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Paper short abstract:

This paper reflects on local responses to energy transition in the National Park Montesinho, characterized by old controversies, agriculture decay and rural abandonment. Ethnography focus ruptures and continuities with ancient communitarian assemblies that provide for the management of the commons.

Paper long abstract:

In one of the remotest parts of the country, National Park of Montesinho(PNM) is the stage of strong polemics surrounding the possibility of constructing a future wind farm. While the municipality and some local groups have received the ever to be wind farm with applause, local representatives of the ICNF (Institute for Nature Conservation and Forests) as well as tourism entrepreneurs were against such infrastructures, manifesting vocally in public hearings and opening space for controversies, ambiguous positions and fragile arguments during the last decade.

Social acceptance (or resistance) towards renewables has been reflected in two polarized positions: On one side, the old farmers have the expectation that it would bring modernity to the region, as well as added value to abandoned lands, nowadays useless. On the other side, environmentalists and tourism entrepreneurs use the rhetoric of landscape threatened by gigantic turbines that damage “pristine” landscape they aim to preserve or to promote, fearing the risk of compromising recent investments on local development projects.

Among those controversies and negotiations, the “Assembleia dos Compartes” is reviving and sharing the profits of the new renting for the abandoned commons. Such local landscape management device was composed by an assembly of neighbors that were able to give inclusive access to land, according to needs and customary law, and to provide the communitarian management of the commons (baldios in Portuguese).

To understand those subtle processes and how they contribute to reconfigure local politics and to envisage new energy futures is the aim of this proposal.