Ankit Kumar

A spirited dialog interrogating the identity, importance and impact of energy geographies is long overdue. If energy geographies are to be assessed by the touchstone encompassing the six responses to our original provocation, then we are encouraged to take heart and have reasons to take stock. As demonstrated in these responses, its core is strong yet remains animated by cognate disciplines. Dynamism and diversity continue to characterize this evolving field, ever improved by fiery debate.

Around the world, the environmental crisis is deepening. Rising global temperatures are fuelling socioecological threats and damage with distinctly uneven geographical consequences. Although rapid and drastic reductions in carbon emissions are critical to preventing climate breakdown, our institutional, societal and individual responses have to date fallen short of what is needed. In the context of this urgency, how we respond now will profoundly reshape the geographies of our lives and will continue to do so far into the future. As geographers, we have a crucial role to play not only in analysing and anticipating these changes but also in advocating, as researchers, collaborators, teachers and citizens, for more sustainable futures. Here our speakers—all leading thinkers in environmental geography and currently shaping agenda‐setting themes in Geo: Geography and Environment —address the place of geography in advancing and advocating for more sustainable, lower carbon and fairer socioecological places and futures. They will reflect on their own experiences and research interests and, in doing so, address questions and debates that speak directly to the vision of geography as a space for new, critical and underrepresented ideas in pursuit of fresh viewpoints and solutions to the world's most pressing environmental problems.

This paper critically examines the idea of climate emergency as a motivator for swifter social, cultural, and political change. Climate emergencies are intended to push politicians and citizens to act fast while asserting control over particular agendas and dissolving opposition. Yet, it is not always clear what actions actors might take in response to such an emergency and to what justice outcomes. The paper juxtaposes the politics and discourses from two key moments of political emergency in India: The constitutional emergency of 1975 and the present moment, when, since 2014, an ethnonationalist party in power has systematically dismantled citizens’ rights. The paper travels back and forth between the historical and present emergencies to explore the discourse continuities and the dangerous exclusions that arise under the guise of emergency and urgency. A common concern with the population growth of marginalised groups of people as an ecological and social problem, and population control and reduction as a solution, unites these two phases of the Indian Emergency with influential groups of Western scientists and cultural interlocutors campaigning for a climate emergency. These illiberal measures show points of consensus between groups that self-identify as liberal and concerned with climate justice and those who fall into the category of far-right ethnonationalist politics. This illustrates a certain insidious agreement on racialised emergency responses to climate change among traditionally politically unaligned actors. Instead of centring justice questions that make those with more power and privilege accountable, climate emergency proponents, in the best case, dilute this by emphasising the population question and, in the worst case, use the emergency arguments to target marginalised citizens while shifting attention away from the powerful. The paper argues that climate emergency arguments are counterproductive to climate justice, and their increasing acceptance and normalisation reveal a climate justice emergency.

This themed intervention emerges from a Chair's Plenary during the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) Annual Conference 2023 on the theme of ‘Climate Changed Geographies’ and addresses geographers and allied social scientists. Drawing on Amitav Ghosh's provocation, it asks if our work on climate change is facing a crisis of imagination. Human geography has historically framed climate change as primarily an environmental problem and fallen short of imagining it as a concern central to the discipline. This, in turn, has prevented human geography from becoming a concern central to climate change. Human geographers have been relegated to primarily being analysts of societal responses rather than their organisers. Following Ghosh, this themed intervention frames climate change as a crisis of imagination and brings together seven scholars to offer some (re)imaginations for this (climate) crisis. The intervention identifies Western hegemony, and a continuing desire to maintain and extend it, as a central cause for this crisis, and makes space mainly for scholars from/of the Global South. Emerging from a varied set of positionalities, they raise three main points. First, historical injustices are central to defining the climate change problem and devising its solutions. Second, the question of coloniality – legitimacy of diverse knowledges, extraction of knowledges, hegemony of knowledges – and a need for pushback against structures of knowledge production that maintain Western hegemony, stays prominent. Third, the idea of reimagining relationships based on solidarity, shared but differential vulnerabilities, responsibilities and care becomes prominent. Scholarly work is unquestionably structured by and sometimes props up the systems of racism, imperialism, violence and hierarchies of power. A profound and radical response to climate change can only come through systems change, and our job is to analyse, initiate, and accelerate those justice‐oriented systems changes which will most effectively deaccelerate climate change.

While a range of rapidly proliferating crises shaped by anthropogenic climate change is profound and generating a raft of spatially-centred energy research, energy geographies does not occupy a central position within emergent climate scholarship, nor within broader disciplinary confines of human geography. The centrality of energy is undeniable, and even in light of the considerable history of scholarship combined with the fundamentally spatial nature of energy systems and transitions, energy geographies endure an occluded existence subsumed. This paper offers a critique of the subdiscipline's ongoing marginality while articulating its salience before offering strategies to help advance the repositioning of energy geographies from the periphery towards a more central position.

