This chapter explores the role of the shifting geopolitical landscape as a critical moderating factor that shapes the relationship between energy transition and IER. It outlines two contrasting trends of globalization and deglobalization and presents a preliminary quantitative assessment of China’s evolving energy trade relationships. The chapter concludes with an exploration of IER under various geopolitical scenarios.

This chapter sets the scene by examining the context of China’s energy transition and its pivotal role in the global energy landscape. It delineates the interplay between China’s domestic energy transformations and international engagements, mapping out the drivers and challenges inherent in this transition. This chapter also previews the core arguments that the book will further elaborate on.

This final chapter extends the discussion to the implications of China’s evolving international energy relations, in turn, on its domestic energy transition, the geopolitical landscape, and global sustainability, including international efforts to combat climate change. It also reflects on the ramifications of energy transitions on the international stage in other countries, specifically Japan and Germany. The chapter concludes with a synthesis of the main findings of the book, providing with an overview of how China’s ongoing transition from fossil fuels to renewables, along with geopolitical shifts, is reshaping its interactions with the global energy sector.

In this chapter, I develop the concept of policy erasure to describe how ideas, practices, or values that used to be important in a vocation can become homeless in its knowledge and language. I am interested in how policy works not only by introducing new ideas, goals, or rationalities, but also by making existing ideas, purposes, or practices disposable. How does the forward march of organizations towards the new entail the relegation of certain concerns and practices to the past, to that which much be left behind to make room for the new? How do organizations make, sometimes violent, distinctions between what kind of values, people, and practices can feel at home and what kind are labelled as foreign and non- belonging. How do new strategies and policies relegate certain values, concerns, and practices to the past and deprive them of a place in language and knowledge?

Empirically, I present some of the main reform movements and policy initiatives that have changed Danish education over the last 35 years. I show how the introduction of new policies in this period worked to forget, delegitimize, or disavow purposes and concerns that had before been meaningful and intelligible. Attempting to cover 35 years of policy development in one chapter obviously means that there are initiatives, events, and nuances that are left out or given less attention than they perhaps deserve. The aim of the chapter is not to give an extensive representation, but to identify specifically the dynamics through which certain things are disavowed and disappear – in my vocabulary: how policy makes ghosts of certain pedagogical ideas, purposes, practices, and forms of knowledge that can no longer have an unproblematic existence in language and culture.

In settings where policies emphasize the urgent need to change and stress the importance of moving away from problematic pasts and towards brighter futures, what happens to the ideas, values, roles, and practices that become superfluous or outdated? Pushed to the margins of what can count as vocational knowledge or legitimate concerns, might such repressed elements linger as a shadowy form of memory of things that used to be important? And if from time to time what has been submerged or disavowed from policies and sanctioned narratives resurfaces, what might such moments of haunting be like? In what forms might these mute inheritances be registered?

In this chapter, I am interested in those haunted moments in vocational work where it suddenly becomes possible to encounter that for which workers have been deprived of a language, now operating at the limits of what is taken to be understandable (Blackman, 2019a). Whereas in Chapter 3, I mapped the processes through which certain vocational concerns, practices, and forms of knowledge were delegitimized and pushed out from what counts as professional discourses, in this chapter, I explore the ways in which such concerns sometimes make themselves felt, oozing into meeting rooms or conversations despite the organizational or managerial techniques in place to keep them out. I am interested in the situations where it becomes possible to testify to those things that have been pushed out of language and knowledge as well as in the performativity of encounters with what is no longer legitimate concerns. What might be the political potential of encounters with ghosts?

