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Institute of Advanced Study
External shot of Institute of Advanced study at Cosin's Hall

Decommissioning for the Future

Offshore wind turbines

Project description

This project will bring together colleagues across disciplines and career stages to catalyse an experimental discussion and co-learning space around ‘decommissioning’ as a concept and set of practices.

Primary participants

Principal Investigator:

Dr Jessica Lehman, Geography
jessica.lehman@durham.ac.uk 

Term:

Epiphany Term 2026

 

Offshore wind, dams, fossil fuels, and small arms all pose challenges of decommissioning. This complex issue spans technical, social, political, and environmental dimensions. Traditionally viewed through a narrow lens, decommissioning now demands broader, interdisciplinary approaches. This project hosts a one-day workshop to explore decommissioning as a critical concept and practice for shaping socio-environmental futures.

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Overview:

The first offshore wind platforms are reaching the end of their lives. New approaches to watershed management entail the destruction of modernist dam projects. Fossil fuels must be left in the ground to achieve emissions reduction targets. The ongoing circulation of small arms threatens peace projects in various sites of conflict. These seemingly disparate sites and circumstances share something in common: they are plagued by the challenges of decommissioning, or the intentional act of taking out of use something that has been deemed no longer desirable or that has reached the end of its life. Decommissioning has complex technical, economic, political, and social dimensions with fundamental implications for socio-environmental futures. Until now dominated by overly technical and narrow framings, scholarship on decommissioning demands comprehensive, open-ended, and interdisciplinary consideration. This project will convene a one-day workshop bringing together colleagues across disciplines and career stages to catalyse an experimental discussion and co-learning space around ‘decommissioning’ as a concept and set of practices that we speculate are highly relevant to the current moment.

Research Topics

Bringing together scholars from different disciplines and career stages for a one-day workshop,  will explore a research agenda for the study of decommissioning as an Anthropocene imperative.

Potential themes:

  • Conceptual vocabularies for the study of decommissioning (developing concepts e.g. inheritance, abandonment, ruination, stranding, residues)
  • Temporalities of decommissioning
  • Aesthetics of decommissioning and decommissioned sites
  • Comparing, contrasting, and connecting case studies of decommissioning
  • Decommissioning and the creation and destruction of economic value
  • Methods for studying decommissioning

Outcomes

  • The outcome will be an interdisciplinary research agenda for the empirical and conceptual study of decommissioning. This will inform an IAS Major Project proposal and other potential funding bids, for example to ERC, UKRI, or Leverhulme funding schemes. We also will produce a co-authored journal article on an agenda for the study of decommissioning, to be submitted to an interdisciplinary journal such as Geoforum or Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space.