Renewable energy, mining, and extraction governance

This project is jointly funded by Cultural Anthropology and the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR). This project compares how solar energy and conventional mining projects are governed to determine the opportunities and challenges of a renewable energy transition. Using collaborative research methods that involve local communities in the design and conduct of the research, the project will examine to what extent large-scale renewable energy projects draw upon the same economic and governance strategies as conventional extraction.

The research team will document the legal, bureaucratic, and economic frameworks for developing and operating large-scale projects in rural areas. Conventional extraction projects have historically deepened the economic and political marginalization of many rural zones, which experience high rates of poverty while shouldering the environmental and economic costs of extraction.

If renewable energy projects draw on the same mechanisms for expropriating resources as mining, then strategies for just energy transition should focus on more than reducing carbon emissions and include socio-economic and political measures to address the systemic marginalization of rural areas. Research results will be shared in the communities participating in the research, through national and international policy venues addressing a renewable energy transition, including among U.S. civic groups, communities, and policymakers engaged in rural energy and economic transition work.

Other broader impacts include collaborative analysis training workshops on civic engagement and extraction, which will broaden participation in science to underrepresented populations in Central Appalachia.

This ethnographic and documentary research initiative will engage civic organizations and rural communities in collecting data about the laws, procedures, and practices that facilitate large-scale solar and mining projects. The project team will produce outreach materials on these governance practices as the basis for field-based, qualitative research on strategies state and corporate actors use to manage these projects.

The research will also establish the commonalities and differences in how residents engage with renewable energy and conventional extraction to make claims for services, policies, or representation related to and extending beyond specific projects. This project will advance anthropological theories of extraction as an expression of governance practices, not only the material resource being extracted, and will relate those theories to agrarian studies of the challenges facing rural areas and the social science of renewable energy transitions.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.