# Energy transitions in a fractured world: Unpacking the political economy of renewable energy development in the Global South

Yanis Rihi

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# Energy transitions in a fractured world: Unpacking the political economy of renewable energy development in the Global South<fnref n="1" />

Yanis Rihi, yanis.rihi@universite-paris-saclay.fr<fnref n="2" />

Paris Saclay University, France

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0005-9507-7602

## Abstract

As climate action intensifies, renewable energy deployment is increasingly portrayed as the primary technical response to decarbonisation challenges. This commentary argues that, in the Global South, such deployment often reproduces historical patterns of subordination, financial dependence and socio-ecological marginalisation. While extensive research has examined upstream extractive dynamics in critical mineral supply chains, far less attention has been paid to the downstream processes of infrastructure development – who decides, who benefits, and who bears the costs. This blind spot is particularly problematic in contexts marked by energy precarity, asymmetrical governance, and international partnerships founded on uneven power structures. By analysing the materiality of infrastructures associated with large-scale renewable energy projects and the conflicts they can generate, this contribution highlights how the energy transition reshapes power relations, land tenure, and governance regimes under the guise of climate cooperation. The rapid rise of the green hydrogen sector exemplifies these nascent dynamics, being promoted as a win-win solution yet frequently entrenching extractive logics and spatial injustices. In response, this contribution proposes broadening the analytical scope of energy transition studies by drawing on situated perspectives and lived realities in the Global South, through an epistemic community capable of connecting essential elements of political economy that are currently treated in a disjointed manner. In that respect, it identifies several interdisciplinary research avenues to analyse the socio-environmental effects of renewables, document conflicts, and make visible emerging implementation alternatives, driven from the margins and attentive to questions of equity, democracy, and justice, thereby challenging what recent literature has termed “green colonialism”.

**Keywords:** Energy transitions, Renewable energy deployment, Global South, Just transition, North-South relations, Energy injustice

## Key messages

* Renewable energy deployment can reproduce exploitative global relations under the rhetoric of international partnership.

* Energy transitions reconfigure land use, power structures, and relations, as well as forms of governance, across the Global South.

* Mainstream approaches obscure the political, social, and territorial realities of renewable energy infrastructure.

* Practical energy justice demands situated, critical, and epistemically decentralised perspectives.

## INTRODUCTION

The tangible effects of global warming are becoming increasingly evident each year, disproportionately impacting populations and territories. Floods, prolonged droughts, crop failures, water scarcity, and extreme weather events are now more frequent across the Global South, which is understood here as low- and middle-income countries in Africa, Latin America, and South-East Asia, many of which share a colonial past (Horner & Carmpody, 2019). Although these countries have historically contributed only marginally to global greenhouse gas emissions, they now stand at the frontline of climate change (IPCC, 2023). In response to the mounting ecological

<footnote n="1">¹ This is a pre-peer review and editing article submitted to *Global Political Economy*.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">² Yanis Rihi is a Political Economy of Development and Environment PhD student at Paris Saclay University. His research focuses on how asymmetrical North-South relations, through the prisms of international financial, institutional, political, and epistemic architecture, shape just transitions to decarbonised economies, with a particular emphasis on the Global South.</footnote>
crisis, climate policies have multiplied, with international forums and national strategies placing
growing emphasis on emissions mitigation. Energy transition strategies, formalised through
Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), have become central to international cooperation
frameworks and investment priorities (UNDP, 2022).

However, the growing emphasis on decarbonization is profoundly reshaping what constitutes legitimate development, thereby redefining the balance of power between the Global North and South, particularly by conditioning access to finance, technology, and international partnerships. As a result, the consolidation and injunctions of a climate agenda, essentially designed and led by the Global North, generate a series of tensions and dilemmas that this contribution seeks to unpack through a critical and reflective political economy lens. While the energy transition is promoted as an inevitable pathway to address the climate crisis, its implementation in the Global South raises fundamental questions about the promise of justice it professes to uphold. Beyond their technical dimensions, renewable energy – such as solar farms, wind parks, dams, or green hydrogen hubs – actively remake and, at times, reinforce global hierarchies of power, often through land appropriation, population displacement, and profound transformations of local environments, as we will see.

