Presentation short abstract

Kenya’s Olkaria geothermal project exposes the uneven geographies of a “just transition.” Through participatory GIS with Maasai groups, we trace green sacrifice zones, where energy sovereignty, pollution, and displacement entangle in the name of decarbonization.

Presentation long abstract

The Olkaria geothermal complex in Kenya is widely celebrated as a flagship of green development and a symbol of Africa’s renewable energy future. Yet its expansion exposes the contradictions and uneven geographies embedded within the discourse of a “just transition.” In the pursuit of decarbonization, geothermal infrastructures have redrawn the socio-material landscapes of land, water, and belonging, reconfiguring who gains and who loses within the green sacrifice zones.

Adopting a critical and participatory GIS (PPGIS) framework grounded in feminist epistemologies, this study engages communities as co-producers of spatial knowledge rather than as data sources.

Through GPS-guided transects, participatory mapping, geo-questionnaires, and oral cartographies, we work with Maasai elders, women, youth, and neighboring ethnic groups. Together, we trace how geothermal expansion reshapes access to land, water, livelihoods, and grazing routes. We also map the spatial concentrations of harm and benefit, where pollution, health risks, and displacement collide with the ambitions of national energy sovereignty, urban tariffs, and employment.

These collaboratively produced counter-maps, layered with satellite imagery and concession data, unsettle the assumed equity and progressiveness of decarbonizing with geothermal. They reveal “green sacrifice zones” not as objective polygons but as dynamic, lived geographies charged with memory, emotion, and struggle. By integrating embodied experience and community memory into spatial analysis, this work gestures toward a pluriverse of spatialities, a terrain where technocratic cartographies of geothermal expansion intersect with the relational micro-geographies of Massai and Maa-speakers.

Presentation short abstract

This presentation explores how Türkiye’s energy transition is shaped by gendered labour, expertise, and policy exclusions. It highlights overlooked inequalities in energy governance and offers a feminist justice framework for more democratic pathways for green just energy transformation.

Presentation long abstract

This paper investigates how gendered power relations and institutional practices shape the direction of energy transitions in Türkiye. While state strategies emphasize decarbonization and technological expansion, the governance of the energy sector remains marked by centralization, limited transparency, and uneven participation. Drawing on feminist political ecology and insights from recent gender analyses in Türkiye’s climate and environment fields, the paper examines how policy frameworks and labour structures reproduce inequalities in leadership, technical roles, and access to emerging opportunities in the green economy.

The analysis highlights three recurring dynamics that reveal the social foundations of energy systems: the erasure of care and reproductive labour in energy planning; the marginalisation of women’s professional expertise in regulatory and technical arenas; and the unequal distribution of transition risks, including energy poverty and job precarity. These patterns show how gender is embedded in both the material and political landscapes of energy transformation.

By connecting these findings to broader debates in political ecology and justice, the paper argues that more democratic and equitable transitions require recognising and addressing these structural inequalities. Drawing on Nancy Fraser’s framework of redistribution, recognition, and representation, it suggests ways energy governance could be reoriented towards more socially grounded and inclusive forms of transition.

Presentation short abstract

This presentation explores the rise of Spain’s energy communities, focusing on their spatial patterns, enabling factors, and challenges in promoting local empowerment against dominant corporate-led transitions

Presentation long abstract

Amid intensifying energy and climate crises, dominant policy responses in Spain and across Europe continue to privilege corporate-led, large-scale renewable energy projects, reproducing extractive logics and territorial inequalities. In contrast, a rapidly expanding energy-community movement advocates for energy as a fundamental right and fosters new subjectivities grounded in care, solidarity, and local empowerment. Yet little is known about where these initiatives emerge, how they spread, and which territorial factors shape their evolution. In particular, it remains unclear whether these initiatives unfold predominantly in rural or urban settings and how local histories, the resistance to large-scale energy projects, and other place-based features condition their proliferation.

