Against the backdrop of ongoing planetary crises, this paper discusses the ambivalent relationship between large-scale material infrastructure, particularly energy technologies, and environmental justice. Inspired by relational and practice-oriented understandings of infrastructure, it develops a conceptual approach for energy-related environmental justice research, which is exemplarily applied to the emerging issue of green hydrogen, drawing on brief insights from the hydrogen frontrunner countries Colombia and Canada and associated struggles over Indigenous sovereignty. This “infrastructural lens”, based on three epistemological shifts – from infrastructure to “infrastructuring”, from social imaginaries to “sociotechnical imaginaries” and from human infrastructuring to “planetary infrastructuring” – provides deeper insights into how patterns of justice and injustice are practically infrastructured and what kinds of imaginaries they evoke or are entangled with. Moreover, it makes tangible how practices of infrastructuring can themselves become part of a broader political ontology, that is, of struggles over ways of being and ways of relating to planet Earth.
Not least since the recent “infrastructural turn” in the social sciences
(Amin, 2014; Harvey et al., 2017b), critical scholars have increasingly
debated the political dimensions of material infrastructure. In this regard,
there is a growing consensus that, for example, dams, roads and bridges and
energy technologies such as pipelines, transmission lines or wind farms are
not neutral entities or inert material things but are imbued with power relations and normative orders, as well as social meanings and imaginaries of
the future (Anand et al., 2018; Boyer, 2014; Harvey et al., 2017a; Jasanoff,
2022; Jasanoff and Kim, 2015). At the same time, there is an increasing
awareness that infrastructure plays a critical role in driving planetary
crises, prompting scholars to focus more thoroughly on the relationship between infrastructure and sustainability (Degens et al., 2022). Within
these debates, large-scale infrastructure projects are seen as “the
production mills of the Anthropocene” (Alejandro Esguerra cited in Berger et al.,
2022:15), leading to massive CO
Building on this ambivalent and paradoxical nature of infrastructure, this article theorizes the role of large-scale material infrastructure, more specifically of energy technologies, in contributing to and causing forms of environmental justice and injustice. Building on this discussion, through short vignettes from Canada and Colombia, it addresses the emerging issue of so-called green hydrogen, i.e., hydrogen produced with renewable electricity and fresh water, which has become one of the most vibrant and important issues within energy policy and decarbonization agendas in recent years. Although most green-hydrogen initiatives and projects are still at a very early stage and despite the fact that green hydrogen is currently quantitatively insignificant in terms of global hydrogen production, it is already foreseeable that this new economy will entail an enormous expansion of energy infrastructure (especially wind, solar power, transmission grids). These developments will not only shape socio-ecological path dependencies (Hanusch and Schad, 2021) and transform geoeconomic and geopolitical relations (van de Graaf et al., 2020), but also create multiple “hydrogen injustices” manifesting around issues such as forced evictions of local and Indigenous communities, limited energy access, rising authoritarianism, the reinforcement of neocolonialism, or water-related grievances (Müller et al., 2022). At the same time, however, if these injustices are properly addressed, green-hydrogen infrastructures could also open up avenues for emancipatory and more democratic energy futures (Kalt and Tunn, 2022), not only but especially with regard to struggles for Indigenous sovereignty. The aim of this paper is therefore to show both theoretically and exemplarily how infrastructure as a dynamic socio-material practice is entangled with issues of exclusion, maldistribution and misrecognition as well as struggles for emancipation, decolonization and autonomy. Contrary to common understandings of infrastructure as a research object, however, this paper draws on and further develops conceptualizations of infrastructure that understand it as a specific perspective that allows for deeper insights into its political geographies and justice implications. In doing so, it draws on existing relational and practice-oriented approaches to infrastructure and carves out an “infrastructural lens” that focuses both on the materiality of infrastructure projects and on the social practices and imaginaries that simultaneously shape them and are shaped by them.
