LUCSUS online seminars – Spring 2022 “Connecting the Local and the Global”

LUCSUS Seminars at Lund University

Issues ranging from climate change and pandemics to finance and digitalization often evoke notions of ‘the global’. Yet, though global, these processes are always grounded in the local; emerging from, having an impact on, and transformed by concrete local contexts and experiences. Connecting the global with the local is central to LUCSUS research and teaching. With this seminar series, we zoom in on the situated experiences, follow the connections, and tease out the relations that link-local with the global.

The seminar series covers topics ranging from climate justice, activism, and decolonization, to governance, health, and digitalization. The LUCSUS seminars are open for the public, held online and take place Thursdays from 11 am to 12 noon.

Fifth Seminar – “Just transitions: Connecting the Local and the Global”

Addressing social and environmental justice across scales represents a huge challenge for activists, academics and policymakers. Historically constituted, but ongoing, uneven power relations embodied in relations of class, race and gender among others intensify the challenge of accelerating energy transitions to address climate change in inclusive and progressive ways. Global initiatives to address climate change and energy transitions necessarily become embroiled in and affected by these power relations which shape procedural and distributional justice. Theoretically and mythologically, this raises issues of how far global operates as a causal or spatial category. This short presentation draws on insights from my recent book Power Shift, thinking about transformative climate justice and ongoing research with colleagues in Nigeria, Kenya and Mozambique on just transitions within and beyond the oil and gas sector to explore how can understand and engage with connections across sites of local and global politics.

Speaker

Peter Newell is a Professor of International Relations at the University of Sussex. He is a specialist in the politics and political economy of environment and development. In recent years his research has mainly focussed on the political economy of low carbon energy transitions. Besides working for academic institutions including the universities of Sussex, Oxford, Warwick and East Anglia, he sits on the board of directors of Greenpeace UK and is a member of the advisory board of the Greenhouse think-tank. He is also co-founder and research director of the Rapid Transition Alliance. His books include Climate for Change: Non-State Actors and the Global Politics of the Greenhouse; Governing Climate Change; Globalization & the Environment: Capitalism, Ecology and Power; Transnational Climate Change Governance; Global Green Politics and Power Shift: The Global Political Economy of Energy Transitions.

To join the seminar online please sign up here. You will then receive a confirmation email with a Zoom link to the seminar.