This article explores the intersections between energy, gender, and labor and the multiple and multidirectional transitions involved in the expansion of renewable forms of energy. Drawing on ethnographic research in the country of Tanzania between 2019 and 2024, from the island of Zanzibar, rural Singida, and peri-urban Arusha, it examines how gender organizes social life, space, labor, and the distribution of new energy resources. Rooted in interview data that tracks how people in diverse households understand the relative benefits of household solar and grid electricity, this article demonstrates how electricity expansion initiatives have reinforced gendered and spatial binaries, as well as brought about social change that undermines and unsettles them. It argues that the uncritical prioritization of “productive uses of energy” comes with problematic costs for women and broader goals of energy transition.
While electricity and electric grids have been a prominent focus in energy infrastructure scholarship, the role of energy efficiency in managing electricity infrastructure and services remains underexplored. This article argues that energy efficiency, often framed as a technical goal of doing more with less, is deeply entangled with ideologies about the state, energy consumers, and electricity provisioning. Drawing on anthropological and Science and Technology Studies literature, it reviews how electric grids have historically shaped political authority and citizenship and explores how energy efficiency operates as both a technical and cultural project influencing ideas of “good” energy consumption. It calls for greater scholarly attention to the role of energy efficiency in shaping sociomaterial relations within the home. Through a case study of Colorado's Weatherization Assistance Program, the article shows how US energy efficiency retrofits are shaped by neoliberal ideologies and prescriptive notions of the “good energy consumer.”
The promises and pitfalls of electric vehicles (EVs) are well-documented. EVs can decarbonize the automotive sector and generate “green-collar” jobs, but they rely on extractive, racialized supply chains and perpetuate an inequitable paradigm of vehicular mobility. While anthropologists have not extensively explored EVs, we argue that anthropology offers essential methodological and theoretical insights for confronting this complexity. Specifically, this article draws from anthropological literature to theorize what we call the EV ecosystem : the complex transnational network of corporations, governments, communities, geological formations, and other life forms that connects the multiple phases of EV development and deployment under racial capitalism, namely: raw mineral extraction; mineral processing; manufacturing; adoption/vehicle sales; recycling; and infrastructure development. As a concept, the EV ecosystem aims to inform ethnographic research that corrects for the shortcomings of non-ethnographic literature on EVs, including the compartmentalization of the EV supply chain and an inattention to racial capitalism.
Latin America is deeply entangled with the technologies and infrastructures of low-carbon energy systems, mostly through the mining for transition materials and the installation of renewable energy projects. This review article highlights the history, contemporary panorama, and future of green energy in Latin America. The article also attends to the production of alternative transition models from Indigenous, Afro-descendant, worker, and activist perspectives. We approach these interventions as emergent scholarship that challenges traditional extractive models. We also draw on our fieldwork in Colombia and Costa Rica as examples of energy conflicts and possible energy futures. Through these examples, we call for more visible critical social science scholarship on the green energy transition, especially on efforts that strive to restore justice and well-being in frontline communities.
Recent efforts to mitigate atmospheric carbon levels have spurred advancements in carbon capture and storage (CCS) and carbon capture, conversion, and utilization (CCCU) technologies, which some consider critical infrastructure for the global energy transition and others view as delaying more ambitious climate policy. This article reviews research on CCS and CCCU—described by some as carbon management technologies (CMT)—asking how scholars and decision-makers evaluate energy technologies for climate change mitigation and consider their potential consequences. Despite a range of critical studies on CCS, current research on CCCU technologies tends to focus on top-down implementation and techno-economic challenges. Further, while extensive work has been published on the technological, economic, and policy dimensions of both CCS and CCCU, scant attention has been paid to the justice concerns resulting from these technologies. This review article draws on approaches from critical social science research on energy transitions, particularly from work focused on the more advanced precursor technology, CCS. We then employ an energy justice lens to scrutinize power dynamics in CMT more broadly, with a specific focus on CCCU technology.
