The Kunshan Workshop will take place June 18–20, 2026, on the campus of Duke Kunshan University.
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This year’s workshop is focused on exploring how green transitions are designed, implemented, and envisioned across Asia’s varied landscapes. Asia is a critical site for studying energy transitions due to its rapidly evolving political economies, diverse ecologies, and long histories of resource extraction.
China has emerged as the world leader in this transition, leading production of solar panels, EVs, and large-scale renewables, while India and South Asia are rapidly scaling renewable energy. Across the region, diverse states are investing heavily in new infrastructures and energy regimes. At the same time, many Asian economies, including China’s, rely on resource extraction both within Asia and from other parts of the world, linking local transitions to transnational extractive frontiers.
In particular, Southeast Asia and the Pacific are increasingly positioned as crucial sites of mineral extraction—such as nickel, rare earths, and potential deep-sea mining—as well as frontline regions of climate precarity where questions of sovereignty, justice, and Indigenous futures shape what “green” transitions can and should look like. These dynamics reveal uneven transitions shaped by industrial competition, energy security concerns, and struggles over land, water, and Indigenous rights. Keeping in mind that many renewables are also based on minerals that are not renewable, this conference also seeks to critically examine the socio-political conditions, techno-scientific developments, and the local and planetary effects that underlie the transition to sustainable futures. This workshop will serve as an interdisciplinary platform for critically examining the past, present, and future of green transitions.
Panelists will share insights on the substantive ways Asia contributes to addressing environmental futures globally, based on unpublished research or similar works in progress, drawing on disciplinary toolkits developed from their expertise in the fields of geography, literature, history, anthropology, political science, and environmental studies.
