- Convenors:
-
Irina Velicu
(CES)
Hestia Ioana Delibas (Centre for Social Studies (CES), of University of Coimbra)
Valentina NOVAGLIO (Université Toulouse II Jean Jaurès)
Mody DIAW (Sciences Po Bordeaux)
- Format:
- Panel
Format/Structure
This panel will consist of a series of short presentations, maximum 6 papers, followed by a collective discussion with the audience.
Long Abstract
Environmental injustice begins even before the soil, forest, or air is polluted, exploited, or stolen (Velicu 2020). Within the extractivist paradigm — understood as a structural and slow form of violence that reproduces a colonial-capitalist logic prioritizing profit at all costs — power is exercised through tactics and practices deployed by corporations and the state to secure access to resources ( Dunlap & Riquito 2023, Gamu & Dauvergne 2018). The “Green Transition” is a continuation of the imperative economic growth depoliticizing the extractivist logic and leading to alienation from dissensus politics (Rancière 2011). Socio-ecological losses and climate inequalities as well as sacrifice zones’ of green capitalism cannot be understood without acknowledging their embeddedness in the colonial history of capitalist relations (Andreucci et al 2025).
The concept of “grey zone” or “complex complicity” emerging from Transitional Justice studies (Mihai 2020), help make sense of contradictions and ambiguities of uneven power relations involved in the extractive violence of resource conflicts and governance. Such relations challenge attachments to moral purity in the allocation of blame, which overlook the complex political, social, and cultural circumstances of particular acts (Neu et al 2016). Complex complicity explains “traitorous” or criminal behavior in an intersectional way, and sheds light on the ambiguous positions of those directly affected by extractive projects. These concepts move us beyond a reductive view of oppression, or compliance, revealing the co-constitutive and performative nature of power and resistance, reproduced through asymmetrical relations and processes of subjectivation as race, ethnicity, gender, class, age, ability etc (Velicu & Garcia-Lopez 2017).
Accepted papers
Presentation short abstract
California focus groups show residents don’t just say yes/no to climate projects; they govern portfolios—setting safety, oversight, and benefit terms for what gets built and where, weighing cumulative risks, rerouting burdens, and insisting on local authority and enforceable monitoring.
Presentation long abstract
The green transition often routes new risk through old sacrifice zones, pushing frontline communities into a grey zone between refusal and conditional consent. Drawing on twenty focus groups in five California communities facing proposals for renewable energy, grid-scale battery storage, and carbon management (incl. DAC), this paper shows that residents do not respond with simple yes/no preferences to isolated projects. Instead, they practice portfolio governance—collectively ranking options, weighing cumulative harms, negotiating binding terms, and sometimes rerouting burdens while attempting to retain benefits. I develop a typology of place attachment that illuminates complex complicity under asymmetric power: (1) Protective attachment & bounded consent—already-burdened communities articulate survival conditions (strict safety standards, Tribal authority, independent monitoring, enforceable community benefits) under which limited hosting might be tolerated; (2) Survival veto—where cumulative risk makes additional siting ethically and materially impossible; (3) Selective redistribution—efforts to deflect high-hazard components elsewhere while demanding local ownership, bill relief, or revenue-sharing. These practices function as survival governance: situated strategies to reduce harm inside institutions that continue to reproduce extractive logics. The analysis complicates NIMBY/YIMBY framings, showing how “green” projects can perpetuate colonial-capitalist relations unless communities secure enforceable protections and decision-making power. I argue that evaluations of transition projects should center terms and power—not abstract support—by asking: who sets conditions, who monitors compliance, how are cumulative burdens capped, and what non-fungible goods (health, sovereignty) are protected? Without these, decarbonization risks deepening environmental injustice under the banner of climate progress.
Presentation short abstract
Romania exemplifies land grabbing in Eastern Europe where the post-socialist transition enabled land alienation and concentration. Using the concept of pin-prick land grabbing (Borras et al. 2024), we highlight the power dynamics that have facilitated large-scale land grabs.
Presentation long abstract
Romania stands as a key example of land grabbing in Eastern Europe: the post-socialist transition
to free markets has materialized in a myriad of factors that led to the loss of rural social fabric and
thus, land alienation and concentration. Using the concept of pin-prick land grabbing (Borras et al.
2024), we draw attention to how various, insidious social relations and power dynamics among
stakeholders, from peasants to officials and economic elites, have led to small-scale land deals
which eventually have facilitated large-scale land grabbing. By bringing to the surface these
´hidden in plain sight´ forms of violence, we show the structural complexity of the phenomenon,
putting forward the need for an environmental justice approach to land grabbing. Empirically, this
study builds on the long-term research work of the authors and forty-one semi-structured
interviews in Hartibaciu Valley (Central Romania) conducted during 2024. We base our argument
on testimonies of the lived experience of those who felt forced to give up land, animals and small-scale
agriculture in the last twenty years of post-socialism. The transfer of land to corporations is
part of a pattern of systemic erosion of rural livelihoods and precarisation of rural life.
Presentation short abstract
The Great Limpopo Park, seen as a wildlife kingdom and transnational cooperative space, has faced escalating violence in the 21st century. A war over its wildlife resources is ongoing . Poaching and anti-poaching efforts are turning this borderland from green to grey.
Presentation long abstract
The Great Limpopo Peace Park is not only a heavily controlled national space supporting tourism and securing borders, but also a space of dissidence where criminal syndicates operate. Despite being highly globalized in terms of tourism, the park escapes full state control and has become a focal point for rhino poaching organized by international crime networks. In this transnational enclave, illegal paramilitary groups exploit wildlife resources. The resulting illegal wildlife trade is among the most lucrative criminal markets worldwide, ranking fourth after drugs, human trafficking, and counterfeiting.
