- Convenors:
-
Cristina Espinosa
(University of Freiburg)
Zabrina Welter
Christos Zografos (Universitat Pompeu Fabra)
Mariana Walter (IBEI)
- Format:
- Panel
Format/Structure
3-4 papers presented by its author(s) in 15 mins. A discussant will offer critical commentary. The session will conclude with an open floor.
Long Abstract
Since the launch of the European Green Deal and the US debates around a Green New Deal in 2019, the green transition agenda has gained decisive momentum. Yet, critical analyses have drawn attention to the colonial dimensions of these transitions. Large-scale extraction of so-called “transition minerals” and establishment of industrial renewable energy facilities in the global South to decarbonise global North economies embody green colonialism. Scholars also highlight the links between green colonialism and the capitalist dynamics underpinning the “decarbonisation consensus”, as well as violent aspects of renewable energy development that reproduce troubling continuities with historical colonialism.
Parallel to this, the adverse effects of the green energy transition have been explored through the notion of “sacrifice”. Sacrifice has been understood as foregone assets such as farmland, as sacrifice zones, and as a political practice. Green energy transition projects often generate profound social and ecological disruptions, which are resisted and contested on the ground, making conflict a central feature of these processes. Accordingly, critical perspectives emphasize not only the harms and new forms of sacrifice associated with green transitions but also resistance, struggle, and agency in shaping them.
New experiences of green sacrifice are emerging across diverse geographies: from rare earth extraction in Madagascar, lithium exploitation in South America’s Lithium Triangle, and cobalt mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo, to the struggles of Sámi communities in Northern Europe confronting renewable expansion in their territories. In light of these dynamics, we seek to advance conversations that connect sacrifice zone-making, colonialism in energy transitions.
We invite conceptual, theoretical contributions that critically examine green colonialism and sacrifice, as well as empirically grounded work that bridges these debates with socio-ecological conflicts, grassroots mobilizations, and efforts to contest and reframe dominant narratives of decarbonisation and the green energy transition.
Accepted papers
Presentation short abstract
This work interrogates lithium extraction’s socio-ecological and epistemic impact. Based on fieldwork with Indigenous peoples in northwestern Argentina and grounded in decolonial political ecology, it exposes the green transition’s socio-ecological conflicts and the making of sacrifice zones.
Presentation long abstract
This work examines whether and how the lithium-driven energy transition reproduces colonial logics in resource-rich regions of the Global South. Grounded in Latin American Political Ecology and decolonial approaches, and guided by a relational, non-extractive methodology, the research engages with testimonies from Indigenous communities in Catamarca and Jujuy in Argentina to analyse the socio-ecological, political, and epistemic implications of lithium extraction.
While framed by the Global North as essential for decarbonisation, extraction in these territories produces or aggravates already existing sacrifice zones marked by severe environmental damage, territorial enclosure, cultural disruption, epistemic marginalization and systematic violations of rights.
At the heart of the study lies the premise that lithium mining is not merely a technical process but a profoundly socio-ecological and epistemological one. This study exposes how these dynamics are enabled and reinforced through multinational corporate–state alliances, technocratic governance, and global environmental governance that fails to protect and value Indigenous Peoples’ traditional knowledge and development models.
The research pursues a dual objective: to expose the material and epistemic colonialities embedded in extractive practices, and to root this critique in the lived experiences and knowledge systems of Indigenous Peoples. Drawing on the concept of border thinking (Mignolo and Escobar, 2010), it illustrates how communities confront these processes through land defense, counter-narratives, and everyday practices of resistance.
By centering these perspectives, the work contributes to debates on green colonialism, the making of sacrifice zones, and socio-ecological conflicts, arguing for an epistemic delinking from Eurocentric transition models and for pluriversal, community-rooted environmental futures.