As indicated, this aim stems from a desire to contribute to two emerging fields of research: first, this paper aims to contribute to theoretical discussions within energy geographies about the relationship between material infrastructures and justice and about the role of energy infrastructures in creating “new energy spaces” (Bridge and Gailing, 2020). While existing studies from political ecology are valuable contributions, they tend to emphasize the dark side of energy infrastructure: how it functions as a territorial weapon, colonizing landscapes and ecosystems and normalizing socio-ecological damage and plunder (Dunlap, 2021). Even beyond the field of energy, research on infrastructure and justice tends to focus on how infrastructure creates patterns of injustice, for example, in the form of exclusionary migration politics through border infrastructure (Kathiravelu, 2021) or oppression and marginalization through urban infrastructure (Rodgers and O'Neill, 2012). In contrast, the questions of how infrastructure is intertwined with and can become a starting point for justice, re-politicization and democratization and how it can shift power relations remain rather underexplored. Second, this paper aims to contribute to a body of recent scholarship that calls for the need for a critical research agenda on the emerging hydrogen transition that focuses on its socio-ecological risks as well as on the potential for emancipatory and democratic hydrogen futures (Hanusch and Schad, 2021; Kalt and Tunn, 2022; Müller et al., 2022). In doing so, and as a complement to this call, the article will focus particularly on the role of struggles for Indigenous sovereignty in relation to green-hydrogen transitions. On the one hand, this emphasis is due to the fact that Indigenous communities have very often been, and continue to be, displaced or otherwise negatively affected by energy-related infrastructure developments, particularly in the context of settler colonialism (Whyte, 2019). On the other hand, as Baka and Vaishnava (2020) argue, there is a general research gap in energy geography regarding Indigenous knowledges and the role of Indigenous communities in energy transition processes, which this article, albeit limited in its empirical scope, seeks to address.
The paper is organized as follows: the first section provides a selective, but not arbitrary, overview of research on material infrastructure within the burgeoning field of energy geographies. It also identifies points of contact for further research. The second section represents the main conceptual part of the article and develops an infrastructural lens for energy-related environmental justice research, drawing on insights from anthropology and science and technology studies. In the third section short vignettes on recent green-hydrogen-related developments in the hydrogen frontrunner countries Colombia and Canada, based on a review and content analysis of the gray literature (online accessible reports, interviews and strategy papers), are used as examples to illustrate what kinds of insights the infrastructural lens developed in this paper can provide. In the last section the arguments will be summarized and critically reflected upon. In addition, starting points for future research are identified.
For more than a decade now, energy has emerged as a new key topic within critical human geography. In contrast to earlier geographical work on energy, which approached the topic from a more positivist and managerial perspective (Calvert, 2016), the sub-discipline has recently expanded in scope and conceptual plurality, opening the field to the inherently political nature of energy systems (Bridge et al., 2018a). Accordingly, Calvert (2016:105) characterizes energy geographies as a “fertile academic borderland” that allows for the bringing together of different geographic disciplines to focus on one cross-cutting issue. Interestingly, however, the topic of infrastructure, or more precisely a critical, non-essentialist perspective on infrastructure, has been of relatively small concern for energy geographers, despite the increasing pluralization of energy-related research and the great interest in infrastructure within the wider social sciences, including other areas of human geography such as resource governance (Bruns et al., 2022). According to a recent energy geography literature review, created by Baka and Vaishnava (2020), analyses of energy infrastructure represent only 3 % of 348 articles, compared to studies on energy extraction and production as well as consumption. Baka and Vaishnava (2020) therefore point to the need to expand research in this area and emphasize the lack of geographic analyses on issues such as transmission planning or electricity grid expansion, as well as on key infrastructural projects. However, this under-representation does not mean that there is no substantial literature on energy infrastructure. Notable are works (also mentioned by Baka and Vaishnava, 2020) such as the analysis of Bouzarovski et al. (2015) on the political geographies of gas infrastructure in Europe and Knuth's (2018) study on the financial aspects of energy infrastructure. Equally important is the special issue of Bridge et al. (2018b) on the role of large-scale energy infrastructure in the (re)production of national state power.
