Renewing the future: Excluded imaginaries in the global energy transition - Sheila Jasanoff

October 2021, Paper: "Sociotechnical imaginaries (STIs) are widely used in the ERSS literature, but their origins in the field of science and technology studies (STS), and the implications of their migration into ERSS, are not well theorized or thoroughly appreciated. We take as our starting point that the STI concept is an offshoot of co-production, the simultaneous production of natural and social order. We resituate STIs in relation to that origin story within co-productionist STS to enhance its analytic power in relation to energy research. We parse STIs along three dimensions of co-productionist analysis: integration, symmetry, and reflexivity. We then contrast the analytic purchase offered by STIs, grounded in co-production, with another popular STS approach, actor-network theory (ANT), by looking at two exemplary cases of the energy transition in the global South."

HKS Author - Sheila Jasanoff