Funded by the European Union (ERC, UNRULY, 101142262). Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
Fostering creativity and care in energy transitions: reframing uncertainty
15 October 2025
Andrea J. Nightingale, Halvor Dannevig, Marta Mboka Tveit, Cedar S. Patterson, Karen Richardsen Moberg, Ural Kafle, Stephen Williams, Mari Hanssen Korsbrekke, Ragnild Freng Dale, Carlo Aall, Tara B. Holm
The UNRULY teams from the University of Oslo gathered with members of the JUSTGREEN and SUSRENEW projects from the Western Norway Research Institute (Vestlandsforskning) to discuss the question of how to do research on uncertainty in the energy transition (Nowotny, 2015; Scoones, 2024; Senanayake & King, 2021). All of our teams are working with various aspects of the green transition, whether that be energy transitions, land use and sustainability or questions of justice. Uncertainty and justice figure large in all of our work. Climate change is causing biophysical changes that reshape what energy technologies are viable in particular places, impact land use and the risks and hazards different confronting communities. Yet, vulnerability to climate change is also affected by societal changes that materialize both as consequences of climate change, and independently of those processes (Mehta et al., 2019). This mutual influence of climate and societal changes creates different forms of climate risk. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has developed a framework to capture this mutuality, and in the upcoming (seventh) main report includes four risk drivers - hazard, vulnerability, exposure and response - of which the last driver is not fully conceptually developed.
We share an approach to these challenges that understands society’s responses as co-productive with ecologies. In other words, we understand social, political and ecological change as occurring together, shaping each other and indeed, producing new uncertainties in that process (D. Haraway, 1990; Latour, 1993). Our teams also share a number of challenges related to doing research in contexts that are confronting both slow, gradual changes, and sudden hazards and shocks. These two processes of change are not always clearly distinct but rather feed into one another. Planning and policy needs to address these and how they co-produce each other (Mehta et al., 2025), a task made more difficult by the diverging time-frames of slow versus sudden changes. From these synergies, we draw out three areas where we find that careful attention is needed as energy transitions unfold.
Reframing the energy transition
Work on energy transition would benefit from being refocused, especially on consumption and entangled transformations, moving towards frameworks of reflexivity. Choosing different entry points can provide novel insight when it comes to more widely-inclusive research on the energy transition. Such entry points can for instance be “events”, like a protest, a broken wind turbine, or a road built to a hydroplant which highlight underlying tensions and conditions (Kapferer, 2010). Objects of the energy transition can also be explored as ‘events’; whether that be a dam, a factory, a document, a form of certification. Such events help engage with unruliness as a story. Unruliness refers to epistemic and empirical sociomaterial dynamics and uncertainties that, together with efforts at management and governance, shape how change unfolds (Nightingale 2025). How the event embeds within energy transitions can help us look at the ethos or narratives of these types of developments, and how these rely on uncertainty and unruliness.
A second entry point for reframing energy transition is revisiting underlying assumptions in the mainstream discourse surrounding energy needs, and introducing alternatives based on efficiency, sufficiency (Steinberger & Roberts, 2010), or degrowth (Asara et al., 2015; Tornel, 2023). This reframing enables us to produce an alternative discourse that doesn’t just promote transition, but transforms energy consumption.
A third entry point is consumption. The energy transition is a land and resource consuming activity, often displacing existing uses of land and creating conflicts that are hard to resolve (IPBES, 2019). For example, the energy transition is demanding vast amounts of rare earth minerals to create electric storage and transmission infrastructures. Current society does not value most raw materials like they are rare, something requiring care, rather we treat them as disposable. These are not limited to objects per se, but even metabolic processes like photosynthesis or ocean currents are taken for granted.
Re-conceptualizing uncertainty
A fundamental question for us is how to study uncertainty (Scoones & Stirling, 2020)? Within policy and practice of the energy transition, a great deal of attention is paid to eliminating uncertainty. The transition itself is predicated upon assumptions that a cure will be found via technological innovations based upon growth and progress. It is these values which drive climate change science and mitigation measures. In contrast, our group discussed which actors, institutions, conceptions of how the world works (ontology), and understandings of time create uncertainty as a problem to be solved. We believe that looking at uncertainty through a diversity of ontologies can open up new pathways to reconciling with it.