Yet, whilst these analyses – broadly defined – focus either on the role of
infrastructure in producing and reconfiguring political space or on the
political economies that shape energy infrastructure, there are other studies that theorize in more depth its inherent political dimension, that
is, how energy infrastructure
While Barry's analysis focuses on the co-production of infrastructure with social conflict, political-ecology-influenced investigations of energy infrastructure tend to emphasize its embodied socio-ecological dimensions and neocolonial logics. In particular, Hornborg's theorization of energy technologies as embodiments of environmental load displacement and asymmetric global exchange challenges their framing as neutral instruments that put nature to work, as is often done in mainstream transition discourses. Instead, he conceptualizes them as “socionatural strategies for appropriating embodied labour and other biophysical resources from less affluent sectors of world society” (Hornborg, 2020:9). Doing so makes it possible to understand how the distributive injustices of a given energy technology, e.g., the spatially uneven socio-ecological harms of photovoltaics, such as displacements and exploitation of labor in peripheral regions, are not unintended side effects but “fundamental to its underlying but mystified rationale” (Hornborg, 2020:10). Hornborg thus emphasizes the need for social scientists to de-fetishize infrastructure and to acknowledge that energy technologies are in essence nothing other than embodiments of the unjust capitalist world system.
A similar, but differently grounded, approach is taken by Dunlap and Laratte (2022) in their “necropolitical” critique of the European Green Deal, which focuses on the deadly implications of green transition agendas
mediated through “infrastructural colonization”. Claiming that “the extraction necessary for low-carbon infrastructures is far worse than
researchers realize” (Dunlap and Laratte, 2022:15), they point to the destruction of ecological habitats; the spread of toxic substances; and the colonization of landscapes, villages and entire regions through so-called green infrastructure. Moreover, a core argument of their critique is that green transition agendas essentially rely on and reinforce neocolonial power relations and resource extraction in the Global South. Using Morocco as an example, they show how concentrated wind and solar power for European energy markets generates green land grabs and violent repression of civil society. At the same time, the potential benefits of these infrastructures for the local population are absent, while the myth of green energy (i.e., that it is inherently sustainable and just) is framed as without alternative. Therefore, as Dunlap puts it in an earlier publication, “infrastructural colonization” contends that infrastructure is a “modality of conquest”, serving as “territorial weapons that, to various intensities, dispossess populations and `roll out' an apparatus of spatial, economic and psychosocial management”. (Dunlap, 2021:6)
As this non-exhaustive overview demonstrates, research on infrastructures within energy geographies is diverse, but it still offers significant potential for further analysis. What's more, it also reveals the political ambivalence of energy infrastructure, emphasized in the Introduction, albeit with a certain bias: while most geographical research tends to focus on the destructive properties and unjust consequences of energy infrastructure, its potential to open up avenues for social change and environmental justice remains rather underexplored (see also Bruns et al., 2022). This is especially true for the role of Indigenous knowledges in energy transition processes, which, as Baka and Vaishnava (2020) point out, represents a general gap within the energy geographies literature. The following section seeks to address these issues by reconceptualizing infrastructure as a specific research perspective.
