Lis, Aleksandra | Poland

Aleksandra Lis holds a PhD degree in Sociology and Social Anthropology from the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. Her research focuses on the challenges to the construction of the European Union Emission Trading Scheme as a new market and a new governance tool. She also examines public perception of energy technology development, focusing mainly on CCS and nuclear as well as shale gas exploration. In her work she is interested in the role of experts and expertise in translating between different interests and in re-negotiating boundaries between politics, economy, science and society.

Project at IAS-STS: Trading Carbon Dioxide across Organizational Fields

The project examines how in three sectors: (1) energy sector, (2) industry sector and (3) banking, firms organize structures and practices of emission trade on the European Union Emission Trading Scheme (ETS). It is examined how organizations innovate to gain from their participation on the ETS and how they accommodate to the changing rules of the ETS (e.g. backloading) and to the future (post-2020) reform of the ETS. Selection of the three sectors provides an opportunity for comparing how organization of carbon trade differs in these sectors and how the organizations in the three sectors depend on each other and take each other into account when trading, thus constituting one market for emission trade. The role of experts and expertise in translating between interests and logics of these sectors is in the center of the examination. The project aims also to shed light on the challenges for the future reform of the ETS as different sectoral interests embedded in organizational structures and practices may again prevent from designing an economically and environmentally efficient market for emission trade in the European Union.

Selected Publications

Riesch, Hauke; Oltra, Christian; Lis, Aleksandra; Upham, Paul; Pol, Mariette. 2013. CCS and Remote Events: Sense-Making in Spanish and Polish Online Focus Groups. Energy Policy 56(May): 693-702.

Oltra, C., Upham, P., Riesch, H., Boso, A., Brunsting, S., Duetschke, E., Lis, A. 2012. Public Responses to CO2 Storage Sites: Lessons from Five European Cases. Special Issue of Energy and Environment 23(2&3).

Lis, Aleksandra. (in press). Europeanization as Interest Re-framing: Polish Trade Unions in the EU Governance. Europe-Asia Studies Assessing Accession Special Issue.

Lis, Aleksandra. 2011. Negotiating the European Union Emission Trading Scheme: Re-Constructing a Calculative Space for Carbon, Polish Sociological Review 2(174).