From the “Right to Energy” to the “Right to the Countryside” and Back Again: Contextualizing Rural Energy Transitions

Rural areas as well as their interlinkages with urban agglomerations have gained increasing attention as the main sites where the current energy transformation toward the use of renewable energy is taking place. Due to this, contestations over transitions and emancipatory efforts to transform energy infrastructures cannot be detached from the structural conditions of rural areas and their entanglements with other spatial scales. In this sense, sustainable energy transitions reflect various differences between as well as within rural areas. Consequently, rural energy transitions are embedded in broader processes of rural change. This contribution to the Focus section illustrates interconnections between energy transitions and rural change as they relate to issues of land-use change in rural areas, rural poverty, and marginalization, along with rural populism. In doing so, we argue that energy transition plays an important role for all these issues of rural development and advocate for a systematic integration of the transformation of energy systems and rural change. We, thereby, believe that contextualizing rural energy transitions can contribute to the realization of a “right to the countryside” and of just and sustainable rural futures within the energy sector and beyond.