Introduction

In our warming world, energy provision is not simply about technology but also politics (Hughes and Lipscy 2013). Energy systems are the result of intensely contested political battles in the domains of technology selection, ownership of capital, environmental externalities, access, and siting. The geographical reach, terms of access, and forms of ownership of electricity infrastructures reflect the prevailing distribution of political and economic power (Bridge, Özkaynak and Turhan 2018). Consequently, this gives rise to injustices such as uneven electricity access, displacement, and voicelessness among marginalized communities. Control over energy infrastructure is not just the result but often also the source of political and social power (Amin 2014; Larkin 2013) – that is, energy shapes politics just as much as politics shape energy.

India is facing the twin imperatives of tackling historic energy poverty through an expansion of its energy system on the one hand and pursuing climate mitigation on the other. India's electricity sector is dominated by coal-fired thermal power, which in turn drives the country's carbon emissions. The energy sector as a whole contributed around 74 per cent of India's total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in 2015, of which 38 per cent was from public electricity generation (GPI Secretariat 2016). On the other hand, India's average monthly residential electricity consumption is only 90 kilowatt-hour (kWh), which is one-third of the global average and one-tenth of that of the US (Chunekar and Sreenivas 2019). Despite official estimates of 100 per cent electrification, many households still receive poor quality electricity for only a few hours each day (S. D’Souza 2019). The growing feasibility of renewable energy (RE) indicates a potential opportunity to address both climate mitigation and energy poverty challenges. India announced a target of 450 gigawatt (GW) of RE by 2030 as against a total installed capacity of 370 GW in April 2020 (PMO India 2019). As we progress towards a low-carbon system, what are the implications of this transition, given existing patterns of injustice and the prospects of their reproduction in our twenty-first-century energy infrastructure?

India's electricity system can be characterized by its gigantic scale; the primary state ownership of its generation, transmission, and distribution infrastructure; cross-subsidization from commercial and industrial consumers to agricultural consumers; and its federal nature.

The Barren Fig Tree parable is modeled on features of the famine in Egypt to portray the imminent coming of God’s kingdom. The dying tree and dead earth beneath, reminiscent of threatening conditions during the Egyptian famine in Joseph’s time, evoke the prospect of the end of the world in Jesus’ time.

This case study explores the State Grid Corporation of China’s (SGCC’s) localization strategies within the Belo Monte hydroelectric project in Brazil, highlighting the challenges and lessons learned by Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) as they expand into Latin America. Over recent decades, Chinese SOEs have emerged as potential collaborators for Latin American countries seeking investment and technology for critical infrastructure projects. SGCC’s involvement in constructing the Xingu-Estreito transmission line for the Belo Monte project stands as a prime example. This line, among the world’s largest and first to implement ±800kV ultra-high-voltage technology outside China, marks not only an engineering triumph for SGCC but also a significant business and legal accomplishment. The company adeptly navigated Brazil’s complex legal environment, tackling multifaceted regulatory, financial, and environmental challenges. This case study, based on government and corporate documents as well as confidential interviews, examines SGCC’s strategies for procurement, financial structuring, environmental licensing, and operational management in the context of this grandiose transmission line.

Reflections on fieldwork

Retractions in social science often involve data processing errors. In this chapter, we discuss a set of seven recent retractions that are highly teachable moments of data processing mistakes. Let’s learn from these examples and hone our skills to prevent and detect analytical errors.

Introduction

The emotion of nostalgia plays a vital role in the appeal, expression, and consequences of different forms of populism. As a response to the preceding chapters in this book, this chapter considers the issues of affect or emotion1 revealed as history mobilized by populists and populist movements and analyses the work that emotions perform in this process. The aim is to offer some thoughts on how we might constructively think about and analyse emotions in these contexts through considering critical notions of ‘heritage’ and ‘registers of engagement’. As the chapters in this book reveal, one of the defining features of populism is how it draws on the past to create, following Paul Taggart (2002), concepts of ‘heartland’ (Chapter 3), as well as the construction of historically situated undervalued and excluded ‘folk’ or ‘the people’ pitted against ‘elites’ (Mudde 2004; Chapters 1, 5, 7, 8, and 11), the utilization of historical mythologizing to solidify the peoples’ ‘hero’ (Chapters 1, 4, 5, and 9), the legitimation of certain memory holders of ‘the people’ (Chapters 2 and 6), or, indeed, the disassociation of the present with the past to create historical alternatives (Chapter 10). The appeal to right-wing populism of revisionist, mythologized, or overly selective histories that avoid ambiguity and emphasize the positive, heroic, and patriotic or nationalistic pride is based on the emotional valence of these histories and the work they do in managing present-day emotions or affective states.

