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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.