Low Emissions Transitions Amidst the ‘Geopolitical Moment’: A Geopolitical Economy Analysis

The relative growth in influence of economic nationalism over domestic and foreign policymaking coincides with ongoing low emissions energy system transformations. One assumption is that the current geopolitical moment, marked by attempts to increase energy independence and control access to and flows of resources, will impede the pace, ambition, and quality of low emissions transformations. Although we have much sympathy with the linking of the current geopolitical moment to the growth of influence in economic nationalism, we apply a broader, constructivist framing of energy geopolitics to identify and understand how changes in international relations and energy systems are shaping one another. This approach helps to reveal a wider range of important types of change – beyond an emphasis on conflict and fragmentation/de-globalisation in energy trade and wider relations. Our approach reveals greater complexity in the nexus between international relations and low emissions transformations partly by applying a broader understanding of what constitutes the ‘geo-‘ in geopolitics and by taking greater account of the materialities of energy system change. We explore the ways in which these IR and energy systems shape one another, and with what consequences, in three areas: critical materials; distributed renewables (and their manufacture); and batteries. We conclude that to truly understand the current ‘geopolitical moment’ and how it relates to low emissions system changes we need to see them as actively shaping one another. At the same time these relations are highly complex. Changing energy materialities and technologies both reinforce national abilities to increase energy independence and less ‘national’ and more domestically fragmented energy systems – whilst the growing role of batteries in electrified energy systems infer complex re-globalisations of international relations. It is analytically important to recognise that low emissions transformations shape international relations, as well as the other way around.