This commentary argues that, in the Global South, the large-scale deployment of renewable energy should not be assumed to automatically deliver a just transition as long as the social, political, financial and epistemic asymmetries shaping its design and implementation remain unaddressed. It therefore calls for renewed attention to the political economy conditions of its development, examining the territorial, socio-environmental, and epistemic dynamics it generates, and outlines a framework conducive to deeper interdisciplinary collaboration. This contribution aligns with a critical reading of energy transitions, attentive to the contemporary forms of asymmetry, dispossession and injustice they reproduce in the Global South – often discussed in recent literature through concepts such as “green sacrifice zones”, “green colonialism”, and “just transitions”. In doing so, it opens up several avenues for perhaps reclaiming the terrain of the political in energy transitions by examining how relations of dependence, resistance, and alternative practices shape plural and contested energy futures.

This contribution unfolds in four parts. The first revisits the material foundations of energy transitions, before turning to the lesser-studied dimension of renewable energy's development and its role in reproducing inequalities and uneven power relations. The third section examines how certain large-scale projects simultaneously serve as a new vector of development inequalities between the Global North and South, as well as a driver of socio-environmental injustices at the local level. Finally, the conclusion proposes the construction of a coherent interdisciplinary research agenda that reconnects issues of justice and political economy to reframe tendencies through situated and critical perspectives.

On the materiality of transitions

There is a rich literature documenting the socio-environmental ramifications of the energy transition, particularly the extractive dynamics surrounding strategic resources such as lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper, and balsa wood – critical materials essential to the production of so-called green technologies. These industries have been shown to have a cascading impact, including land dispossession, intensified water pressure, and the forced displacement of local communities (Oxfam, 2025). Through these processes, many countries in the Global South are relegated to geo-economic peripheries, serving primarily as reservoirs of raw materials that sustain transitions elsewhere. Global decarbonisation thus rests on contemporary forms of subordination and the externalisation of socio-environmental risks, factors that are paradoxically often overlooked in mainstream discussions of “green growth”.

As a matter of fact, this growing body of research has played a key role in shaping a critical grammar of transition in recent years, articulated through concepts such as “green grabbing”
(Fairhead et al., 2012), “green extractivism” (Yang & He, 2021; Dorn, 2022; Dunlap et al., 2024), and “green (neo)colonialism” (Hamouchene, 2023). In this regard, we note the importance of concepts that enable us to identify and name certain phenomena, particularly in highlighting the contemporary forms of domination and exploitation underpinning post-carbon economies, revealing their continuity with historical regimes of predation. Indeed, this empirical and theoretical work demonstrates how the energy transition often reproduces and, in some cases, deepens the historical power relations embedded in the global political economy.

In this instance, low-carbon technology value chains remain deeply hierarchical: while the Global North concentrates technological, financial, and decision-making power, the Global South continues to bear the social, territorial, and environmental costs. These costs are frequently imposed on areas historically inhabited by rural or Indigenous communities, reproducing long-standing patterns of expropriation and dispossession (Jerez et al., 2021). They thus serve as a reminder that, behind the consensual rhetoric of decarbonisation, lie concrete material conflicts, in which the promise of a low-carbon future in some regions is experienced elsewhere through profound territorial and social disruptions (Valderrama & Cardoso, 2025).

**On the other side of transitions: renewables, infrastructure and power relations**

While extensive scholarship has examined the unequal distribution of the impacts of transition efforts, much less attention has been paid to another, equally constitutive dimension of the global decarbonization agenda: the large-scale deployment of renewable energy in the Global South. To date, research in the social sciences and humanities remains limited in its analysis of how these infrastructures contribute to the reproduction of (neo)colonial logics. This gap is all the more striking given that, often framed as inherently sustainable and virtuous, these projects produce deeply uneven and frequently conflictual, territorial, institutional, and social dynamics (Solomon et al., 2026), particularly in the Global South, where the colonial legacy of land ownership continues to exert a lasting influence on conflicts of various kinds.

In a recent study, Akrofi et al. (2024) identified and characterised a series of social and environmental injustices associated with renewable energy development across eleven African countries. These injustices, which manifest in various forms, are embedded in complex local contexts that involve social, political, economic, and institutional factors. The authors highlight the structural disconnect experienced by local communities between the legitimising discourse associated with these projects (modernisation, inclusion and sustainability) and the actual (non)observed socio-economic and energy benefits.