Presentation short abstract
In the paper, I argue that colonial continuities in Chile are reproduced in Green Capitalism. Material concessions by hegemonic forces result in the division of communities along racialized and class lines, thus stabilizing extractivist structures, shaping subjectivities and struggles in Atacama.
Presentation long abstract
The Salar de Atacama has - not yet - been officially declared a sacrifice zone, but instead an ‘empty space’. It is precisely there that the green costs of global capitalism are internalized and distributed unevenly among society and Nature. Lithium, the ‘white gold’, is extracted from the supposed emptiness of the Salar and exported to the world market. Colonial continuities persist in green extractivism. But unlike after the invasion of the Conquista and even 500 years later in societies of the Global South, the dominant discourses of ‘development’, ‘progress’, and ‘prosperity’ are not just empty words in the Salar today. The ruling forces make state-orchestrated concessions to local communities, which in part participate in the ‘model Chile’ for the first time and qua raza. As a result, lines of conflict are shifting, both between and within communities, where power relations and societal relations with nature are changing. In this light, I reveal the dark side of ‘green’ lithium extractivism in Chile. Based on field research, I detect the emergence of a fragmented lithium consensus that is anchored in the "extractivist common sense" (Gramsci, Gudynas). To explain it, I first outline the historically developed structures. Secondly, I highlight the mechanisms of the “integral state” (Gramsci, Poulantzas) that reproduce the extractivist model under a green guise. Thirdly, I show to what extent strategies affect the subjectivities and modes of living in the Salar, so that subaltern struggles and capitalist contradictions are dealt with in the interests of the glocal ruling forces.
Presentation short abstract
Drawing on a renewed dependency theory perspective, we show that green transitions in Latin America’s extractive regions are shaped as much by domestic elite strategie as by North–South relations of antagonistic cooperation, dynamics often missed in green colonialism debates.
Presentation long abstract
Despite the growing critiques that frame the energy transition as a new form of green colonialism, most accounts still overlook how transitions unfold in concrete territories. In the Global South, energy transformations are not linear processes imposed from the North but messy, negotiated and territorialised arenas where actors with unequal power intersect. To grasp these dynamics, we draw on a renewed dependency perspective that foregrounds the role of domestic elites and corporate conglomerates, as well as the antagonistic cooperation between Northern and Southern capital that jointly shape 'dependent modernization'.
Based on comparative fieldwork, we analyse these processes in two emblematic extractive regions of Latin America. In Chile's Atacama desert, we observe an infrastructure scramble driven not only by global capital but also by powerful domestic conglomerates, which seek to decarbonize mining operations, expand desalination capacity and position the region as a renewable-energy hub. In Mexico's Yucatán peninsula, the tourism industry faces its own socio-ecological limits and responds through further commodification, including the industrialization of sargassum, the installation of desalination plants by international resorts and the rapid expansion of solar energy provision by transnational firms.
Taken together, the cases show that transitions are shaped by speculative interconnections across energy, water and logistics infrastructures; and by domestic corporate actors whose influence often rivals or exceeds that of their Northern counterparts. These dynamics remain largely absent from mainstream political ecology and energy-colonialism frameworks, which privilege North–South domination while overlooking domestic corporate power, infrastructural speculation and the class relations that organize territorial governance.
Presentation short abstract
This presentation scrutinizes the renewed sacrificial tendencies in Swedish green industry representations, reinscribing indigenous Sápmi as a site of extraction. I show how these projects summon fantasies of future happiness through the opportunity envisioned in the beauty of the exploitable.
