Exploring the Role of Identities and Perceptions of the Future in a Post-coal Mining Region: The Demolition of Andorra Coal-fired Cooling Towers (Spain) as a Tipping Point

AbstractIn May 2022, the last cooling tower of the coal-fired power plant in the Spanish region of Andorra in Teruel province was demolished. After forty years in operation such an event had a huge emotional effect on the local population, since much of the local identity and tradition was built around this industrial emblem. On the one hand, it represented a final symbolic farewell to a way of life around coal, now perceived to have inevitably ceased to exist. On the other hand, it highlighted the need to accelerate the full regional transformation towards a new socio-economic structure whose agents of change, content and new identities were not yet well-defined. Our research explores the role of identities and perceptions of the future as key constraining or enabling factors in tipping former carbon-intensive regions towards clean energy and sustainable development pathways. Understanding how local populations see their uncertainties about the future, and examining other views on relative deprivation and inequality, are central in developing enabling governance arrangements and continuous learning feedback loops required in rapid socio-energy transformations. We found out that embracing transformative change towards green transformations may entail adopting more diversified, self-defined complex forms of collective sense-making processes based on project identities.