They also demonstrate that the uneven geographic distribution of projects, depending on whether they are located in rural or peri-urban areas, shapes differentiated impacts on populations, particularly concerning energy allocation, local job creation, and skills transfer. In terms of the environment, the study highlights tensions relating to access to land and water resources, which are often reallocated for productive use. In several cases, solar power plants have been built on former public land that was historically used for agriculture, grazing, or wood collection, thereby transforming communal land into private spaces for profit.

These findings resonate with broader concerns raised by recent work on so-called green hydrogen, a sector often portrayed as emblematic of post-carbon innovation yet marked by similar contradictions, as Tunn et al.'s (2024) study of the rush for green hydrogen in 28 countries from the Global South with high export potential shows. The authors conduct a comparative assessment of the socio-environmental risks associated with the growth of this emerging industry. They demonstrate that the development of green hydrogen could perpetuate and exacerbate historical imbalances to the disadvantage of the regions producing it. The resulting injustices manifest as the exclusion of local communities and civil society, the increased privatisation of shared spaces and commons, and conflicts between multiple stakeholders over the control of resources. These dynamics are further exacerbated by regional particularities in the Global South, such as chronic
water stress, the influence of political and economic elites, and their entanglement with
transnational capital, as well as postcolonial legacies of land ownership that currently limit the law's
capacity to serve as a tool for mediation or redistributive justice.

Furthermore, behind the declared climate ambitions – compliance with the Paris Agreement, limiting global warming to 1.5°C or 2°C, and achieving a just global transition – lies a set of policies designed to accelerate the rollout of renewable energy sources that fundamentally rely on market-based mechanisms, with little consideration for the multiple social and political conditions required to make these projects effective (Lang et al., 2024). Perhaps less visible than the extractive logics operating upstream in value chains, the dynamics constitutive of renewable energy development are nonetheless decisive because they profoundly reshape power relations, land rights, livelihoods, forms of governance and local development trajectories.

As such, the political economy of energy transition cannot be confined to the extraction of critical materials; it must also engage with the concrete processes through which renewable energy production projects become territorialised, hitherto too frequently presented as mere techno-economic undertakings or straightforward responses to climate imperatives (Apfel et al., 2021). Moreover, it is worth remembering that nearly 60% of Indigenous lands in the Global South – approximately 22.7 million km², equivalent to the combined territories of Brazil, the United States, and India – are currently threatened by industrial development linked to the energy transition, including large-scale renewable projects (Oxfam, 2025). This trend suggests the emergence of new extractive frontiers centred on renewable energy.

It is therefore justified to broaden our critical lens on post-carbon trajectories, focusing not
only on what is extracted but also on what is built – infrastructure, networks, systems, and forms
of access – and to ask key political economy questions: where, how, and for whose benefit are
these projects being implemented? This situation invites a return to the foundations of critical
political economy by asking, following Newell and Mulvaney (2013), a series of reterritorialized
questions about a just transition: what forms of power – state, corporate, and financial – are
exercised through renewable energy? What mechanisms of consent or coercion accompany them?
What alternatives are being crafted at the margins, through social resistance movements or through
the epistemologies of the Global South? Re-embedding current trends and dynamics into critical
debates on North-South relations, climate governance, and imaginaries of progress and
development can thus serve not only as an analytical renewal but also as an invitation to politicise
future technological and energy choices.

On the expansion of renewables in the Global South

The strong average annual growth in solar and wind capacity installations across several Global South countries between 2013 and 2023 – such as Jordan (+160% and +83.7%), Vietnam (+127.9%), Brazil (+122.8% and +29.5%), and Chile (+93.1% and +31.4%) – highlights the dynamism of these regions in the global energy transition (Energy Institute, 2024). Yet, this rapid expansion warrants a closer examination of the conditions and terms under which it unfolds. The pace of deployment reflects a tension inherent to modernity itself: technological progress advancing faster than the social, institutional, and environmental transformations it necessitates.

Recent developments in Africa further illustrate these general trends. In South Africa, several large solar farms have been commissioned since 2014, and installed capacity has grown significantly since 2020. Capacity additions totalled 2,964.7 megawatt (MW) in 2023 alone, driven mainly by commercial and industrial projects rather than residential initiatives (Solomon et al., 2026). Meanwhile, Morocco has positioned itself as a pioneer in the MENA renewable energy sector, accounting for 75% of the increase in renewable electricity generation in North Africa (Solomon et al., 2026). Its target of achieving a 52% renewable share in its electricity mix by 2030 appears within reach: by the end of 2023, Morocco had reached a total renewable capacity of 4,187
MW, including 1,858 MW from wind, 1,395 MW from hydropower, and 934 MW from solar (Energy Institute, 2024).

