Natasha Larkin, Chris Gibson, Chantel Carr, Natascha Klocker
Notwithstanding the substantial social science literature on energy transitions, little attention has been paid to the role of lawmaking and its spatial implications for governing how infrastructure lands in place. Adopting a legal geographic approach and engaging with Jessop's strategic relations theory, we address these gaps through a case study of Australia's offshore wind sector. Documentary analysis and statutory interpretation methods are used to: 1. trace the emergence of a national legislative framework derived from specific regional conditions and fuelled by developers seeking a spatial fix; and 2. identify how the legislation produces new oceanic legal spaces to develop infrastructure, in the form of zoning and private licences for capital accumulation. We document how institutionally entrenched strategic actors engaged and shaped the new sector through a multitude of forums, building consensus while attending to their overlapping interests. Such interests were embedded into the resulting shape of the legislative framework. While opening new spatial territories in the ocean for renewable energy production and rescaling centralist power in electricity markets, Australia's offshore wind laws replicated existing problematic nature-society-energy dynamics. When materialised in place, new legal spaces unfolded over and disrupted existing coastal relations, ecologies, and cultural practices. We thus show how new legal arrangements for oceanic energy spaces give rise to the possibility for place-based conflict. Attention to lawmaking and the legal production of space offers important insights into whose interests transition laws serve, along with why contestation erupts in place over energy infrastructure.