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Abstract In this paper, we reflect on our collective experiences engaging with Anishinaabe Tribal Nations in the Great Lakes region to support Tribal sovereignty in decision‐making for food, energy, and water (FEW) systems. In these diverse experiences, we find common lessons. The first set of lessons contributes new empirical knowledge regarding the challenges and opportunities that rural Great Lakes Tribal Nations navigate for enacting sovereignty in decision‐making. Our experiences illustrate that while Tribal Nations benefit from a broad and deep commitment to sovereignty and many cultural strengths, they are often challenged by shortages in administrative capacity; technical support; and embeddedness in economic, socio‐cultural, and institutional dynamics that must be further negotiated for Tribes to enact the sovereignty to which they are inherently (and legally) entitled. Productive partnerships struggle when university partners fail to acknowledge these realities. The second set of lessons addresses the potential for, and challenges of, effective engagement processes. We find that engagement with university professionals is often mismatched with the priorities and needs of Tribal Nations. Effective engagement with Tribal Nations requires practical knowledge, applied assistance, and grounded, genuine relationships; these requirements often run counter to the institutional structures and priorities imposed by universities, federal funding agencies, and student recruitment. These findings, associated with both empirical knowledge and lessons on process, highlight shared insights on formidable barriers to effective engagement. Based on our firsthand experience working with rural Tribal Nations on FEW decision‐making, we share these reflections with particular focus on lessons learned for professionals who engage, or hope to engage, with Tribal Nations in rural settings and offer opportunities to transform engagement processes to better support the immediate, practical needs of rural Tribal Nations.
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Cultural imaginaries or incommensurable ontologies? Relationality and sovereignty as worldviews in socio-technological system transitions
Scholars bridging the fields of science and technology studies (STS) and energy research in social sciences (ERSS) offer a rich and integrated conceptualization of how energy systems are imbued in social systems, including cultures, social structures, institutions, and social relations of power. Yet as fields of study, STS and ERSS are dominated by approaches to understanding nature, culture, and relationships among them with origins in western European Enlightenment thinking. In this article, we argue that the language of “imaginaries” provides an understanding of culturally organized normative commitments but may obscure attention to what are actually diverse and sometimes incommensurable yet legitimate plural ontologies. Tribal Nations, Indigenous communities, and other non-Western worldviews are not simply imagined; they offer different teachings regarding the relational and embedded realities governing relations among human and more-than-human beings across time and space. The field of STS has a rich history of exploring ontological controversies and provides insight into understanding diverse and competing perspectives in science and technology, yet without articulating the connection between this conceptual terrain and the lived realities of socio-technological system entrenchment or change. ERSS recognizes participation, energy system democratization, and even co-production as components of a just energy transition, while most typically thinking about participation as a methodology or research approach rather than as requiring consideration and even wholesale reconceptualization of ontological foundations. To advance convergent, transdisciplinary social science research in socio technological transitions requires grappling with plural ontologies regarding the reality of relations in the world. Here, we explore diverse ontologies shaping the realities of energy systems through the lens of Tribal Nations in the Great Lakes region in the United States. Ontologies that recognize reciprocal relationships among human and more-than-human beings as well as the sovereignty of these beings and their collective kinships suggest fundamentally different priorities for energy systems transitions. Moving beyond the language of imagination to recognize that cultures can involve diverse and sometimes incommensurable pluralistic ontologies is essential for developing inclusive and just frameworks for socio-technological system transitions.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1934346
- PAR ID:
- 10294094
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Energy research social science
- Volume:
- 80
- Issue:
- 10
- ISSN:
- 2214-6296
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 102242
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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