From Azerbaijan to Guanajuato, energy is at the centre of geopolitical agendas and conflicts. Global militarisation and inter-imperial competition are largely associated with disputes over critical minerals related to the energy security of the major powers. In addition, non-state actors – from organised crime, to corporations, to militia groups – drive other types of conflicts over energy. Meanwhile, the global rise of authoritarianism and the far-right has strengthened structures of capitalism, inequality, racism, and patriarchy, which have taken on the new forms of green extractivism and energy colonialism. 

As I argued with Miriam Lang and Mary Ann Manahan in our recent book, The Geopolitics of Green Colonialism, green colonialism presents the global South as a subaltern space that can be exploited, destroyed, and reconfigured according to the needs of dominant regimes of accumulation. It implies today a new dynamic of extraction and appropriation of raw materials, natural goods, and labour, on behalf of what is portrayed as the ‘green’ energy transition.

Only a few decades ago, in the 1990s and early 2000s, the fossil fuel industry promoted climate-change denialism while promising jobs and prosperity. Later, it turned to extreme energies, while actively obstructing energy democratisation initiatives, trying to delay the energy transition as long as possible. Today, the industry seeks to become a major player in renewables by diversifying its business around solar, wind, and low-carbon energy bets, while effectively undermining the actual transition debates and opportunities. Dominant and emerging powers such as the European Union, United States, and China, together with large corporations and portions of the global capitalist elite, have linked themselves to the energy transition agenda by the construction of a new capitalist consensus, which Maristella Svampa and I term the ‘Decarbonisation Consensus‘. 

Fossil gattopardismo

In the Italian writer Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s classic novel, Il Gattopardo (The Leopard), gattopardismo refers to the practice of changing everything so as to ensure that nothing really changes. In the energy transition context, saving the climate and decarbonising the economy have now become mantras in the public debate. The gravity of the climate emergency is recognised, and the traditional denialism of the industry is no longer dominant, even if it still has considerable weight. Increased investment in renewable energy is now posited as an answer to climate change. However, because that investment requires continued economic growth, the expansion of energy demand with an increase in the extraction of hydrocarbons is made to seem like a necessary part of the approach to energy transition, under the illusory umbrella of ‘net zero’ policies. In essence, fossil gattopardismo maintains the ideology of indefinite economic growth. Meanwhile, the policies and horizons that are accordingly constructed are insufficient to keep us under the 1.5ºC threshold of warming. And severe socio-environmental impacts, especially through the exploitation of natural resources, are intensified. Fossil capitalism and decarbonised capitalism are not two different paths, much less two opposing projects, but rather two sides of the same coin. 

The public-relations success of fossil gattopardismo has major implications. Most importantly, the dominant approach to decarbonisation is not guided, as it should be, by de-concentration and de-commodification of the energy system, care for nature, and global climate justice. Instead, other motivations win out, such as attracting new financial incentives; securing – at any cost – the energy independence of some countries; or improving the image of polluting corporations. The effect is to intensify commodification and various forms of speculative investment.

Challenges to the construction of energy democracy 

Faced with this scenario, in which the agents of the climate crisis come dressed in green camouflage, democracy, even in its liberal version, is under threat, while energy is increasingly concentrated and commodified. How, then, to build true energy democracy? 

A true energy democracy consists of energy justice, sovereignty and a just ecosocial transition. To move in this direction, we must confront a double impasse: the restriction of democracy to the mere framework of political liberalism, and the limiting of discussions of sovereignty to the realm of state affairs. 

Regarding the former, we must rethink our political communities and democracy as an instituting practice. Authoritarianism is gaining ground worldwide amid an intense democratic setback (including de-institutionalisation, loss of rights, threats to activists, normalisation of authoritarian value, etc.) and a closing down of political systems, which are increasingly oligarchised. In the face of a highly accelerated political life, in which genuine public debates are rare and where only a few actors make decisions that shape the lives of many, the demand to reclaim democracy implies a need to slow down the pace of politics and open new participatory spaces beyond the officially demarcated institutions, to channel the profound disaffection of citizens towards politics and politicians into revitalising democratic life rather than anti-politics. To this end, it is urgent to break out of the liberal trap that has caused in the contemporary world a cleavage of democratic institutionality versus authoritarian drift, with the radical right confronting the systemic pillars and the progressive forces defending the status quo and operating as a containing force, but never as a transformative one.  

Regarding the second part of the impasse, we must continue working on redefining the meaning of sovereignty. The corporate capture of the state, and a lack of guarantees and rights, not only block a just transition but also urge us to think of sovereignty in a new, more decentralised, communal, and territorial sense. In the 1990s, rural movements worldwide forged the concept of ‘food sovereignty’, to show the limits of the hegemonic notion of ‘food security’ focused only on access to food. Today, we need to strengthen a global movement for energy sovereignty, which lays bare the corporate logic on energy. To this end, we should bet on local politics as the most promising arena in which to advance the tenets of an ecosocial state, emphasising universal protection mechanisms and prevention instead of compensation. Ideally, this would form a transitory political organisation, which could be dissolved in the medium and long term into political communities of another type – hopefully, more biocentric ones. 

In order to achieve this, we must influence the short-term concrete transition policies related to energy with a post-extractivist perspective, by strengthening local autonomy and more decentralised energy systems. At the same time, as Sabrina Fernandes has argued in a previous Alameda dossier, we also need an internationalist conception of sovereignty to promote and sustain the relations of solidarity that can attend to the structural causes of polycrisis, rather than simply its localised effects. 