The aforementioned entry-points into the study of the energy transition can be traced and stories told that reveal how unruliness is shaped, and how this again shapes the transition. By departing from objects as the sole analytical focus, we can tell the story of the networks, knowledge, hierarchies and assemblages where unruliness appears. What happens when unruliness is rejected? What happens when it spurs generation? This reframing creates space for articulation of collective desires and imaginations.
The only sure way to eliminate uncertainty is by embracing theologies of complete certainty, or those based on an understanding of the world that sees time as repetitively circular (Burg, 2022). This understanding sits in contrast to the dominant scientific understanding of time as linear, a trajectory that is going somewhere (Abram, 1996; Nadaï, 2019). Within linear understandings of time uncertainty emerges as a problem of the future, something to be solved. We therefore believe the premise of the question should be: how do we learn to move with uncertainty as part of existence, where the future is unknown and change is the only absolute certainty?
Current mainstream thinking on energy transitions necessitates the use of imaginative thinking. Imaginative thinking highlights how a number of premises must be accepted in order to engage with stories of uncertainty. Hopeful pathways require some imagination, as the current hegemonic narratives of climate change and the future are rife with a sense of inevitable doom. It is often easier to imagine climate collapse than the regulatory framework to prevent it, despite many scholars emphasizing the way narratives of climate apocalypse are embedded in historical uneven relations and exploitation (Dillon, 2012; Finbog, 2021; Osborne & Carlson, 2023; K. Whyte, 2020; K. P. Whyte, 2018).
We also believe that imaginative thinking can help counteract the prevalence of conspiracy theories and false narratives that create basic mischaracterisations of not only the future, but also the present. These narratives are often rooted in binaries—climate change is real or not real, justice is necessary or unnecessary—shutting down precisely the space wherein our changing world and interpretations of it are emerging. We need imaginative thinking in order to develop frameworks that have space for contrasts and contradictions, mobilising it to open up not only how uncertainty shapes the Green Transition, but also how our conceptualisations of uncertainty shut down some lines of inquiry. Imaginative thinking can foster the relationships, institutions and practices needed for the solidarity, flexibility, experimentation and creativity that we believe are needed to live with uncertain futures.
Imagining a governance of creativity and care
In different ways, each of our projects is aimed at addressing the question of how to govern uncertainty and change. We remain sceptical of the adequacy of current efforts in addressing the challenges at hand, not least because we see more uncertainty and injustice arising around the benefits and losses of energy transitions. Can development and social organization based on care, flexibility and creativity help us to better navigate uncertainty? These are end points facilitated by current governance, but the journey is where the focus needs to lie.
This journey presupposes justice, both in terms of a just re-distribution of burdens and benefits associated with the energy transition, and a recognition that there are different ways of valuing and knowing nature and society (Jenkins et al., 2016). These are critical issues that we believe too often get lost in the urgency characterizing the transition, and the seriousness of planetary crises. Society must imagine new governance architectures to deliver on energy transition ambitions, but equally, we need to imagine new just ways of relating to each other and our world.
One analytical departure for such a reimagination queries the objects of study, narratives of sustainability, who has the right to question them, and networks through which they emerge. Another departure point is recognising the slow work of consensus building, of ensuring just engagement with the dilemmas of the energy transition. Putting into practice a governance of care requires interrogating how power operates in political, institutional and social domains to create narratives of sustainability, of limits, of a good life. Keeping the analytical focus on the journey, we take an investigative approach to reveal power relations and intersections as they occur in particular social and political relationships, narratives, and the relationships arising around energy transition technologies.
But we are left with questions about how we can effect change through governance practices grounded in care, flexibility, and creativity. A shift toward a new governance approach inevitably raises the question of how such values can be institutionalized without overlooking how caring relationships themselves are also sites of power and sometimes coercion. To help address these challenges, we mobilise a co-productive methodology that takes ontological difference seriously and institutional history as one that is reframed and remade through co-production/co-creation.