These few stylised facts in the Global South thus epitomise the contemporary pursuit of progress – necessary, yet unevenly governed and unequally controlled. The current accelerated pace of change is also reflected in the global policy arena. At the 28th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP28), nearly 200 countries pledged to triple global renewable energy capacity by 2030. By 2050, renewables could account for up to two-thirds of the worldwide energy mix (IRENA, 2024). But behind these numerical targets lie complex questions about the range of local conditions that facilitate implementation. The Global South holds roughly 70% of the world's renewable energy potential. Africa alone accounts for around 40% of the global solar potential (Oxfam, 2025). By 2030, renewable energy generation in the Global South is expected to quadruple, surpassing 2,000 terrawatt (TWh) of solar and wind power annually (RMI, 2024).

It is essential to note that achieving these projections would require the use of technologies with significant environmental impacts – particularly photovoltaic and wind farms, which require vast areas of land and substantial water use for photovoltaic panels and often compete directly with agricultural production for biofuel feedstocks (Akrofi et al., 2024). Although conceived as “win-win” partnerships through the lens of international cooperation, many projects are, in fact, part of a global market logic that prioritises financial returns at the expense of social inclusion (Lang et al., 2024). Rooted in developmentalist thinking, these projects reproduce the conditions inherited from previous aid and investment regimes without challenging the dominant structures of production and consumption. Designed with capital accumulation and optimised energy flow in mind, they tend to reinforce existing power relations (Banerjee, 2024; Dagnachew et al., 2025).

At the same time, per capita energy consumption in industrialised countries continues to rise (Akizu et al., 2017), exacerbating global energy inequalities. Within this context, many territories, primarily in the Global South, serve as ecological service zones due to their resource potential or capacity to host infrastructure, thus becoming instrumentalised for their environmental functions. As recent scholarship has shown, this conception reflects a material and political hierarchy often described as “green colonialism” (Hamouchene, 2023; Lang et al., 2024), transforming countries in the Global South into new green sacrifice zones upon which the architecture of energy transitions is built. From South Africa to Morocco, and from Chile to Indonesia, the current evolution of energy transition partnerships and green hydrogen initiatives – though still in their early stages – already reveals a pattern of transition conceived primarily as an investment and energy-security opportunity for the Global North, rather than as a vehicle for the structural transformation of local energy systems (Banerjee, 2024). Set against a backdrop of intertwined tensions of domestic politics and international relationships (Dagnachew et al., 2025), the development of renewables across the Global South risks consolidating a new international energy order defined by dependency, outward orientation, and subordination.

It is worth pausing to consider the loaded concept of “green colonialism” employed early. The term *colonialism* is now a recurring analytical category used to describe relationships of domination and control associated with the injustices caused by climate change and the policies designed to address them (Bhambra & Newell, 2022). Furthermore, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recently included the term into its *Sixth Assessment Report on Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability* (IPCC, 2022), signalling an institutional recognition of the entanglement between colonialism and climate change. The concept is thus analytically pertinent because it invites us to move beyond viewing colonialism as a mere historical factor in the climate crisis and consider it instead as an intrinsic and enduring element whose power dynamics persist and are being reactivated through contemporary climate governance mechanisms (Bhambra & Newell, 2022).

Although a growing body of literature has sought to explore the climate-colonialism nexus (e.g., Dorn, 2022; Dunlap et al., 2024), often amplified through Indigenous voices (e.g., Whyte, 2017; Gilio-Whitaker, 2019), the issue of large-scale renewable energy projects and their
accompanying power relations remains comparatively underexplored. Yet, the neoliberal market
ideology at work in this area is not insignificant. It structures the flow of capital, the architecture
of public-private partnerships, and the conditions imposed by international financial institutions
(Lang et al., 2024), reflecting a historical continuum of colonial practices in which the rhetoric of
“international partnership” conceals enduring relations of subjugation. Accordingly, the concepts
of “green colonialism” or “climate colonialism” (see, e.g., Mahony & Endfield, 2018; Bhambra &
Newell, 2022; and Oxfam, 2025) are fully warranted. Building on these contributions, one might
further develop the concept of neoliberal green colonialism to capture the constitutive dynamics
of renewable energy expansion within the context of global capitalism. The injustices generated by
decarbonisation in the Global South can thus be understood as part of a long continuum of
dependency, where colonialism endures both as a legacy and as a living force within the political
economy of climate governance.