In the 1990s, scholars of science and science and technology studies initiated a paradigm shift in the study of infrastructure. Thanks largely to
the work of Bowker (1994) and Star and Ruhleder (1996), critical social science began to see infrastructure not as an inert material object and the
result of a certain political and/or engineering process but as a web of
relationships between technological artifacts and social actors, infused
with power, moral orders and the complexity of the social (Harvey et al.,
2017b). As Larkin (2013:329) puts it, Infrastructures are matter that enable the movement of other matter. Their peculiar ontology lies in the facts that they are things and also the relation between things
The first shift from infrastructure to infrastructuring urges researchers to abandon the common understanding of infrastructure as the generally invisible backdrop of society, i.e., the material things and connections that make social life possible. Rather, it suggests what Bowker (1994) calls an “infrastructural inversion”, which means focusing on the often hidden and mostly invisible inner workings of infrastructures, that is, on the social practices, norms and classification systems through which they come into being and function as such. In doing so, it can be shown that (im)material infrastructures, e.g., health systems, borders, supply infrastructure and road infrastructure, are in many cases powerful and highly normative instruments of justice and injustice, as they generally tend to privilege certain social groups while excluding and discriminating against others (Bowker and Star, 1999). Moreover, as Niewöhner (2015) argues, this reconceptualization of infrastructure as a material–semiotic practice, i.e., as infrastructuring, makes infrastructure more accessible to ethnographic research on the ways in which actors, technical things and moral orders are entangled and on how spatial relations between them are created. Seen through the lens of infrastructuring, then, spatial relationships, such as those between center and periphery, are not given but emerge through multiple processes of planning, designing, altering and maintaining of, e.g., supply, road or energy infrastructure.
The second shift from social imaginaries to sociotechnical imaginaries directs the researchers' gaze to the visions, affects and knowledge systems that make sense of infrastructuring practices and that give them their
legitimacy. However, in contrast to common understandings of social
imaginaries as merely ideational constructs (Taylor, 2004), the notion of
sociotechnical imaginaries, coined by Jasanoff and Kim (2015), focuses more
explicitly on the material, technological and scientific underpinnings of
social imaginaries, i.e., on ways in which visions, technical objects and the
associated scientific knowledges are co-produced in practice. Sociotechnical imaginaries are thus “collectively held, institutionally
stabilized, and publicly performed visions of desirable futures, animated by
shared understandings of forms of social life and social order attainable
through, and supportive of, advances in science and technology” (Jasanoff,
2015:4). This approach therefore allows for an understanding of how the
creation of energy infrastructures, such as those associated with, e.g., green hydrogen, is intertwined not only with the ways in which society
In addition to shifting the focus to the practices and sociotechnical imaginaries of infrastructure, the third epistemological shift consists in understanding infrastructuring not only as a purely socio-material activity – i.e., as processes by which humans shape technologies and vice versa – but also as a dynamic that is both contingent on and part of the non-human forces of the Earth system. In particular, the notion of planetary infrastructuring, developed by Szerszynski (2022), urges researchers to understand human-made infrastructure as a “variation on a more general phenomenon in the ongoing self-organization of planets” (Szerszynski, 2022:207). In this regard, planetary infrastructuring means considering infrastructuring not only taking place at different spatial scales, but also being characterized by different agencies and temporalities of the Earth system, e.g., seismic, geological and all kinds of biological activities; oceanic and atmospheric circulation; hydrologic dynamics; and, most importantly, the multiple and ever-increasing impacts of climate change. In emphasizing these intersections, Szerszynski's intention is therefore to focus on the causal relations between these dynamics: on the “interconnected meshwork of causation … that involves processes on different timescales modulating each other in ways that give rise to function and purpose” (Szerszynski, 2022:208–209). This more-than-human approach, therefore, treats the multiple, self-organizing agencies of the Earth system as more than the material base upon which human infrastructuring depends; rather, it treats them as active, unruly and often unpredictable participants in the processes of planning, creating, maintaining, modifying and deconstructing infrastructure (see also Barry, 2017; Kropp, 2018; Maguire and Winthereik, 2017).
