbon future. Decarbonisation is then not confined to setting targets to reduce emissions, but involves a host of more or less explicit ways in which carbon comes to be problematized and acted upon in relation to a multiplicity of scales and settings, such as the dwelling, the neighbourhood, the city, the nation and beyond.

This session seeks to examine, compare and contrast different approaches towards understanding the politics and geographies of pathways to decarbonisation. We seek to unpack the notion of pathway itself, advance conceptual understandings of the nature and dynamics of low carbon pathways, and bring together scholars working on the identification of the key aspects behind pathway viability, lock-in, dependency, coalition and implementation. We seek contributions examining how decarbonisation pathways are being made, both at material as well as discursive levels, including those that examine: how agents and authorities operating at different scales are re-making infrastructures in more or less low carbon ways; which organisations, either operating in particular contexts or across them (as e.g. national agencies, transnational networks) are serving as ‘intermediaries’ for low carbon transitions; and which rationalities, techniques, practices, artefacts, and subjectivities are being shaped and promoted in the configuration of low carbon sites and spaces. Finally, we encourage contributions that examine how this process of promoting decarbonisation in turn results in a change in the operation of power in society, in the nature of socio-political and economic systems, and has implications for issues of development and justice.

Abstracts of 250 words should be should be submitted to [log in to unmask] for consideration for inclusion in the session by October 10^th 2014. Participants will be notified by October 17^th and will then need to register for the conference and provide their PIN to the organisers by October 24^th in order to be included in the panel.

-- 
Andrés Luque-Ayala

Research Associate, Department of Geography

Durham University, United Kingdom

Tel: +44 (0) 7906651142
Email: [log in to unmask]