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This article analyses the conditions facing labour within the renewable energy (RE) accumulation strategies of electricity capital. We draw on value-theoretical perspectives developed within Marxist and feminist political economy to understand how labour is being reorganised within the transition to RE. We use value theory to identify key dimensions of RE labour across the exploitation of wage labour and the appropriation of labour-in-nature. We apply this lens to data from existing academic and policy studies on 'employment' and 'environmental' issues in RE value chains. We connect evidence on formal labour market issues such as employment numbers, job quality, and labour organising and state regulation, with research on the socio-ecological conditions of possibility for RE across materials, land and households. We argue that value theory reveals how distributive and sustainability outcomes of RE are a product of how labour is organised in the energy transition. We finish with considerations for union and social movement strategy regarding the scale and scope of green labour agendas within and beyond energy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines a group of intellectual workers who occupy a peripheral but not powerless position in the global economy of knowledge. How do they handle relations with the global metropole, especially in new fields of research where established hierarchies are in question? Three new domains of knowledge - climate change, HIV/AIDS and gender studies - are studied through interviews with 70 active researchers in Southern-tier countries Brazil, South Africa and Australia. A pattern of extraversion, involving active adoption of paradigms from the metropole, is widespread and institutionally supported. Major alternative knowledge formations have not emerged in these domains. However contestations of more specific kinds are frequent. Paradigms are adapted, criticism is offered, activism is engaged, capacities are developed and allegiances sometimes changed. The valorization of local knowledge, which goes beyond the abstractions of universalized paradigms, is particularly significant. Not stark subordination, but a complex collective negotiation characterizes the response of intellectual workers in the Southern tier. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]