“Take your responsibility”: the politics of green sacrifice for just low-carbon transitions in rural Portugal

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• dc.contributor.author van Meer, Dominique
• dc.contributor.author Zografos, Christos
• dc.date.accessioned 2025-02-25T07:18:07Z
• dc.date.available 2025-02-25T07:18:07Z
• dc.date.issued 2024
• dc.description.abstract The EU has recently taken important climate action, notably through the launching of the European Green Deal. However, EU action has been criticized for its potential to generate a heavy increase in mining of ‘critical minerals’ necessary for renewables technologies, and so create green sacrifice zones both overseas and within Europe. We explore the politics of green sacrifice making through an analysis of green governance practices and opposition to them in a case of a lithium mining conflict in rural northern Portugal. We find that institutional rearrangements attempt to reconfigure lithium mining as a force for sustainability in ways that enable capital accumulation. Such reconfigurations clash with concerns about maintaining a meaningful life in localities where mining would take place, as well as alternative definitions of the logic of the circular economy and of what the proper scales of decision-making for marginalized territories should be. Government and corporate action attempt to resolve these clashes by promoting a discourse of ‘responsibility’, which assigns public institutions the role of convincing communities to accept ‘green’ mining; to corporations the role of exercising corporate social responsibility; and to affected populations the role of subjects whose political action should conform to their consumption habits and help deliver a distinctive ‘European way’ of being responsible in a warming world. We conclude that green sacrifice is essential for maintaining economic growth and a liberal order of governance, delivered through a biopolitics of inclusion that exists side-by-side with attempts at self-constitution. We highlight a contradiction between what such praxis tries to achieve and ways in which some critical constituencies seek to address democracy challenges of just transitions.en
• dc.description.sponsorship Open Access funding provided thanks to the CRUE-CSIC agreement with Springer Nature. The authors would like to acknowledge support by the GRES research project (Contract No. CNS2022-136115) funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation MCIN/AEI/https://doi.org/10.13039/501100011033 and the European Union Next Generation/PRTR programme. Support for this research has been provided by the Ramón y Cajal Programme (Contract No. RYC-2015-17372), funded by the Spanish State Research Agency (AEI), the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, and the European Social Fund (ESF).en
• dc.format.mimetype application/pdf
• dc.identifier.citation van Meer D, Zografos C. “Take your responsibility”: the politics of green sacrifice for just low-carbon transitions in rural Portugal. Sustain Sci. 2024;19(4):1313-26. DOI: 10.1007/s11625-024-01519-0
• dc.identifier.doi http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11625-024-01519-0
• dc.identifier.issn 1862-4057
• dc.identifier.uri http://hdl.handle.net/10230/69717
• dc.language.iso eng
• dc.publisher Springer
• dc.relation.ispartof Sustainability Science. 2024;19(4):1313-26
• dc.relation.projectID info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/ES/3PE/CNS2022-136115
• dc.rights This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
• dc.rights.accessRights info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
• dc.rights.uri http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• dc.subject.keyword Political ecologyen
• dc.subject.keyword Sacrificeen
• dc.subject.keyword Just transitionen
• dc.subject.keyword Low-carbon economyen
• dc.subject.keyword Miningen
• dc.subject.keyword European Green Dealen
• dc.subject.keyword Portugalen
• dc.title “Take your responsibility”: the politics of green sacrifice for just low-carbon transitions in rural Portugalen
• dc.type info:eu-repo/semantics/article
• dc.type.version info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion