Despite increasingly dire warnings about 'climate emergency',
decisions regarding climate change mitigation and energy production
in Australia have been characterised by heated political debate.
According to the dominant framing of this problem, competing
interests have brought various stakeholders into conflict, and such
conflict is seen as an impasse to decisive and effective action.
This
paper follows an action research project undertaken in 2013, which
aimed to both explore and cultivate deliberations between two
stakeholder groups typically portrayed at the heart of such conflict:
Melbourne-based environmentalists demanding a reduction in fossil
fuel use; and 'coal communities' in Victoria's LaTrobe Valley, for
whom the coal industry currently plays a significant economic role.
Focus group methodology was used and expanded to create 'deliberative
spaces' involving members of both groups, and so became a research
process and a researched process. The research thus sought to examine
the ways that participants discussed, understood and constructed
low-carbon transition in the Latrobe Valley, but also how
participants from these geographically distinct stakeholder groups
interacted and 'deliberated' with each other. The potential for such
interaction and deliberation to affect participant subjectivities,
attitudes towards and engagement with low-carbon transition (and each
other) remains a motivating interest – an interest that this paper
aims to stoke further as interesting ground for further
investigation.
This paper is concerned with the geographies
low-carbon energy transition in the context of climate change
mitigation; action research methods; and how the latter might be
employed to both explore and serve the former. It will reflect upon
the particular adaptation and application of focus group method used
in the action-research project, along with the particular conceptions
of transition that were deliberated upon and their implications for
advancing low-carbon transition. Ongoing doctoral research into the
dynamics and possibilities of Latrobe Valley energy transition,
taking inspiration from a diverse economies approach, will be
proposed.