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.