As it turns out, these three epistemological shifts have not only analytical
but also normative, as well as spatial, implications, some of which have already been touched upon: the first, and most obvious, is that by approaching infrastructure as a practice, it becomes possible to reflect more thoroughly on its inherent quality to produce spatially unevenly distributed winners and losers, i.e., to privilege certain groups while excluding and disadvantaging others. Rather than seeing these justice implications as unintended or external consequences of infrastructure, an infrastructural lens brings to the fore that they are inherent in the making, planning, maintaining, modification, etc. of infrastructure itself and contingent on actor constellations and power relations. From this perspective, then, material infrastructures and practices of infrastructuring are
The second normative implication is derived from the notion of sociotechnical imaginaries, which urges researchers to understand processes of infrastructuring as being co-produced with visions of desirable futures. However, the questions of what constitutes a desirable future and for whom it will be realized are obviously contested and a matter of competing hegemonies. What's more, these questions are also questions of justice, since the pursuit of a particular version of the good life, e.g., the expansion of green infrastructures combined with the intensification of neoliberalism, can lead to new injustices and exclusions. At the same time, infrastructure projects and associated imaginaries often evoke particular affects such as anger, fear, anxiety or grief (Hentschel and Schröder, 2020:193). These can amplify feelings of injustice, transforming them into indignation and outrage as well as counter-hegemonic resistance and anti-democratic tendencies (van Veelen et al., 2021). In this context, it seems only appropriate, when Naumann (2021) speaks of “infrastructural populism”, to argue that the expansion of infrastructure (e.g., green infrastructure) or the deterioration of public infrastructure (transportation, utilities) plays a crucial role in the loss of trust in democratic institutions and in the rise of right-wing populism. As a result, infrastructure often represents a key issue in right-wing agendas and a tool for populist mobilization and spatial domination.
The third normative implication is also ontological. Following Szerszynski's suggestion to think of infrastructuring as a planetary phenomenon in essence means abandoning some of the most fundamental assumptions of Western modernity, namely that human civilization can control the forces of nature through technological fixes (see also Clark and Szerszynski, 2021). A fruitful approach to sharpening and expanding this argument and translating it into environmental justice research is Escobar's (2018) decolonial design theory. Combining insights from Latin American social movements with design theory, Escobar develops an approach called “autonomous design”. In doing so, he claims that designing practices are always ontological; i.e., through the creation of material things, such as infrastructure, people create worlds and ways of being that in turn are the preconditions for designing. This does not mean, however, that this cycle is inescapable or unchangeable. Rather, Escobar argues that in situations where communities are struggling for autonomy, i.e., against colonial domination and political, cultural and economic heteronomy (e.g., through neoliberal reforms or extractive industries), they engage not only in political resistance, but also in diverse practices of experimentally designing new decolonial and autonomous worlds. At the core of these struggles, then, is the pursuit of justice, self-determination and sovereignty, both discursively and materially, through the creation of self-governed infrastructures of, for example, reproduction, care and basic provisioning, which in turn derive from and enable relational, non-Western and place-based ways of being (see also LaDuke and Cowen, 2020).
It is precisely here that Szerszynski's notion of planetary infrastructuring
and Escobar's design theory meet: both emphasize the need to move beyond
anthropocentrism and to focus more thoroughly on modes of infrastructuring
(or designing) that rely on Indigenous knowledges and the collaboration of
human and non-human agencies and which have historically been devalued as
inferior to Western modernism. Planetary infrastructuring, then, does not mean dealing with planet Earth in a control-oriented and techno-utopian mode, as proponents of the “planetary stewardship” approach propose (Steffen et al., 2011). Rather, it means “facing the planetary” (Connolly, 2017), that is, dealing with the multiplicity of planetary forces by embracing ontological pluralism and situated, place-based approaches (Nightingale et al., 2020). It also means – and here the notion of Bulkeley et al. (2014) about infrastructures as experiments comes back into focus – seeing planetary infrastructuring as a world-making and world-changing dynamic through which alternative modes of living together may emerge. Accordingly, as Jensen and Morita (2017:620) note, Viewed as open-ended experimental systems that generate emergent practical ontologies, infrastructures hold the potential capacity to do such diverse things as making new forms of sociality, remaking landscapes, defining novel forms of politics, reorienting agency, and reconfiguring subjects and objects, possibly all at once.
