The People, Place and Energy Research Centre has launched an Edited Collection, co-edited by Manon Burbidge, Katherine Sugar and Stefan Bouzarovski, entitled “Navigating Persistent Energy and Climate Crises: Critical Reflections”, following PPERC’s launch event on 18th June 2026.
The edited collection brings together the perspectives of 15 researchers from a range of disciplines and career stages across the University of Manchester. Contributors attend to the everyday geographies of crisis, including how households experience energy injustice, how communities organise around climate risk, how practitioners navigate competing pressures in
policy and service delivery, and how infrastructures of care are underpinned by human labour (Bouzarovski, 2025). These accounts illuminate the political nature of the impacts of energy and climate crises, which are constantly negotiated via the tensions between neoliberal governance pressures, on the one hand, and frontline needs, on the other.
A further shared focus lies in examining place-based and
geographically sensitive responses to energy and climate crises, and what these reveal about the possibilities and limits of just energy transformations. Contributions consider a wide range of practices and
interventions, from trans-local experiments in energy governance to grassroots forms of resistance
and mutual support. Rather than treating place-based
responses as inherently progressive or scalable, the contributors critically reflect on their ambivalences, including the tensions between local action and
structural change, and between inclusion and exclusion.
In doing so, the 15 contributors collectively
underscore the importance of territoriality, lived experience and political power in shaping pathways of response.
Urban Energy Transformations Hub 