Paper short abstract

The paper explores moments of post-disaster ‘green’ transition in the Indonesian Sultanate of Yogyakarta. Attention is directed to the plural legal configuration that informs transition ranging from transnational legal templates to normativity produced in more-than-human assemblages.

Paper long abstract

The paper explores moments of post-disaster transition in the Indonesian Sultanate of Yogyakarta. Such phases of transition are considered to usually follow on disastrous eruptions of volcano Mount Merapi. According to local wisdom and spiritual knowledge, at irregular intervals the volcano demands a reset, the rebalancing of relations that have fallen into disarray. Such worldview addresses eruption as a cyclical event allowing for the reordering of relations that have gone off course and initializing a new phase in the relations within more-than-human (MTH) assemblages. Since colonial times, however, domestic and international political and legal institutions seize the opportunity of such post-disaster situations to replace established patterns of agrarian and extractive practices, leading to the remodeling of the preceding socio-economic, ecological and legal situation. The beneficiaries of such post-disaster management aver its embedding in global processes of green transition, which lead to linear progress and ‘growth’ while countering the challenges of the anthropocene, such as climate change.

The techno-legal framing of this linear model of transition, however, so the paper’s argument, serves above all the demands of global extractivism. The dominant legal framework is set in line with extractive practices leading from a post-eruptive re-balancing of more-than-human justice in local understanding to intensified corporate economic exploitation of which local people are excluded.

The paper draws attention to the plural legal configuration that informs transition. It asks what normativity is produced in situations of transition initiated by natural forces and what more-than-human normativity does contribute to the pluriversality of the law.

Paper short abstract

Based on ethnography in northern Portugal, this paper examines resistance to lithium mining promoted under EU just transition law. It shows how universalized green governance clashes with legal pluralism, reproducing power asymmetries while enabling alternative visions of justice and care.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines a seven-year socio-environmental conflict in Covas do Barroso, a rural mountain community in Portugal, where residents oppose an open-pit lithium mine promoted as part of the European Union’s green transition. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, I analyze how EU and national legal frameworks recast local commons as extractive infrastructures in the name of climate urgency and energy sovereignty. I show how the universalized language of sustainability and just transition conceals uneven socio-legal effects, intensifying long-standing power asymmetries between rural communities, state institutions and transnational capital. In Covas do Barroso, these governance mechanisms collide with historically grounded legal pluralism embedded in the baldios (commons), where everyday practices of communal irrigation, shared labor, and collective decision-making sustain alternative normative orders of land stewardship, reciprocity, and care. These practices enact a form of political agency that both exceeds and contests state-centric legal recognition. The conflict mobilizes memories of past contamination, unmet promises of infrastructural “progress,” and divergent interpretations of sustainability, while also revealing internal disagreements over possible futures. I argue that resistance emerges not simply in opposition to extraction, but through epistemic and normative struggles over what counts as “green,” “just,” and “equitable.” The case exposes three contradictions in global just transition governance: the erasure of local temporalities through accelerated legal timelines, the privileging of technoscientific expertise over embodied knowledge, and the displacement of moral economies of reciprocity by extractive logics. The paper highlights the limits of universalized transition frameworks and the generative role of legal pluralism in articulating alternative futures.

Paper short abstract

The paper examines how agrivoltaic practices experienced at the intersection of social values, institutional settings and ecological constraints in a green transition, showing cooperation between development and pastoral livelihoods depends less on technology than on governance and local knowledge.

Paper long abstract

This paper questions dominant narratives of the global green transition by examining how large-scale photovoltaic development reshapes socio-ecological relations, livelihoods, and land-use competition in Konya, Türkiye, where a 1,350 MW solar power plant has been established. Focusing on the introduction of agrivoltaic practices and the Under-Panel Grazing model, the study shows how transition occurs in ecological fragility, pastoral traditions, and asymmetric relations between global energy agendas and local communities. Conducted in the Konya Closed Basin, Türkiye’s most water-stressed region, it shows that integrating drought-resilient pastoral practices with energy infrastructure can strengthen rural livelihoods and water conservation. Yet, while agrivoltaics is promoted as a symbiotic solution to land-use conflict, its implementation reveals how institutional arrangements, and regulatory frameworks shape the societal reaction.

Using the Multi-Level Perspective framework and mixed-methods design combining longitudinal ethnography with ten households, stakeholder interviews, and quantitative data, the paper traces how global climate and energy governance interacts with local legal-institutional settings. These interactions transform pastoral knowledge, gendered labour relations, and emerging value categories such as “grass milk.”

The findings highlight both productive and exclusionary effects of green infrastructure. While some households diversify their livelihoods and improve production, the model remains fragile due to informal governance and shifting corporate priorities. The study argues that agrivoltaic transitions depend on participatory arrangements that centre local knowledge, institutional adaptation, and socio-ecological specificity. In doing so, it contributes to debates on justice, governance, and land-use in the energy transition, particularly in societies in semi-arid sunbelt regions facing overlapping climate and development pressures.

