Taking the power back: conceptualizing a people-centred energy transition

• The global hegemonic energy transition discourse is framed as politically neutral. • The energy transition discourse obscures and reproduces global inequalities. • Governmentality research balances post-colonial critique and agency of the “weak”. • Governmentality allows for transformative and policy-relevant research. • Governmentality’s decentred power unlocks individuals’ transformative potential. This paper critically examines the dominant discourse of the global energy transition from fossil fuel-based energy to low-carbon sources and reveals its underpinning in a liberal cosmopolitan-informed biopolitical logic. This discourse achieved hegemony by instrumentalizing climate change science, making it appear politically neutral and ecologically imperative. This research reveals three key limitations of this hegemonic discourse, namely depoliticization, Westen-centrism, and obfuscation of unequal power relations. These limitations compound to shield the hegemonic energy transition discourse from political and intellectual scrutiny, which in turn risks perpetuating colonial and racialized global hierarchies characteristic of the fossil fuel-based energy system. This paper joins the literature which seeks to highlight how power is embedded in energy discourses and practices. This paper advances a conceptual contribution to this literature through proposing the use of Foucauldian governmentality. This research demonstrates that governmentality is better equipped than post-colonialist perspectives to simultaneously historicise and contextualise unequal power relations to account for contingency, resistance, and agency. This paper therefore advocates for the operationalization of governmentality to account for post-colonial structures without jettisoning an awareness of the role of individual agency in reshaping energy systems and subverting attendant power relations. By doing so, governmentality-minded investigations can transcend interest-based perspectives to enable policy-relevant findings with the potential to transform the status quo