Description
The green transition is increasingly critiqued as a business-as-usual project - one that reproduces extractivist logics under the banner of sustainability, reconfiguring rather than resolving the crises of capitalism and climate. This paper examines how extractivism endures within the green transition through bureaucratic hegemony: the everyday mechanisms that legitimise and govern violent resource frontiers in the name of sustainability. While framed as a global response to climate breakdown, it is local bureaucratic practices that sustain and reproduce familiar dynamics of extractivism and capital accumulation. Environmental impact assessments, corporate transparency regimes, and participatory consultation frameworks signal administrative order while embedding extractive imperatives within mundane governance routines, obscuring the unequal power structures they perpetuate.
Drawing on neo-Gramscian and everyday IPE approaches, and based on fieldwork in Argentina’s lithium sector, the paper conceptualises bureaucracy as a mechanism mediating between the global and the local. By aligning the two, it transforms conflict into procedure and disorder into management, and thus becomes a stabilising function for capital accumulation in times of crisis. As such, the global promise of sustainability as articulated in market-based visions of the green transition becomes materially embedded in everyday life, even though it reproduces ecological and social violence.
By tracing this scalar entanglement, the paper argues that the green transition’s political economy depends not only on markets or technology, but on the mundane infrastructures that make extractivism appear lawful, participatory, and sustainable. Bureaucratic hegemony thus reveals how the global pursuit of a “green future” is sustained through local practices of order, where the administrative everyday becomes a key site of capitalist power.
