The making of ' green ' capitalism in Europe ' s marginal regions : renewable energy production as territory grabbing for accumulation

The making of ‘green’ capitalism in Europe’s marginal regions: renewable energy production as territory grabbing for accumulation Samadhi Lipari Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Leeds School of Geography August 2021 The candidate confirms that the work submitted is his own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others. This copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. The right of Samadhi Lipari to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. © 2021 The University of Leeds and Samadhi Lipari Abstract It is no mystery that we are living in times of multiple ecological crises. Not only are phenomena such as climate change, widespread pollution, biodiversity loss, and soil artificialisation threatening irreversibly the ‘natural’ world. They imperil human society too, for human society is part of nature. Taking a historical materialist perspective, this thesis understands those crises as originating in capitalist social relations, which maximise the exploitation of both human labour and the ecosystems. By the same token, the thesis maintains that mainstream responses to the crises are fully framed within the capitalist paradigm of perpetual and privatised ‘accumulation for accumulation’s sake’, only now legitimised through ‘green’ credentials. Building on theoretical and political approaches calling for the incorporation of an ‘ecological’ rationality within capitalist relations, these responses articulate faith in and commitment to the modernisation of productive cycles and governance systems, from which a more sustainable – ‘green’ – capitalist economy can apparently arise. Differently, this thesis interprets such a ‘green’ turn as capitalism’s adaptation and expansion in the context of the ecological crises, with the overarching purpose of furthering our understanding of these dynamics. More accurately, the thesis deploys and innovates a range of historical materialist categories to analyse the hitherto under-explored relationship between the ‘green’ as an accumulation opportunity and its leveraging as a legitimation framework. Empirically, the thesis investigates the accumulation of surplus value in and around renewable energy generation at the level of production areas, the enclosure and transformative processes it triggers, the class and factional cleavages it entails, and the regulatory mechanisms and legitimation narratives to which it is associated. Methodologically, it combines a comprehensive theoretical elaboration with case studies of two generation systems, one in southern Italy focused on wind energy and a second in eastern Germany focused on agricultural biogas. The thesis’s main argument is that under capitalism, renewable energy generation expands accumulation frontiers over not yet or ‘inefficiently’ commodified spaces and natures. This II occurs through their privatisation and abstraction into fictitious capital –that is through their commodification and financialization. In contrast with marginalist approaches, this thesis reconciles the socially necessary labour time theory of value with political ecology. It rejects the assumption that privatised spaces and natures might ‘innately’ provide exchange value, maintaining conversely that they serve as a collateral to capture –by way of rentsurplus value produced in society at a different point in time and space. Secondly, the thesis offers a definition of ‘green’ capitalism as a hegemonic project in the making. This is characterised by two interrelated dialectics: one tending to restructure the forces and relations of production; the other to re-build hegemonic narratives and apparatuses, around re-significations of the ‘green’ made compatible with sustained accumulation. Thirdly, the thesis advances the category of territory grabbing, intended as a spatiotemporal process whereby a territory, or places within or of it, is abstracted from its stratified historical identity, reduced to exchange value, and transposed into the accumulation function of an investment scheme. As a principal contribution, this thesis offers an elaborate and original framework, broadening the range of theoretical and analytical instruments needed to decipher contemporary capitalism and its ‘green’ variant, both conceptually and empirically. In continuing the historical materialist tradition, as the concluding chapter explains, that framework, and the empirical findings it has produced, are not merely intended to enrich specialised literature, but most importantly to strengthen scholar and activist debates and practices towards a social and environmental justice beyond the inequalities of capitalism. III Acknowledgements “A hundred times a day I remind myself that my inner and outer life depend on the labours of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the measure as I have received and am still receiving” - Albert Einstein If this thesis exists today, I must thank first and foremost Paul Routledge and Stuart Hodkinson, my supervisors. When they decided to believe in the project and accept to supervise it five years ago, I was a different person and my understanding of life and social sciences was shallower than it is now. I am grateful to them for supporting and guiding me all along the path up to here, seeing further when I was lost in the fog of detail and keeping me grounded when the wind of abstraction was blowing against lucidity. If I had the time and resources to complete this research it is thanks to the University of Leeds Scholarship and to the EU Erasmus Programme. I would like to express my gratitude to Paul Waley and Michael Janoska from my Research Support Groups for their pungent yet always constructive criticism. The fieldwork of this research was possible thanks to the analytical and practical support of experienced researchers and wonderful colleagues in several universities across Italy and Germany. In Italy, my sincere appreciation goes to Gennaro