Spain’s recent boom in energy communities offers a window into these counter-geographies of transition. Using a mixed-methods approach that combines nationwide mapping, a review of grey literature, a participatory workshop, and semi-structured interviews with key actors I analyze the spatial patterns, territorial drivers and relational networks through which energy communities spread in Spain. Additionally, I illustrate how corporations appropriate the narrative of community empowerment, implementing fake energy communities, where citizens subscribe to a shared photovoltaic self-consumption without participating in any meaningful decision-making, while energy companies retain control and capture public funds. The study shows that the emerging community energy networks fight against these practices, advancing a new culture of energy that truly puts communities at the center of the transition.

Presentation short abstract

This paper explores the political ecology of bioenergy in Colombia. The paper unpacks how previous processes of migration and uneven development shape current forms of accumulation by (de)electrification. In contrast, practices of energy commons/conviviality shed light on other energy transitions.

Presentation long abstract

Since 2020, the town of Puerto Carreño, in Colombia’s Eastern plains, has been powered by a privately owned biomass-based power plant. Before the plant, Carreño relied on an interconnection to Venezuela’s grid. However, in the early 2010s, political tensions between the two countries and the impacts of the Venezuelan economic crisis on its infrastructure prompted Colombia to end Carreño’s electricity provision agreement. To prevent blackouts, private investors believed they could use biomass from tree plantations to generate electricity. Forestry firms had previously established these plantations for timber exports, but challenging infrastructure and high costs frustrated these efforts. As such, bioenergy emerged as a profitable enterprise to boost the forestry economy and end Carreño’s energy dependency on Venezuela.

Unfortunately, since the plant’s opening, Carreño has experienced blackouts and poor electricity service. Illegal connections to the grid in informal neighborhoods, which are inhabited mainly by poor Venezuelan and indigenous migrants, are often blamed for bioelectricity’s shortcomings. In reality, the private generator’s power purchase agreement established conditions that, I argue, have led to a process of accumulation by de-electrification. As a result, an off-grid community that briefly enjoyed access to electricity during the interconnection “went back to the shadows”, as my interlocutors claim. Carreño’s case demonstrates that present-day aspirations for “energy sovereignty” can mirror unjust capital-driven transitions. In contrast, Carreñenses highlight the importance of interconnections and interdependencies. I show how energy commons such as communal fridges and illegal “spiderweb” connections constitute practices of energy conviviality that pave the way for other energy transitions.

Presentation short abstract

This presentation analyses place-making in community-based energy governance in post-disaster Fukushima, showing how initiatives seek to transform the spatial manifestations of power relations in energy governance and highlighting their situated, pluriversal character.

Presentation long abstract

Expectations for community-based energy initiatives have grown significantly, yet such efforts are often romanticised and instrumentalised. Despite the widely shared belief that they deliver just and democratic energy governance, these initiatives in practice can entail adverse effects, unintentionally reproducing existing social injustices within energy governance arrangements. To address the conundrum, some scholars have been critically examining the true calibre of such local engagements by, for instance, foregrounding their disruptive potential. In this presentation, I extend this line of inquiry through an examination of community-based energy governance in a non-Western context, highlighting its situatedness and pluriversal characteristic. Specifically, I focus on engagements in Fukushima following the 2011 nuclear disaster. To date, some residents have engaged in community-based energy governance both inside and outside the affected areas. Yet, the number of initiatives remains small relative to regional electricity demand, which some might take as evidence that their contributions remain modest to decarbonisation at a broader scale. In contrast to this interpretation, I rather attend to the multifaceted roles of community-based initiatives in response to the nuclear disaster. Specifically, by drawing on semi-structured interviews and oral history of the practitioners in and from Fukushima, I delineate how people have engaged with and attempted to transform the spatial manifestations of power relations in and around energy governance through place-making practices. The analysis shows that their engagement exceeds contributions to decarbonisation. It sustains life in radioactively contaminated ‘barren’ landscapes, reweaves relations among humans and more-than-humans, and rebuilds furusato (ふるさと, homeland).

Presentation short abstract

Drawing from political ecology and agrarian studies, this paper develops, applies, and discusses an analytical understanding of what we term the ‘repertoire of resistance’ to large, technologically oriented environmental “fixes” centered on net-zero ambitions and renewable energy targets.

