Publication
Energy Expansion at the Global Peripheries
LIQUIT contribution to the IDS Bulletin special issue on justice and the energy transition
The LIQUIT Voices team contributed to a special issue of the IDS Bulletin, published by the Institute of Development Studies, dedicated to struggles for justice in the context of the energy transition.
The article brings together two seemingly distant realities: quilombola and rural communities in the Jequitinhonha Valley, Brazil, and the village of Covas do Barroso, Portugal. Despite their geographical distance, these territories are facing similar processes linked to the expansion of lithium mining, including intensifying territorial conflicts and community-led forms of resistance.
At the centre of the analysis lies a key question: who does the energy transition serve?
The article argues that reducing the climate crisis to the need for decarbonisation has contributed to legitimising the expansion of extractive frontiers, often reframed as spaces of green development. This process frequently overlooks the impacts on communities whose ways of life are grounded in long-standing relationships with land and local ecologies.
Rather than representing a rupture, these dynamics reproduce familiar patterns. Narratives of underdevelopment and empty land continue to be mobilised, positioning certain regions as peripheral and in need of transformation through extractive projects.
The article was written by Francisco Calafate-Faria, Klemens Laschefski, Bruna Viana de Freitas, Fabiana Soares Leme, Rômulo Barbosa and Aline Weber Sulzbacher, and was launched during a hybrid event at COP30 in Belém.