Avallone (University of Salerno), Ivano Scotti (University of Molise), Dario Minervini (University of Napoli), Emanuele Leonardi (University of Parma) and Pietro Saitta (University of Messina). In Germany, I thank Rosa Lehman, Fabricio Rodriguez, Malte Lühman and Anne Tittor (University of Jena), and Maria Proestou (Humboldt University of Berlin). Invaluable was the assistance of Marica Di Pierri, Michele Solazzo and Giuseppe Fappiano in organising the fieldwork activities in Italy and Marianne Lotz in translating my interviews in real time to and from German, a wonderful yet very complex language. I cannot thank you enough. A sincere thanks is for to all the staff at the School of Geography. Without the warm and stimulating environment everyone there contributed to keep, those years would have been far harder. Acute insights and relaxing chats came from moments with Glenda, Sara, IV Deidre, Nikèe, Antonio, León, Yi-Min, Sungje, Oguzhan, Marie, Taco, Gabriele, Moteb, Brenda and Budi. A special mention goes to Stefano Azzarà. A friend and an intellectual to whom I owe much of my understanding of historical materialism, the philosophical foundation of this thesis. I am grateful to my friends Lamprini, Alberto, Maria, Tamsin, Arek, Lavinia, Lalo, Zora, Yannis, Efren, Chris, Dayo, Gabriele, Hazvinei, Giancarlo and Fernando. You all made this time unforgettable with your warmth, empathy and compassion. My family, Joe, Giusy, Nancy, Nirvana, Ivan and Anna was and always will be the bedrock on which any strength rests and from which every effort starts. For being my safe harbour, I thank you deeply. Paola, Nina, Filippo, Aurora, Giulia, Silvia, Gianni, Concetta, Domenico and Anna, to you I am wholeheartedly grateful for walking together over these last many years and making me feel at home at every moment. Enza, I do not know if you can see the fruit of your love. But I know that I feel you by my side, minute by minute, step by step. Every measure of my gratitude would be insufficient compared to what I have received from you. And Irene, you gave me your love, your patience and care, your heart beating with mine. Thank you. Without you this work would have been a mountain extremely more arduous to climb. Instead, we are here together and the sun is shining. V List of Tables Table 5.1 Case studies identified at an early research design phase ............................... 108 Table 5.2 Preparatory interviews with experts for case study A ...................................... 111 Table 5.3 List of interviews for case study A ..................................................................... 113 Table 5.4 Preparatory interviews with experts for case study B ...................................... 117 Table 5.5 List of interviews for case study B ..................................................................... 119 Table 6.1 Types of subsidy schemes for renewable energy generation ........................... 136 Table 6.2 Renewable energy levy and burden sharing amongst types of consumers in Italy ........................................................................................................................................... 145 Table 6.3 Renewable energy levy and burden sharing amongst types of consumers in.. 154 Table 7.1 Simulated revenue distribution amongst members of a wind energy territorial alliance .............................................................................................................................. 201 Table 8.1 Simulated revenue distribution amongst members of a biogas territorial alliance ........................................................................................................................................... 236 Contents Abstract .................................................................................................................................. I Acknowledgements .............................................................................................................. III List of Tables .......................................................................................................................... V List of Figures ...................................................................................................................... VII List of Acronyms ................................................................................................................... IX Preface.................................................................................................................................. XI Chapter 1 – Introduction ....................................................................................................... 1 1.1 A preamble: the ecological crises and the greening of capitalism ......................... 1 1.1.1 From early environmentalism to renewable energy transitions: the ‘green’ as an accumulation frontier ............................................................................................... 5 1.2 Rationale, guiding questions, main argument and key contributions ................. 10 1.3 The research epistemological foundation ............................................................ 11 1.3.1 The historical materialist conception of history and space .......................... 11 1.3.2 Defining the key categories of this research: capitalism and ‘green’ capitalism……………………………………………………………………………………………………………….18 1.4 Main argument: renewable energy as ‘green’ capitalism in the making ............. 19 1.5 Thesis outline ........................................................................................................ 21 Chapter 2 – The theories for the ‘greening’ of capitalism: advancing the accumulation frontier ................................................................................................................................ 27 2.1 Introduction .......................................................................................................... 27 2.2 Ecological modernisation: leveraging environment protection as an accumulation growth model .................................................................................................................. 