Overview

Struggles over power and justice in the Clear Fork Valley Published in 1982, John Gaventa’s award-winning Power and Powerlessness examined the dominance of the absentee coal industry in Central Appalachia. Gaventa and Gabe Schwartzman update the story through coal’s decline and into the present while focusing on how power relations and community mobilizing have changed and evolved during this era of transition. Their analysis tracks the impact on a place where a fossil fuel–based economy shaped political and social structures for over a century. As they show, new forms of power emerged while old ones remained, and both affected the popular struggle for a future that’s both just and more inclusive.

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9780252046933

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Reviews

""More than forty years after his pathbreaking book Power and Powerlessness was published, John Gaventa and his coauthor Gabe Schwartzman return to the Appalachian Valley to explore the question of what a post-coal future looks like in a world in transition. The result, Power and Just Transitions, is a hugely impressive, rich but accessible, engaged and rigorous study of the struggles over a just transition away from fossil fuels that will be of interest to a growing community of scholars and activists keen to ensure that collective responses to climate change do not further marginalize those who have already suffered so much in the name of 'development'. I wholeheartedly recommend this critically important book."" --Peter Newell, author of Power Shift: The Global Political Economy of Energy Transitions

Author Information

John Gaventa is a professor and research fellow at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex. He is the author of Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley. Gabe Schwartzman is an assistant professor of geography and sustainability at the University of Tennessee and has been deeply engaged in community mobilization efforts in the Clear Fork Valley.

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