Great Power Leadership and the Infrastructural Geopolitics of Net-Zero
At a time when the balance of power is in flux, this workshop will examine the concept of ‘great power leadership’ in the context of competition between the United States, European Union and China, and explore how this is influencing Net Zero infrastructures and technologies. Academics, policy makers and industry specialists from around the world will look at the shifting balance of power, and the competing strategies and visions of the great powers as they negotiate the geopolitics of energy transition.
This workshop examines great power leadership in the context of the emerging geopolitical competition over transnational infrastructures, energy transition and the changing nature of international order.
The United States and the European Union have both announced infrastructure investment programmes that have energy transition and connectivity at their core in recent years (the United States via leadership of the G7 Partnership for Global Infrastructure Investment (PGII), and the European Union via its Global Gateway projects).
These strategic moves are a direct response to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, a multi-decade strategic plan to transform the nature of connectivity and international order across Afro-Eurasia. Part of the BRI’s aims is to produce a ‘green silk road’, leveraging Chinese leadership in green technology, as part of the pressing need for international leadership in the transition to more sustainable relationships with the natural world.
As the balance of power shifts, these great powers appear to be leaving behind the last four decades of US led globalisation, entering a new period with very different characteristics. This will be a time of competing infrastructural geopolitics, in which the leadership and vision of great powers, each with differing political, economic, and societal models, will determine how the 21st century will take shape, which states and their allies will thrive, and which will falter.
The workshop seeks to develop the concept of great power leadership in the context of a shifting balance of power and emerging infrastructural geopolitics. It seeks contributions that interrogate the competing strategies and visions of great powers as they compete in the geopolitics of energy transition. It seeks to investigate how the shaping of infrastructure can be a form of structural power and strategic advantage in a world of competitive states.
