In the form of an explorative empirical study, this paper deals with the reasons for the survival and demise of isolated Swiss ski lifts. For the first time, all isolated lifts documented in Switzerland have been recorded and coded according to a total of six conditions. Using a set-theoretical research method in the form of qualitative comparative analysis (QCA), the study aims to identify the necessary conditions and configurations of sufficient conditions explaining (non-)survival. It transpires that closed isolated lifts tend to be outdated and have no technical snowmaking facilities. Moreover, it has become evident that the simultaneous occurrence of the lack of lift facility replacement, lack of technical snowmaking and high ski area competition has caused the closure of most isolated lifts. Low natural snow depth and low elevation difference, conversely, have not had a measurable impact. The causes for the survival of isolated lifts, by contrast, are extremely heterogeneous.
Sustainable development is of equal concern to Geography as an academic discipline and Geography Education. Given Geography's explicit conceptual and thematic affinity to sustainable development, various professional organizations developed normative documents proclaiming Geography to the main carrier subject of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). The aim of this paper is to explore what effects the special proximity of school Geography to the promotion of ESD has on the design of geographical specialist knowledge. Lower secondary Geography curricula (1992–2022) of the federal state of Berlin served as sample for content analysis. Viewed in light of work from the History of Education, Sociology of Education, and Subject Education, the results show a progressive loss of disciplinary identity accompanied by a concurrent shift in focus from factual judgments to value judgments.
Facing multiple and embodied inequalities inscribed in the energy system, this intervention argues for a feminist perspective on energy geographies. Extending critical research on urban infrastructure with concepts of care, it seeks to contribute to more just energy relations. In a first step, the article examines two energyfields:caring
Cemeteries are a reflection of the values, history, and composition of their respective communities. Current social developments are therefore also visible through them. The contribution describes the work of DeathLab, a public event series that uses contemporary artist-designed urns as a means of exploring shifting values in funeral culture through physical manifestations. The events involve visits to places associated with farewells and allow for discussions about the cultural significance of death and mourning practices. The practices surrounding death and the artifacts associated with them, such as urns and cemeteries, are intertwined with population geography considerations, and incorporating these elements into scientific analysis such as through artistic interventions holds great promise.
Renewable energy infrastructures, such as wind and solar farms, require land on which they can be deployed. While politics and conflicts over accessing land for renewables are well documented, the role, conditions and potential agency of landownership have been often overlooked or oversimplified as a powerful terrain in the field of renewables development. In this paper, we explore the relationship between landed property and community renewable energy projects. In particular, we focus on how landed property variously influences the development modes of renewables by acting as a mediator, barrier and enabler for different types of wind energy projects. We show how this takes place through appropriation of rents in processes of assetisation and value grabbing by landowners. In this way, value grabbing acts as a vital intermediary process to understand green grabbing and wider processes of capital accumulation through renewables. We draw on insights from the Netherlands and Scotland to illuminate different mechanisms, social and historical conditions, and policies through which landed property constrains or enables community wind energy projects. The paper finishes by sketching out some alternative ways of allocating land for the deployment of renewable energy projects, which could help shift the balance of power in favour of community energy developments.
reflexive capacity, which is the ability of organizations to include diverse stakeholders and knowledge in decision-making. By analyzing a case study from Germany, we highlight how this capacity can transform over time and impact adaptation strategies. We conclude that understanding power and agency in this context can provide important insights for improving climate change adaptation.
Based on a review of existing research on adaptive capacity, we identify a research gap in theorizing institutions, power structures, and agency in municipal climate change adaptation processes. Drawing on sociological institutionalism, governmentality, and communicative planning theory, we use post-structuralist concepts of power topower withpower over. The emergence and transformation of reflexive capacity are illustrated and discussed with one case study municipality in Germany, revealing the potential of this concept for the analysis of participation in adaptation processes and the power structures that are inherent to them. In the paper, we incorporate the concept of reflexive capacity with established concepts of adaptive capacity, creating an integrated framework termed institutional adaptive capacity. The analysis concludes that examining power structures and agency in the context of climate change adaptation explains how capacity stocks and individual psychosocial capacity mobilization are institutionally embedded and influenced by reflexive capacity. We argue that the consideration of power structures and agency can provide a complementary approach to explaining adaptive capacity and call for further transdisciplinary empirical research on this topic in different settings of state-initiated adaptation processes.
Around the world, smart grids are emerging as a universal tool to address a wide range of social and technical problems facing energy systems. Despite considerable research on these systems, the ways they differ in the local (re)production of power relations have so far been little discussed. This paper fills this gap by developing a “situated governmentality approach” in conversation with the critique of Foucauldian governmentality studies. By applying this approach to smart grid strategies in Germany (Smart Energy Showcases – Digital Agenda for the Energiewende, SINTEG) and India (National Smart Grid Mission, NSGM), we identify different ways in which power is mediated through situated governmentalities. While SINTEG employs technologies of power that promote a disciplinary regime, the exercise of power in the case of the NSGM displays many elements of a digitally enhanced sovereign approach. The findings reveal the range of governmental programmes that can be realized through smart grids and open up a perspective on the situated functioning of smart grids in energy transitions.
