The energy transition has become a central normative axis of global climate action. International instruments, national regulatory frameworks, and public policies currently converge in the acceleration of renewable energy as a response to the climate crisis. However, this process, frequently presented as inherently positive, is not politically neutral. On the contrary, it unfolds asymmetrically across territories marked by deep historical power imbalances, particularly in the Global South.

Under the category of clean energy, extractive dynamics are reconfigured in ways that reproduce classic patterns of territorial dispossession of Indigenous peoples and rural communities, racial violence, and violence against women and girls. A weak implementation of the right to free, prior, and informed consultation, the erosion of environmental protection frameworks, and the limited enforceability of corporate human rights obligations reveal a structural gap between climate commitments and justice standards.

In this context, the energy transition directly challenges the law, not only as an instrument that enables investments and large-scale projects, but also as a field of dispute over responsibility, distribution of burdens, and reparation of harms. Can we speak of a just transition when social and territorial costs continue to be externalised onto the same groups historically subjected to vulnerability? This article puts forward the proposition that a truly reflexive energy transition necessarily requires not only recognising harms and measuring impacts but also dismantling entrenched forms of control, authority, and epistemic hierarchy within the governance of the transition itself.

Green colonialism

Many scholars have characterised this reconfiguration of current colonial relations, unfolding under the guise of energy transition or sustainability, as green colonialism. Far from representing a rupture with fossil fuel and extractivist models, the transition tends to inscribe itself, through new material forms and normative legitimacies, into a long-standing colonial regime of dispossession and inequality. As Hamouchene and Sandwell observe, transitions driven from the Global North are embedded in a logic of accumulation that reproduces “the parameters of dispossession and resource plunder that characterise the fossil fuel regime”, now under a paradigm of nature’s commodification presented as sustainable. In this sense, the energy transition is not primarily orientated toward guaranteeing access to new forms of energy that do not exacerbate the climate crisis but toward securing new cycles for wealth generation and ensuring the supply of industrial centres and elites.

Green colonialism thus constitutes a regime of structural externalisation of costs. The social, territorial, and cultural impacts of the transition are concentrated in territories that have been historically colonised, while financial and economic benefits are captured in the Global North. Other authors, such as Farhana Sultana, describe these dynamics as a web of material, epistemic, and political relations through which the climate crisis and its supposed solutions not only reproduce colonial, racial, and economic violence but also, in climate governance arenas such as the UN climate and biodiversity conferences, tend to obscure historical responsibilities, displace costs onto already marginalised populations, and produce new forms of control over territories, bodies, and futures in the Global South. The transition thus emerges not only as a technical process but also as a new field of geopolitical dispute over who decides, who pays, and who is sacrificed.

Law and the work of practitioners play a fundamental role in this new arena of contestation. Katharina Pistor explains this clearly when she notes that “capital is not a thing but a legal relation”, produced through the legal codification of assets to which law grants “priority, durability, universality, and convertibility”. From this perspective, the energy transition is not only a technological transformation but also a process of legal recodification of new objects that can once again be appropriated, protected, and made profitable in the name of sustainability.

In line with Pistor, law cannot be understood as a neutral instrument that merely regulates the transition. Categories such as property, investment, clean energy or due diligence are not only technical concepts but also legal and political constructions anchored in normative matrices of the Global North that are projected onto colonial and postcolonial territories, either to enable dispossession or, in their counter-hegemonic potential, to try to prevent it. The question is not only what the law regulates in the energy transition but also whom it protects, whom it exposes and under which rationalities of power such protection or exposure is structured.

Legal instruments and strategic litigation

Examples of global legal instruments that currently frame the energy transition include the Paris Agreement, the Escazú Agreement, and the Corporate Due Diligence laws. These instruments are often presented as normative proposals aimed at aligning business activity with climate action and the protection of human rights. However, both in their design and in their implementation, these frameworks have tended to reproduce structures of inequality by prioritising investment stability, corporate legal certainty, and global competitiveness over the effective guarantee of human rights, particularly the rights of Indigenous peoples and communities.

