“Take your responsibility”: the politics of green sacrifice for just low-carbon transitions in rural Portugal

Abstract

The EU has recently taken important climate action, notably through the launching of the European Green Deal. However, EU action has been criticized for its potential to generate a heavy increase in mining of ‘critical minerals’ necessary for renewables technologies, and so create green sacrifice zones both overseas and within Europe. We explore the politics of green sacrifice making through an analysis of green governance practices and opposition to them in a case of a lithium mining conflict in rural northern Portugal. We find that institutional rearrangements attempt to reconfigure lithium mining as a force for sustainability in ways that enable capital accumulation. Such reconfigurations clash with concerns about maintaining a meaningful life in localities where mining would take place, as well as alternative definitions of the logic of the circular economy and of what the proper scales of decision-making for marginalized territories should be. Government and corporate action attempt to resolve these clashes by promoting a discourse of ‘responsibility’, which assigns public institutions the role of convincing communities to accept ‘green’ mining; to corporations the role of exercising corporate social responsibility; and to affected populations the role of subjects whose political action should conform to their consumption habits and help deliver a distinctive ‘European way’ of being responsible in a warming world. We conclude that green sacrifice is essential for maintaining economic growth and a liberal order of governance, delivered through a biopolitics of inclusion that exists side-by-side with attempts at self-constitution. We highlight a contradiction between what such praxis tries to achieve and ways in which some critical constituencies seek to address democracy challenges of just transitions.