Technological advancement is often coupled with increased material and energy consumption – including where it claims to be ‘green’. Yet the environmental burden does not stop there: the uneven geographical distribution of extraction, processing, and waste disposal risks exacerbating global inequalities and creating new forms of social injustice. Electric vehicles, AI data centres, and renewable energy technologies are cases in point. The articles in this special issue examine the conditions under which technologies are developed, deployed, and contested. Drawing on political economy, political ecology, and science and technology studies, they introduce transformation conflicts as a conceptual lens: conflicts rooted in competing visions, unequal power relations, and distributive consequences of specific technological pathways. Who benefits – and who bears the costs? The answers cannot be separated from the political-economic structures in which technologies are embedded and point toward a re-politicization of technological decision-making that takes seriously both social justice and ecological sustainability.
Schwerpunktredakteur*innen: Nora Krenmayr, Martin Cerny