Paper short abstract

The European Union is facilitating energy transitions in Europe and South Africa. In Estonian the EU (covertly) valorises carbon masculinities and in South Africa it (overtly) challenges them. This paper will explore how actors engage with Just Transition frameworks to negotiate gendered and justice

Paper long abstract

The European Union is funding and facilitating two energy transitions. In Europe, through the European Green Deal, it attempts to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050, while ensuring a modern, resource-efficient, competitive (capitalist) economy. In South Africa, the European Union is the primary funder of the international Just Energy Transition Partnership, an 8.5-billion-dollar program to decarbonise the South African economy while creating jobs and industries and while ensuring a ‘fair transition’ for affected communities.

The predominance of men in carbon extractive industries worldwide ensures that masculinities are central to both these transitions, yet they are treated in near inverse manners. In transitioning Estonian oil shale workers, the European Union’s (unstated) concern is ensuring a viable masculinity, a ‘just transition’ from their petro-masculinity to an equally meaningful subjectivity. While policy documents mention opportunities for women, public discourse mostly focuses on retraining and employing men. In contrast, in directing South Africa’s energy transition, the European Union demands that gender equity takes centre stage, directing significant economic and political capital at reshaping South Africa’s gender norms within this transition. Yet South Africa’s coal miners, as much as Estonian oil shale workers, are experiencing the loss of a privileged carbon-masculinity.

This paper explores how South African and Estonian actors engage with and subvert Just Transition frameworks and funding mechanisms as they negotiate and re-create their gendered subjectivities, as well as how they articulate narratives of ‘green’ and ‘justice’ that reflect (and subvert) heteronormative masculinity.

Paper short abstract

This paper connects EU’s low carbon hydrogen policy with local protest against local ‘green’ hydrogen production, ultimately pushing for imports that outsource land use conflicts. The ‘just transition’ is only possible with the socioecological fix of externalizing exploitation.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the political economy of low-carbon hydrogen as a contested tool for a ‘just transition’, demonstrating how regulatory frameworks reproduce spatial power asymmetries.

While no longer considered as an energy panacea, hydrogen remains under research for specialised applications, and is slowly being used in production, with pipelines actively being repurposed and filled. The long-term strategy is to replace the high-emission (‘grey’) hydrogen with – in-part locally-produced – low-carbon (‘green’) hydrogen. The EU’s REDIII directive mandates that low-carbon hydrogen requires new installations for renewable energy (concept of additionality). Yet in Germany, even for projects benefitting local firms and where surplus electricity would lower local energy costs, necessary expansions are actively hindered in local parliaments by movements that have internalised anti-sustainability (anti-green, anti-solar, anti-wind) as part of their core political identity.

These groups construct identities around exaggerated critiques of sustainable energy, stifling nuanced debate over actual problems and polarising German society over wind and solar power. Instead, the proposed and appraised solution is hydrogen import, implying neo-extractivist plans to appropriate land at Europe’s peripheries and beyond for German industry. In these cases of Germany’s ecological transition, we can observe that socioecological fixes (Ekers/Prudham)—where social, ecological and often inherently capitalist problems are dealt with outsourcing land-use, and social and political conflicts—is applied here in two ways: by relocating energy production abroad, ecological risks are externalised, while associated socio-political conflicts are also avoided, reduced, or offshored. Thus, the ‘fix’ for low-carbon industries via hydrogen becomes entangled with international land exploitation.

Paper short abstract

Hydrogen and lithium socio-technical imaginaries co-produce regional space in Northwest Bohemia, Czech Republic. We use the concept of Re-infrastructuring to show how industrial/coal legacies shift from burden to asset, exposing place-based transition as contested and uneven.

Paper long abstract

This paper is a case study of negotiating the EU's just energy transition in the regional context. It examines discourses surrounding the proposed hydrogen economy and lithium mining projects in Northwest Bohemia (Czech Republic), a coal- and industry-dependent region currently targeted by EU transition funding/decarbonisation. The paper advances the claim that decarbonisation is characterised by an inevitable intersection between socio-technical futures and socio-spatial transformations: socio-technical imaginaries (of "hydrogen economies" or "critical minerals mining") actively reconfigure spatial imaginaries of regions, while spatial imaginaries (of peripheries, corridors, hubs, or "affected territories") reciprocally shape what these technologies can plausibly mean and how they are justified. To render this mutual dependence empirically visible, we introduce re-infrastructuring as an analytical concept. Re-infrastructuring condenses the relationship between socio-technical and spatial imaginaries and allows us to trace it across both material registers (inherited infrastructures, sites, labour, landscapes) and immaterial/institutional registers (funding instruments, governance arrangements, expertise, know-how, and discursive repertoires). Our central argument is that regional transition politics is organised around attempts to re-infrastructuralise institutional–socio-material inheritance to reassemble what regions already "have" so that inherited burdens become narrated and governed as assets and future value; disconnection becomes connectivity; and historical grievances are translated into continuity and strategic regional positioning (e.g., from an extractive "energy reservoir" to an "energy heartland" and "laboratory"). The paper thereby reframes place-based transition not as a neutral policy principle, but as a contested process of regional revaluation with distributive consequences.

