Questioning Green Capitalism: How Does Indigeneity Shape Contention Campaigns Against Renewable Energy Extractivism and Its Hegemonic Outcomes?

Over the last 40 years, large-scale projects of renewable energy have expanded across the globe, affecting lands, rivers and critical ecosystems and human groups. Either to increase net energy production, reduce the cost of electricity or as part of (financialized) strategies to address global warming, these megaprojects have increased the potential for mobilization from affected communities, and, therefore, they may bring about larger sociopolitical consequences. In several of these cases, indigenous communities have led these resistance and protest campaigns. In this paper, I examine how the condition of indigeneity of mobilized communities shapes the process and results of contention against large renewable energy extraction projects, and how it differentiates from those struggles pushed by non-indigenous communities. Indigenous communities' relationship with the territories, repertoires of resistance and contention, organizational forms and longstanding links (and conflict) with the nation-state, all forged in internal-colonial histories, draw distinctive pathways for these instances of contention and their outcomes in the hegemonic order, usually with deeper socio-ecological and structural implications. This reflection bases in a dialogue of studies of collective action outcomes, indigenous movements, internal-colonialism and extractivism. The analysis grounds in a comparison of 6 campaigns of organized opposition against hydropower megaprojects in three countries of Central America (El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras) and its consequences in the hegemonic conflict of each social formation between 1972 and 2019. Using materials from archives, interviews with participants and fieldwork, I contrast the features of 4 contention campaigns with indigenous communities (Mayan and Lenca) as protagonists, and 2 contention campaigns led by non-indigenous rural communities. Considering the contextual divergencies in terms of political conditions, development model, international juncture and the trajectories of each society, indigeneity stands as differentiating factor in mobilization dynamics and its consequences in the hegemonic order.