A transition that displaces the costs of decarbonisation onto those who contributed least to the crisis is not a green transition. It is a new form of enclosure.
The global rush towards renewable energy, carbon markets, and green infrastructure is reshaping landscapes across the Global South at a pace that outstrips the capacity of affected communities to respond. Wind farms in the Brazilian Caatinga, solar parks in the Sahel, hydroelectric dams in the Amazon — each of these projects is framed as a necessary step towards a sustainable future. Yet the question that is systematically avoided is: sustainable for whom? When a wind energy company installs turbines on collectively managed pasturelands, the carbon accounting may improve, but the social fabric of the communities who depend on that land is torn apart.
The concept of a just transition has emerged to address this tension, but it remains dangerously underspecified. In its most common usage, a just transition means ensuring that workers in fossil fuel industries are retrained for green jobs. This is a necessary but profoundly insufficient framing. It ignores the territorial dimensions of energy transitions entirely — the fact that new energy infrastructure occupies space, that this occupation transforms land tenure regimes, that the benefits of energy production flow outward to distant consumers whilst the costs remain embedded in local landscapes.
Research across seventeen communities in the state of Bahia reveals a consistent pattern: green energy projects arrive through processes that mirror the extractive logic of the industries they claim to replace. Land is leased or purchased through negotiations that exclude communal governance structures. Environmental impact assessments treat territory as a physical surface rather than as a socially produced space. Compensation mechanisms operate on an individual basis, fragmenting collective land management systems that depend on cooperation. The spatial arrangements of the old extractive economy are reproduced in green clothing.
This is not a failure of implementation. It is a structural feature of transition models that separate environmental objectives from territorial justice. When policy frameworks treat decarbonisation as a technical goal to be achieved through the most cost-efficient spatial deployment of infrastructure, they inevitably gravitate towards the territories where land is cheapest, governance is weakest, and resistance is most easily overcome. These are, without exception, the territories of the poorest and most marginalised communities.
A genuinely just transition requires rethinking the relationship between energy policy and territorial governance. It means recognising that the communities on whose land green infrastructure is built are not obstacles to be managed or stakeholders to be consulted, but legitimate governance authorities whose consent and participation must shape the terms of any transition.
This position has concrete implications. It means that benefit-sharing mechanisms must operate at the community level, not the individual level, and must be designed in dialogue with existing collective governance structures. It means that environmental impact assessments must incorporate spatial justice criteria — evaluating not only ecological effects but the transformation of land tenure, resource access, and institutional arrangements. And it means that transition planning must be understood as a form of regional development, not merely as energy policy — one that integrates territorial sovereignty, livelihood security, and ecological sustainability as inseparable objectives.
The alternative — a green transition that reproduces the spatial injustices of extractive capitalism — is not only ethically untenable. It is practically unsustainable. Communities whose governance systems are destroyed do not quietly absorb the costs. They resist, they organise, and they hold the projects accountable. A transition built against communities will fail. A transition built with them — on their terms, in their territories, through their institutions — is the only one that has a chance of enduring.