I focus on right-wing populism because, as Stuart Hall (1979) has observed, the right continues to be far more effective than the left in organizing populist politics. There are lessons to be learnt by the left in analysing how particular emotions, specifically nostalgia, are used, which can facilitate the development of ways to challenge right-wing populism. Indeed, the affective repertoires of populism and how and why emotions are managed and mobilized are significantly different between those who hold conservative or progressive ideological positions (Jost 2019). I do not equate populism with ideology and follow Ernesto Laclau's definition (2004, 2005) that populism is most usefully understood as a particular logic of politics. Nonetheless, understanding the ideological contexts and implications of how certain emotions are expressed and managed is essential for understanding their utility within right-wing populist movements.

In this chapter we revisit a hotly contested study on the effects of having LGBT parents. Critics identified many debatable modeling choices, mostly involving data processing decisions. We analyze how robust the original results are across 2.6 million model specifications. As we show, there was a lot more to learn about this study and the role that assumptions play in producing conclusion.

Japan is the world’s fourth-largest economy and a close ally of the United States. Yet its politics are highly anomalous: It is a democracy in which one party, Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), wins nearly every election. Even an electoral reform, expected to bring about alternations in power between two large parties, has. The chapter uses data on the outcomes of every Lower House election held since the LDP’s inception in 1955 and public opinion surveys to flesh out the puzzle of LDP dominance. It surveys three explanations for this. One emphasizes structural features of the electoral systems Japan has used and explains how they have translated into advantages for the LDP. The other two probe the reasons why voters vote for the LDP. One holds that voters vote for the LDP because they prefer its policy positions, ideological orientation, leaders, or reputation for competence. The other holds that voters vote for the LDP because of the access to central government resources its politicians enjoy. This chapter explains how over time, real-world events and empirical studies have chipped away at the explanatory power of each account. This warrants another look at this question.

‘If you want to know what it is really like here you must come at night,’ I was often told when first getting to know the jhupri labourers. They spoke of the mess (jhamela) and the fighting (ganjam). The image they draw upon most to convey life here is the sight of labourers competing for work. By day the bazaar and adjacent avenue are clogged with imported Japanese cars, dilapidated buses, CNGs and rickshaws, all slowly inching forward in the shadows of the new metro rail, protesting each metre gained with a cacophony of horns. By late evening the traffic around Kawran Bazaar calms but is replaced with a different jostling for space. As labourers catch sight of arriving trucks, they speed their flat-backed rickshaw vans towards them. Rather than face forward, they often reverse, running while swivelling the handlebars so as to arrive ready to receive sacks. With neither brakes nor chains, the labourers are masters of weaving and dodging obstacles at high speed, forcing each other off course and lobbing insults at rivals. Those who arrive first wait the least, are likely to get more of the goods to deliver and hence higher payment at the end of the night. Fights and injuries are common. Liton described the scene as: ‘The van drivers barricade the truck[s] like an army.’ The image then suggests chaos, a ruthlessness and precarity for people relying on their health and needing to work here day to day to survive and support families. In reality, however, the majority of the trucks are not unloaded in this manner and the jhupri labourers rarely race for work. Instead, most labourers wait in a queue (serial) or follow instructions from a labour leader. Work, in other words, is highly ordered. Yet the claims of precarity that the jhupri labourers evoke with these images are still very real, only materialised in a different way. Risks stem not so much from the need to race and jostle for work, but rather from the dependencies which give order to work.