Low Carbon Politics

In the coming decades, South Asia will play a significant role in worldwide urbanization. India’s urban population is projected to increase by 416 million by 2050, while Pakistan’s and Bangladesh’s urban populations are expected to grow by more than 50 million each. Additionally, South Asia will be a major driver of global energy demand growth. These two foundational transformations of the 21st century – urbanisation and energy transition – are intricately interlinked. The urgency of climate action and domestic energy security requires to meet these growing demands from low-carbon energy sources and to move towards higher energy efficiency, especially in cities, where an increasingly significant amount of energy will be used. However, energy planning and governance have been historically dominated by national and regional actors. Energy seldom falls under the purview of urban local bodies, and electrical engineers often display little interest in urban issues. Despite a recent noticeable shift, the urban scale – cities as a sphere of shaping energy patterns – has largely been overlooked in energy social science research in South Asia.
We propose this special issue to understand the energy patterns in South Asian cities and their implications for urbanisation and national energy transition. We aim to critically examine the irenic notion of “transition” itself from the perspective of cities as spheres of mobilisation and action. We seek to focus on electrification and low-carbon energy deployment as well as the end-uses that drive the energy patterns, such as transport, cooling, heating, cooking, etc. We aim to cover the relationships, and potential paradoxes and contradictions, between the changes in energy systems and socio-spatial inequalities, and the related debate on energy justice. More info on this link