Nonetheless, these same legal frameworks have the potential to be reclaimed from below by communities defending their territories, who contest them through a counter-hegemonic reading. In this blog, and as a lawyer who has accompanied communities in the Global South for twenty years, I would like to share reflections from two experiences that illustrate these tensions with particular clarity: the litigation pursued by the Zapotec community of Unión Hidalgo against Électricité de France in Mexico and the defence of the Pilmaiquén River by the Mapuche Williche people against the Norwegian state-owned company Statkraft in Chile.

In the Unión Hidalgo case, the Gunaa Sicarú wind farm promoted by Électricité de France was developed through irregular individual contracts over Indigenous communal lands, without guaranteeing an adequate consultation process. The community documented practices of social fragmentation, criminalisation, and violence against human rights defenders. The community, in alliance with the Project on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ProDESC) and the European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights, decided in 2021 to file legal action under the French Duty of Vigilance Law, the first case in which an Indigenous community in Latin America used this law to defend its territory.

Although this law represented a historic breakthrough by turning due diligence into a legally binding obligation, its practical application has revealed structural gaps and procedural barriers that severely limit its transformative potential.

Four years after the beginning of the litigation, it has become evident that companies continue to interpret the duty of vigilance as a mechanism for managing reputational risks rather than a substantive duty aimed at preventing actual harm to people and territories. Ambiguity regarding the scope of protected rights and the high evidentiary burden placed on communities have turned due diligence into a highly technical, costly, and inaccessible field for those who suffer the impacts.

This experience is not exceptional. Over more than twenty years of strategic litigation and community accompaniment at ProDESC, we have documented numerous renewable energy projects in Latin America that have advanced systematically over Indigenous territories without guaranteeing free, prior, and informed consent, reproducing practices of land grabbing, community fragmentation, criminalisation, and violence, particularly against women defending the community territory and rights. In these contexts, due diligence has not operated as a material limit on corporate power capable of mitigating the climate crisis but rather, in many cases, as a device that legally legitimises projects presented as green or sustainable, even when they are sustained through structural rights violations.

The Pilmaiquén case, in Mapuche Williche territory in southern Chile, reinforces this critical reading through an additional dimension: the leadership of Indigenous women of the Global South in the struggles against green colonialism. The defence of the river has been led primarily by women such as the Machi Millaray Huichalaf: her political and spiritual work combines territorial protection, community life, and cultural identity to oppose hydroelectric projects promoted by the Norwegian state-owned company Statkraft. These projects have been financed without adequately guaranteeing the right to consultation or consent of the Mapuche Williche people, disregarding their spiritual, cultural, and political relationship with the river and imposing a development model disconnected from Indigenous self-determination. This process has generated recurring patterns of criminalisation, selective prosecution, and gender-based violence against women human rights defenders, revealing how the energy transition can deepen structural inequalities when imposed on historically racialised territories.

Through a transnational strategy, Mapuche communities supported by ProDESC and the Initiative for Transnational Justice activated a procedure before the Norwegian National Contact Point of the OECD, shifting the centre of accountability to the parent company in the Global North. This process has made it possible to internationally denounce the territorial, cultural, and spiritual impacts of the hydroelectric projects and to highlight the violence against women human rights defenders in a space typically dominated by technical language about responsible business conduct. The Pilmaiquén experience shows that a truly decolonising approach to law must not only question its own categories but also recognise Indigenous women as central political subjects of the transition, dismantle the supposed neutrality of corporate responsibility mechanisms and acknowledge that without self-determination, without free, prior and informed consent and without effective protection for defenders, there can be no meaningful discussion of a just transition.

Towards a transition from the Global South

In light of the structural limits of what is commonly referred to as the law of the energy transition as it currently prevails, it becomes essential to imagine and build alternative transition pathways: energy processes anchored in the self-determination of peoples, the centrality of territories, and the recognition of legal pluralism. From the Global South, the struggles of Indigenous communities and Indigenous women human rights defenders compel us to envision a feminist transition from the South, one that does not reduce energy justice to emission reduction metrics or to green financial flows but instead situates it within relations of power, historical responsibility, and respect for spiritual ties with nature. A truly just transition requires a reflexive dismantling of the technical neutrality of law, one of the key focuses of the dialogue being held at the newly established Centre for Advanced Studies RefLex. In this context, it should also contest the corporate capture of sustainability and redirect normative frameworks toward the effective protection of life. It is not only a matter of changing the energy matrix but of transforming the logics that determine who pays, who benefits, and who is considered expendable in the name of the climate.