Short Abstract

This panel critiques global green just transition narratives for reinforcing power asymmetries and capitalist logics, exposing how universalised sustainability frameworks yield un/just results. We examine law’s contested role, local resistance, exploitative infrastructures, and alternative visions.

Long Abstract

The panel problematises and de-centers the narrative of a global green transition, which is deeply embedded in power asymmetries, capitalist economies, and contested visions of the future. These hegemonic discourses often universalise certain knowledges while marginalising localised, plural, and historically situated notions of “green”, “just” and “equitable”. By focusing on tensions between internationalised climate and energy governance and the socio-ecological particularities of diverse jurisdictions, we seek to reveal how the “just transition” paradigm reproduces ambiguous and at times unjust results under the disguise of sustainability – or, how such narratives are used to impede defossilisation efforts.

We particularly welcome anthropological studies that trace how globalised legal and “green” transition governance mechanisms are polarising, yet also being appropriated, transformed or rejected, revealing how law mediates, enables or undermines equitable outcomes amidst plural actors’ constellations and competing normative imperatives. Insights into how legal pluralism can challenge or transform homogenising and essentialising tendencies in dominant climate and energy governance are especially sought.

Presenters are encouraged to address one or more of the following guiding questions:

- How do plural legal orders and governance arrangements transform or exacerbate polarisation in socio-ecological transitions, and what role anthropology plays in understanding contested governance?

- How do local actors engage with, adapt to, or subvert regulatory JT frameworks in contexts where global governance mechanisms conflict with local sociolegal realities?

- How does polarisation manifest and reshape the role of law in JT governance in the context of fragmented regulatory JT regimes, and what does this reveal about the limits of the global green transition paradigm?

- How does material‑infrastructural practice embody historic exploitation, and how do actors contest or reproduce these materialities?

- What epistemic and narrative strategies do collective actors worldwide employ to articulate ‘alternative’ visions of “green” and “just”?

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