UC Irvine

This dissertation examines the sociotechnical dynamics of renewable energy transition in Austin, Texas and considers their implications for developing more just and effective modes of environmental governance. While considerable advancements have been made in terms of reducing the City’s carbon emissions, their basis in the techniques and practices of petro-capitalism continues to reproduce many of the social and environmental injustices of the city’s former fossil- fueled energy system. Accordingly, I suggest, Austin’s renewable energy transition can be seen as “out of joint,” as sedimented histories of racial exclusion and petro-capitalist development continue to haunt Austin’s renewable energy transition. By studying and contrasting the various thought styles of Austin’s diverse environmental communities, I argue that Austin’s out-of- jointness and associated injustices are rooted in a misguided reification of energy systems as a distinct and taken-for-granted domain for intervention. Alternatively, I suggest an approach to “energy systems” as always entangled with other interdependent systems (social, cultural, and epistemic as well as technical and ecological). As such, I argue that part of the governance challenge of just energy transition lies in developing new modes of coordination and collaboration across systems, jurisdictions, and domains of expertise – well beyond energy systems per se.Theoretically, we need to better account for the full ecology of entangled systems involved in sociotechnical change. Drawing on twelve months of fieldwork and archival research, funded by the Wenner Gren Foundation, this dissertation brings the specificities of Austin’s energy transition to bear on current anthropological understandings of environmental governance and sociotechnical change. The energy systems entrenched in most places today both articulate with and produce different kinds of temporalities (the grid’s 60hz, the 9-5pm work week, energy assistance schedules, our expectations for the future, etc.), many of which have resulted from and continue to be imbued with the dynamics of petro-capital. These temporalities undergird the social rhythms and patterned behaviors through which we reproduce ourselves and our environments, ensuring that change is never straightforward because of the many cross-system, ecological ways that the past haunts the present. In sum: fossil fuel energy locks us in in multiple ways – beyond what can be addressed in narrow approaches to sociotechnical change. To account for this, I develop the concept of “petro- ghosts” to think about the way petro-capitalist logics, desires, and practices have and continue to shape Austin’s emergent renewable energy system, and its discontents. I also characterize the practices by which certain communities (especially those focused on energy justice) attempt to recognize and exorcize these specters by developing alternative scales and frames of analysis. Focusing on these divergences in data practices and infrastructures, thought styles, and rhetorical modes of expression among energy transition advocates, I identify how these influence the scales and systems that different communities deem relevant to energy transition and appropriate for organized interventions. Inversely, I also take note of the systems different communities sideline as irrelevant, invaluable, risky, or simply too inveterate to warrant their attention. I draw on this data to demonstrate how Austin’s current model of environmental governance is linked to deep seated investments in technocratic ideologies and expertise, ideologies that have attained a sense of inevitability and “realism” in the city, in part, through their sedimented influence on daily life in Austin. As a result, resistance involves a widening of the range of knowledge and expertise considered relevant to just energy transitions, and to the development of new public data capacities to uncover, recognize, and excise remnants of Austin’s petro-racial capitalist pasts. Drawing upon these knowledge production and ethical practices, I suggest the potential to bolster these efforts by adapting collaborative, community-engaged ethnographic methods towards the development of just transition strategies, for Austin and elsewhere.