Self-instituting processes versus (green) extractivism. Citizenship and activism through Renewable Energy Communities

Abstract (English)

My ethnography explores whether and in what terms precisely political subjectivities can (or cannot) arise in a micro-context, and whether (energy) citizenship experiments can be likened to self-instituting processes with a basis other than the logic of profit and speculation.
I examine local phenomena in Sulcis, South Sardinia, that seem to be connected with the cultural consequences of decades-long dispossessions tied to the loss of industrial citizenship and linked to the exclusion of local communities from decision-making processes and planning and control mechanisms over production processes. I hypothesize that this loss influenced the possibility of thinking politically and acting collectively, affecting – among others – the possibilities of mobilization from below.
It is unclear whether the ecological transition really represents a horizon of possible change for communities, or whether it is instead experienced as an imposition of development models from outside that could be interpreted as a failure from the local communities’ point of view.
Since 2022 we observe the emergence of a Sardinian (municipal-scale) protest movement against the installation of offshore wind farms decided on by the Italian government (within the RePower Europe framework), a mega-project pivotal to the regional and national energy transition strategy.
The national interest, first represented by strategic heavy industries, and now by sustainable energy, prevails over the right of local communities to decide on what happens in their own territory. Local communities complain that their land was first exploited by others, sacrificed and then abandoned, highlighting the lack of compensatory mechanisms and/or real involvement in the development that is the carried out under EU and national policies.
However, some local actors, and namely administrators, believe that the population can and should be involved in projects that aim to convert to renewables, guaranteeing benefits for the community itself as a priority through a Renewable Energy Community – REC, thus moving away from the extractive paradigm of Sardinia as a national energy extraction platform. This may suggest that it is the top-down logic inherent in the energy policies that individualizes subjects and obstructs their capacity to project themselves in a community through (energy) citizenship, and not the energetic transition itself.