GROUT

GROUT explores the expansion of (green) extractivism driven by planetary urbanisation. Challenging the ‘urban’ as a particular category this study aims to show the massive socio-ecological transformation in rural hinterlands driven by urbanisation and the energy transition.

In so-called first world economies like Europe, mining for so called critical minerals has approached densely populated areas (like the city of Caceres in photo below) where governance structures are characterized by high complexity, mixed narratives and processes. The project aims to explore the implications of (green) extractivism in the peri-urban areas of big cities in Australia.

Research team: Marta Conde, Isabelle Anguelovski, Vigya Sharma

Case study: Illawarra, Australia 

Through the case study of the Illawarra, South of Sydney the project analyzes how gentrification is occurring despite pollution from coal mines and industrial operations. Using cognitive psychology to uncover how citizens make a green compromise by invisibilising or relativising pollution, the study contributes to understanding the environmentally privileged, key actors in planetary urbanisation and energy transition processes.

Multi-stakeholder analysis and action research in the Illawarra

Aiming to contribute to a more just energy transition, researchers organised a workshop in Newcastle, Australia, together with Darryl Best, an ex-miner, that brought together key change-makers from the Illawarra with the founders of the Hunter Jobs Alliance, an alliance between environmental groups and unions that has managed to attract government funding for jobs in the energy transition. The alliance between these two groups is not only necessary to promote electrification and avoid the green sacrifice of peri-urban areas but also to achieve a deeper transformation of society in order to tackle climate change.

Understanding green extractivism with nickel

The paper co-authored with Diego Andreucci, Gustavo López, Isabella Radhuber, Daniel Voskoboynik, JD Farrugia and Christos Zografos “The coloniality of green extractivism: Unearthing decarbonisation by dispossession through the case of nickel” published in Political Geography exemplifies the paradox of fossil fuel burning to generate energy: this key mineral for rechargeable batteries is remarkably carbon intensive and polluting due to its smelting and refining final stages.

As researchers demonstrate, the large-scale deployment of solar and wind technologies will generate land enclosures and conflicts (for example has been predicted solar energy will require 600 times more land than coal). This will have more impact on rural areas, especially in the Global South where land is cheaper and as already witnessed in peri-urban areas. Through cases from Philippines, Indonesia, Colombia and Guatemala the study shows how nickel extraction uses that same neo-colonial extractivist logic generating ecological destruction, dispossession, health impacts and murderous violence against environmental defenders.

Understanding the political economy of Green Extractivism

Through this fellowship Conde also develops the concept of the ‘mineralstate’ whereby mineral dependent countries transform their institutions and regulations to support (green) extractivism, ignoring environmental, social and cultural concerns. Through Australia’s history we can identify corruption and regulatory capture anchoring Australia (and mineralstates) into an extractivist path. The urgency of energy transition is already exacerbating the pervasive forces in the mineralstate with Australia changing regulations to facilitate mining in Indigenous lands.

Understanding response to green extractivism

In the paper published in Global Environmental change in 2023 Marta Conde, Mariana Walter, Lucrecia Wagner and Grettel Navas develop the concept of “Slow justice and other unexpected consequences of litigation in environmental conflicts”.

The researchers pose that environmental litigation, a very common strategy used by local groups in socio-environmental conflicts, face several unexpected consequences i) slow justice caused by companies delaying court proceedings by appealing every ruling, demobilizing social movements. So even if they win the court cases, they lose because companies ignore or delay complying with the sentence. ii) The courts’ languages and proceedings reduce complex impacts to simplified, scientifically verifiable and legally punishable damages invisibilising harms and victims. And iii) local groups lose control of the legal procedures and the resistance process itself with judges, lawyers and even local leaders taking key decisions about court jurisdiction, demands and narratives, ignoring those marginalised, with gender implications.