Green Coloniality and Just Energy Transition: Innovation, Enduring Structures, And The Struggle For Rights

Abstract

This research aims to critically analyze the contradictions inherent in the hegemonic model of energy transition in the context of globalized capitalism, investigating how current climate governance architectures and the strategies of transnational corporations impact the realization of human rights. It starts from the premise that the energy transition represents a large-scale technological and financial innovation, grounded in new market instruments, environmental metrics, and regulatory arrangements aimed at decarbonization. However, it argues that when such innovations are not accompanied by corresponding democratic and legal innovations capable of redistributing power and ensuring meaningful participation of affected communities, the transition tends to reactivate colonial logics of territorial appropriation, reproducing historical inequalities and promoting systematic violations against indigenous peoples, quilombola communities, and other traditional groups. Methodologically, the study adopts a qualitative approach with a theoretical-critical orientation, based on an interdisciplinary literature review and documentary analysis of international normative instruments, combined with the analysis of a Brazil-based case study. The theoretical framework is based on the critical theory of human rights developed by Joaquín Herrera Flores, in dialogue with decolonial thinking and the field of Business and Human Rights, with emphasis on the United Nations Guiding Principles. The results show that merely formal compliance with environmental standards and sustainability taxonomies is insufficient to prevent socio-environmental violations, especially in the absence of binding legal mechanisms for extraterritorial accountability of corporate actors. It is concluded that an effectively just energy transition requires the centrality of human rights, understood as historical and conflictual processes of struggle for dignity, as well as the political recognition of popular resistance as constituent subjects and the strengthening of legal instruments capable of addressing violations produced by transnational corporate action.