From here, two broader observations can be drawn from the emerging, fragmented
literature. First, energy transition trajectories are still rarely analysed through the lens of North-
South interdependencies that shape them. Most studies continue to focus on the national
experiences of developed countries, without situating these within broader global dynamics of
resource redistribution, risk, and climate responsibility (Akizu et al., 2017). Second, in the Global
South, empirical research remains dominated by technocentric and econometric approaches,
centred on production potential, investment flows, and efficiency metrics, often at the expense of
the socio-political, historical, and territorial dimensions (Apfel et al., 2021). In a sense, these
approaches naturalise transition as a universal, neutral, and linear process, overlooking its inherently
conflictual nature. Reframing these studies within a systemic understanding of global
interdependencies could, by contrast, enable a genuine process of collective learning, identifying
both the obstacles and the levers to building democratic, just and context-specific energy
trajectories (see Newell and Mulvaney, 2013).

This gap becomes particularly visible in the emerging green hydrogen sector. Indeed,
presented as a cornerstone of future low-carbon economies, its production demands vast quantities
of land, water and electricity – resources often concentrated in regions with low industrial density
but high solar or wind potential (Tunn et al., 2024). In several African and Latin American
countries, international consortiums, backed by public-private partnerships, are establishing export
hubs to supply European and Asian markets, with limited local participation and an inequitable
distribution of benefits. The partnership between the state of Ceará in Brazil and German industrial
actors exemplifies this pattern: a development model that remains externally driven and resource-
oriented (Dietz, 2024). Namibia offers a similar case. Hailed as the “African champion of green
hydrogen”, the country is experiencing a rapid expansion of mega-infrastructure projects in its arid
coastal regions. At the same time, land tenure issues, community rights, and environmental impacts
remain marginalised, as do the social justice measures meant to accompany such projects (Tunn et
al., 2025).

Beyond these individual cases, several scholars have highlighted how the green hydrogen
sector is being actively promoted within international arenas. For instance, Cezne (2025) describes
a genuine speculative rush unfolding against a backdrop of enduring geographical asymmetries,
green extractivism, and socio-environmental injustice. As such, he argues, the future of this
resource is not only projected, but also “spectacularised” in policy and private business forums –
through scenarios, agendas and promises. This enthusiasm, fuelled by speculative projections such
as those showcased at the *2025 World Hydrogen Summit*, sustains an economy of promise centred on
anticipation that obscures the concrete socio-ecological conditions of its realisation, emphasising
an urgent need to conduct rigorous strategic environmental assessments that incorporate not only
climate impacts, but also the dimensions of public participation, respect for cultural sites,
protection of areas rich in biodiversity, and sustainable water use. In this context, policymakers
may have a role in assessing the systemic risks associated with these investments, including land
dispossession, water scarcity, technological dependency, and limited socioeconomic benefits for
host territories and local communities. Without such assessments, these projects risk deepening inequalities in energy access and perpetuating extractive models that are reconfigured through the framing of collective decarbonization efforts (Tunn et al., 2024; Dagnachew et al., 2025).

Meanwhile, in sub-Saharan Africa, nearly four out of five people still lack access to reliable electricity, and 24 out of 54 countries have an electrification rate of less than 50% (Dagnachew et al., 2025). This fundamental disconnect between export-oriented strategies and unmet domestic energy needs underscores a core issue of energy justice, thereby raising critical questions about the relevance of international partnerships that prioritise external objectives set by the Global North over local social imperatives (Lang et al., 2024). The progressive development of these global renewable energy production networks is thus reshaping the geopolitics of energy, already historically marked by profound asymmetries.

Consequently, the central challenge lies not only in producing renewable energy, but in defining the political, social, and epistemic conditions under which it is produced and circulated – to avoid an ambivalent process of fossilising renewables, that is, their incorporation into new circuits of dependency (Vezzoni, 2024). It is within this context that the concept of a “just transition” becomes particularly relevant, providing an analytical entry point for interrogating how notions of justice are framed, negotiated, and operationalised across contemporary energy transformations.

