Ryan Stock

Utility-scale solar development in India has dispossessed peasants of land and livelihoods. Smallholders alienated from land have not been equitably remunerated, rehabilitated, nor offered employment at new solar parks. Yet it remains unclear which modalities of dispossession are used across solar sites. Drawing on mixed methods fieldwork from the Gujarat Solar Park and the Kurnool Solar Park, this study advances research on the processes of land dispossession by examining the following research questions: 1) Which constellation of actors and institutions facilitate land dispossession for solar development in India; 2) Through which modalities do these actors and institutions conduct solar-induced land dispossessions? We find actors and institutions behind solar park development in India function as agents of dispossession. Wielding coercive inscription devices that include land acquisition laws, wasteland categorizations and iterative titling, they seize peasant land in service of private and financial firms to underwrite the rollout of large-scale solar interventions.

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.

Widely considered a success story of climate multilateralism, imperial geopolitics of the global North enabled by state development brokerage have manifested gendered energy injustices in the Upper West region of Ghana. The recently commissioned Kaleo Lawra solar plant (35 MW) was developed by the Volta River Authority in a region beleaguered by economic and energy poverty, receiving assistance from Elecnor SA (Spain), Tractebel Engineering (Germany) and funding from Kreditanstalt Für Wiederaufbau (Germany). This project also emerges out of the G20 Compact with Africa and Germany's Marshall Plan with Africa, elaborated in accordance with policy mandates of gender equality. Drawing from mixed methods fieldwork and the literatures of energy geographies, geopolitical ecology and feminist geography, our study reveals land enclosures for the project have dispossessed marginalized women of access to vital firewood and economic trees, exacerbating their economic and energy poverty. Instead of lighting up the lives of those left in the dark, the solar plant exemplifies broader dispossessionary energy transitions in the global South that sustain colonial-capitalist production relations and Northern hegemony under the auspices of saving a world-system in crisis.

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.