Green Energy Crimes and Resistance in the Global South

Climate change is looming large on the planet. However, green energy transition proposed as a policy solution poses its own problems. While climate change and resource extraction have been studied from a criminological perspective, little attention has been paid to developing a criminological analysis of the green energy transition. Drawing on green criminology, state-corporate crime framework and Southern criminology, this chapter aims to address this gap with a focus on the Global South. Adopting a harm-based definition of crime which includes both illegal acts and legal but harmful acts, and based on published case studies across political ecology and critical geography literatures, the chapter presents a threefold typology of green energy crimes as state-corporate crimes of accumulation at the intersection of neoliberal capitalism and the Global North-South power inequalities. Furthermore, resistances against green energy crimes by the affected rural communities are explored by highlighting the ideological and epistemological dimensions of these struggles. The chapter calls for a more wholistic analysis of the social harms of energy development that goes beyond a sole focus on climate change and attends to the dynamics of state-corporate criminality and of resistance in the green energy transition.