Climate futures: Imagination and its influence on Green energy policy in Scotland

Despite its long-standing relationship with North Sea oil extraction, Scotland’s renewable energy targets are amongst the most ambitious in the world. The SNP-led Scottish Government has continuously promised to exceed the UK’s and EU’s 2050 climate action ambitions, committing to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2045. However, these ambitions are not on track to be realised, stagnated by inner party disagreements on what a net-zero future should look like. Strong disagreements over future sustainable energy policies dominate the narrative across the SNP’s government, stagnating the development and implementation of renewable energy policy. In this paper I present my three year Leverhulme project investigating these internal stagnations, arguing that this stagnation stems from competing imaginations of utopian/dystopian futures exist in tension amongst SNP politicians, who struggle to balance local and global responsibilities.

Gabriela Manley is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Durham. Her project, titled 'Climate futures: Imagination and its influence on Green energy policy in Scotland', will investigate the link between independence, imagination, and the current push for net-zero energy in Scotland. Previously she was a Teaching Fellow at the University of St Andrews’ Social Anthropology department where she worked on Scottish nationalism and its futural orientations, paying attention to the ways in which the future influences political action, in particular utopian/dystopian imaginations of climate futures. Her research is based on long-term fieldwork amongst Scottish National Party activists in Edinburgh. She is the founder and co-convenor of the ASA Anthropology of Time network and the webmaster for American Ethnologist.

To book a place at this event please visit our EventBrite page.