From Global Justice to Local Perceptions: Navigating Fairness within Energy Transitions

What do justice and fairness mean in developing ‘green’ energy transitions? What is an ‘energy injustice’? What does it mean to have ‘fair’ energy systems? How do scale, time, and demographics change how we might answer such questions? In this talk, Dr. Nathan Wood will explore the rapidly growing field of energy justice to address how shifting its core questions and theoretical foundations can contribute to more ‘just’ energy transitions. He will illustrate how the language and theory of justice have been used to conceptualize, testify to, and connect energy issues conventionally viewed as purely technological and economic systems to a diversity of underlying socio-political and ethical problems. Charting the origins of predominant understandings of energy justice, he will critically explore the developments required to reconcile the tensions between local acceptability and the global justice issues which underpin the need for green energy transitions. The talk concludes that a more open and reflexive energy justice field, better integrated with both environmental and climate justice discourses, is required to conceptualize and realize just energy transitions.

Join us in Salisbury Laboratories 305

Dr. Nathan Wood, Visiting Scholar

Department of Integrative and Global Studies 

Friday, January 13th 3:00 PM - 4:30 PM

More about Dr. Nathan Wood Dr. Wood is a Postdoctoral Fellow and Coordinator at the Fair Energy Transition Centre based between Utrecht University and Eindhoven University of Technology, in the Netherlands. Prior to this, he was a visiting scholar at the Rachael Carson Centre in Munich. He previously held a fellowship teaching applied ethics at the University of Leeds where he also completed his Ph.D. titled Energy, Capability, and Justice: a foundation for a normative account of energy systems. His doctoral work focused on using moral and political philosophy to better understand the ethical problems which stem from energy systems and their governance. More broadly, his research focuses on understanding the normativity - that is, how we think and reason the world ought to be - in grounded justice trajectories, particularly within energy and environmental justice discourses. He is currently working on a number of topics; establishing a normative energy ethics agenda, tensions between transition agendas in the Global North and South, critical approaches to energy justice and egalitarian approaches to climate change mitigation. He has a strong interest in procedural justice and decision-making within complex systems, as well as, the use of eudaemonic conceptions of well-being, such as the capabilities approach, in understanding how a person or group’s interests intersect with these systems.