Description
Over the past two decades, the EU has increasingly positioned itself as a global leader in the energy transition away from fossil fuels, developing an integrated policy framework connecting environmental objectives with economic and geopolitical ambitions. While these policies are framed as EUropean accomplishments, they substantively rely on resource flows from non-EUropean countries. North Africa has been explicitly identified by the EU as a strategic partner due to its geographic proximity and renewable energy potential. Tunisia, in particular, has since the 2010s been increasingly incorporated into EUrope’s green economic sphere. Latest developments, most prominently Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, accelerated this process and increased the attention towards the country’s potential for production of renewable energy, green hydrogen and its derivatives. These initiatives are presented as mutually beneficial, for they would aid Tunisia’s decarbonization, promote economic development, and enable exports to Europe. Drawing from semi-structured interviews with Tunisian civil society actors conducted during a 7-months fieldwork in Tunisia, as well as discourse analysis of key EU and Tunisian policy documents, this paper instead argues that the EU’s green partnership and promises of ‘green growth’ conceal extractive neocolonial dynamics which privilege the metropole’s accumulation at the expense of the periphery’s needs. With a specific focus on the EUropean hydrogen strategy, it in fact shows how this is embedded in a neocolonial structure reproducing EUropean enrichment, international standing and epistemic centrality while externalizing costs to Tunisia and foreclosing local spaces of dissensus and alternative visions regarding ecological transformation.
