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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.