Jugaad is an Indian name for versatility and improvisation, a sensibility for improvisation, an ability for improvisation and an enabling of improvisation. This paper proposes the idea of Jugaad Infrastructure for versatile socio‐material infrastructure arrangements that inhabit and thrive in the messy aesthetics of everyday life. It does so by extending the focus of infrastructure geographies from ‘big stuff’ to little devices such as solar lamps that gain significance when deployed in big numbers. The paper advances two ideas. First, it argues that jugaad circumvents the formal–informal boundary set by designers. By piercing this boundary, jugaad affords more fluid socio‐material relationships involving infrastructures and their users. In so doing, jugaad affords versatility. Second, it develops the idea of Jugaad Infrastructure. Jugaad Infrastructure folds two things into it. First, infrastructures that are designed in ways that facilitate jugaad, albeit within firmly maintained boundaries and attempt to capitalise on people's aptitude for jugaad to take different forms, inhabit different spaces, enable different purposes and all this while somewhat retaining their shape. They are easy to maintain. This helps them travel to, function and stay in different places. In this way, small devices spread around in large numbers to become big infrastructure. Second, it represents the ensembles of fluid socio‐material relationships and resources involving infrastructures and their users through which infrastructures are tailored to ‘better’ fit everyday lives and needs. Jugaad Infrastructure inhabits the liminal spaces of struggle between designers claiming jugaad as a limited practice that leads to stable innovations and users deploying unlimited jugaadas an everyday practice of socio‐material flux. The paper is based on qualitative research conducted in India during 2012–2013, 2016 and 2017 using participant observations, discussions and interviews with users, entrepreneurs, market players and designers, in addition to documentary evidence from reports and websites.

The Anthropocene and associated sense of crises, most prominently climate change, have opened up an urgency versus justice dilemma. While an epochal thinking drives the urgency, it is essential to attend to the ruptures illustrated by historical events like colonisation that shape the fabric of the Anthropocene and its impacts. Historical patterns of extraction and racialisation that underline the Anthropocene and climate change fit neatly into the schema for contemporary and future energy transitions shaped by an apolitical discourse of urgency and emergency. Attending to the historical ruptures helps root universal and apolitical urgency in justice for/from particular places and peoples and reframe ideas like climate emergency and climate crisis as more accurate climate justice emergency and climate justice crisis.

The Anthropocene has thrown at us a challenge of balancing urgency and justice. Urgency brought about by myriad environmental crises, most prominently being climate change, and justice that any adequate response to these crises needs to be rooted in. This is a dilemma because we need pathways for urgent action on climate mitigation and energy transitions while centring the slow and considered work that historical and contemporary justice questions demand. This is because while the Anthropocene calls humans to unite, its impacts have been, are, and will be, felt differently. The Anthropocene narrative's framing of a universal humanity connects to a long and dangerous history of what is human and what qualifies as humanity, a history of colonising, racializing, and dehumanising black, brown, and indigenous bodies around the world. We need narratives of the Anthropocene that confirm the importance of decolonising political, economic, and scientific institutions, not to deny urgency, but to foster a more political Anthropocene that creates space for new narratives of justice. The question then, that this paper initiates, is: How to progress anti–and de‐colonial thought for energy geographies within a somewhat colonising discourse of urgency in/of the Anthropocene? To think of energy geographies of/in the Anthropocene, one that explicitly embeds within itself justice, this paper outlines three areas of work. First, the paper proposes a need to engage with and learn from energy histories other than those from the Euro‐American contexts. Second, it urges more focus on the question of difference. Third, the paper proposes a deeper engagement with critical race theory and postcolonial/decolonial theories to investigate questions of justice. These proposals are provocations to open energy geographies to a wider range of questions, approaches, and concerns.

Smartness in smart grids and cities is an assemblage of devices that produce data as truth claims and deploy new modes of governance focused on chal (deception, cunning) and bal (power) with a promise to reduce losses and maximise profits. Building on postcolonial geographies, the paper argues that chal (छल) and bal (बल) are central to understanding the deployment of smart grids in India. Managers use the idea of the practice of chal and bal by political citizen-subjects, and the disorder of governance this causes, to justify the deployment of smart infrastructure. However, the paper shows that smartness can be understood as automation, and deployment from a distance, of chal and bal by a capital-state nexus to counter the chaliya (छलिया) (deceptive/cunning/cheat/trickster) citizen-subjects. Planners and implementers expect data and digitalisation to bring order by (re)training and excluding lower-level workers and consumers. These promise to reduce resource losses, making electricity utilities profitable. Rather than being distinctly corporate or clearly in the domain of the state, smart is situated at the fracture of public and private resources, and political and civil spaces. By developing a postcolonial analysis of smart grids and focusing on the ‘inbetweeners’, electricity utility staff and middle-class citizen-subjects, the paper furthers the understanding of smartness and subalternity of elites.