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Capitalist claims of energy transition, sustainable development, and renewable energy have proven misleading, even catastrophic. This raises a key question: What does genuine sustainability and renewability look like? Drawing from postdevelopment, this special issue explores the pluriverse of energy transformations with and beyond modernist, state-centric, and capitalist paradigms. In addition to energy sovereignty, we advocate for energy autonomy through self-determined, community-led energy governance rooted in socioecological reciprocity. This editorial examines community energy and community (renewable) energy ecologies, and the colonial foundations of energy, distinguishing it from electricity. We identify three political fault lines in community energy research: (1) the role of the state, (2) the manufacturing of “needs,” and (3) technical challenges. The special issue brings together authors exploring energy conceptualizations and electricity generation practices in Chile, Mexico, Brazil, Puerto Rico, Uganda, and Ladakh, India. Reflecting on energy autonomy, the conclusion, while acknowledging the limitations of the special issue, affirms calls for an insurrection in energy research that challenges state-centric approaches, encourages committed methodological approaches, and urges a shift beyond technocratic solutions toward pluriversal, decentralized, and collectively managed energy systems.
Tornel et al. (Wed,) studied this question.