Presentation short abstract

This paper examines how solar energy expansion in Mexico reshapes socio-territorial relations to secure land access, showing how historical inequalities and territorial narratives are mobilized to enable the installation of solar infrastructure.

Presentation long abstract

In the face of climate collapse and the progressive decline of fossil fuels, so-called low-carbon energies have gained centrality in climate, development, and energy security agendas. Framed by the dominant discourse of the “energy transition”, projects such as large-scale solar parks are reshaping socio-territorial relations worldwide, especially in the peripheries of the world-economy.

When embedded in the logic of capitalist accumulation, and implemented by transnational corporations, this transition follows material and technical requirements oriented toward profitability. These requirements intertwine with existing socio-ecological relations in territories and in doing so transform local ways of organizing life, contributing to broader reconfigurations of the social metabolism.

This research aims to explore how the implementation of solar energy infrastructure in Mexico instrumentalizes and reorganizes pre-existent socio-territorial relations to secure access to land. Through a dialogue between empirical findings and conceptual frameworks such as solar capitalism (Ávila-Calero, 2025), extractivism, and generative powers of capitalism (Bear et al. 2023), the analysis traces mechanisms through which solar energy promoters facilitate infrastructural installation in Mexico. These mechanisms include the refunctionalisation of socio-economic formations (notably the ejidos), the mobilization of historical marginalisations anchored in class, gender, and ethnicity, as well as the deployment of discourses of “empty” or “environmentally degraded” lands.

The research argues that these strategies are not only effects but socio-territorial reconfigurations required by the corporate energy transition. They show that territorialized social relations operate as the interface through which hegemonic energy agendas attempt to materialize, while also becoming potential sites of dispute.