From Transition to Transformations: Commoning Securities, Green Practices and Livelihoods
Transition has become a keyword for the global shift from a fossil-fuel-intensive economy to a more sustainable one. Yet, it is surprising that researchers and policymakers of contemporary energy transitions have not paid sufficient attention or drawn parallels with the non-linear, unpredictable and multi-directional transition for which there is an actual case of the 1990s postsocialism. The main aim of the project is thus to work towards a more inclusive, critical and attentive approach to transition by employing a conceptual approach that draws together yet uncombined literature, policy-focused research and everyday geographies. The research, thus, develops a framework of transformations based on literature and a strong presence in Ida-Virumaa, an apt site for research on transitions and transformations as it has undergone multiple interconnected crises. The project integrates interviews, media, and document analysis with collaborative, artistic and co-creative methods.
Aims and objectives:
The main aim of the project is to work towards a new transition framework that acknowledges conflicting and turbulent transformations while capturing developments at the intersection of macro and micro scales.
With the approach centred on conceptual learning between literatures, the first objective is building on the conceptual shifts from transition to transformations within the existing literature about postsocialist experiences, which can then inform green transitions.
The second objective is to have a more inclusive, critical and attentive approach to transition in the scholarship and policy practices.
Research Questions:
RQ1: How do previous transformations, such as the societal shifts from the 1990s provide lessons that inform, affect and potentially revise the current green challenges of multiple transformations in scholarship and policy narratives to avoid falling into traps of marginalisation and peripheralisation?
RQ2: How would the overlapping security challenges of military, environment, energy and livelihoods intersect with one another and express in the (geo)politics of transitions?
RQ3: How are postsocialist and green transformations experienced in everyday lives and how have locals adapted or resisted these changes?
The project hypothesises that intersecting energy and postsocialist transitions helps to generate a novel account of transition framework that is more attentive to inequalities and polarisations, builds from the experiences and thus incorporates participatory approaches and identities, and pays attention to the geopolitical shifts in terms of security (incl military, societal and energy security).
Work packages
The project is divided into thematic work packages (WPs), ranging from an umbrella WP1 that maps relations among transition literatures, including socio-technical transitions, postsocialism, just transitions, and degrowth, to general project management. In between are core packages where most of the empirical work happens. These three are:
WP 2 focuses on the intersection of transitions and (geo)political re-bordering that creates complex, overarching and interconnected security challenges where military defense, environmental sustainability, economic stability and social cohesion are entangled. The WP scrutinises how the deepening strategic, civilisational and geopolitical fault lines between the EU/West/NATO and Russia shape national policy decisions and local livelihoods in this borderland.
WP 3 focuses on the process of commoning within transition. Thus, the WP intersects contemporary everyday practices of labour, care and reproduction in terms of socio-natural assemblages with past practices and future imaginations. The WP looks into daily geographies of (in)formal energy and sustainability practices and common initiatives, including grassroots climate mitigation practices such as repair and reuse in dacha communities or the usage of common yards of block-house buildings
WP 4 positions the region’s energy workers at the intersection of postsocialist and energy transition. Throughout the postsocialist transition in Estonia, the Russian-speaking working class has been perceived as a socially vulnerable and potentially disloyal, felt particularly intensively in the context where their daily labour contributes to energy security. The focus in this WP is on the current and former brown and green energy workers and family members on livelihoods, memories of transition and experience with green transition. At the centre are the lived realities of energy transition.