Using the emerging issue of green hydrogen as an example, the following section will now illustrate through vignettes from Colombia and Canada how the infrastructural lens and the three epistemological shifts discussed in this section can be applied and what empirical insights they may provide.
Green hydrogen is increasingly being discussed as a key issue in achieving the goal of carbon neutrality (IEA, 2022). Produced using renewable energy and electrolysis (the splitting of fresh water into oxygen and hydrogen), it is seen as a viable solution for decarbonizing hard-to-electrify sectors, such as heavy industry and heavy transportation. At the same time, it can contribute to increasing energy independence through replacing fossil fuels in industrial sectors and its ability to store stranded energy from renewable energy sources. However, the transition to green hydrogen is controversial, particularly from a justice perspective: while some argue that green hydrogen can contribute significantly to a just transition and environmental justice, e.g., by improving air quality for marginalized communities in industrialized zones or by creating green jobs (Stelpstra, 2020; Yellen and Castillo, 2021), critics point to its multiple socio-ecological risks, especially as several countries in the Global South, such as Chile, Namibia, Morocco or Colombia, are currently developing ambitious green-hydrogen strategies. These developments therefore carry the risk of creating and reinforcing neocolonial dependencies between the Global North and Global South (van de Graaf et al., 2020). At the same time, the required massive expansion of hydrogen infrastructure (renewable energy, pipelines, production and desalination plants) risks displacing marginalized, colonized and Indigenous communities, triggering conflicts over land and the expansion of extractive industries, such as mining (Cuenca Berger, 2021).
In addition to this, the materiality of green hydrogen itself poses various challenges and risks. Most importantly, its raw material – fresh water – is a scarce and contested resource, especially in producing countries such as Chile, Morocco, Spain, Australia, Namibia and Colombia. Green-hydrogen production will therefore potentially impact on limited regional water supplies and fuel simmering water conflicts. In the case of using desalinated seawater, which is being discussed as an alternative to fresh water, it can also pose a threat to marine life and coastal communities, as the desalination process has several negative environmental impacts due to the generation of brine and the use of toxic chemicals (Jones et al., 2019). Another major concern is transportation. To make hydrogen transportable, it must be cooled and liquefied or converted into derivatives such as ammonia, which are costly and very energy-intensive processes. In addition, transporting hydrogen and ammonia through pipelines carries the risk of leakages, which could lead to explosions and the toxifying of humans and ecosystems (Patonia and Poudineh, 2022).
Given these multiple challenges of “hydrogen justice at the nexus of energy, water and climate justice” (Müller et al., 2022:2), scholars have recently called for a critical research agenda on hydrogen transitions (Hanusch and Schad, 2021; Kalt and Tunn, 2022). How can an infrastructural lens, as developed in this article, contribute to this call? And what insights into the justice dimensions of this emerging economy can it provide? In what follows, I attempt to answer these questions in a preliminary way, These insights are preliminary in the sense that they are not based on primary empirical data. They have been compiled through a review and content analysis of the gray literature, including online-accessible policy and strategy papers, reports, and written and oral interviews with Indigenous community representatives and members of national governments.
As described, the crucial insight of the notion of infrastructuring is that
it directs the researchers' attention to the ways in which infrastructures
are being implemented, planned, and maintained and to how these practices intersect with justice and the construction of space. The case of the
department of La Guajira in the northeastern part of Colombia is particularly well suited to illustrating these interrelationships. La Guajira is an arid and remote region that is severely affected by climate change and has recently been identified as a promising green-hydrogen production site, primarily due to its potential for wind energy (Ministerio de Minas y Energía, 2021). However, the region is also home to the Wayúu Indigenous people, who suffer disproportionately from water scarcity, access to energy and a general lack of basic services (Ojeda et al., 2017). Given that
Therefore, green-hydrogen infrastructuring in La Guajira
seems to systematically threaten Indigenous sovereignty and exclude
Indigenous knowledges. Moreover, the transition to green hydrogen seems to
perpetuate the long and unjust history of colonial land appropriation,
leading to conflict, resistance See
To date, green-hydrogen plans are only being implemented on a very small
scale. More than 99 % of current global hydrogen production is based on
fossil fuels, while only 0.04 % is produced by water electrolysis (IEA,
2022:71). Thus, green-hydrogen production is still a dream for the future, albeit with profound consequences for the present. As Hanusch and Schad (2021:82) put it, Hydrogen futures are in the making right in front of our eyes and will determine socio-ecological path dependencies for decades to come.
