LOST Tech-Law-Planet Seminar Series

As societies accelerate efforts toward decarbonization, the governance of energy transitions has become both an urgent task and a site of profound ethical tension. While the language of “transition” often evokes progress, innovation, and sustainability, it can also obscure the extractive practices, power imbalances, and socio‑environmental trade‑offs embedded within emerging energy systems. This seminar examines what lies beyond the dominant transition narrative by exploring the ethical dilemmas, legal challenges, and hidden costs that shape contemporary governance of energy and material transformations. Bringing together perspectives from law, technology, and sustainability studies, the session aims to open a critical space for rethinking how transitions are governed—and for whom they are truly just.

LOST invites you to join us for a seminar that brings together two complementary perspectives on the governance challenges emerging in a rapidly transforming global energy landscape.

  • The first presentation examines the ethical complexities of steering energy transitions, highlighting how shifting understandings of value and risk shape governmental decisions and the societal futures they enable.
  • The second presentation turns to the geopolitics and legalities of climate-era intervention, using the case of Venezuela to explore how international legal architectures are mobilized around extractive rents and competing visions of sovereignty in the Americas.

Together, these presentations reflect the contested ethical, political, and legal terrains that underpin efforts to build new energy futures.

Online access to the meeting via:

https://eoppimispalvelut.zoom.us/j/65374210492

Speakers

Dr Sean Field, Director of Policy, Senior Researcher, University of St Andrews

Sean is currently a Senior Research Fellow and the Director of Policy at the Centre for Energy Ethics at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. He currently leads the Financial Pathways theme of the Scottish Research Alliance for Energy Homes and Livelihoods and was a Lead Analyst with the UK Department of Energy Security and Net Zero. His recent book is “Carbon Capital: Climate Change and the Ethics of Oil Investing” (NYU Press 2025).

The ethical complexities of energy transition and its governance

Abstract: To govern is to engage with a set of ethical quandaries associated with the basic functioning of society, set within a normative strategic direction for, and vision of, the future. Energy transition is shaping these directions and visions in ways that break from the past by prompting governments to consider how their energy systems should be reordered. As an elemental building block of contemporary economies and societies, the reordering of energy systems away from fossil fuels has deep and far-reaching implications for people and the planet – creating new dependencies, security concerns, and opportunities. This presentation will examine the ethical complexities of energy transition governance through the conceptual lenses of value and risk. It will be argued that by paying critical attention to how and why value and risk are understood, calculated, applied to energy, and acted upon by governments, we can better understand why energy transitions are governed as they are, and the prospectus for the future.

Prof Rene Uruena, Professor of Law, Universidad de Los Andes

Rene Urueña holds the WTO Chair at Universidad de Los Andes (Colombia). A Max Planck Fellow in Law, he has been counsel and several times an expert witness before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, served as Special Advisor on Complementarity to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, as President of the Colombian Academy of International law, and as an adviser of the Selection Committee of the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (Colombia). He has been a Fellow at New York University, a docent at the Institute for Global Law and Policy at the University of Harvard, and a visiting professor at the City University of New York, and at the universities of Tel-Aviv, Utah, Lapland, and Helsinki. He holds a LL.M. (laudatur) and a Doctor of Law (eximia cum laude) degree from the University of Helsinki, and a law degree and a postgraduate degree in economics from the Universidad de los Andes (Colombia).

Extractive Regionalism? Venezuela and the Legal Architecture of a Climate Era Intervention

Abstract: The US capture of Venezuelan President Maduro can be read as climate era intervention: a repertoire of coercive practices that ties geopolitical hemispheric dominance to the governance of energy-centred extractive rents. Using this intervention as an entry point, the lecture traces a legal toolkit that operates between force and commerce, and situates this architecture within Latin American legal traditions of non-intervention, sovereign equality, and permanent sovereignty over natural resources. The climate emergency is becoming a new grammar of intervention, requiring new international legal strategies for a just, climate-compatible, and decolonial energy transition in the Americas. 

Questions? 

Please contact LOST coordinator Beata Mäihäniemi (beata.maihaniemi@ulapland.fi)