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Contribution short abstract

Based on militant research with the Alliance against Energy Poverty in Catalonia, this contribution explores how women affected by the energy model transform into collective political subjects, challenging dominant energy regimes through care, reciprocity, and collective agency.

Contribution long abstract

This research draws on militant and participatory research with the Alliance against Energy Poverty (APE) in Catalonia to interrogate how Europe’s green transition produces new forms of displacement. While green growth narratives frame decarbonization as a technical solution, they often obscure how energy infrastructures reproduce colonial hierarchies, uneven vulnerabilities, and forms of social abandonment—particularly for racialized, feminized, and precarious populations living at the margins of energy systems.

Starting from the lived experiences of women affected by energy poverty, the research examines how the category of “people affected by the energy model” is not merely descriptive but politically produced through collective struggle. Within APE’s methodology of collective counseling—horizontal spaces of mutual aid and political action—individualized experiences of deprivation are reframed as structural injustice, enabling participants to move from stigmatized victims to collective political subjects capable of contesting dominant energy regimes.

Building on this experience, the research broadens the notion of “affected” beyond energy poverty to encompass harms produced across the energy system, including extractivism, territorial dispossession, and climate-related impacts. This expanded category allows connections between urban contexts of energy deprivation in Europe and extractive and climate-affected territories in the Global South, highlighting the transnational and colonial dimensions of the green transition.