Marie FORGET, Institut des Hautes Etudes de l'Amérique Latine - Sorbonne Nouvelle. CREDA UMR 7227, France
The complex patterns of energy transition have been investigated by geographers under four main criteria. The first is a rather usual question on the relation between public policies and the existing changes in territories and the way in which energy transition is building new energy spaces.The second is related to a critical assessment of the materiality of energy transition, the way in which new materials such as lithium are being mined, transported, used and recycled in global production networks . The third set of question is related to the issues of social and spatial justice in the energy transition, and how a change in energy technologies and markets might affect vulnerable households. Finally, some authors deal with the geopolitics of energy transition and its capacity to change the global balance of power (Van de Graaf et al., 2020).
In this context, scholars have paid only scant attention to the multiple time-scales involved in an energy transition. On the one hand, public policies envision long term objectives and benefits of energy transition. On the other hand, in territories where projects related to energy transition are implemented, conflictive temporalities appear between local population and firms. Historical inequalities and conflicts are reactivated and ecosystems cycles modified. At the global scale, Latin America is simultaneously a focal point for many technologies and materials used in the energy transition and a region where the previous development policies have not been able to fully integrate national territories and address adequately inequalities.
In this presentation we build a case study of the times and space of energy transition in Latin America relying on field work carried out in Chile, Argentina and Colombia. We argue that energy transitions intertwines different temporalities in the same territories, and not as a smooth change from one stage to another.
Mots clés : energy transition|Latin America|inequalities|temporalities
A105032SV