‘Comparative imagination’ for Just Transitions #1: The hard but rewarding work of developing a shared language.

In ‘Thinking cities through elsewhere,’ the British geographer Jennifer Robinson ( UCL Department of Geography ) challenges us to ask what it takes to develop a truly global perspective on the crucial societal issues of today. Too often, theory development in Europe and other places in the ‘Global North’ dominates academic work. It is not uncommon for a PhD thesis in, say, India or Senegal, to be largely based on theories and concepts developed in 'northern contexts'. In doing so, it may implicitly import context-specific assumptions about what the world looks like, including what ‘cities,’ ‘hospitals,’ and ‘houses’ are or should be. To take seriously global developments like ‘energy transitions,’ ‘climate change,’ and ‘urbanisation’ requires a conversation encompassing “a multiplicity of urban experiences” Robinson argues, a comparative imagination that is. In her words, it requires all of us to “open more opportunities to think through elsewhere and build methodologies and practices that require such conversations to be intrinsically open to revision, making space for insights originating from anywhere.”

In a series of three articles we, Megan Davies , Stuti Haldar , and Jesse Hoffman , will describe how we have tried to create such opportunities for a ‘global’ conversation in the ReSET project. ReSET is an international project focused on shaping just energy transitions, involving teams from India, Germany, South Africa, and the Netherlands.

"We argue that developing a shared language is difficult but crucial for a collective understanding of energy transitions and how they can align with goals for a more just and humane world."

At the heart of our three articles is a two-week meeting of the ReSET team in India in March 2024, hosted by our team members from the Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS). In this first article, we will focus on the development of a shared conceptual language for studying the transition from fossil to renewable energy in diverse global contexts. We will argue that developing a shared (visual) language is difficult but crucial for a collective understanding of energy transitions and how they can align with goals for a more just and humane world, ultimately creating a just energy transition.

The hard but rewarding road to developing a shared language

In March 2021, the ReSET team met in bustling Mumbai before continuing to the home base of the IIHS in Bengaluru, located on the Mysore plateau in Southern India—a city with a population of 14 million and growing. While life on the Mysore plateau was once known for its pleasant climate year-round—which explains the many sanatoria in Bengaluru—rapid urbanisation and climate change have led to insufferably hot and dry summers in the city. Yet in March, during our visit, the weather was pleasantly warm and dry.?

This visit to Bengaluru came about three years into the ReSET project. Our time together marked an important conclusion for us: we had finally landed on a shared language and framework that allows us to talk about cases from very different contexts, namely the electrification of human settlements in Mumbai, the struggle for remunicipalisation of the grid in Hamburg, attempts to go ‘off-grid’ in South Africa, and the fight against energy-intensive hyperscale data centres in the Netherlands (see videos of our case studies here: https://resetframework.org/case-studies). And it was a hard-fought outcome—the road to developing a shared language had been much harder than anticipated.

In the first two or three years of the project, we invested considerable time and energy into building shared notions about abstract concepts and empirical realities, refining what we were already working with. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, in-person team meetings were cancelled, so all of this had to happen in long, sometimes tiresome Zoom meetings. We navigated the growing number of blackouts in South Africa due to the deepening energy crisis surrounding the state-owned utility Eskom, as well as tricky time zones with our colleagues in India.

Arriving at this shared (visual) language took a long time because we needed to truly understand how we communicate and reason with one another, but also because of fundamental differences in what terms mean in different contexts—take the very word ‘energy transition,’ for example. As we defined it above, it is often understood as a transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources. However, for those places that lack access to the electricity grid and the formal energy economy, the energy transition may very well mean moving toward, rather than away from, fossil fuels, for example, in efforts to electrify informal settlements. These complexities prompted us to discuss energy transitions and just energy transitions in the plural. Comparing cases brought to the forefront the understanding that no word or idea can be taken as universal.

"For those places that lack access to the electricity grid and the formal energy economy, the energy transition may very well mean moving toward, rather than away from, fossil fuels"

The Triple Re- Framework

This brings us back to the emergence of a shared language and framework that we developed in India and discussed in the ReSET Summer School toward the end of our time together in Bengaluru. Our language is encapsulated in the Triple Re- Framework. The three ‘Re-’s’ (Re-Imagining, Re-Coding, and Re-Configuring) identify action perspectives for people engaging with energy transition dynamics. The Triple Re- Framework is a method of analysis that helps people understand and then act upon the possibilities for a just energy transition in diverse global contexts.

The Triple Re- Framework takes the differences in the cultural and political meanings of (energy) infrastructures as its starting point. More precisely, it provides concepts and tools to understand how people envision energy futures and then act upon those visions. If you are interested in learning more about this, or watch the animation of the Triple Re- Framework here: https://resetframework.org/framework

The Triple Re- Framework is the product of a journey across various places: it was first developed during an excursion in 2019 to the energy cooperative EWS Elektrizit?tswerke Sch?nau eG , located in the village of Sch?nau in Germany's Black Forest, south of Freiburg. In the years that followed, we refined and revised the framework by engaging in conversations about cases from the four countries. In Bengaluru, we brought it together into a coherent whole and tested it with others to make sense of the dynamics surrounding the utility-scale Pavagada solar park, a few hours from Bengaluru. During the ReSET Summer School, an important observation was that the framework helps to raise awareness of how particular experiences in one place can connect to experiences elsewhere in the world without reducing them to mere comparisons.

Developing a shared language and method of analysis did not come easily for the ReSET team; however, it has become a crucial tool for facilitating learning through elsewhere and enabling conversations across different contexts. In the coming year, we aim to further refine the Triple Re Framework by connecting more cases from the Global North and South. In the spirit of Robinson's closing words: “A reformatted urban comparativism insists on keeping open the possibility of drawing any urban places, experiences, and events into sometimes overlapping, sometimes disjunct, but always revisable conversations about the nature and future of the urban.”

In the next article, we will discuss how our experience with ‘comparative imagination’ continued during two visits to the ReSET case studies in Mumbai and Pavagada. Stay tuned!

Authored by ReSET researchers Jesse Hoffman Stuti Haldar Megan Davies

Other ReSET members: Aromar Revi Amir Bazaz Mithlesh verma Philipp Sp?th Bleta Arifi Mark Swilling Thandeka Tshabalala Kevin Foster Iris Mathar Thomas Bauwens ??

Institutes involved: Universiteit Utrecht Urban Futures Studio Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development, Utrecht University Stellenbosch University Centre for Sustainability Transitions Albert-Ludwigs-Universit?t Freiburg

ReSET is funded by VolkswagenStiftung

Video editing: Media team of the Indian Institute for Human Settlements & Hilde Segond von Banchet

Website: with thanks to fORMATSaNDmECHANISMS Studio Anne Büttner and Moritz Theiselmann