Two opposing visions of wildlife use and globalization collide here. The legal approach monetizes animal lives indirectly (tourism, trophy hunting), while the illegal one treats wildlife as a directly marketable resource (horns, ivory, skins, meat). Parks are described as “honey pots” for tourists—ironically, the same features make them attractive to poachers. This park has thus become an unstable arena where rangers and criminals clash over survival and wildlife, with predation both driving and resulting from this dissidence.
In response, states have pursued a “green militarization” of the park. Initially enhancing ranger training and equipment, they then introduced advanced technology, transforming the Great Limpopo Peace Park into a smart border that is technologically heavily militarized. The securing of wildlife resources is turning this borderland from green to grey—but what kind of grey zone is it?
Presentation short abstract
The study explores why some Aegean communities stay silent despite geothermal harms. It argues that silence reflects constrained agency within uneven power relations, revealing the grey zone between discontent and open resistance under extractive development.
Presentation long abstract
Over the past decade, Turkey’s Aegean region has witnessed expansion of geothermal energy projects, promoted by the state as part of its ‘green’ energy transition. By creating pollution, soil degradation, water depletion, and disruptions to agriculture-based livelihoods, these projects have generated widespread local discontent. Despite facing comparable harms, communities have responded in markedly different ways: while some villages have resisted, others have remained largely silent. This silence, however, does not necessarily signal acceptance. Instead, many of these communities occupy a grey zone: a position marked by dissatisfaction and concern, yet unable or unwilling to translate discontent into open resistance.
Drawing on scholarship on hegemony, silence, and compliance, this study examines the grey zone through the ambiguous, uneven, and contradictory power relations that constitute it. The analysis shows how discontented yet silent residents operate within asymmetric dependencies on local powerholders, companies, and state actors, as well as intersecting hierarchies of class, gender, and age that shape who can speak, when, and at what cost. These dynamics produce a terrain in which silence emerges as a contingent and situational response. It embodies a complex assemblage of compliance, fear, desperation, indifference, and uncertainty, reflecting constrained agency shaped by asymmetric power relations and by the tensions of occupying multiple, sometimes incompatible, subject positions within extractive governance regimes. By bringing these dynamics to the fore, the study conceptualizes silence as an active and meaningful mode of response - one that reveals the layered power structures and socio-political logics that organize community life under extractive development.
Presentation short abstract
Lithium mining in Portugal and Serbia reveals how the green transition generates new sacrifice zones in the Global North. Analysing evolving conflicts, actor constellations and complex complicities, we show how extractive pressures reshape socio-ecological futures in politically volatile contexts.
Presentation long abstract
This paper analyses lithium extraction in Portugal and Serbia as emblematic cases of how the European green transition generates new sacrifice zones within the Global North. Drawing on political ecology and the panel’s focus on environmental injustice as complex complicity, we examine how EU strategic ambitions, national policy frameworks and corporate interventions converge to reshape peripheral territories through extractive interests.
Building on our comparative proposal, we trace the socio-ecological conflicts surrounding the Mina do Barroso (Portugal) and Jadar (Serbia) projects, where communities confront environmental risks, threats to agricultural livelihoods and top-down licensing procedures. Despite these parallels, the political trajectories diverge: mass mobilisation in Serbia led to the temporary withdrawal of Rio Tinto’s permits, yet the project remains latent and vulnerable to reactivation; in Portugal, recent strategic designation at EU level has revitalised the Barroso project despite ongoing legal challenges and local resistance. These dynamics underscore the importance of analysing conflicts in real time, as current political decisions will decisively shape the future of these territories.
By analysing actor constellations, power relations and ambiguous local positions influenced by economic dependency and institutional distrust, this contribution shows how the so-called green transition reconfigures it within Europe. The comparative approach advances debates in Political Ecology by demonstrating how decarbonisation agendas can reproduce inequalities, generate complex forms of complicity and expand extractive frontiers under the banner of sustainability, also in the Global North.
Presentation short abstract
We claim that environmental justice research and practice in Eastern Europe has displayed an insidious form of whiteness. In this presentation we show how infrastructural and performative dehumanisation deepen white supremacy and privilege against a Roma community in Romania.
Presentation long abstract
In Eastern Europe, whiteness functions as a structuring racial logic that organizes space and hierarchies of belonging.Environmental justice research in this region has mostly been blinded by whiteness, being split between human rights-oriented research on discrete Roma communities and environmental justice studies animated by raceless engagements of highly visible environmental conflicts. Underlying both of them is a taken-for-granted irrelevance of whiteness as organizing principle of racial capitalism. Drawing on a long-term case study of Roșia Montană (2005-2024) and its Roma community of Dăroaia (2018-2024), we advance the conceptual pair of infrastructural and performative dehumanisation as interrelated processes that sustain whiteness or what has recently been called “gadjo-ness” (Matache 2025). Building dehumanizing infrastructures maintains white privilege, while the everyday performance of dehumanization deepens white supremacy. We achieve a deep integration of theory and methodology by critically engaging with the case of Roșia Montană, which was saturated with progressive but race-blind social movements, and with our own racially-unaware work. Realizing the insidiousness of Whiteness was prompted by an unexpected interaction in the field, which made us enlarge our initially liberal conception of Roma environmental injustice. We collected our data in mid-2024, consisting of 31 interviews with Roma men and women, local authorities and others, and direct observations in Dăroaia. Our results show how whiteness is both inscribed in space and performed as mundane practice, both of which perpetuate whiteness as organizing principle of racial capitalism. Based on these insights, we advocate a reconsideration of insidious whiteness in environmental justice research in EasternEurope.