Towards a Sustainable Synergy: End-Use Energy Planning, Development as Freedom, Inclusive Institutions and Democratic Technics

Abstract

Even as modern energy-society relations have produced unprecedented economic growth, they have ushered in a crisis of social inequality and ecologically unsustainable levels of resource and energy throughput. Despite the persistence of these drivers and impacts, conventional environmental responses interpret this crisis as insufficiently advanced modernity and prioritize more economic growth and more efficient technology. This conventional strategy represents a very narrow engagement with values and instead relies on technological optimism. It perpetuates the detachment of development and energy planning from democratic deliberation about ends. As such, it is an important enabler of the environmental crisis. In this light, the chapter identifies and discusses alternatives strategies and considers the synergy between them. The alternatives discussed include the DEFENDUS approach for energy planning, the Human Development and Capability Approach and the Sustainable Energy Utility as an institutional template. Together, along with “democratic technics,” these alternatives can offer avenues to resist “more of the same” as a response to the environmental crisis. They invite us to critically reconsider the ends of growth and development and reclaim human-centered imagination and creativity for charting more sustainable and equitable realities.