Who owns the land owns the wind? Land and citizenship in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, Mexico

Abstract

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La captura del viento: Energía eólica y la política de la renta en el Istmo de Tehuantepec, México

“…La tercera perspectiva, en la línea de los estudios agrarios ha sido desarrollada por Torres Contreras (2022, 2023) quien aporta más detalles sobre los cambios en la tenencia de la tierra así como los procesos de cambio agrario en la región. En el primer tema argumenta que las demandas por la tierra por parte de distintos setores en el Istmo son también reclamos de ciudadanía.…”

Clean development or the development of dispossession? The political economy of wind parks in Southern Mexico

“…This has been vital, as the Mexican state has been determined to valorise Indigenous territory, whether through outright privatisation or via territorial concessions for exploration (and often exploitation) of mineral resources. As Torres Contreras (2020) has documented, the major locus of territorially-based resistance to wind park expansion in the Isthmus comes precisely from those areas where communal claims to property still exist such as Juchitán.…”

“…Newell and Bumpus (2012: 51) note that empirical and theoretically-informed work on understanding the scalar power relations involved in carbon markets and their impacts on everyday subaltern livelihoods have been lacking. Even fewer studies exist that explore renewable energy projects that are based in the Global South and with Southern perspectives on such renewable energy projects in mind (Torres Contreras, 2020: 21). Specifically, wind parks have been identified as an empirically under-examined element of critical work that looks at the nexus between neoliberalism and nature (Siamanta, 2019).…”

Making space for community energy: landed property as barrier and enabler of community wind projects

“…Much of this expansion is driven by large, multinational private and state actors such as China Energy (China), RWE (Germany), EDF (France), Iberdrola (Spain) and NextEra Energy Resources (United States) (GWEC, 2020). But the social relations surrounding renewable energy technologies have been contested from the early days of development (van Est, 1999). Possibilities for decentralised utilisation of renewable energy can challenge prevalent ownership structures of the energy sector and turn more attention to issues of collective participation, community empowerment distributional justice and democracy (Becker and Naumann, 2017).…”

“…Without access to land or rights to use land, no onshore wind farms or solar energy projects can be developed in the first place. As we discuss further in the following sections, landed property has latent power by virtue of its position: indeed, some have argued that this situates landowners as de facto renewable resource owners (Hughes, 2021;Traldi, 2021;Wade and Ellis, 2022). From this perspective, landed property also co-determines ownership structures of renewable energy assets and thus shapes different rent relations.…”