Presentation long abstract

While large, technologically oriented environmental “fixes” centered on net-zero ambitions and renewable energy targets dominate sustainability transition imaginaries, such endeavors have resulted in growing levels of opposition. Those resisting renewable energy projects and programs contend that, on the ground, these “fixes” are producing ecologically destructive and socially regressive energy futures. Drawing from political ecology and agrarian studies, we aim to develop, apply, and discuss an analytical understanding of what we term the ‘repertoire of resistance’ to such initiatives in terms of its vocabulary, forms, and effects. Based on seven person-months of qualitative fieldwork in Rajasthan and New Delhi, we analyze resistance to industrial-scale solar energy projects in the agrarian state of Rajasthan, India, then discuss insights using social regulation concepts of institutional change and accountability change. The first addresses shifts in norms and values that regulate legitimacy; the second explores how sanctions and incentives align actors’ behaviors in relation to justice, law, security, ecology and other ideals. Together, these concepts enable us to theorize what the myriad forms of resistance to large solar energy projects, and state and corporate responses to them, reveal about power relations and socioecological dynamics in the context of competing claims on land. This place-based empirical research illuminates dynamics of energy transitions, agrarian struggle, and resource governance at the nexus of climate change and contemporary capitalism.

Presentation short abstract

The quality of narratives about full-scale biomethane deployment in Catalonia, Spain, is contrasted against quantitative evidence. The paper reveals territorial distributional imbalances that perpetuate rural areas as energy colonies and landfills subordinated to large consumption centres.

Presentation long abstract

Biomethane has been promoted by the EU and governments to play a key role in the energy transition to a decarbonised future: a flexible renewable energy carrier suitable for heating, electricity generation and transport; able to substitute natural gas and reduce external energy dependency, as well as to foster circular economy by closing the nutrient cycle.

On other side, environmental and civil society organizations argue that large-scale biogas infrastructure risks to lock in unsustainable livestock practices, increasing the burden over local infrastructure, and generating digestate surpluses that threaten soil and water quality.

Against this backdrop, this study investigates the societal implications of a full-scale implementation of biomethane production using Catalonia as a case study.

The main narratives in favour and against large-scale biomethane deployment are identified, indicators derived from the narratives are evaluated, and narratives are confronted with quantitative evidence.

The results are mapped at the county level and reveal territorial imbalances perpetuating rural areas as energy colonies and landfills subordinated to large consumption centres. Also, there would be a shift from dependence on fossil gas imports to plant-based protein imports, and an increasing burden on rural territories due to a significant increase in heavy-duty traffic, and large quantities of digestate produced in municipalities already declared Nitrate Vulnerable Zones.

This conflict seems to be the recurrence of the center-periphery conflict, in which the opposition to supposedly clean and renewable energies seems to be about maintaining local control on landscape use, and are related to distributional, procedural and recognitional injustices.

Presentation short abstract

Building on a growing chorus of critics, this paper argue that the energy justice framework risks extending the violences of the racial colonial capitalist present into a post-carbon future, and considers what a decolonial abolitionist energy future might entail.

Presentation long abstract

Scholarship on energy justice has gained traction in academic and policy circles alike, in part because it offers a practical framework for assessing the fairness of energy systems and for charting a course towards a renewable energy future. Insofar as it demands an equitable distribution of harms and benefits, fair and inclusive decision-making procedures, and the recognition of rights of structurally marginalized groups, the energy justice framework presents as a progressive improvement on the grave injustices that have accompanied the fossil fuel energy regime. However, a closer look reveals that this call for justice leaves the dominant structures of the racial colonial capitalist order intact and shielded from critique. Specifically, in its calls for distributional justice, the framework is silent on the logics of capitalist accumulation which produce the uneven distributions it denounces. In its calls for procedural justice, the energy justice framework assumes the sovereignty and legitimacy of the colonial state, thereby denying the authority and jurisdiction of Indigenous legal and political systems. And, in its calls for recognition justice, the framework disregards decolonial critics who contend that the “politics of recognition” deepens dispossession and undercuts more radical demands to dismantle colonial relations. Drawing on examples from Canada, Scotland, and Norway, this paper builds on a growing chorus of scholars who argue that the energy justice framework serves to extend the violences of the racial colonial capitalist present into a post-carbon future. In conclusion, I consider what a decolonial abolitionist energy future might entail.

