Dispossessed By the Green: Land Enclosure, Precarious Labor, and the Politics of Recognition In the Global South Energy Transition

The clean energy transition is being built at speed — and on someone else's land. Across the Global South, wind farms and mega-solar parks proliferate on terrain administratively classified as "wasteland" or "empty," a colonial cartographic inheritance that erases pastoral routes, sacred geographies, and the subsistence ecologies of communities who belong to these landscapes without formal title. The decarbonization imperative is real, but its enactment is predominantly top-down: the participatory principles of just transition rarely survive contact with land acquisition, bureaucratic speed, and the silencing of dissent.

This roundtable interrogates two contradictions: the enclosure of grazing lands, forest margins that dispossess pastoralists, Indigenous communities, and the landless, who hold no title but deep relational claims to place; and the precarization of construction labor, made disposable once the build phase ends.

Drawing on Spivak's caution that emancipatory projects risk speaking for the subaltern while foreclosing the grounds of their refusal, the session insists on recognition: whose labor counts as constitutive, whose ecological knowledge as legitimate, whose belonging as a right to be consulted rather than compensated? Compensation cannot answer who is permitted to speak — and to refuse.

We welcome ethnographic, comparative, and critical contributions — decolonial, feminist, postcolonial, from Asia, Africa, and Latin America, addressing dispossession in renewable corridors, the gendered and caste-differentiated dimensions of green displacement, and community refusal. It proposes a decolonial sociology of energy that treats the dispossessed not as remainders awaiting integration, but as a constitutive standpoint: a just transition rethought from the margins it produces.