Demanding ownership: Energy democracy and environmental labour geographies

Abstract

This paper contributes an ‘ownership perspective’ to the spectrum of labour environmentalist enquiries, and positions environmental labour geographies within a wider political economy of transformation. The paper explores the concept of energy democracy as a trade union strategy that pursues the social and economic ownership and democratic governance of energy systems and resources. Empirically, the paper presents the case study of Trade Unions for Energy Democracy (TUED), as an ‘actually existing’ initiative of labour environmentalism, contextualising its emergence and enduring relevance in terms of its approach to ownership vis-à-vis justice-oriented demands, and exploring its geographies through a strategy of spatially specific mobilising and regionally focused movement building. The paper investigates how the TUED network has developed a transnational, labour-inclusive framework of energy democracy as labour environmentalism, by promoting democratic control and the social, public and collective ownership of energy systems and resources as tangible solutions to address the climate emergency. The paper also establishes how the TUED network creates radical geographies of labour environmentalism, through the varied mobilisation of its participating unions in their specific local and regional contexts around actually existing opportunities for policy and political intervention. The paper concludes that the question of ownership is a fundamental one for environmental labour movements and their geographies, and one that shifts the emphasis of labour environmentalist thinking towards the democratisation of labour environmental ownership relations.