Presentation short abstract

This work examines the distribution of ownership of photovoltaic power plants in Sicily, questioning the centralized model of energy production and the involvement of local communities in the decision-making process, within the framework of the just transition and the political ecology of energy.

Presentation long abstract

Climate changes have brought the ecological transition at the centre of public, institutional and academic debate. Transitioning from fossil fuels to renewable energy has been presented by international and national policies as an inevitable path to mitigate the effects of global warming. The topic of energy governance has stimulated a critical reflection on the models in which energy is produced, managed, distributed and consumed. Whilst renewable energy sources are often depicted as a tool for decarbonisation and local development, the concentration of ownership of power plants in the hands of few market players spawns power centralization and capital accumulation, limiting the involvement of communities in the decision-making process and the access to economic benefits.

This work examines the distribution of ownership of photovoltaic (PV) power plants in Sicily, focusing on large installations on the ground (>1MW). Drawing on the analysis of geolocated data (e.g. government agencies, land registries) and field research, this work assembles the geography of PV ownership and assess the degree of capital accumulation that stems from it. This work fits into the theoretical framework of political ecology of energy, aimed at analysing the relationships between power, inequalities and social, economic and environmental injustices that arise with energy issues. By questioning the centralized model of energy production and distribution, the analysis discusses degrowth as essential for building a sustainable system consistent with the environmental justice. Sicily represents an emblematic case study, contributing to the debate on the just transition towards a participatory, democratic and locally rooted energy system.

Presentation short abstract

This presentation exposes how green transitions reproduce white supremacist logics of dehumanization, territorial appropriation, and exploitative labor regimes—revealing green growth narratives and policies embedded in international and multilateral climate fora as a continuum of imperial extraction

Presentation long abstract

The rhetoric of "green" transitions and discourses is structurally embedded in white supremacy, patriarchy, and racial capitalism. This presentation, grounded in feminism, antiracism, and decoloniality, dismantles the myth of climate neutrality by examining how green extractivism operates through the same racial hierarchies and colonial logics that have rendered certain bodies and territories disposable.

The so-called transition to renewable energy intensifies exploitation in the Global South through what is understood as racial sacrifice zones—territories predominantly inhabited by Indigenous, Afrodescendant, and peasant communities whose lands are commodified as "empty space" and whose labor is made artificially cheap through unequal exchange. From lithium extraction to hydrogen production, green growth reproduces the dehumanization mechanisms of settler colonialism: framing certain populations as obstacles to progress, biodiverse ecosystems as resources awaiting appropriation.

This violence extends beyond territorial extraction, encompassing exploitative labor regimes rooted in the racialized, geographical, and gendered division of labor. The same system that devalues minerals under Latin American soil devalues care, domestic and subsistence work, linking global extraction chains to global care chains in a unified logic of differential valorization.

The presentation, informed by the upcoming policy brief prepared for the Feminist Action Nexus, explores how these white supremacist structures shape climate discourse and policy in multilateral spaces like the UNFCCC, limiting what can be achieved in international negotiations. It advocates for challenging Northern "solutions" that rely on ongoing exploitation of racialized bodies and territories, calling for transitions rooted in genuine decolonization, labor justice, self-determination, demilitarization, and the abolition of racial capitalism itself.

Presentation short abstract

Temporal justice (TJ) serves as an analytical framework for detecting how different temporalities are prescribed, resisted, and negotiated during the green transition. Through case studies from Extremadura and Vis, we demonstrate how time itself emerges as a site of inequality.