Presentation long abstract
Sweden prides itself on its mining tradition, contributions to European self-sufficiency and, more recently, its crtitical mineral deposits and leadership in the decarbonization of the steel industry. Meanwhile, destructive impacts on land and biodiversity are largely overlooked. Drawing on the literature on extractivism, emotional political econology and a psychoanalytical conceptual framing I analyse “green” investments’ continued inscription of indigenous Sápmi as extractable, invoking through traditional colonial tropes that place specific effort on the beauty of the sacrificed land. I do this more specifically by analyzing narratives and visual representations produced by mining, “green” steel and low carbon energy actors legitimizing the expansion of their presence in Sápmi in the context of the Swedish industrial green transition. I explore the continued orientation toward extraction in green transitions, which continue to require spaces of sacrifice, as driven by a fantasmatic promise of happiness in the future. I contribute with a reading of these sacrificial tendencies in Sápmi as driven by a colonial allure for the land, which I read as an affective endeavor, an attraction to the land and the potential it is envisioned holding. I find that they not only reproduce colonial mindsets of emptiness and oportunity, but that they do so by capitalizing on the allure of the land’s beauty, referencing lush nature as a desirable trait to legitimize extraction for the greened colonial project. With this reading, I explore the emotional components of extractive sacrifice and scrutinize the common industry framing of extraction as rational and unemotional.
Presentation short abstract
We examine 35 cases of environmental justice resistance across REEs supply chains (21 countries). Where and how are extraction frontiers expanding? How is the booming material demand and competition over green growth, defense and AI agendas configuring old and new extraction frontiers.
Presentation long abstract
Rare-earth elements (REEs) are a group of 17 chemical elements considered critical for digitalization and for the energy transition, as well as military and aerospace applications. The International Energy Agency (IEA) suggests that to meet Net Zero Emissions goals the extraction of REEs would have to increase by a factor of 10 by 2030. Indeed, it has already increased by more than 85% between 2017 and 2020, driven mainly by the demand for permanent magnets for wind power technology and electric vehicles. Currently, China has almost the monopoly of REEs extraction and processing worldwide. Europe, US and other industrialized economies are deploying domestic and international strategies to secure the access to these strategic elements in their territories and abroad. We present a collaborative documentation process of EJ struggles taking place across REEs supply chains (extraction, processing and recycling sites).
We examine 35 cases of socio-environmental contention in 21 countries. We examine the trends regarding where the expansion of extraction frontiers is taking place (Artic, deep seas, in the Global South and within industrialized countries), how it is taking place (social, ecological and cultural impacts, procedural injustices, violences) and who is being affected and is resisting. We discuss how the growing demand for materials, green growth, defense and AI agendas, in the context of an accelerated geopolitical competition, as well as environmental justice resistances are configuring old and new extraction frontiers.
Presentation short abstract
This presentation explores the social engineering of the Thacker Pass lithium mine on unceded northern Paiute (Numu/Nuwu), Shoshone (Newe) land in north-central Nevada, USA.
Presentation long abstract
Governments are expanding national and international efforts for mining critical raw materials. Justified in the name of mineral supply-chain security, military equipment, digital and purportedly ‘green’ technologies, this presentation explores the Thacker Pass lithium mine on unceded northern Paiute (Numu/Nuwu), Shoshone (Newe) land in north-central Nevada, USA. Approving the Thacker Pass lithium mine and processing facility, the mine operator, Lithium Americas (LAC), explicitly confronted ‘social engineering challenges’ in establishing their operations. This research draws on 30 semi-structured interviews, 11 informal interviews and a focus group. This presentation details the social engineering of the Thacker Pass mine, revealing government support, corporate science, green washing, public relations, information control and repression to begin the construction of the Thacker Pass mine. This demonstrates questionable state-corporate-legal conduct, manipulative scientific and employment claims to promote llithium mining alongside great socioecological risks. Lithium mining is placing greater stress on biodiversity, air, water and local Indigenous and ranching populations. The Thacker Pass (and neighbouring) lithium mine(s) further aggravates cultural, ecological agrarian issues, and, considering long-term US government assimilation practices, we argue the mine continues the genocidal/ecocidal colonial process. Locating, and effectively fighting this colonial process, we show remains challenging and conflictive on the cultural, ecological and economic level.
