Governing Extractive Futures: Territory, Rents, & Environmental Governance

Join Juan Pablo Vera Lugo for a discussion on energy transitions, and environmental politics in Latin America. This presentation examines the politics of extractive governance and energy transition through a comparative project on mining territories in Colombia, Peru, and Chile, centered on Montelíbano, southern Córdoba, Colombia. The analysis is complemented by two Colombian cases—the Cesar Mining Corridor and offshore wind projects in Galerazamba, Bolívar—which illuminate different dimensions of transition in extractive territories. Rather than framing a “just energy transition” primarily as a shift from fossil fuels to renewables, the presentation approaches transition as a contested political and territorial process shaped by struggles over extractive rents, environmental liabilities, monitoring, participation, and competing visions of territorial futures.
Montelíbano provides the main empirical entry point. Large-scale nickel extraction coexists with informal and illegal gold mining, bringing corporations, state institutions, local communities, Indigenous and Afro-descendant organizations, and illegal armed actors into overlapping regimes of governance. The analysis examines how these actors negotiate rents, environmental responsibilities, monitoring practices, and participation in decisions concerning mining and territorial development.
The Cesar Mining Corridor highlights the politics of post-extractive futures, labor, environmental repair, and the redistribution of extraction’s benefits and costs. Galerazamba, in turn, shows how offshore wind development can generate new forms of territorial reordering, affecting land values, access, expectations, and participation The presentation argues that a just energy transition cannot be reduced to technological substitution. It requires confronting the institutional and territorial arrangements through which rents, environmental liabilities, monitoring capacities, and decision-making power are distributed. Environmental governance and participation are therefore central to the production of more just extractive and post-extractive futures.