Understanding rural energy transitions through the spatial dynamics between rural change and energy system transformation

Abstract

Globally, rural areas provide resources and numerous locations for fueling the energy transition. Energy transitions have the potential to reshape the physical and social dimensions of rural territories. Despite evident interdependencies between the evolution of rurality and the progression of the energy transition in the rural world, the analysis of their interconnectedness remains markedly limited. The conceptualization of a ‘rural energy transition’ is still scarcely mentioned in social research, and the necessity of further attention to new rural spatialities characterized by processes of materialization and imagination of the energy transition is increasingly evident. By bringing together the analysis of energy transition and rural change – which usually appear as separate academic debates – this contribution seeks to understand the rural energy transitions by referring to Lefebvre's Theory of the Production of Space. In light of this, the paper proposes an analytical instrument for grasping and interpreting the complexity of the localized rural energy transitions in a novel integrative way that puts at the heart of its comprehension the relation of co-production between energy transition space and the totality of the rural space. The article offers a coherent approach for both analyzing rural energy transition by integrating material and immaterial dimensions, representations and imaginaries, and multiple social practices that are inevitably anchored to wider rural changes; and concomitantly understanding how they develop along a continuum ranging from extractive to emancipatory logics.