Presentation short abstract
A new green Hydrogen megaproject is ending the precarious and unfair balance between astronomy, extractive industries and indigenous activities in the Atacama Desert, threatening local communities and dark skies alike but also opening room for decolonial approaches to just transitions.
Presentation long abstract
The launch of a new megaproject for producing green Hydrogen in the Antofagasta region in Chile triggered an ongoing socioecological conflict that ended the already precarious and unfair balance between astronomy, extractive industries and traditional economies from the local indigenous communities in the Atacama Desert. This work presents incoming findings of the SKYJUST research project investigating the relationship between international astronomical observatories and sustainability policies in the Global South. The paper presents the case of the INNA, the project of an American corporation that threatens the integrity of the largest European astronomical observatories in Chile, unveiling the precarious governance of astronomy and the feeble protection given to citizens and indigenous communities alike face the new green hydrogen hype fueled by mainstream narratives of Green Deal and energy transitions. The analysis shows the key role played by scientific agencies in building broader coalitions but warns of the fragility of science-community alignments, calling for the building of long-term partnerships and the revision of astronomy’s own colonialism. Depicting a scenario in which incumbent colonial regimes are disrupted by a new sacrificial green extractivism, the article pleads for more collaborative de-colonial approaches to just transitions.
Presentation short abstract
Drawing on insights from political ecology, critical geography and environmental justice, the paper interrogates the rise of ‘climate extractivism’ and calls for a fairer, post-extractive future reimagining relationships with the earth.
Presentation long abstract
Drawing on insights from political ecology, critical geography and environmental justice, the paper draws from an upcoming book interrogating the rise of ‘climate extractivism’: the opening up of new resource frontiers and the construction of infrastructure megaprojects in the name of sustainability and climate mitigation. From artisanal cobalt mining in the DRC to rare-earth geopolitics, and from biofuel plantations to deep-sea and space mining, he reveals how green growth agendas frequently reproduce colonial structures, social injustice and patterns of dispossession. Many proposed solutions, such as geoengineering, carbon offsets, circular economy schemes and degrowth, remain tethered to considerations of economic growth and geopolitical competition. Rather than rejecting the urgency of climate transition, critiques call for a fairer, post-extractive future– one that wholly reshapes how we produce and consume energy, and fosters a more democratic, cooperative relationship with the earth.
Presentation short abstract
Decarbonization creates winners and losers everywhere. A political economy framework, grounded in just transition, explains these spatial injustices across the North-South divide, challenging climate justice orthodoxy.
Presentation long abstract
Global greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, making extreme climate impacts unavoidable and reinforcing the need to integrate mitigation and adaptation. Yet climate actions often produce trade-offs rather than synergies: mitigation initiatives can displace vulnerable communities or divert resources from resilience efforts, while adaptation measures may increase energy demand and undermine mitigation goals. Although governance is frequently cited as crucial for managing these tensions, its role in shaping the mitigation–adaptation nexus remains under-theorized. This study develops a conceptual framework—grounded in just transition scholarship and interpreted through a political economy lens—to explain how governance arrangements influence interactions between mitigation and adaptation in decarbonization processes. The framework demonstrates how governance generates adaptation-related trade-offs through the uneven distribution of decarbonization costs and benefits across social groups and regions, challenging conventional framings of climate justice that focus on a simple Global North–Global South divide. Through a comparative examination of Ireland and Ethiopia, the study shows how distinct political–economic regimes—market-oriented or state-led—can produce parallel forms of spatial injustice during the green transition. The analysis argues that effective governance of the global green transition requires addressing structural drivers of injustice that cut across the North–South divide. A comparative North–South lens thus offers a richer understanding of how equitable governance can foster genuine synergies between mitigation and adaptation.
Presentation short abstract
This paper examines data centers in rural Norway as ambiguous infrastructures, positioned between national policies, municipal interests and foreign investors, where contested classifications fuel conflict and expose underlying tensions within the green transition.
Presentation long abstract
This paper examines how data centers have become sites of socio-ecological ambiguity and green extractivism in rural Norway. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and anthropological theory, it analyzes how municipalities, industry actors and environmental groups struggle to define what a data center is and what role it should play in the green transition. Mary Douglas’ insights on classification is applied as a way to illuminate why data centers may emerge as anomalous objects that unsettle categories such as industry, infrastructure and environmental initiatives, generating both optimism and resistance. Court rulings, planning conflicts and public debate show how definitional power shapes land use, regulation and socio-ecological risk. Using Igor Kopytoff’s notion of "cultural biographies of things", the paper traces how data centers shift identity as they move across economic, political and environmental regimes, revealing conflicting value claims.
The analysis situates the Norwegian cases within critical infrastructure studies by engaging Patrick Brodie’s work on climate extraction and corporate hospitality in Ireland´s data center sector. These concepts highlight how rural territories are positioned as green resource frontiers through their provision of land, energy and political predictability for global technology firms. The paper argues that data centers exemplify the tensions at the heart of green transitions, where promises of sustainable growth, digital innovation and local benefit collide with extractive practices, infrastructural burdens and uncertain long-term outcomes.
Presentation short abstract
Focusing on the Mina do Barroso project, this presentation reveals how Europe’s green transition relies on sacrificial and colonial logics that deepen rural marginalisation and erase community voices, highlighting the need for energy policies that safeguard incommensurable place-based values.
Presentation long abstract
This presentation analyses the 'Mina do Barroso' project in northern Portugal to show how contemporary green transitions reproduce colonial relations and generate new forms of socio-ecological sacrifice, thereby contributing to debates on decoloniality and energy transitions. Grounded in a collaborative and engaged relation with Barroso’s struggle since 2021, it employs a mixed-methods approach—including Critical Discourse Analysis of the EU Critical Raw Materials Act and Portugal’s National Energy and Climate Plan, thematic analysis of corporate and public consultation materials, and a year-long ethnographic fieldwork with interviews and extensive fieldnotes—to connect inhabitants’ lived experiences with the policies enabling green extractivism.
Our analysis situates Portugal’s lithium rush within its historical condition as a peripheral European economy, showing how extractive promises intersect with long-standing patterns of dispossession, State abandonment, and the marginalisation of rural lifeworlds. These trajectories, reinforced by persistent discourses depicting rural territories as backward or dying, shape how contemporary extractivist pressures produce layered forms of marginalisation embedded in enduring internal colonial dynamics. In Covas do Barroso—designated as World Agricultural Heritage—this results in a “double dispossession”: decades of infrastructural neglect now followed by a renewed extractive wave framed as both essential and inevitable. We identify four sacrificial logics that normalise lithium extraction by: invoking urgency, framing rural life as expendable, appealing to technocratic restoration, and delegitimising community dissent.
By revealing how developmental, green, and increasingly military narratives silence opposition and restrict imaginaries of alternative futures, we argue for energy policies that centre communities’ right to say no and safeguard incommensurable place-based values.
Presentation short abstract
Over the past years, the Plataforma Latinoamericana y del Caribe por la Justicia Climática has mapped false solutions to climate change and green sacrifice zones in Abya Yala. This presentation shares results of this collaborative mapping and discusses its potential for climate justice activism.