Paper short abstract

This presentation examines Transformation Initiatives in the rural Andes as locally grounded critiques of both capitalist development and grand green transition narratives, showing how economías propias negotiate welfarist governance while exposing the limits of universal just transition frameworks.

Paper long abstract

We examine the role of welfarism in shaping economías propias—locally embedded economic practices that coexist with and respond to the limits of capitalist economies, while remaining attuned to local ecologies and socio-environmental relations—in rural Andean contexts. Grounded in Critical Development Studies and ethnographic research, the presentation approaches these practices as Transformation Initiatives that critically engage with dominant development paradigms, including both mainstream capitalist models and universalized narratives of green and just transitions.

Rather than treating Transformation Initiatives as autonomous or coherent alternatives, we conceptualize them as plural, context-dependent formations embedded in, and constrained by, welfarist governance regimes. Welfarism is understood as a historically rooted mechanism of power based on external aid and state intervention, articulated through development and sustainability discourses and implemented through sector-specific public policies.

Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in rural Peru between 2018 and 2023, the analysis shows that welfarist dynamics have been internalized across most identified initiatives. Rather than constituting a clear rupture with existing orders, Transformation Initiatives emerge as hybrid and contested spaces that combine prefigurative aspirations with inherited governance logics, generating both creative potential and internal tension. By foregrounding these frictions, the presentation contributes to debates on contested governance and socio-ecological transitions. It highlights how locally grounded practices simultaneously critique and complicate hegemonic narratives of development and green and just transition, revealing the limits of universal transition frameworks when confronted with situated rural realities.

Paper short abstract

Sea buckthorn has been used in healing for millennia. East German breeders, farmers and recultivation experts embraced it, but with the transition to capitalism, their research was defunded. Can sea buckthorn support the just green transition as an import substitute for orange juice from Brazil?

Paper long abstract

The wild sea buckthorn shrub (Hippophae rhamnoides L.) has been used in traditional medicines across Eurasia. As a pioneer plant it has thrived in harsh environments. Since the 1960s, East German agrobiologists selected local sea buckthorn cultivars for coast protection, to foster an import substitution of citrus fruits, and to recultivate pits especially in lignite-mining regions. The political and economic transition of 1989/90 led to a defunding of sea buckthorn research, but enthusiasts continued to research, promote and cultivate their “Lemon of the North” without pesticides, fertilizers and irrigation. Spurned by short-term Federal and EU funding schemes, sea buckthorn-human relations underwent several transitions, booms and busts. Notable were the foundation of Sanddorn e.V., the association for sea buckthorn and wild plants, in 2000, and the organization of the International Sea Buckthorn Association conference in Potsdam, in 2012. Today, a dozen farms produce five thousand tons of sea buckthorn fruits per year, and process them into drinks, food, health and well-being products. In 2025, the central sea buckthorn juice producer (2000 tons) has tapped into green just transition funds and installed solar panels to power his factory. Meanwhile, a dearth of orange juice caused by climate turbulences in Brazil prompted its sales representative to recover the import substitution idea and newly dub sea buckthorn the “Orange of the North.” Ironically, the plant itself struggles to resist climate change. The paper discusses its socio-legal and ecological prospects to continue to support more just and green transitions in the future.

Paper short abstract

The paper examines World Bank’s iCRAFT policy-based crediting initiative in Uzbekistan, exemplifying market-driven green transition governance, and shows how conflicting 'green' narratives and state’s strategic ambivalence produce hidden politics of agency, negotiation space and power asymmetries.

Paper long abstract

The paper examines the politics of the green energy transition through conflicting narratives surrounding the Innovative Carbon Resource Application for Energy Transition Project (iCRAFT)- the World Bank’s flagship “policy-based crediting” initiative in Uzbekistan and an attempt to operationalise the Paris Agreement’s Article 6.2 framework for trading ‘mitigation outcomes’. Designed to incentivise fossil fuel subsidy reforms and accelerate clean energy transitions, iCRAFT epitomises the rise of market-driven climate governance. Yet its implementation exposes tensions between global sustainability imperatives and the socio-political realities of a post-Soviet, natural resource rich state.

The paper analyses how iCRAFT’s hegemonic discourse - rooted in neoliberal developmentalism and technocratic climate rationalities - universalises particular notions of “green” and “equitable” transition. Far from being a passive recipient, Uzbekistan engages with iCRAFT through strategic ambivalence, appropriating its logics to reconcile international expectations with national priorities. It shows how resource-rich states can strategically leverage green finance to diversify geopolitical dependencies – generating new dependencies in the process. Focusing on the political economy of state subjectivity, the paper shows how the seemingly inclusive green transition paradigm reproduces power asymmetries while creating new spaces for negotiation and geopolitical repositioning. By tracing how instruments such as policy-based crediting become arenas of power struggle, the study contributes to debates on globalised legal pluralism, exposing how corporatised hybrid governance reconfigures socio-ecological relations under a “green” veneer.