‘Fine, you made your energy, but how much did we have to pay for this?’ Embracing situated energy ecologies for pluriversal futures

Growing energy and material throughput, climate change targets and political economic evolution have spurred rapid deployment of lower-carbon energy infrastructures. Many of these developments have relied on ‘cheap nature’, often covering agropastoral and indigenous lands, which raises questions about the implications of energy transitions for non-industrial lifeways.

This article explores the onto-epistemological foundations that comprise the emergent energy transitions paradigm. Anchored in ethnographic findings from fieldwork in Rajasthan (India), we identify naturalism as the dominant ontological basis of knowledge production in global energy policies and examine its imaginaries and practices. We draw on Philippe Descola's ontological modes of identification to question universalism and demonstrate its perpetuation through energy transition practices. These approaches overlook socioecological complexity, a gap starkly showcased by the solar energy rollout in agropastoral Rajasthan, with Jaisalmer district as its epicentre. To overcome these limitations, we propose and empirically test the Situated Energy Ecologies principles, which combine (a) a post-productivist approach based on a commitment to energy sufficiency; (b) a commitment to ontological and epistemic recognition, to better capture place-based ways of knowing and being; and (c) autonomous practices based on prefigurative politics and agonism. By integrating a wider array of human experiences, this tripartite heuristic fosters a pluralistic understanding of energysociety relations towards emancipatory engagement.