Presentation long abstract
After years of denial and postponement, more and more governments and businesses are now jumping on the green bandwagon of the (corporate) green transition. This has led to the proliferation of what we deem false solutions. They are false because they fail to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as they claim, and far from changing the colonial and patriarchal structures that are at the root of the crisis, they reinforce the status quo. Moreover, they create places and populations of ‘green sacrifice’: they dispossess communities, degrade ecosystems, deepen social inequalities and environmental racism, while they commodify nature to the benefit of global and national economic and political elites. In the face of the worrying popularity of these false solutions and the expansion of green sacrifice zone-making across Abya Yala, the Plataforma Latinoamericana y del Caribe por la Justicia Climática (PLACJC) decided to map false solutions in the region. The PLACJC is an alliance of around 30 (grassroots) organizations from Abya Yala that aim to resist green colonialism and promote climate justice. For this mapping, its members collaboratively elaborated a bottom-up conceptualization of false (and real) solutions, built a publicly accessible map of false solutions and sacrifice zones across the region: www.mapafalsassoluciones.com. In this presentation, we will 1) present the results of this mapping and the insights they provide into the proliferation of false solutions and climate colonialism, 2) reflect on its collaborative methodology, and 3) discuss its potential for climate justice activism and the nurturing of real solutions to climate change.
Presentation short abstract
The study analyses how green sacrifice zones are created and legitimised in Spain. It addresses the issue of which ecological-distributive dynamics and valuation languages explain the growing local opposition to renewable energies, analysing the case of Galicia.
Presentation long abstract
Currently, there is a growing number of social movements in various countries opposing the installation of renewable energy infrastructure promoted under so-called ‘green’ policies. The increase in these conflicts shows that such policies, geared towards the so-called Just Ecological Transition or Energy Transition, in many cases reproduce what the literature has described as energy colonialism. This concept refers to the persistence of capitalist logic of resource extraction and appropriation, inherited from the fossil fuel energy model, and the prevalence of monetary valuation criteria for environmental assets (Pusceddu, 2020; Sánchez & Matarán, 2023).
This work adopts the approaches of Political Ecology and Ecological Economics to analyse local opposition to renewable energy projects, understood in these currents as ecological-distributive conflicts. It also examines the emergence of new ‘green sacrifice zones’, i.e. territories that bear the environmental and social burden of these facilities while supplying electricity to large urban areas (Martínez-Alier, 2008; Keucheyan, 2016).
This paper addresses the problem of how green sacrifice zones are generated and legitimised in the context of Spain's energy transition, which is an aspect that has been little studied in countries of the Global North. Our research asks what ecological-distributive dynamics explain these configurations and what languages of valuation emerge in local conflicts.
I explore the case of Galicia, in NW Spain. I identify potential sacrifice zones through the analysis of data from the energy sector, as well as the different languages of valuation through conflict analysis.
Presentation short abstract
The study examines how the European Green Deal and EU-Morocco Green Partnership intersect with Morocco’s occupation of Western Sahara. The critical discourse analysis reveals how the renewable energy development risks legitimizing control over Indigenous peoples and reproducing green colonialism.
Presentation long abstract
The European Green Deal (EGD) is widely hailed as a transformative policy framework aimed at achieving climate neutrality by 2050, including pledges to 'leave no one behind’. Yet, its external dimension raises critical questions about justice and power in global energy transitions, especially in postcolonial contexts. This paper examines how the EGD intersects with Morocco’s renewable energy ambitions and the ongoing occupation of Western Sahara, investigating whether these dynamics reproduce colonial hierarchies under the guise of sustainability. While the EU promotes values of human rights and sustainable development, its Green Partnership with Morocco – an agreement signed in October 2022 to support Morocco's energy transition and climate cooperation – risks legitimizing Morocco’s control over Western Sahara and further exploitation of Sahrawi peoples. A significant part of Moroccan renewable energy projects, including large-scale wind and solar farms, are developed in Western Sahara, with plans to export electricity to European markets, undermining Sahrawi self-determination and raising ethical concerns about green colonialism and energy injustice. Using critical discourse analysis of EU, Moroccan, and Western Saharan media narratives, official documents, and other relevant sources, such as reports from watchdog organizations, this study investigates how actors frame renewable energy projects, whose voices are amplified or silenced, and what normative claims are mobilized. By situating the EU-Morocco Green Partnership within debates on green colonialism, the paper contributes to broader discussions on the justice dimensions of global energy transitions and calls for greater scrutiny of sustainability narratives in contested territories.