ABSTRACT
Governments, namely in the Global North, are fostering the deployment of large-scale low-carbon and associated energy infrastructures to mitigate climate change. However, deployment often raises opposition from local communities. Social sciences’ research aiming to understand opposition has been steadily increasing over recent decades but has largely overlooked how opposition to renewable energy infrastructures often stems from, reveals, and may also promote colonialist practices. This chapter will discuss the importance of uncovering and examining renewable energy colonialism in its psychosocial, cultural, institutional, geographical, and political dimensions for creating energy democracies. To this end, it will first define renewable energy colonialism in its relation with neo- and carbon colonialism, environmental and energy justice, and other related concepts and approaches. Second, based on several examples, it will reflect upon state-of-the-art research that reveals how renewable energy colonialism occurs at different levels or scales: transnationally, internationally, and intranationally. In so doing, the chapter will also illustrate how renewable energy colonialism is enacted through different voices, namely, through governmental and corporate practices, the media, and everyday discourses. Finally, reflections on the critical and analytical potential of the concept of renewable energy colonialism and on how to take it further will be presented.