Presentation long abstract

Green transition is often presented as universally beneficial, but the current implementation of the infrastructures of low-carbon energy deepens social and environmental injustices. The European Union and member states fund energy infrastructure in peripheries, but often without addressing structural vulnerabilities, ecological limits, or local modes of life that contradict linear planning and technocratic urgency. Through two contrasting case studies, we demonstrate how temporal justice (TJ) serves as an analytical framework for detecting how different temporalities are prescribed, resisted, and negotiated during the green transition. In Extremadura, Spain, local activists resist the imposed corporate model of energy transition adapting to the imposed hurry, but at the expense of personal sacrifices. Complementary, in the self-sustainable island of Vis, people opt for slow living, the creation of convivial knowledge practices and self-sufficiency through dry-stone walling, rainwater harvesting and other sustainable practices as a rebellion against technocratic governing and market-based advancements. We show that sustainability is also about how fast, for whom, and on whose time we transition. TJ asks who sets the pace, who waits, who bears acceleration risks, whose rhythms are recognized, and how harms and benefits unfold across time. It highlights tensions between linear policy schedules and cyclical community rhythms, and between the accelerated tempo of green-growth agendas and slower local temporalities. Thus, it should be part of the just transition framework, complementing the pillars of distributional, procedural and recognition justice. Through this lens, time itself emerges as a site of inequality, linking TJ to the spatial production of peripheries.

Presentation short abstract

Exploring the diversity of the energy transition, our ethnographic work in Brazil's Northeast shows how the dominant sociotechnical imaginary overlooks local territorial aspirations. Yet, through their practices, rural communities present an alternative imaginary based on distributed energy systems.

Presentation long abstract

The energy transition is a powerful sociotechnical imaginary that envisions prosperous and sustainable futures achieved through decarbonized technologies. While science and technology studies have largely focused on expert and policy discourses to identify and discuss dominant and alternative imaginaries, our study examines their practices and material implications to show how these imaginaries can be contested and reformulated. Drawing on ethnographic research in the Serra da Ibiapaba, a region with exceptional solar and wind resources in the Brazilian state of Ceará, we first demonstrate that the dominant imaginary overlooks the materiality of the energy transition. Although the development of corporate-owned wind energy necessarily requires a reconfiguration of land access, this is treated as only a secondary concern, addressed through quick and unstable fixes. These processes generate divisions and dispossession within communities, whose own territorial aspirations are often denied in centralized projects designed to meet national and global demand for “clean” energy.

In contrast to these top-down enactments of the dominant imaginary, our ethnography also reveals an alternative imaginary emerging directly from the material concerns of rural communities. Through community-owned distributed solar power systems, smallholders and cooperatives can access cheaper energy and invest in irrigation to ensure their social and economic reproduction. However, this alternative form of energy transition remains grounded in local practices and bounded at the community level. Unbounding and dissemination are only possible through the discursive work of civil society actors who articulate a cohesive vision and engage with policy-makers to advocate for a supportive institutional environment.

Presentation short abstract

We map contested hydropower development in Georgia, where over 100 HPPs are already built, and 200+ planned to 2034, to expose hidden networks of capital, class and ecological inequality behind “green transition” infrastructure, showing how (semi-)peripheries are structurally tied to core economies.

Presentation long abstract

The European Green Deal envisions a climate-neutral EU by 2050. Yet, it relies heavily on its Southern and Eastern neighbourhood as externalized sites of energy production: a dynamic intensified after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In this context, large connectivity projects such as the Black Sea Submarine Cable reinforce peripheral roles assigned to neighbourhood countries like Georgia. At the same time, grassroots movements contest the socio-ecological impacts of green transition infrastructures. This presentation reflects on an ongoing mapping project focused on hydropower, Georgia’s most visible and contested green transition pathway. While around 100 hydropower plants (HPPs) – some of which have been considerably contested – have been built since EU-led liberalization in the early 2000s, current plans foresee more than 200 additional HPPs by 2034. Recent authoritarian legislation in the country provides the state with more tools to suppress grassroots mobilization. Our mapping aims to support grassroots actors by uncovering and visualizing the class and capital interests behind hydropower development. Treating infrastructure not as neutral physical artefacts but as capitalogenic formations, we trace relational networks of equity, debt, supply, and de-risking involved in individual HPPs through combined researcher-driven and participatory data collection. This approach foregrounds the often-invisible circuits of value transfer, class interests, and unequal ecological exchange connecting (semi-)peripheries to EU cores. We use the presentation to discuss the analytical and political openings and limitations of this mapping work, and reflect on how relational geographies and mapping can enrich political ecology debates on green transitions, action research and grassroots mobilizations.