Sustainability, Economics, and Ethics (SEE)
Green energy in contested territories: The cases of Western Sahara and French Guiana
On the 11th of December of 2024, Dr. Roberto Cantoni explained how hydrogen production has become one of the renewable energy industry’s main focuses. Hydrogen is often depicted as the environment-friendly techno-fix that will make electricity generated from solar and wind power storable and tradable on world markets. When implemented, however, this techno-optimistic vision can easily link to the reproduction of familiar dynamics of enclosure, exclusion, encroachment, and entrenchment emphasised by the political ecology and energy justice literature with regard to other ‘green’ projects.
In this seminar, Cantoni analysed one of such case in a territory of Overseas France, French Guiana, where in 2020, three French companies conceived plans for the world's largest solar-hydrogen power plant. The Electric Plant of West Guiana promised to save CO2 emissions while ending recurrent outages for 70,000 Guianese.
Customary chiefs belonging to the indigenous Kali’na peoples rejected the project from the outset, criticising the imposed notion of hasty and lucrative development based on gigantic infrastructures, which they see as a form of ‘eco-colonialism’, as well as depriving them of lands to hunt, fish and food gathering.
While the Kali’na people are also resorting to juridical arguments to fight against the plant, they principally oppose the vision of their territory as no one’s land, propagated by the industrial environment, and instead defend an alternative vision based on “a certain form of slowness and modesty”. They also fight for the recognition of indigenous rights: a request that inevitably clashes with the French state’s historically uniformitarian approach.
Finally, he showed that the Kali’na communities’ position on the plant was not unanimous, and that internal conflict contributed to weaken the struggle against the plant. Based on fieldwork, he examined this socio-environmental conflict through the prism of decolonial energy justice.