Short Abstract

This panel explores how renewable energy reshapes land, communities, and values, with the risk of producing new inequalities and sacrifice zones. We invite papers that reflect on the moral and social consequences of energy transition, examining how people navigate and respond to these changes.

Long Abstract

Across the world, renewable energy development is reshaping how people inhabit, value, and make sense of land. While often celebrated as part of a pathway toward sustainability, these transitions have deepened inequalities, polarizing destinies between those who profit from new “green” economies and those who experience dispossession, devaluation, and job precarity (Deberdt and Billon 2024; Klinger et al 2024; Sinha 2017).

Scholars have explored the role of state and corporations in consolidating control over land and resources to enable renewable energy expansion (Avila et al. 2022; Lang et al 2024). Dunlap (2020) describes these dynamics as green grabbing, a form of ecological and extractive violence (2020: 662) while Zanotelli and Tallè (2019) define landscape grabbing as the destruction of landscape's material and immaterial values for local communities.

This panel explores how renewable energy infrastructures contribute to reconfiguring relations to land, belonging, and livelihood, and how people interpret and contest the moral and material consequences of these transformations. We invite papers that, through ethnographic cases, engage with:

- How renewable energy and other land uses (farming, tourism, financialization) create conflicts and tensions for residents as the landscape changes;

- How land-use polarization from energy transition projects affects residents’ daily lives, jobs, income and mental health.

- How anthropologists might rethink concepts such as justice and sustainability, considering the uneven geographies and moral economies of energy transition;

- How collaborative ethnography can help reduce polarization around energy transition;

- How multi-use infrastructure (e.g. agrivoltaics) enables different land uses and interests to coexist.

This Panel has 1 pending paper proposal.
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