Siddharth Sareen - Enabling Sustainable Energy Transitions: Practices of Legitimation and Accountable Governance

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When I was 11, I lived in the river plains of northern India, a region poorer than sub-Saharan Africa (Alkire and Santos 2014). It was before the turn of the millennium, and while the mercury routinely went past 45 C, my household struggled to cope with frequent power cuts totalling a dozen hours a day. We had the relative luxury of a diesel generator and an inverter, cooked using gas cylinders and a parabolic solar cooker, used electric water heaters, and the nightwatchman burnt charcoal to stay warm on winter nights and cooked his morning meals on a woodstove.

When I was 21, I lived on an elite university campus where the government ensured round-the-clock power supply so the lights never went out. Months before Copenhagen hosted the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of Parties (CoP) 15, I was an invited student delegate at a global sustainable development summit. Midway through, during a plenary session with the then-head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and a leading British Broadcasting Corporation news anchor, I posed a question in the limelight. In two days of discussions on how to address the climate change challenge, why had nobody discussed the role of the United States of America (Christoff 2010), since our prospects looked bleak without its geopolitical backing and political economic will?

Now 31 years old, I live in Norway , one of the richest countries in the world with a fortune built on oil, with hydropower its predominant domestic energy source. My home runs almost entirely on electricity, from heating to cooking to hot water. Our transport systems are increasingly electric, except air travel which continues to be carbon emissions intensive and popular. During the CoP 24 in Katowice, the centre of coal in Europe, someone half my age spoke truth to power. Greta Thunberg said that our political representatives have failed us and that we must act now to address the climate crisis for todays youth and the vulnerable to have livable futures.

Those three decadal conjunctures of material configuration, institutional context and relative privilege reveal a great deal about the spatiotemporally contingent nature of how we experience the deeply entangled climate and energy crises. My concern with these contemporary crises has continued and increased in my transition from childhood to mid-career researcher; and so has the associated urgency. We live in a time of many criseslocal, national and global; short-, medium- and long-term; social, environmental and economicand the heart of each one is political. This book concerns the greatest crisis of our times, which spans generations. It is about addressing the drivers and impacts of climate change, which means rapidly decarbonising our energy systems, and deeply changing whom they benefit (Bickerstaff et al. 2013). This is a mammoth task with competing stakes, too vital to be left to privileged sets of decision-makers who have already failed to safeguard and secure public interest for decades, and much too big for a modest book. Rather, its envisaged contribution is to show how to make this crisis visible for what it truly isa crisis of accountabilityopening up space to discuss and establish anew (Dowdle 2017) the terms for more accountable governance to enable sustainable energy transitions. For the purpose of this book, the term sustainable energy transitions signifies changes to our energy systems that enhance both decarbonisation and social equity.