Jakob Grandin

As renewable energy sources increasingly outcompete fossil fuels on cost and efficiency, novel questions arise around how, when, and where renewables can displace fossil energy. We need to understand fossil fuel displacement as a sociopolitical and spatial process. In this article, we focus particularly on the scales and practices of legitimation through which fossil fuel displacement occurs. We advance an understanding of how such displacement is conditioned by incumbent multiscalar arrangements and of how these can be overcome. We suggest that there are different practices of displacement that operate across multiple scales—here conceptualized as discursive, financial, institutional, and infrastructural—and use them to develop an analysis of solar rollout and fossil phase-out in Portugal. Our analysis shows that although renewables have partially displaced fossil fuels both discursively and financially, they have not yet displaced the historically large-scale nature of energy generation. Rather, the persistence of fossil fuel geographies and sectoral institutional arrangements keeps the displacements of energy transition at a spatial remove from citizens.

Literatures on sustainability transition and transformation increasingly emphasise the role of spatiality and local agency. This paper argues that relational thinking has much more to offer this debate than presently acknowledged, particularly in revealing the geographical interconnections between dispersed nodes of action and innovation. We use relationality to show the interconnections at work in exchanging and negotiating sustainability interventions between cities and across scales. Using the mass transit planning process in Addis Ababa as a point of entry, we trace how the city’s transformation is negotiated at the intersection of local agency, the Ethiopian national political setting and international networks. A host of actors from different scales come together as transformation is assembled by aligning extensive local experience with elements mobilised from elsewhere. This relational mobilisation perspective arguably infuses hope into the debate, because it opens new ways of identifying seemingly insignificant actions and actors elsewhere and recognising them as potential drivers of change.