29 2.3 Nature as capital. Political economy debates from nature’s rule to nature’s trading ............................................................................................................................. 32 2.4 The markets for ecosystem y services as a case of ecological modernisation at work............................................................................................................................. 41 2.5 Conclusions........................................................................................................... 45 Chapter 3 – ‘Green’ capitalism I. A hegemonic project in the making ............................... 47 3.1 Introduction.......................................................................................................... 47 3.2 The theoretical framework, an overview ............................................................. 48 3.3 Capitalism without the green ............................................................................... 51 3.3.1 A world of commodities ................................................................................ 52 3.3.2 Labour and value ........................................................................................... 53 3.3.3 Primitive accumulation ................................................................................. 56 3.3.4 Capitalism and Capitals ................................................................................. 58 3.4 Capitalism with the ‘green’: a new story?............................................................ 61 3.4.1 The dialectical unity of nature and labour. A Hegelian explanation ............ 62 3.4.2 The production of nature .............................................................................. 67 3.4.3 The fixes of ‘green’ capitalism as a hegemonic project ................................ 77 3.5 Conclusions........................................................................................................... 84 Chapter 4 – ‘Green’ capitalism II. Spatial dynamics between extractions and competing territorialisation .................................................................................................................. 85 4.1 Introduction.......................................................................................................... 85 4.2 Uneven geographical development, ‘green’ enclaving, and value extraction .... 85 4.2.1 Uneven development and the division of labour at the global and lower scales ................................................................................................................. 86 4.2.2 Enclaving, extractivism and the ‘greening’ ................................................... 88 4.2.3 Value-extraction chains from local to global ................................................ 90 4.2.4 The territorially based alliance between capital mobility and immobility ... 91 4.3 The territory between spatial abstractions and ‘green’ extractions ................... 93 4.3.1 Space: the mode of existence of social relations .......................................... 93 4.3.2 Space abstraction between power, counterpower and accumulation ........ 95 4.4 ‘Green’ capitalism at work: the grabbing of territory ........................................ 101 4.5 Conclusions ......................................................................................................... 102 Chapter 5 – Methodology ................................................................................................. 103 5.1 Introduction ........................................................................................................ 103 5.2 Research ideation, design and key questions .................................................... 103 5.2.1 Ideation ....................................................................................................... 104 5.2.2 Design and guiding questions ..................................................................... 105 5.3 Case studies and data collection ........................................................................ 108 5.3.1 Case study identification and structuring ................................................... 108 5.3.2 Case study A – data collection on wind energy in southern Italy ............... 110 5.3.3 Case study B – data collection on wind energy in east-Germany ............... 116 5.3.4 Data analysis................................................................................................ 122 5.4 Ethical and positionality aspects of this research .............................................. 123 5.4.1 Ethical aspects and actions to address them .............................................. 123 5.4.2 Reflections on my positionality ................................................................... 124 5.5 Conclusions ......................................................................................................... 125 Chapter 6 – Ecological modernisation and renewable energy governance in the EU and the case study national contexts ............................................................................................. 127 6.1 Introduction ........................................................................................................ 127 6.2 Ecological modernisation in the EU .................................................................... 127 6.2.1 From costly burden to accumulation horizon: the ‘environment’ in the Environmental Action Programmes of the EU ........................................................... 128 6.2.2 The EU’s governance of renewable energy generation .............................. 131 6.3 Ecological modernisation in Italy and wind energy generation: a top-down contested process ......................................................................................................... 139 6.3.1 Alternative energies as a contested field ................................................... 