OMG Seminar 

With Bregje van Veelen   

Date: November 7, 2025.13.00 -14.30
Location: Copenhagen Business School, Kilevej 14 A, 2000 Frederiksberg, in Room K4.74 (4th floor)  

The role of time in transitions: towards a politics of time
Time plays a key role in low-carbon transitions, with questions around deadlines, speed, and urgency shaping many of the debates around the changes required to mitigate the climate crisis. While transitions are often imagined through linear timescales, indicating a neat manageable trajectory from now to a desired end point (‘net zero by 2050’), in reality, change rarely happens in a steady way. Through two recent research projects I have been investigating the social and political realities of so-called ‘temporal dynamics’ on the ground. Through qualitative fieldwork in communities impacted by the phase out of fossil fuels as well as other forms of low-carbon industrial change, I have investigated several dimensions of time: How stakeholders try to control the timelines of transitions, who has the power to do so, how the past might disrupt progress towards desired futures, and what happens when desired futures do not arrive at all? Based on this, I will argue that (1) we need to diversify our understandings of the role of the past in transitions and the multiple ways it shapes the future; and (2) the value of a perspective that considers time as political, a power dynamic in its own right, which shapes the directions and outcomes of low-carbon transitions. In doing so, I argue that focusing on time can offer a useful lens for analysing the dynamics of low-carbon transitions.
 

Biography
Bregje van Veelen is an Assistant Professor at the Lund University Centre for Sustainability Studies in Sweden. Underpinning her research is the understanding that there is more than one way to a low-carbon society and that we need to ask how different low-carbon pathways emerge, evolve, and to what effect. With a background in human geography, she is especially interested in the place-based impacts of energy transitions; the interactions between local and non-local actors in steering change; and the democratic and justice implications of this. She currently leads two research projects, one focused on the phase out of fossil fuels, the other on low-carbon transitions in the steel industry. In both projects she analyses how workers and communities navigate these changes, and the implications for achieving a 'just transition'. More information about her research can be found here: https://www.post-carbon.co.uk/