Granite city sunset:uncommoning the energy transition

This article develops the concept of “uncommoning” as a critique of prevailing modes of energy transition in the Global North. It integrates insight from critical geography, anthropology, and decolonial studies that challenge assumptions of linear progress, inevitability, and commonality underpinning energy transition experiments and highlight the fraught temporalities involved. Informed by ethnographic data on the contentious implementation of an Energy Transition Zone (ETZ) in Aberdeen (Scotland), we demonstrate how residents, campaigners, and their allies interrogate the shared ground on which dominant narratives of energy transition are staked, revealing underlying relationalities of power, epistemic inequity, and socioeconomic disparities. The perspective of uncommoning does not propose simplistic alternatives but rather illuminates an emergent propositional politics that orients to modes of care, equity and justice.