140 6.3.2 The institutionalisation of renewables as a source of energy and profit ... 142 6.4 Ecological modernisation in Germany and biogas generation: a convergence of interests ......................................................................................................................... 146 6.4.1 Biogas and agriculture: a long-lasting functional relation .......................... 146 6.4.2 Alternative energies alternative worlds: environmentalism and anti-nuclear movements ................................................................................................................ 148 6.4.3 Biogas and renewable energies as a strategic policy area ......................... 150 6.4.4 Between ordoliberalism and social market economy: Germany’s way to capitalism ................................................................................................................... 155 6.5 Conclusions......................................................................................................... 156 Chapter 7 – Value extraction in and around wind energy in the Italian southern Apennine ........................................................................................................................................... 157 7.1 Introduction........................................................................................................ 157 7.2 Between marginality and sustained accumulation: a socio-historical account of the research context ..................................................................................................... 158 7.2.1 Basic facts about the fieldwork region and the Mezzogiorno .................... 159 7.2.2 Evidence of a divide .................................................................................... 161 7.2.3 Social structures and accumulation patterns: the historical geography of the north-south divide ..................................................................................................... 163 7.2.4 Southern lands in the Italian capitalism: from a class struggle arena to a financialised investment asset .................................................................................. 166 7.2.5 The Irpinia earthquake ................................................................................ 169 7.3 The political economy and ecology of wind energy generation in the Italian southern Apennine ........................................................................................................ 172 7.3.1 Italian wind energy: a southern affair ......................................................... 172 7.3.2 The territorially based alliance and value extraction chain around wind energy ............................................................................................................... 173 7.3.3 Investment strategies in an uncertain regulatory framework .................... 179 7.3.4 Land appropriation, nature commodification ............................................ 192 7.3.5 Value distribution patterns ......................................................................... 199 7.3.6 From a rural to an industrial district: ‘green’ transformations as territory grabbing ...................................................................................................... 202 7.4 Conclusions ......................................................................................................... 206 Chapter 8 – Value extraction in and around agricultural biogas in Brandenburg and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern .............................................................................................. 209 8.1 Introduction ........................................................................................................ 209 8.2 The fieldwork region as an extractive enclave ................................................... 210 8.2.1 A marginal territory in a marginal macro-region ........................................ 211 8.2.2 Biogas on East-Germany cheap and concentrate land: old concentrations and new appropriations .................................................................................................... 215 8.3 The political economy and ecology of biogas generation in Brandenburg and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern ........................................................................................... 221 8.3.1 The biogas miracle in Germany ................................................................... 222 8.3.2 Between agriculture and renewable energy: Biogas as a territorial alliance....................................................................................................... 224 8.3.3 Biogas generation: a driver to land abstraction and financialization ......... 229 8.3.4 Surplus value distribution and uneven development ................................. 236 8.3.5 The abstraction of the fieldwork region into a horizon for ‘green’ accumulation as territory grabbing ........................................................................... 241 8.4 Conclusions ......................................................................................................... 246 Chapter 9 – Discussions and conclusions: renewable energy as ‘green’ capitalism at work ........................................................................................................................................... 249 9.1 Introduction........................................................................................................ 249 9.2 Territorialised accumulation: cooperation in a rentier regime ......................... 250 9.2.1 A composite form of rent as a revenue source .......................................... 250 9.2.2 Territorial marginality as a cost-effectiveness enhancer ........................... 252 9.2.3 Territorially based alliances and the excluded ........................................... 252 9.3 Land enclosure and grabbing, from formal to real abstraction ......................... 