## Discussion et conclusions: Towards a renewed research agenda

All of the above underscore the need to refresh our collective understanding of energy transitions. This implies moving beyond a narrow focus on extraction or technology to examine the complex, multi-scalar political economy of deployment itself – its sites, actors, and power relations. It is no longer sufficient to document the externalities of a transition model built on Euro-North American reference points; we must also interrogate its structural foundations – the technical and political imaginaries that sustain it, the institutions that organise it, and the international hierarchies it perpetuates.

In other words, a genuinely critical analysis of energy transitions requires deconstructing dominant analytical frameworks – still shaped mainly by logics of profitability and economic performance – to open the way for approaches that are locally grounded, historically situated, and epistemically decentralised. Yet, such deconstruction cannot occur without situating energy transitions within the global and interdependent structures that make them possible. What unfolds in the Global South is not a mere external consequence or peripheral contingency; it is constitutive of the material, financial, epistemic, and geopolitical architecture of the transitions envisioned in the Global North that remain largely obscured by hegemonic analytical frameworks and discourses (Rihi, 2025a). They, however, go a long way in explaining the current impasse: as long as energy transitions are conceived without a systemic re-examination of North-South relations – that is, without questioning the logic of dependency, cost externalisation, and the hierarchization of sovereignties – the promises of climate justice will remain largely formal, depoliticised, and even instrumentalised.

This opacity is particularly evident in the financial sphere, whose mechanisms play a central role in operationalising decarbonization agendas. Designed and controlled by actors of the Global North, climate finance – understood as the ensemble of public and private investment flows directed towards mitigation and adaptation (Zylinski, 2024) – now relies predominantly on debt-based instruments. Recent studies have shown that this dynamic perpetuates historical inequalities between the Global North and South to such an extent that some authors describe it as a powerful tool of domination (see, e.g., Valderrama & Cardoso, 2025; Ghosh et al., 2025). Furthermore, Nunez et al. (2023) show that low-income countries are encouraged to contract new loans to finance mitigation projects, often at the expense of investments in adaptation or affordable energy access, which are crucial for reducing both structural injustice and climate vulnerability. This
financial imbalance not only delays necessary transformations, but also drives up energy prices, widens access inequalities and deepens dependence on external donors.

In this context, the concept of just transitions offers a valuable analytical lens for rethinking global energy trajectories. Now widely invoked in international forums, it has gained significant traction – but its meanings are multiple, often contested, and require careful unpacking. In its dominant formulation, circulated within UN agencies, donor coalitions, and multilateral institutions, the concept of a just transition is derived mainly from the experience of industrialised countries. It primarily refers to social cushioning strategies that accompany decarbonisation, such as factory closures, job losses, or sectoral restructuring. This narrow interpretation, centred on the social management of industrial transitions in the Global North, nevertheless tends to obscure the structural asymmetries and power relations underpinning global energy transformations (Rihi, 2025a).

This techno-economic environment, which determines the conception of the transition, tends to obscure its conflictual and political dimensions. It aspires to inclusivity, yet without reconfiguring underlying power relations (Newell & Mulvaney, 2013). It invokes justice yet rarely interrogates the structures and mechanisms of domination or the interplay of actors that sustain them. In this sense, the idea of a just transition must be understood not only as a technical or distributive process, but also – and perhaps more importantly – as an ethical horizon that calls for the reconfiguration of relationships among societies, economies, and ecologies. Otherwise, it risks being reduced to a performative mantra, emptied of much of its transformative potential and reintegrated into the dominant logic of green growth and competitiveness.

However, it is through its specific reappropriations, driven by collectives, social movements, trade unions and scholars from the Global South, that the concept of a just transition appears to recover much of its transformative potential. In these contexts, it is mobilised as a political instrument of protest and reconfiguration, grounded in particular historical trajectories and territorially embedded struggles (Rihi, 2025b). Gradually, the concept has expanded beyond the energy sector alone to encompass a range of sectoral and geographical contexts, including extractive industries, agriculture, food systems and Indigenous peoples' rights, hence the now everyday use of the term in the plural. These alternative appropriations, although still fragmented and precarious, are animated by powerful visions of change and redefine transition in its strongest etymological sense: as a shift from one regime to another – not only in energy terms, but also in economic, social, ecological, and political ones. From this perspective, just transitions represent systemic transformations that seek to break with the historical continuities of extractive development, knowledge marginalisation, and dependency logics (Rihi, 2025b).