The challenge lies in combining immediate policies of democratisation of the energy system, focusing on participation and governance, while maintaining the horizon of radical systemic change in relation to ownership, production, and distribution of energy resources. I propose thinking in terms of ecosocial transitions that work in parallel with complementary dimensions of energy democracy in its more radical sense:

• As a mechanism that can make possible, in the short term, the institutionalisation of practices of popular participation in decision-making on the energy sector and universal transition policies related to the provision of energy, the fight against energy poverty, environmental racism, and the increase in the cost of living. Binding popular consultations and other measures to ensure fossil fuels remain in the ground, such as the movement leading to the referendum in Ecuador, in August 2023, against oil exploitation in Yasuní, should be replicated worldwide. 

• As a process that, in the medium term, can achieve the steady democratisation of energy. It is necessary to consider advances and setbacks, and the correlation of forces and mapping of alliances and opponents at different levels. This requires fighting against trends in the privatisation of public services, and strategic planning in a multi-scale, and multi-temporal process of opposition, to dismantle power relations while redefining social relations around energy. 

• As a horizon, to move towards as we advocate systemic change in the long term, which can serve as an (eco)utopian guide for transforming the energy system as a whole. One set of ‘horizon demands’ has been articulated by Tatiana Roa and Pablo Bertinat: the decommodification of the energy system, which breaks with neoliberalism and the logic of privatisation, allowing the recovery of crucial energy sectors; participatory democracy, which includes popular and workers’ participation in decision-making and more democratic control of the energy sector; energy de-concentration (currently in the hands of large corporations), in tandem with political decentralisation and distributed generation that strengthens local control, albeit in interconnected national and regional grids, prioritising the commons and the public as a way out of the public-private dichotomy. 

The core principles of energy democracy in an ecosocial transition 

In contrast to the Decarbonisation Consensus, energy should be conceived of as a right, and energy democracy should act as a mechanism, a process, and a horizon for sustaining life on our planet. Under the umbrella of the ecosocial transition, energy democracy requires a combination of socio-political arrangements and the protection of ecosystems, peoples, and nature. 

Some overlapping principles are central to this process. We could divide them into three types: 

1. Principles of political empowerment: self-government, self-management, autonomy, interculturality, reciprocity, and solidarity.

2. Principles of energy justice: the recognition and cancellation of ecological debt, redistribution, reparations, energy sovereignty, territorial and human rights and the rights of nature, the centrality of energy justice (in the intersection of racial, ethnic, gender, and socio-environmental justice). 

3. Principles of sustainability of life: interdependence, eco-dependence, multi-species ethics, care, communalisation. 

These principles are essential to expanding both sovereignty and democracy. They can also foster changes in culture and generate new political imaginaries. At the same time, these principles cannot be understood simply as a normative orientation and a horizon of desire. They are only nourished by concrete and pluriversal practices and transformative initiatives, which are in fact already present in diverse ecosocial alternatives in both the Global North and the Global South. 

Examples of some of the thousands of local initiatives and experiences of energy communities worldwide include: community wind cooperatives run by neighbours, such as in Ulverston, England; public initiatives that offer alternative energy at no cost to low-income families, like the Solar For All programme in the United States; renewable-energy projects overseen by specific organisations, such as the one coordinated by women’s organisations in Sirakorola in Mali, which has enabled thousands of rural villagers to gain access to energy through solar panels; or the communities in various parts of Colombia that build alternative energies using existing local knowledge (involving biodigesters, efficient wood cookers or solar dehydrators, among other technologies). 

These examples show, in different latitudes, the possibility of relating to energy collectively and respectfully of nature. However, while local energy alternatives are critical, three caveats are necessary: 

i. We must maintain sight of a global outlook towards restructuring the world energy system, paying attention, for example, to unfair trade agreements and global supply chains. 

ii. We cannot restrict our conception of energy alternatives to matters of access and consumption, however important those areas  may be. Instead, we should increase their transformative potential by connecting them to broader processes of ecosocial transition, such as food (agroecology and food sovereignty), production (de-localisation strategies and postcapitalist practices of social and solidarity economy), infrastructure (cooperative housing), and mobilities (ways of inhabiting, socialising and moving in the territories). Moreover, this articulation makes it possible to connect different struggles and strengthen transformational capacity at the socio-ecological convergences. 

iii. We cannot isolate energy alternatives to the local level, because our responses must be localised but not localistic. On the one hand, we must pay attention to the municipal, national, and regional scales. On the other, we need an internationalist approach to energy democracy that overcomes the usual dichotomy of localism-statism present in political debates. Platforms such as Trade Unions for Energy Democracy (2015) or meetings and declarations like Our Future is Public (2023) and the South-South Manifesto for an Ecosocial Energy Transition (2023), are the result of global articulation processes, involving advocates of energy democracy (such as environmentalists, ecofeminists, climate justice movements, peasant and indigenous leaders, trade unions, antiracist movements, among others) from different places of the world and with complementary perspectives. Together with other transnational spaces of convergence, they are the seed of a new type of eco-territorial internationalism, committed to just transitions in a transformative and global key. 

Author’s note: a special thanks to Pablo Bertinat for his comments on an earlier draft.

___

Este artigo faz parte do dossiê de Transição Energética a ser lançado em março de 2025.