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Infrastructuring environmental (in)justice: green hydrogen, Indigenous sovereignty and the political geographies of energy technologies.

Authors :
Fladvad, Benno
Source :
Geographica Helvetica. 2023, Vol. 78 Issue 4, p493-505. 13p.
Publication Year :
2023

Abstract

Against the backdrop of ongoing planetary crises, this paper discusses the ambivalent relationship between large-scale material infrastructure, particularly energy technologies, and environmental justice. Inspired by relational and practice-oriented understandings of infrastructure, it develops a conceptual approach for energy-related environmental justice research, which is exemplarily applied to the emerging issue of green hydrogen, drawing on brief insights from the hydrogen frontrunner countries Colombia and Canada and associated struggles over Indigenous sovereignty. This "infrastructural lens", based on three epistemological shifts – from infrastructure to "infrastructuring", from social imaginaries to "sociotechnical imaginaries" and from human infrastructuring to "planetary infrastructuring" – provides deeper insights into how patterns of justice and injustice are practically infrastructured and what kinds of imaginaries they evoke or are entangled with. Moreover, it makes tangible how practices of infrastructuring can themselves become part of a broader political ontology, that is, of struggles over ways of being and ways of relating to planet Earth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Details

Language :
English
ISSN :
00167312
Volume :
78
Issue :
4
Database :
Academic Search Index
Journal :
Geographica Helvetica
Publication Type :
Academic Journal
Accession number :
174709766
Full Text :
https://doi.org/10.5194/gh-78-493-2023