Green Sacrifice in Spain - GRES

Why GRES?

This project looks at justice issues related to the implementation of social transitions to low-carbon energy systems that seek to be just (known as just transitions). It explores the point made by grassroots social movements that although transition is inevitable, justice is not. The concern lies in that just transitions could create sites of ‘green sacrifice’ by shifting environmental and social costs to Global South peripheries, which may end up serving as sites for the toxic mining of “transition minerals” (such as lithium) and large-scale renewable energy production facilities (e.g. solar and wind farms), for the benefit of decarbonisation in the Global North. This suggests that there is a risk that green transitions can end up being premised on colonial and neo-colonial relations, which are to an extent themselves responsible for generating the climate crisis in the first place. But despite the undeniable relevance of this explanatory framework for understanding the justice implications of such transitions, sites in the Global North (e.g. Europe) also serve as provisioners of green infrastructure (mining, solar and wind farms), where local movements also invoke the language of colonialism to challenge those same implications. Yet, such Global North localities lack a historical past or present of having been colonised, which raises challenges for the application of that framework for explaining the justice implications of just transition in those localities.

GRES explores the relevance, potential and limits of using this framework by hypothesising that green sacrifice in Europe emerges through a combination of shifting costs to poor and marginalised (depopulated) territories and the justification of that cost-shifting through what decolonial studies experts call a coloniality rhetoric of salvation through newness (e.g. by means of ecological modernisation), which emphasises imperial instead of colonial difference. To test the limits and potential of this hypothesis, the project focuses on the case of Spain, a country among those currently spearheading just transition in Europe.

Aim and objectives

The aim of GRES is to establish the political and policy mechanisms through which the unavoidable transition to low-carbon economies can also be truly just. To achieve this aim, the project engages political science in interdisciplinary interactions with methods and concepts from geography (mapping), discourse analysis, critical environmental social science (political ecology) and decolonial studies.

The project has the following objectives:

• Identify socio-economic, ecological and territorial patterns of infrastructure for the just transition

• Analyse governance mechanisms that make green sacrifice possible

• Specify how green infrastructure is experienced and contested in-situ
   

Funding