When Climate Action Fuels "Green Colonialism"

Around the world, the green transition is increasingly being promoted. Governments, companies, and NGOs are seeking to integrate it into everyone’s lifestyle. But sometimes, this noble mission clashes with an equally, if not more, important challenge: the preservation of human rights.

The green transition is often presented as a break with the past: a shift away from fossil fuels toward a cleaner, more sustainable economy. In terms of energy sources, it is. But in terms of the underlying economic logic, the picture is less clear. Large-scale renewable energy infrastructure still requires land, minerals, and sea space. It still tends to expand outward, into territories and ecosystems that have so far been spared. The communities living in those territories are often expected to absorb the costs while the benefits flow elsewhere.

This is the paradox we set out to explore in a talk for SKEMA’s Transition Week 2026, drawing on two recent activities that gave us an unusually close view of this debate: an interview with Eirik Larsen, Head of the Human Rights Unit at the Saami Council, conducted for the Monaco Polar Symposium, and a Special Issue on Business, Human Rights and Just Transition in the Energy and Extractive Industries that I co-edited for the Business and Human Rights Journal with Damilola Olawuyi, Claire Bright, and Qaraman Hasan. The picture that emerges from both is striking: when it comes to whose land and lives are affected, the green transition can look uncomfortably like what came before it.

Green colonialism: The Price of Progress, Paid by Others?

Eirik Larsen put it plainly in our conversation: the green transition, as currently practised, risks becoming a form of green colonialism. The Saami people across northern Scandinavia and north-western Russia are among those most immediately affected by climate change, despite having contributed almost nothing to it. Yet, as their ancestral pastures are shrinking as ice cover retreats, they are also being asked to give up land for wind turbines and energy infrastructure that will power cities far from their territories, without sharing in the energy or the revenues produced.

The Fosen Njaarke case captures this tension in legal terms. The Norwegian Government licensed wind turbine construction on Saami herding lands, ignoring early warnings from the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination and the Saami Council itself. In 2021, the Supreme Court of Norway ruled that this violated the rights of the Saami people under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. A negotiated agreement followed in 2024, with provisions to protect indigenous culture and direct some energy production for local use. It was a partial victory, but it came after years of damage and only through sustained legal pressure.

What this case reveals is not an exception but a pattern. As the Special Issue’s editorial argues, efforts to advance clean energy transition programmes have been increasingly linked to social exclusions, rising energy poverty, and constraints on access to land in already vulnerable communities. The green transition has a structural problem: renewable energy expansion is frequently pursued with the same extractive assumptions as fossil fuel development, treating land as available and local communities as a problem to be managed rather than as stakeholders with rights.

When Rights Become a Last Resort

One of the clearest takeaways from the Special Issue is that business and human rights frameworks are doing important work in this space, but often in a reactive way. Companies and governments move forward with projects, and rights come in through the back door, via court challenges and reputational crises, once the damage is already underway or done.

Dorothée Cambou and Karin Buhmann‘s contribution to the Special Issue examines wind energy developers’ responsibilities toward Indigenous Peoples through three landmark court cases, including both Fosen and the Lake Turkana Wind Power Project in Kenya. In the Turkana case, the developer had described the land as an “investable terra nullius,” available for clean energy investment. The Kenyan court rejected this framing entirely, ruling that the land was collectively owned and used by multiple local communities, and that the allocation process had been performed illegally and unconstitutionally in violation of those collective rights. As Cambou and Buhmann show, this is precisely the kind of reasoning that a rights-based approach makes possible: rather than treating consultation as a procedural formality, it requires recognising that Indigenous peoples’ relationship to land encompasses collective tenure, cultural survival, and self-determination, none of which can be reduced to a transaction.

Elsewhere in the Special Issue, Bailey and Lavite examine the civil claim brought by the Unión Hidalgo community in Mexico against the French energy company EDF under France’s Duty of Vigilance law, one of the first cases brought under that law and the first to claim violations of Indigenous rights. The case illustrates how newer corporate due diligence legislation is beginning to create transnational legal avenues for affected communities, even if their effectiveness remains uncertain. Macchi’s analysis of deep seabed mining pushes the argument further, showing that the demand for transition minerals is now driving extraction into marine environments that were previously untouched, raising serious questions about whether due diligence obligations under current regulatory frameworks are stringent enough to match the risk. This is a crucial question at the heart of research we are conducting with colleagues from the FRONTIERS project at Copenhagen Business School.

Together, these cases show that companies face growing legal exposure when they fail to ensure meaningful consultation and respect for local land rights. But they also show that accountability tends to arrive late, after communities have already been displaced, fragmented, or dispossessed.

Rights as a Foundation, Not a Constraint

This is where the argument becomes more interesting, and where we think the conversation most needs to go. A rights-based approach to the green transition is sometimes framed defensively, as a set of limits on what companies and governments can do. That framing is not wrong, but it undersells what rights can actually offer.

Certain rights are directly relevant here in ways that go beyond individual protection. For instance, the rights to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment, to decent livelihoods, to health, and to free, prior and informed consent are not simply individual entitlements. They are relational and place-based. They connect people to the land, water, and ecosystems they depend on, and they create a basis for demanding not just compensation after harm, but participation and shared governance before decisions are made.

Several contributions to the Special Issue draw on environmental justice frameworks to develop this point. Götzmann and Dicalou make the case for a feminist approach to energy justice, showing how the distributional, recognitional and procedural dimensions of energy systems all need to be addressed together if the transition is to avoid creating new gendered inequalities alongside existing ones. Kilimcioglu, examining the South African experience, argues that a genuinely just energy transition requires decentralised, democratic systems grounded in local ownership and meaningful participation at all levels of decision-making. Symington‘s fieldwork in the Lithium Triangle points to community empowerment as the key success factor in critical mineral extraction: the projects that work best are the ones where communities themselves define what a just transition means, rather than having it defined for them.

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What connects these contributions is the idea that a rights-based approach does not only constrain extractive models. Taken seriously, it points toward different ones entirely.

The contrast with more collaborative models is instructive. Indigenous-led solar initiatives, in the US, Canada and Australia for example, have built in community ownership structures, local governance participation, and long-term benefit-sharing. These are not concessions extracted through litigation. They are the starting premise. Communities are not managing the externalities of someone else’s energy project; they are co-owners of their own.

This is a different kind of sustainability: not just lower emissions, but an economic model that has society and environment at its heart rather than treating them as costs to be minimised. The Special Issue’s editorial frames this as going “beyond just transition”: moving from a compliance mindset toward genuinely responsible and rights-based business practice in the energy and extractives sector.

The green transition will not be just by default. The same growth logic and extractive assumptions that drove the fossil fuel economy are capable of driving the renewable one, if left unchecked. Business and human rights frameworks matter because they create accountability and set enforceable limits. But their deeper contribution, as the cases gathered in the Special Issue suggest, is in pointing toward the conditions under which communities become genuine partners in the transition rather than its uncompensated hosts. The green transition is not just a technical or infrastructural challenge. It is a question about what kind of economy we are building, for whom, and on whose terms.

Based on talk given at SKEMA Transition Week.