Paper short abstract

This paper examines the Spanish component of EfiDuero Energy, a cross-border community energy initiative in Spain and Portugal, showing how mountain rural communities challenge green extractivism through commons-based energy governance and alternative practices of territorial and energy justice.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines EfiDuero Energy, a cross-border community energy initiative operating across rural territories in Spain and Portugal, with an analytical focus on the Spanish component of the project. EfiDuero Energy brings together rural municipalities in north-western Iberia, including several located in mountain areas of the Galician-Leonese ranges and the Central System (Spain)—territories historically shaped by depopulation and marginalization. In the context of the European Union’s green transition, these areas are increasingly reconfigured as new green frontiers and potential sacrifice zones for renewable energy expansion.

Drawing on a qualitative methodology combining institutional analysis and fieldwork, the paper explores how local actors engage with and respond to processes of green extractivism and green grabbing associated with large-scale, market renewable energy infrastructures. Against this backdrop, the Spanish branch of EfiDuero Energy emerges as an alternative model that re-politicizes energy through collective ownership, democratic governance, and distributed production, challenging the dominant logics of green capitalism.

The analysis shows how, in the Spanish case, community energy practices redefine energy as a common good embedded in territorial care, social reproduction, and energy justice, rather than as a purely technical or market-based solution to the climate crisis. By foregrounding decision-making and reinvesting benefits within the territory, EfiDuero Energy questions green growth narratives that frame rural mountain areas as empty or underutilized.

This case contributes to anthropological debates on environmental justice, commons, and territories of life in Europe’s uplands, illustrating how cross-border initiatives can generate grounded alternatives to extractive green transitions locally.

Paper short abstract

This intervention explores the uneven geographies of conservation frontierization in the Southern Carpathian Mountains of Romania by discussing nested forms of environmental injustice deepened by recent conservation projects.

Paper long abstract

In Europe’s mountain areas, from the Carpathian to the Cantabrian Mountains, conservation interventions are being integrated into the EU’s strategies to relaunch the economy by addressing the joint climate-biodiversity crisis. Rewilding, private wilderness reserves, and the expansion of strict protection of biodiversity are framed as such urgent fixes to the polycrisis and promoted as opportunities to reverse rural decline in win-win scenarios that obscure complex environmental injustices stemming frontier-like extractive processes. A notable example of an emerging European conservation frontier is taking place in the Carpathian Mountains. Over the last three decades, this mountain range has witnessed a spur of complicated changes in the governance of natural resources coupled with intense forms of extractivism, including illegal logging, harmful hydropower developments and contested mining. More recently, the Carpathians are reimagined as one of Europe’s last strongholds for developing ambitious conservation projects including emblematic national parks, private wilderness reserves, and experiments in rewilding and carbon offsetting. Building on political ecology approaches, and grounded in over ten years of ethnographic engagements in various regions of Carpathian Mountains of Romania, this intervention will examine the spatial contours of wilderness protection initiatives across this emerging green internal periphery to contextualize how green growth by conservation deepens existing environmental and social injustices while reinforcing historical marginalization and vulnerabilities.

Paper short abstract

This article investigates the frictions between the expansion of conservation frontiers in the Italian Alps and the emergence of localized, convivial forms of conservation from groups of mountain neo-rurals.

Paper long abstract

In this article, I investigate how different conservation narratives and practices signal alternative visions of development and life in mountain regions. First, I theorize the current growth-oriented expansion of conservation frontiers as part of the ‘neoliberalization of the mountains’, that is a political project that re-organizes human-nature relations in the mountains unevenly, in pursuit of economic growth. Alongside other capitalist changes (abandonment and touristification), I argue that growth-oriented conservation enacts and reproduces visions for Europe’s peripheries centered on wilderness and leisure, while foreclosing others. Second, drawing on ethnographic research with neo-rural communities of farmers and shepherds in the Western Italian Alps, I interpret their labour with/through nature as a form of convivial conservation (Büscher & Fletcher, 2020). I argue that this approach to conserving nature reproduces a way of living in the mountains that pursues care instead of growth, and that is mediated by labour and connection rather than leisure and separation. This analysis shows that Europe’s peripheries are far from ‘empty’ spaces that simply await for the roll out of growth-oriented conservation frontiers. On the contrary, they are political battlefields where alternative ideas for how to conserve nature can represent different struggles for how to live in Europe’s marginalized areas.

Paper short abstract

Building on anthropological fieldwork and interdisciplinary collaborations, this paper advances an anthropological understanding of justice that centres on land use, acknowledging that land and its use is at the core of struggles over green transition projects.

Paper long abstract

The Finnmark region in Norway is both the homelands of the indigenous Sámi population and increasingly a site of conflicts over ‘green transition’ projects. Amongst these is Blue Moon Metals’ copper mine in Kvalsund, which was given strategic status by the European Commission in 2025 – despite more than a decade of protests, most recently a 200-day long protest camp June 2025-January 2026. The licensing process has also been marked by a lack of recognition justice (Dale and Dannevig 2023). With the electrification of petroleum installations, new power lines and prospective wind power plants, the mountains and plateaus of Finnmark are yet again made a frontier, now in the name of the green transition.

Those resisting such developments, whether indigenous or not, often practise being on the land in reciprocal, respectful and non-extractive ways – whether in the form of fishing, reindeer herding, berry-picking, a protest camp or a touring theatre performance. These practises of care are central to questions of justice, and to what kinds of lives and livelihoods are to be protected and abandoned.

This paper advances an anthropological understanding of justice that focuses on land use rather than energy or environmental justice per se, acknowledging that land and its use, past, present and future, is central to the struggles over ‘green’ projects. This grows out of an anthropological engagement with the Finnmark region through many years, and an interdisciplinary collaboration with scholars of geography, planning and justice through the NordForsk-funded project JustGreen.

Paper short abstract

This contribution brings together the political ecology of conservation and mountain geographies and reflects on the contested environmental futures of the Dolomites, in the Italian Eastern Alps, through the analysis of governance, conservation visions and community struggles in Cortina d’Ampezzo

Paper long abstract

In recent years, mountain environments have been discussed in the institutional framework of the European Union to support a vision of green transition in relation to the severe impact of the climate crisis, highlighted by the IPCC, and connected issues of socio-environmental change. However, scholars in critical geography and political ecology have recently highlighted the controversial nature of this institutional vision and how it can legitimize new frontiers in capital accumulation and diverse processes of mountain extractivism and commodification. In parallel, scholars argue the imperative of support radical trasformative change of mountain futures towards climate justice. Aimed to further this reflection, this contribution brings together the political ecology of conservation and mountain geographies and reflects on the environmental futures of the Dolomites, in the Italian Eastern Alps, through the analysis of governance, conservation visions and community environmental struggles in Cortina d’Ampezzo. Cortina, together with some neighboring valley, hosts soon the 2026 Winter Olympics. This case, and the Dolomites more in general, shows the rising contested nature of environmental futures and their politicization, between controversial ideas of accumulation by sustainability and critical environmental visions, rooted in the community, claiming limit, care and justice. This vision encompasses experiences and practices that reminds conviviality in conservation and can advance a critical reflection in the political ecology of mountains on commodification, conservation and community interplays.