The imperative for transformation cannot overshadow the vitality of autonomous capacities for compassion and creativity that do not require coercive enforcement. Stabilising such framings requires reconstituting control as entangled, cyclical, and paradoxical. We recognize the effort to imagine gentler and just worlds and relations is enduringly difficult, even unruly, and has more to do with journeying than arrival. Imagining governances of care and creativity require a tolerance for staying with unruliness (D. J. Haraway, 2016).
Who are we?
At the University of Oslo, Department of Sociology and Human Geography, two funded research projects are working on questions of unruliness. Unruliness refers to the uncertainties that emerge from biophysical and technological change, and how they come together with political and sociocultural uncertainties.
At Western Norway Research Institute (Vestlandsforskning), the climate and environment research group holds three funded research projects that are working on questions of land use, energy transitions and justice within those processes. Key here is understanding how processes of land use change driven by the green transition produces unjust distribution of benefits of loss of values, as well as how the green transition co-produces new risks.
UNRULY: Unruly entanglements of sociomaterial change, knowledge, and power in energy frontiers (ERC Advanced Grant)
The project examines renewable energy initiatives and their implications on individuals' relationships with their land, each other, and the state. Hydropower projects play a critical role in society’s efforts to adapt to and mitigate climate change; however, clean power plants alone are insufficient for ensuring a just and sustainable transformation.The energy sector is influenced by geopolitics, injustices, environmental changes, and development efforts, making research on socio-material change essential. The project aims to develop a new analytical framework and methodologies that integrate social and material aspects to better understand change and address justice issues.
UNRULY SUSTAINABILITY: Unruly Sustainability Challenges: addressing uncertainty in governing energy transitions (UiO Energy and Environment Grant)
This project aims to innovate new methods to gain novel insights into sociomaterial change. Energy transitions provide a dynamic example of how uncertainty and unruliness can undermine efforts at prediction and governing change. The Thematic Research Group brings together a unique interdisciplinary team spanning between the humanities, social science and stochastic mathematics. The main focus is to develop new methods that can help understand how uncertainties are shaping trajectories of change, with a particular focus on acoustic methods. The overall research question asked is, how do prediction and planning create new uncertainties and governance challenges in sustainable energy transitions?
JUSTGREEN: Landuse justice for green transition (Nordforsk grant)
JustGreen is aiming to develop a land use management framework that can be used to help resolve conflicts over land use in the green transitions. We draw on theories of legitimacy, justice, and pluralistic valuation to develop a framework for just land use assessment.
This aspect is important, as a fundamental reason for the nature crisis is the failure to appropriately value nature in decision-making processes. The framework will be applied to studies of ongoing and completed processes of land use change in relation to onshore wind projects and mining projects in Norway, Finland, Denmark, and Iceland.
Enabling land use justice (Research Council of Norway grant)
Enabling sustainable and just land use warrants a fundamental shift in how diverse and competing values are accounted for in land use decision-making.. The purpose of ‘Enabling land use justice’ is to develop and test a framework (in collaboration with the Justgreen project) to aid land use planning processes by establishing just principles for weighting and balancing conflicting interests between socio-economic-, environmental-, and justice concerns. The project is highly interdisciplinary, and has a work package using ecology and life cycle assessment methodologies for identifying biophysical values and determine green house gas emissions from land use change.
SusRenew addresses the ongoing transition towards a future renewable and net-zero GHG emission energy system. More precisely, the project will investigate how to assess and reduce climate risk that may arise because of this transition. The project relies on comprehensive participation from stakeholders in the renewable energy sector, covering representatives from energy providers, public as well as private end-users of energy, and energy policy actors. The project will co-produce knowledge about compound climate events that may affect the energy system, i.e. various hazard events that can occur at the same time over different regions.
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Andrea J. Nightingale, Halvor Dannevig, Marta Mboka Tveit, Cedar S. Patterson, Karen Richardsen Moberg, Ural Kafle, Stephen Williams, Mari Hanssen Korsbrekke, Ragnild Freng Dale, Carlo Aall, Tara B. Holm
Funded by the European Union (ERC, UNRULY, 101142262). Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
