Description
This paper critically examines the hidden costs of the ‘Green Transition,’ by considering the renewed push for resource extraction in Latin America, in particular for ‘climate-critical minerals’ like lithium. Framed as a transformative and just shift aimed at sustaining economic growth and simultaneously mitigating climate impacts, the 'Transition' obscures the violent histories of resource extraction it claims to transcend. The move towards ‘green extractivism’ thus presents itself as a break from prior ‘dirty’ extractive-led developmental models, yet rather than a transformative departure, represents an intensification of extractivism as it strategically adapts to meet the contemporary demands of the global economy.
Beneath its ostensibly benevolent character, ‘green extractivism’ has produced novel forms of extractive violence, made politically legitimate through a ‘green’ capitalist logic. This is enabled by the alignment of state and corporate interests, which mutually reinforce each other and delegitimise alternative political realities, especially those of directly affected campesino and indigenous communities. By illuminating these ‘shadows’ of the 'Transition', this paper interrogates the resilience of extractivism within the Anthropocene, challenging assumptions that its global dominance, and relevance in maintaining the capitalist system of production, is weakened.
To achieve this it employs an Everyday IPE framework and draws on fieldwork conducted in the ‘Lithium Triangle’, both of which engage with the day-to-day realities along emerging extractive frontiers. This builds a local-to-global understanding which demonstrates that micro-level dynamics are inextricably linked to international politics, and is vital in understanding how wider power regimes perpetuate inequality in mundane ways. As such, it reveals how deeply rooted colonial hierarchies persist as the harms of capitalist development continue to be outsourced to the Global South, for a sustainable 'Transition' elsewhere.