At first glance, the overarching sociotechnical imaginary of green and blue
hydrogen seems to be obvious: it essentially builds on and reproduces a
desirable future of ecological modernization, that is, uninterrupted economic growth decoupled from CO
In addition to these debates, the contested nature of hydrogen imaginaries
becomes particularly evident when they are spatially manifested, i.e., when national governments or other territorial authorities declare certain nations or regions to be hydrogen regions or hotspots. In the case of La Guajira, which was declared by the former Minister of Mines and Energy, Diego Mesa Puyo, the “epicenter of the energy transition” (cited in Ramirez et al., 2022:n.p.) – a vision that has only recently been taken up (at least in terms of content) by the current leftist president Gustavo Petro See interview with Gustavo Petro via
The case of La Guajira illustrates very well the extent to which hydrogen
infrastructuring collides with Indigenous rights and how it might lead to a
resurgence of colonial relations and associated injustices. Insights from
other hydrogen frontrunner countries in the Global South such as Chile
(Cuenca Berger, 2021) or Morocco and Namibia (Müller et al., 2022) show
similar (potential) conflicts and confirm this neocolonial tendency. However, there are also attempts to decolonize hydrogen infrastructuring, to build alliances between corporations and Indigenous communities, and to embed green-hydrogen production within relational ontologies and claims for environmental justice and Indigenous sovereignty. In this regard, the Canadian context is particularly interesting. Since 2015, representatives from both Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples have increasingly viewed renewable energy projects as a potential way to reconcile the historical and ongoing violence against Indigenous peoples perpetrated by energy-related settler colonialism. See Preston (2013) for a discussion of Canadian settler colonialism in relation to energy extraction.
In the case of green hydrogen, there appears to be no difference. More recently, individual First Nations representatives have described renewable
hydrogen as a tool for Indigenous self-sufficiency, justice and
reconciliation (I. Day, cited in Creamer, 2021), and as an “opportunity for
Indigenous peoples across Canada to live up to their reputation as stewards
of the land”. See interview with Chief Billy Morin, Vice Chair of the Edmonton Region Hydrogen HUB and Chief of Enoch Cree Nation, via
The Indigenous Principles of Just Transition were
developed and published by the Indigenous Environmental Network; see See
Therefore, these emerging Indigenous-led green-hydrogen projects could serve as examples for what Escobar describes as autonomous design and Szerszynski as planetary infrastructuring, since they represent attempts to infrastructure decolonial worlds, based on an Indigenous and non-Western understandings of nature and in interaction with Mother Earth and planetary forces. Moreover, they also seem to create “practical ontologies” (Jensen and Morita, 2017), namely, by experimentally connecting Western sociotechnical imaginaries with Indigenous knowledges and worldviews, which have historically been treated rather separately.