254 9.4 Socioecological transformations and territory grabbing ................................... 256 9.4.1 Alterations to landscape and biophysical processes .................................. 256 9.4.2 Reconfiguration of the socioeconomic fabric and class dynamics ............. 257 9.4.3 Reframing risk and efficiency: political subjectivation and contestation ... 258 9.4.4 Territory grabbing – a full definition ........................................................... 259 9.5 Renewable energy generation: ‘green’ capitalism at work ............................... 261 9.5.1 Structural inequalities as an accumulation condition ................................ 261 9.5.2 Concealing inequalities through ‘sustainability by definition’ ................... 263 9.5.3 A hegemonic project in the making: uneven development and ‘green’ capitalism ................................................................................................................... 264 9.6 Final considerations and future directions ........................................................ 266 Appendix A – Questions for semi-structured interviews with project stake holders. ..... 271 Appendix B – Modelling of two wind energy generation projects in Italy ....................... 279 References ........................................................................................................................ 281 Chapter 1 – Introduction “I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is.” Greta Thunberg’s address to the World Economic Forum's Annual Meeting in Davos, 2019 *** “Electrification will be the answer to climate change” Auke Lont, chief executive of Statnett, Norway’s state grid company, interviewed by the Financial Times, 2021 *** “The European Green Deal is our new growth strategy” Ursula Von Der Leyen, press remarks on the occasion of the adoption of the European Green Deal Communication, 2019 1.1 A preamble: the ecological crises and the greening of capitalism This research was conducted and written at the end of the 2011-2020 decade, the warmest on record. 2020 was the worst year so far, with an average temperature 1.2 (± 0.1) °C higher than between 1850-1900, considered by the World Meteorological Organisation as a preindustrial benchmark. Intense droughts, storms, heat waves, disappearing glaciers, melting polar ices, and rising sea levels are all effects of a climate crisis which has just begun to show its daunting face. Every year that passes, it knocks on the doors of our cities more insistently -with floods, huge wildfires and a whole arsenal of extreme events whose dynamics and intensity are predicted with improving precision. The climate crisis is real, is here to stay and is not alone. It comes with a capillary pollution and widespread ecological disturbances, provoked by all the contaminants and materials that the current mode of production has simply dumped into the ecosystem, a biodiversity loss accelerating at vertiginous rates and an equally fast and concerning soil artificialisation. What we are 2 witnessing is actually the unfolding of multiple ecological crises at the global scale. Not only are they threatening the ‘natural’ world -they imperil human society too, for human society is part of nature. Climate change is but the most concerning and overarching of their interrelated dynamics. Its scenarios will vary greatly depending on whether the governments of the Global North, China, India and Russia will act timely and effectively to keep temperatures between 1.5 and 2 °C above the preindustrial benchmark or let them rise above 2 °C. The multiple ecological crises do not affect everyone with the same intensity, a truth hard to deny. Social inequalities are already exacerbating their effects and in turn being exacerbated by them. For instance, with warmer temperatures the habitats of diseases like malaria, dengue fever, chikungunya and West Nile virus are expected to stably change and broaden. Worsened morbidity rates will hit the poorest harder, as they already do, and those without access to good hygiene, sanitation and health care. And it will increase mortality rates amongst them. A destroyed climate is also changing the patterns of rainfall, heat and cold. As a result, in the next decades, the productive capacity of continental food systems, like the sub-Saharans, will be seriously endangered, with the concrete risk of food security and sovereignty being disintegrated for hundreds of millions. Whole populations will be able to defend their right to a safe and comfortable life only by migrating. In short, the ecological crises are and will be social and political crises. Where do these crises come from? Mass deforestations since the 16th century, intensive burning of fossil fuels since the 18th century and ecosystem contaminations throughout are epiphenomena of much deeper socioecological dynamics. The current fashion is to view these dynamics through the concept of Anthropocene, proposed by Crutzen and Stoermer (2000). Basing on the detectable atmospheric, geologic, hydrologic and biosphere permanent alterations unquestionably attributable to human activity since the industrial revolutions, the two scientists argue that the current period is a new geological era, that of the Anthropos. The concept has fast crossed the border of academic debate, gaining notoriety to the wider public, thanks to its efficacy in describing the impact and magnitude of human-made alterations. 