This is where a crucial political challenge arises: ensuring that just transitions become spaces for convergence, where social temporalities, ecological imperatives and historical claims for justice can enter into dialogue. In other words, this means conceiving transition as a plurality of political pathways, rooted in specific contexts, negotiated through power relations, and capable of loosening the grip of the growth, sustainability and equity triad. This perspective calls for a reorientation of current research agendas, which remain dominated by technical, econometric, or optimisation-oriented approaches. Indeed, such frameworks struggle to grasp the conflicts fully, social responses, resistance movements, and the processes of social recomposition unfolding in territories directly affected by the operationalisation of energy transitions.

It therefore seems interesting to foster dialogues grounded in critical humanities and social sciences – fields capable of situating current transformation within both global power relations and the local configurations through which they take shape. A few ideas can be put forward here – not as an exhaustive roadmap, but as a partial and situated contribution to an ongoing collective reflection and effort; an invitation to outline an interdisciplinary research agenda.

<caption>**Table 1.** Interdisciplinary research avenues for studying renewable energy transitions in the Global South.</caption>
<table><thead><tr><td>Analytical entry</td><td>Research direction</td></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Location and distribution of projects</td><td>Examine the spatial and social logics behind renewable energy siting. Who decides where projects are located? Who benefits and who bears the costs? How do infrastructures reshape land tenure, access rights, and territorial sovereignty?</td></tr><tr><td>Energy governance and institutions</td><td>Investigate decision-making, planning and participation mechanisms. What forms of authority (state, corporate, multilateral) prevail? What scope exists for democratic governance and community control?</td></tr><tr><td>Infrastructure and North-South interdependencies</td><td>Analyse technological, financial and geopolitical dependencies. How do global value chains and investment flows reproduce asymmetries? What forms of dependency or bargaining power emerge for Southern states?</td></tr><tr><td>Justice and law</td><td>Assess mechanisms for redress, benefit-sharing and procedural safeguards. How are principles of justice translated into contracts, legal frameworks, or transnational litigation? Where do gaps in accountability persist?</td></tr><tr><td>Gender, commons and social reproduction</td><td>Explore the gendered and social dimensions of transitions. How are access to land, water, and energy reconfigured? What are the effects on care work, livelihoods, and collective resource management?</td></tr><tr><td>Contestations, resistance and alternatives</td><td>Map forms of resistance, counter-expertise and local experimentation. How do communities mobilise? What epistemologies and practices of energy sovereignty emerge from below?</td></tr><tr><td>Circulation of knowledge and global norms</td><td>Study the movement of expertise, standards and imaginaries. How do narratives of green growth or just transition circulate? What counter-narratives and situated knowledges challenge them? How do epistemic injustices – silencing of local expertise, mitigation-first logics, marginalisation of adaptation – shape transitions in the Global South?</td></tr><tr><td>Finance and debt dynamics</td><td>Investigate the role of climate finance and debt. How do financial architectures shape the pace, scale and form of transitions? What alternatives to debt-based mechanisms are being proposed?</td></tr><tr><td>Temporalities of transition</td><td>Explore tensions between global timelines (e.g., carbon neutrality targets) and local socio-political rhythms. How are temporal conflicts negotiated, and with what implications for justice? How is the afterlife of renewable infrastructures addressed (decommissioning, recycling, environmental degradation)? What informal economies and labour regimes emerge around these processes?</td></tr></tbody></table>

Bringing these critical perspectives together would make it possible to move beyond the performative discourse and to engage more directly with the realities of renewables: how they are implemented, legitimised, contested and governed – and under what conditions they might genuinely contribute to just outcomes, rather than reproducing existing inequalities. Of course, a central challenge now would be to establish a collective space for reflection and research that can bring greater visibility to these issues. Reflecting on them requires bringing together diverse disciplines, fields, and generations of scholars. Establishing a cross-disciplinary epistemic community would help take stock of existing research, create spaces for exchange and training, identify shared issues, and lay the foundation for a common research agenda.

Such a community could also foster the circulation and confrontation of knowledge, capable of articulating multi-spatial and multi-scalar perspectives, fragmented literatures, and of bringing a collective voice from the Global South to academic and political arenas. In this sense, the political economy of transitions could consolidate itself as a structuring field for analysing the plurality of energy futures and the dynamics that underpin them. At a historical juncture in which today's energy choices are shaping the political, economic, and social regimes of tomorrow, renewed attention to the political dimensions of transition trajectories becomes crucial for understanding how dominant development narratives are constructed and sustained.

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