Organizations seem to be ever more obsessed with renewal and transformation. In public and private organizations alike, change has become the key imperative. People must work in new, innovative, and flexible ways, and even renew and develop themselves, identifying with and embodying the desire for constant change. However, what happens to the ideas, values, roles, and practices that become superfluous when organizations move on to the new? Perhaps we can understand organizations as a dense site where layers of meaning, struggle, and affect accumulate? Despite attempts to change, improve, and renovate, organizations might be inhabited by remnants of former purposes, outdated working routines, long- gone ideals, and ways of knowing no longer in use. In this book, I raise questions about how those things that are discarded, submerged, or repressed might linger as a sort of ghostly memory of an organization, institution, or vocation. I am interested in what it means to inherit from previous generations of workers and in exploring how encounters with ghostly remnants open possibilities of other, alternative futures.

The book is about vocational work, specifically work in education. Educational institutions have a long and rich history of pedagogical thinking, knowledge, and practice, yet in recent decades one reform has hastily replaced the other. As many studies have shown, during the last decades, several comprehensive reforms have been formulated and implemented as education has been cast as a means to achieve a competitive labour market; this has taken place in the context of an emerging international policy field led by actors such as the Organisation for Economic Co- operation and Development (OECD; see, for example, Ozga et al, 2011; Lawn and Grek, 2012;

In this chapter, I discuss the concept of archive and how I converse with the archive of the history of Danish education. The book is based on an archive of historical and contemporary sources documenting education policy and practice over time. However, an archive is so much more than a set of materials found in certain locations. Archives are not simply placeholders of evidence. They are not just a place ingenious researchers go to find answers to pregiven questions. In Archive Fever, Derrida (1995) pushes the notion of archive far beyond understanding it as an access to a fixed past. An archive never rests; it morphs and develops, and this opens the archive as a site of contestation and politics. Archives open questions about power by confronting us with disappearances and displacements. Moreover, in the relationship between researcher and archive, it is not always the former who is in control. In what follows, I discuss the understanding of archives that I draw on in my strategies for unsettling and being unsettled by the archive of Danish education history.

I begin the chapter by considering my own attractions to and entanglements with the archive of Danish education. Next, I present the diverse kinds of sources that I include in the archive that is the empirical foundation of the book. Working my way through distinct theoretical understandings of the concept of the archive, I then discuss the different approaches of conversing with an archive that I use in the chapters that follow from this.

The archive has us

As I describe in Chapter 1, my own arrival at this book project includes a personal inheritance, years of avoiding certain themes, and strange and partly unexplainable attractions to certain questions.

In the early 1920s, Thora Constantin- Hansen bought a house with a garden by the fjord outside the Danish city of Roskilde and started her own school. Building on the school tradition of Grundtvig and Kold, her training at Natalie Zahle's teacher training college, and her experience with the Montessori methods, she was determined to put to work the novel pedagogical ideas of her time. The school was designed as a so- called home school. Thora Constantin- Hansen believed that a school organized as a home would allow children to thrive and learn in freer and more natural manners. In her opinion, traditional schools constituted conditions far too narrow and ‘unnatural’ for children's development to flourish. Organizing the school as a home would allow her to work towards the children's development through a harmonic everyday life where teaching, learning, play, and household chores would blend into each other and constitute safe and nourishing conditions for development. Around 10– 15 pupils started in her school.

In 1961, the Kroggaard school opened not far from Odense in Denmark. The newly appointed group of teachers, including the principal, were keen to organize teaching and practise education in ways that supported pupils’ personal growth and their capacity to be part of a democratic society. The school initiated new ways of including pupils in decision making, allowing them to choose subjects and, to some degree, to decide on the content of teaching and the methods used. New democratic bodies, such as pupils’ councils, were introduced, and democratic involvement was to be an integral part of the everyday life of the school. Moreover, the aim was to make the school more open to the local society by building relationships with tradespeople and small businesses in the community and including them in education processes (Andersen et al, 1968; Øland, 2011; Skov, 2011).

The school understood itself and its work to be a move away from the hierarchical and authoritative approaches that the teachers had found in many other schools of the time. In a report documenting the work done at the Kroggaard school, the teacher collective wrote that if pupils were to experience the school as meaningful, it was important

Teaching was organized so that pupils were involved in the decision making on the content of and the methods used in teaching.