Mapping the spatial turn in social science energy research. A computational literature review

Social science scholars have identified a “spatial turn” in energy research over the last three decades. This article systematically reviews the literature on energy, space, and place and decomposes this inter- and transdisciplinary academic landscape. A corpus of 7879 research articles related to spatial perspectives on energy issues is processed and analyzed based on a step-by-step framework for the automated, transparent, and reproducible analysis of large sets of research articles. For this purpose, natural language processing approaches, including named entity recognition and structural topic modeling, are adopted. Based on this large-n selection procedure, selected topics related to the geographical political economy of the energy transition are reviewed in detail. The review maps the geographical scope and scale of the research field, highlights major topics, and shows the distribution of methodological approaches and the role of geographic information systems in this research field. The results show a growing body of literature attentive to socio-spatial variation and the uneven spatiality of energy systems. Nevertheless, uneven geographical distributions of studies with a strong focus on the major industrialized countries and generally only a few comparative cases were also found. In particular, research on the energy transition and renewable energy policy is strongly informed by studies addressing the Global North, limiting the evidence base for other regional contexts from the Global South.