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The distributed nature of renewable energy has given rise to new forms and scales of energy governance, in particular the emerging role of households and community organisations in generating and distributing renewable energy. Accompanying this trend has been the emergence of intermediary organisations, whose role it is to mediate between these actors cf. the market and the state, with the aim to move from local experimentation to widespread transformational change. While in recent years a significant body of research has emerged that has considered intermediary functions, less is known about intermediary spaces. By tracing how intermediary spaces are shaped, negotiated, protected, and expanded, this article makes three contributions to the literature on energy governance and low-carbon intermediaries. First, a focus on the relational nature of intermediary spaces challenges the community/state binary in energy governance. Second, it highlights the power dynamics behind these emergent relational spaces; showing such spaces are not neutral, but produced through social relations within and beyond them, affecting the functions that intermediaries seek to fulfil. Third, it provides an understanding of how the ever-changing nature of intermediary spaces can also enable new spaces for action to emerge and challenge the status quo.

Calls for greater 'energy democracy' foresee a greater role for voluntary sector activity – including through community groups' ownership of energy projects – to help produce more open, participatory and just energy systems. This article offers a novel conceptualisation of democracy through viewing community energy projects as assemblages of heterogeneous elements, and traces their enlacement with a wide range of social and political relations. This enables us to explore how a position of distributed agency affects the possibilities, challenges and realities of enacting new forms of democracy. Drawing on empirical research in England and Scotland, we trace the relations that community groups form in the process of setting up energy projects. In doing so, we go beyond the binary view that sees such groups as inherently democratic responses to undemocratic systems or as co-opted actors in governmental programmes, instead exploring the multiple ways these new socio-material configurations 'become-democratic'. Through furthering an understanding of energy democracy that emphasises democracy-as-process, we demonstrate its inherent emergent, contingent and uncertain qualities.

Abstract
The complex nature of climate change requires action at different scales and in different ways, but questions remain around how to produce climate action that is both multiscalar and joined up. Here we explore this question by adopting a relational approach to studying climate action by faith-based actors, who increasingly play an active role campaigning on climate action. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork with representatives of Christian churches in Sweden, Belgium, Scotland, and England, we identify two interrelated processes that explain how climate action "travels": first, through horizontal circulation (between faith-based and non-faith-based spheres), and second, through vertical circulation (across individual, local, national, and international levels). However, such processes are not without friction. We demonstrate how processes of "translation" can ensure the integration of climate action into new contexts and result in producing new scalar relations but also exclusions. In doing so, we advance understandings of how multiscalar climate action is produced by nonstate actors.

This article furthers political geographic thinking on democracy by generating and employing a conceptualisation of 'assemblage-democracy'. Bringing an assemblage perspective to democratic thinking brings to the fore three key dimensions: the co-constitution of material and non-material connections; connectivity and associations, in particular engagement with multiple heterogeneous 'minoritarian' publics; and the (re)construction of spatial configurations such as scale. We employ these three dimensions of materiality, publics, and scale, in combination with the concept of (de)territorialisation to produce a geographic conceptualisation of democracy as emergent, precarious, and plural. We operationalise and refine the concept of assemblage-democracy through an empirical analysis of democratic experiments with energy resources. Specifically, we analyse negotiations involved in emergent democratic energy experiments through in-depth qualitative empirical study of community-owned energy projects in the UK, asking what kind of democracy emerges with new technologies and how? In answering this question, we demonstrate the fragile, contingent, and contested nature of democratic practices and connections produced in the (re)enactment of energy infrastructures. In doing so, this article also shows how an assemblage lens can offer a renewed understanding of how democratic politics is configured through material resource governance.

AbstractFor rural communities, energy projects can provide a host of benefits, and yet also be a source of significant conflict. Place attachment has become an increasingly popular concept for understanding local responses to large scale renewable energy installations. However, there has been significantly less attention paid to how place attachment influences local responses to community‐led developments. This study contributes to the body of research on place attachment by examining its role in shaping opinions on two locally initiated projects. Interviews were conducted with residents in two rural communities in the Scottish Highlands, where community organisations are developing renewable energy projects. The findings show that place attachment was an important motivator for the development of these projects, but that different types of place attachment also formed a key source of disagreement. Finally, the implications of these findings for rural communities engaging in community‐led development initiatives will be discussed.

In recent years the term 'energy democracy' has become increasingly popular, especially in the context of aspirations for a low-carbon transition that include wider socio-economic and political transformation. The emergence of 'energy democracy' is thus part of a broader trend in research and practice which has sought to foreground the 'stuff' of politics. Yet, unlike the more academically developed concepts of energy justice and energy citizenship, energy democracy is a concept that emerged largely from social movements. This has resulted in a body of literature with little connection to established academic debates and theories. The growing popularity of the concept calls for a critical evaluation of the term and how it is used. By reviewing existing energy democracy publications and bringing these in conversations with more theoretical literature, we are seeking to address four issues; the rationale for pursuing energy democracy, the people and stakeholders involved and excluded, the proposed material focus of energy democracy, and the geographical focus of energy democracy. In the subsequent discussion we draw connections between energy democracy, the growing body of social science energy research and political theory, and identify avenues for further research.

This intervention seeks to revivify democratic thinking in political geography, through foregrounding and pluralising its material and temporal dimensions. At the same time, it speaks to a renewed centrality and relevance of infrastructure and infrastructural projects in political discourse. The contributions included here demonstrate how an infrastructural lens can offer new insights into democratic spaces, practices, and temporalities, offering more expansive versions of what it means to act politically. Specifically, these contributions intervene in existing geographical debates by bringing to the fore four underexplored dimensions of democratic governance: (im)materiality, connectivity, performativity, and temporality. In doing so, it develops a research agenda that broadens and regenerates thinking at the intersection of socio-spatial theory and democratic action and governance. ; Previous title: Intervention: Democratising infrastructure