The aim of this paper was to show how energy infrastructure and technologies are entangled with issues of environmental justice and struggles over Indigenous sovereignty. Inspired by existing social science research on infrastructure, it aimed to develop an analytical approach that provides deeper insights into its normative, political and spatial implications. This infrastructural lens draws on three distinct but complementary epistemological shifts – from infrastructure to infrastructuring, from social imaginaries to sociotechnical imaginaries and from human infrastructuring to planetary infrastructuring. In doing so, it allows for the examination of not only how patterns of justice and injustice are practically infrastructured and what kinds of imaginaries they evoke or are entangled with, but also how practices of infrastructuring can themselves become part of a broader political ontology, that is, of struggles over ways of being and ways of relating to planet Earth (Jensen and Morita, 2017). In particular, energy and, more specifically, hydrogen infrastructures demonstrate this very well: on the one hand, despite their claim (and actual potential) to contribute to a more sustainable and just world, they run the risk of reviving neocolonial relations between the Global North and Global South and generating multiple environmental injustices at the water–energy–food nexus (Müller et al., 2022). On the other hand, however, there are attempts to decolonize hydrogen infrastructuring and to experimentally connect Indigenous worldviews and knowledges with a sociotechnical imaginary of ecological modernization. In particular, the emerging partnerships between hydrogen companies and Indigenous communities in Canada, as well as related statements by First Nations representatives, attest to the claim that green hydrogen could indeed become more than just another tool of “infrastructural colonization” (Dunlap, 2021); it could also be a vehicle for decolonization, Indigenous sovereignty and environmental justice.
Of course, these interpretations must be treated with caution. First, it is
important to note that this paper is not based on primary empirical data. As
such, it does not represent a full-fledged analysis, but rather it provides
glimpses into an emerging topic that has only recently become of interest to
critical scholars. The insights presented in this article therefore should
be seen as starting points for empirical research on infrastructural justice
and injustice in relation to hydrogen/energy but not as its endpoints. They are meant to stimulate thought and further research and should not be taken as incontrovertible facts. Moreover, as should be the case generally when studying Indigenous struggles for autonomy, it is important not to fall into
the trap of romanticizing Indigenous peoples as modernity's anti-scientific
other (Blaser, 2013; Niigaaniin and MacNeill, 2022). Nevertheless, there are
ways to valorize Indigenous knowledges without essentializing them and
reproducing the modern–premodern binary. One of these might be to demonstrate, as this paper has done, that Indigenous communities are indeed technology-oriented and taking a leading role in renewable energy and
hydrogen projects without disregarding their cosmologies and self-given
role as “stewards of the land”. Similarly, it is important not to derive
an ideal path from individual cases. Indigenous communities and worldviews
Therefore, these examples deserve greater scrutiny and empirical attention, particularly with regard to two areas of research: first, it is necessary to connect and contrast these cases with existing work on renewable energy conflicts and claims for energy democracy (Hughes, 2021; Boyer, 2019; Burke and Stephens, 2018). In this regard, questions of ownership, land tenure, access to energy and energy technologies, as well as questions of the governance of these initiatives, are important. Secondly, the questions of Indigenous sovereignty and Indigenous citizenship under conditions of ongoing settler colonialism need to be critically interrogated in relation to the role of infrastructure and energy technologies. In particular, the seemingly paradoxical situation of creating Indigenous sovereignty that is both detached from and deeply embedded in settler colonial governance, which Simpson (2014:11) describes with her notion of “nested sovereignty”, and the tensions and contradictions that arise from these relationships need to be problematized through empirical analysis. The infrastructural lens developed in this paper is intended to provide conceptual support for these emerging areas of research.
No data sets were used in this article.
The author has declared that there are no competing interests.
Publisher's note: Copernicus Publications remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
This article is based in part on lectures and research conducted during a Social Justice Fellowship at the Research Institute for Sustainability (RIFS), Helmholtz Centre Potsdam. I would therefore like to express my sincere thanks to all those involved in the fellowship, especially Achim Maas, Alexandra Tost, Bernardo Jurema, Christina Camier, Henrike Knappe, Louis Kotzé and the other fellows of the Social Justice program. Furthermore, I would like to thank Antje Bruns, Matthias Naumann and Sören Becker for the organization of the theme issue.
This research was funded by the Research Institute for Sustainability, Helmholtz Centre Potsdam, and the German Research Foundation (Humanities Centre for Advanced Studies “Futures of Sustainability”).
This paper was edited by Jevgeniy Bluwstein and reviewed by two anonymous referees.