Presentation short abstract

Analyses Mexico’s federal and state solar programmes (2013–2024) to ask who becomes a “solar subject” and who is excluded, showing how developmentalist logics in energy transition policy shape access, justice and power in the post-Paris era.

Presentation long abstract

The dominant discourse on the energy transition portrays solar energy as a global “win-win” solution that can mitigate GHG emissions and reduce energy poverty. In much of the Global South, however, this promise materializes through state programs that translate the “solar solution” into administrative categories, access rules, and justificatory narratives. Since the enactment of the Climate Change Act (2012), federal and state governments in Mexico, across changing administrations, have implemented solar programs targeting diverse populations. This article explores which groups the Mexican state designates as “solar subjects” and which it renders invisible when translating this global script into policy. Empirically, I analyze all federal and state solar-support programs (2013–2024) using program rules and official documents. I combine computational text analysis with qualitative coding to position each program along two axes: whether it invokes the rhetoric of “sustainable development” or operates as developmentalist social policy with little environmental content, and which types of beneficiaries it privileges—households, firms, productive projects or communities—through differentiated access barriers. The article bridges policy design approaches and the social construction of target populations with debates on distributive energy justice and the depoliticization of climate action in the Global South. Rather than proposing a new grand theory, it offers an empirical map of how developmentalist logics persist across political ideologies, structuring who is positioned to benefit from solar technology and under what conditions in Mexico’s post-Paris era, nuancing political ecology debates about how climate policies become instruments of inclusion and exclusion.