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Johannes Stripple

Johannes Stripple

Associate Professor | Senior Lecturer | Principal Investigator BECC

Johannes Stripple

Towards a material politics of socio-technical transitions : Navigating decarbonisation pathways in Malmö

Author

  • Johannes Stripple
  • Harriet Bulkeley

Summary, in English

As the politics of climate change shift from the design of international institutions to the pursuit of decarbonisation across multiple sites, researchers are increasingly calling attention to the geography and politics of transitions. We suggest that recent work has so far been limited by its rather incongruous focus on power as a capacity held by individual agents on the basis of the resources which they command, such that the material and relational aspects of socio-technical systems and their dynamics are neglected. In this paper, we bring critical political geographical perspectives to bear on the question of the politics of decarbonisation. Recasting decarbonisation as a matter of political geography then opens up questions of its socio-spatial configuration, its indeterminate and provisional nature as well as the ways in which decarbonisation politics are socio-materially constituted. In Malmö, a city renowned for its attempts to direct urban development towards low carbon futures, we find that decarbonisation is enacted through practices of legibility, demonstration and agreement. These serve to navigate particular junctures and form new socio-material connections and realignments between carbon, capital and infrastructure. We suggest that pathways to decarbonisation are not going to be created by any kind of linear blueprint but through processes that allow them to realign and reorder socio-material relations in new sites and domains across the urban fabric.

Department/s

  • Department of Political Science
  • BECC: Biodiversity and Ecosystem services in a Changing Climate

Publishing year

2019

Language

English

Pages

52-63

Publication/Series

Political Geography

Volume

72

Document type

Journal article

Publisher

Routledge

Topic

  • Human Geography
  • Political Science (excluding Public Administration Studies and Globalization Studies)

Keywords

  • Climate change
  • Decarbonisation
  • Materiality
  • Politics
  • Socio-material connections
  • Socio-technical transition

Status

Published

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 0962-6298