European and UK engagement with North Africa's renewable energy sector has been driven in part by efforts to secure low-carbon energy supplies, meet climate targets, and position the region as a strategic energy partner for Europe. However, many large-scale solar, wind, and electricity interconnection projects have been planned and implemented through agreements between governments, investors, and international institutions, often with limited consultation of the communities directly affected by them. As a result, local populations have frequently had little influence over decisions concerning land use, access to resources, or the distribution of project benefits, raising concerns about procedural justice, consent, and the reproduction of unequal power relations under the banner of the green transition. These dynamics have led some scholars and activists to argue that renewable energy development risks replicating extractivist patterns, whereby energy is produced primarily to serve external markets while the environmental and social costs are borne locally.
Building on a previous workshop on green extractivism, this day-and-a-half workshop brought together scholars from diverse disciplinary backgrounds and geographical contexts to focus specifically on North Africa. The workshop aimed to:
- Identify key empirical cases of renewable or "green" energy projects that are reshaping the region's socio-political and socio-ecological landscapes.
- Examine continuities and ruptures in contemporary extractivist dynamics, as well as the local responses, resistance strategies, and contestations emerging around these developments.
- Develop a collaborative research agenda addressing the most pressing issues related to renewable energy transitions, extractivism, and environmental justice in North Africa.
Guest presentations:
Yahia Mahmoud, Lund University. “Harvesting wind and sunlight, stirring sands: the expansion of renewable energy frontiers and local resistance to green extractivism in North Africa”.
Hamza Hamouchene, Transnational Institute. “The Energy Transition in North Africa/the Arab Region: a tale of extractivism, fossil capitalism and green (neo)colonialism?”
Zeina Moneer, Nordic Africa Institute. “When Clean Becomes Fair: Assessing the Well-Being Impacts of Egypt’s Benban Solar Project through a Capability Lens”.
Roberto Cantoni, Universitat Ramon Llull. “Green occupation: low-carbon energy and territorial control in Western Sahara”.
Maria Cariola, Copenhagen University. “Legal infrastructures of green extractivism: The EU-Chile trade deal”.
Some of the key takes from the workshop are that:
- Landscape transformations are driven by a diverse set of actors and processes operating across multiple scales. Research on these developments should therefore consider the interplay between geopolitical efforts by the European Union to secure imports of "clean" energy, national strategies to enhance competitiveness within global markets, and state-led projects of territorial integration and control in peripheral or historically marginalized regions, such as those found in Tunisia and Morocco.
- Time scales are equally significant. Contemporary forms of green extractivism cannot be understood in isolation from the broader processes of economic liberalisation that unfolded across North Africa from the 1980s onwards. These reforms opened the region to foreign direct investment from the European Union, China, the Gulf states, and other actors, laying the foundations for the renewable energy developments and extractivist dynamics observed today.
- Large-scale renewable energy projects, such as wind and solar parks, may drive ecological change, pollution, resource appropriation, and land-use transformations that affect agricultural and pastoral livelihoods, yet their long-term impacts remain understudied.
- In addition, while the energy generated may be renewable, the infrastructures required to produce, store, and transmit it, including solar panels, wind turbines, transmission cables, and cement-intensive installations, rely on material extraction and can become sources of pollution and waste at the end of their life cycle. Moreover, many of these projects are located in arid and semi-arid regions where water scarcity is already a major concern. Their significant water requirements, combined with those of other extractive industries, can exacerbate pressure on local water resources and intensify existing environmental and social challenges.
- In most cases, people in rural areas mobilised to contest displacement by land-use change and pollution, but their claims are about re-distribution (e.g., access to funding, development of social and economic infrastructure in their villages) of the revenues generated by large-scale energy projects. Sahrawis on other hand, struggle for sovereignty and self-determination.
- Methodologically, research on green extractivism in North Africa would benefit from collaborative, multi-sited, and participatory approaches that combine solidarity-based research networks, citizen science, engagement with affected communities, and critical partnerships with both social movements and non-academic actors, while remaining attentive to issues of access, political sensitivity, competing stakeholder interests, and the silences that shape knowledge production.
The workshop was organised by Maria Andrea Nardi and Yahia Mahmoud together with members of the Extractivism Research Network (ERN) and funded by Lund University Strategic Research Area Middle-East in the Contemporary World (MECW).
Workshop was held 21-22 May 2026, Lund
