Description
Tackling climate change is challenging not only because it poses an existential threat, but also because it requires coordinated political action amid an increasingly fractured international environment. However, while it is impossible to mitigate the effects of climate change without fostering an energy transition, the latter has become an increasingly complex process. First, because resources are no longer geographically concentrated, the division between producers and consumers is blurred, energy transportation no longer involves pipelines and tanks but electric grids, generation is decentralized, and the greatest advantage for states is not the physical possession of energy resources but the control of the technologies needed to transform them into actual electricity. Second, because green technologies have increasingly been securitized. As a result of the transformations in both the energy sector and broader international relations, traditional conceptions of energy security no longer support the complexity of the green transition. This paper investigates how these dynamics affect the concept of energy security. It addresses empirical changes that have challenged long-established conceptual and theoretical frameworks. Considering the central role that technology has taken in the energy transition, it proposes a re-conceptualization of energy security by bringing international political economy into the concept.