In this brief contribution, I reflect on some of the newest tendencies and fashions in social theoretic thinking in the field of human geography and beyond. Human geography attracts its scholars, thinkers and audiences with its engagement to contribute to a better environment and a better world. As such human geography as a discipline is a political project, with high societal relevance. In this human engagement with the world around us, the relationship between the human and the spatial environment is of central importance, and thorough scientific conceptual reflections are crucial in a discipline that is not just political but also scientific. Geographers traditionally excel in sophisticated conceptualisations of our physical and social environment but have rather neglected the conceptualisation of the other end of this relationship, the human being and becoming. In the current debate on the various versions of posthumanism, we observe that one easily resorts to rather simplistic categorisations and qualifications of what we envision as posthuman utopias or dystopias, with sometimes also dangerous ethical consequences. In this contribution, I try to argue that, if we dig a bit deeper, with the help of the philosophical anthropology of Helmuth Plessner we gain a more nuanced and sustainable as well as ethically responsible view of the role of the posthuman self in the geography of today's world.
The article intends to bring together two perspectives on analysing and understanding societal developments and transformations. It takes infrastructures and migration as cases to discuss how a focus on infrastructures' role in migration processes can inform migration studies and how, in turn, a focus on migration processes can inform studies on and theories of infrastructures. Based on the assumption that studies on infrastructures can be carried out in all fields of society, as we find infrastructures in all societal sectors, and that migration, in turn, affects all fields of society and all its sectors, we shed light on the particular forms that infrastructures take in the course of migration journeys and the actors that are involved; the effects the infrastructures have on migrants and their (im-)mobility; the role they play before, during and after the migration; and how they are co-constituted by actors and co-create social, spatial and physical settings. The article provides the reader with an overview of key strands of research in both infrastructure studies and migration studies and develops an infrastructure-sensitive perspective for research carried out in the field of migration studies.
Energy justice is a rapidly developing area of research and policy advocacy. Recently, some critiques have been formulated, particularly from postcolonial, political ecology, and more-than-human perspectives, such as the concept's rootedness in Western thought and its too narrow anthropocentric focus. This paper presents an integrative model of various energy justices including perceptions that allow for a more nuanced and expanded understanding, drawing on recent concepts of environmental and energy justice. This analytic perspective integrates understandings of justice as a subjective belief, including increased consideration of the role of emotion in evaluating justice. According to this understanding, there is no “one” energy justice. Instead, there are multiple, sometimes contradictory, and fluid perceptions of justice.
Due to tightened controls at the Croatian border and pushbacks by border guards, ‚people on the move‘ are forced to stay in Bosnia and Herzegovina for a longer time. This article explores the infrastructures that refugees and other migrants use and maintain in canton Una-Sana and how they shape their movements and everyday lives. These ‚infrastructures of (im)mobility‘ fulfil a dual function: they structure mobility locally, along the Balkan route and across the EU's external border and enable life in (forced) immobility in the border space. To better understand these infrastructures, their physical, social and digital dimensions, and their patterns of (re)production need to be scrutinized. Building on central arguments of the mobility paradigm and critical migration studies, we argue that the (re)production and (re)configuration of infrastructures of (im)mobility is largely driven by highly unequal global mobility regimes and restrictive bordering practices, but that they can also become sites of autonomy and resistance against social marginalization, spatial exclusion and enforced immobilization.
Accelerating and more comprehensive legislation and litigation indicate a new significance of law in recent years within climate change politics. However, this development has been scarcely reflected upon in German-language geographical research on climate change adaptation, which primarily focuses on climate adaptation politics and policies. In order to illuminate these issues, this article engages with the political and legal scientific debates on juridification; reflects these in the context of climate adaptation; and traces the processes of juridification of climate policies in the German context from a historical perspective. Intersecting with insights from legal geography, this contribution introduces the concept of „Legal Ecologies of Climate Change Adaptation“ as a novel and legally nuanced perspective. Within human geographic climate adaptation research, this perspective opens up new theoretical and conceptual interests, empirical domains, and possibilities for interdisciplinary collaboration.
infrastructural lens
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.
This paper examines whether and to what extent the application of the method of hermeneutic photography can contribute to reducing epistemic relations of violence and thus to decolonizing empirical social research. To this end, an empirical study by the author is subjected to a re-reading and methodological reflection from postcolonial perspectives. On the basis of this, it will then be worked out which potentials and limits the work with the method of hermeneutic photography offers for research projects that are carried out in countries of the so-called Global South.