3 Yet, the category poses substantial problems to social sciences. By indicating the Anthropos as responsible for the ecological multiple crises it naturalises and depoliticizes unevenly distributed responsibilities along class, race and gender cleavages. This thesis takes a different stance. Its underlying theoretical framework holds that the ecological crises are not to be blamed on humans in the abstract, who would unleash them because of their myopic and improvident nature. Following a historical-materialist approach, the thesis maintains that the crises originate from the social relations inherent in capitalism, which maximises the exploitation of both human labour and ecosystems in order to sustain ‘accumulation for accumulation’s sake and production for production’s sake’ (Marx, 1976). From this standpoint, the ecological crises are historically and geographically rooted within class, race, and gender privilege. They are the poisoned gift of a mode of production -capitalismthat has increased social wealth to a level hitherto unknown in human history. By reinvesting and incessantly revolutionising its own productive and organisational capacity, capitalism has appropriated and converted ever greater matter and energy, including human labour, into enormous quantities of commodities. And yet, this has come with huge social and ecological costs. On the one hand, uncontrollable quantities of entropic matter such as Green House Gases (GHGs) and pollutants (Georgescu-Roegen, 1971) have been dispersed along capitalism’s historical geography. On the other, accumulation has been sustained through forcible appropriations of land and ecosystem resources leaving hundreds of millions deprived from their material conditions of subsistence and transforming them into wage-labourers, ‘free’ to sell the sole commodity they own, labour power, to those who control the means of production, capitalists (Marx, 1976; Wallerstein, 2004a; Moore, 2015). The exploitation of wage-labour is not the only and -to some extentthe worst of human labour appropriations by capital, as it has been constantly intertwined with slavery and other forms of forced and unpaid labour, included women’s domestic work. The division of labour amongst classes has come to mirror a division of labour amongst regions and countries of the world, evolved from colonialism and imperialism to neo-colonial and postcolonial unequal exchange and dependency (Wallerstein, 2004; Moore, 2015). Aligned to a similar line of reasoning, Donna Haraway (2017) and Jason Moore (2015), although through distinct paths, come equally to conclude that academic and political 10 consequence of such an abstraction process, the universalist and very concrete purpose that renewable sources may serve - to decarbonise the ecosystem and preserve human and non-human life - is definitively conflated with the abstract universalism underlying market ‘rationality’ -tended solely to quantify and abstract the real into an ever-expanding accumulation frontier. In the final analysis, renewable energy transitions based on the principles of ecological modernisation and neoliberal governance can be read as an example of how environmental concerns and contestations, initially emerged as a delimited negation of capitalism, became sublated into its universal -this time ‘green’- assertion. 1.2 Rationale, guiding questions, main argument and key contributions The preamble hints at two central questions: what are the processes through which a ‘green’ capitalism can translate the ecological crises into an opportunity for more accumulation? And with what effects in terms of spatiotemporal organisation and socioecological transformations? Seen through the lens of historical materialism, these questions reflect the curiosity and interests which have fuelled the intellectual effort underpinning this thesis. Providing an answer to them is in fact its overarching purpose. In empirical terms, the research main goal is to investigate the extraction and accumulation of surplus value as it takes place in and around the generation of renewable energy at the scale of production areas or territories (see chapter 4), the enclosure and transformative processes it triggers, the class and factional cooperation, or conflict, patterns it entails, and the governance processes to which it is associated in terms of both institutional structures and hegemonic narratives. Methodologically, it combines a comprehensive theoretical elaboration on ‘green’ capitalism and its spatial dynamics, with a case study analysis of two renewable energy production systems located in southern Italy and eastern Germany, respectively wind energy and agricultural biogas. As said, these are two marginal regions within a centre of global capitalism, the European Union. Observing their integration into unequal exchange patterns allows to explore how ‘green’ accumulation and uneven geographical development interplay. 11 In order to achieve its main goal, this research theoretical and empirical investigation is oriented by four questions: - How it is possible to understand the consolidation of the governance systems regulating renewable energy transitions in the EU and national contexts and regions of the case studies through the historical materialist categories of sublation (refunctionalisation) and hegemony? - How can we interpret the extraction and accumulation of surplus value in and around renewable energy in terms of the socially necessary labour time theory of value? What are the implied distribution, cooperation and conflict patterns amongst class and class factions and groups? - How does the enclosing of ecosystem spaces (lands), stocks and flows targeted for renewable energy generation take place? Is force organised through legal frameworks, physical violence or market mechanisms, or a combination of the three? - How does the extraction and accumulation of surplus value in and around renewable energy transform socioecological relations in the production areas, in terms of class relations and space and nature commodification (abstraction)? 1.3 The research epistemological foundation This section discusses historical materialism as the epistemological foundation of this research and clarifies how it has informed the research questions and the overall research process. It is organised into two subsections. The first provides a broad presentation of historical materialism and introduces the core categories upon which the research theoretical and empirical analysis has been developed, such as mode of production, division of labour, class, hegemony and the production of space. The second section provides a working definition for capitalism and ‘green’ capitalism, which will be refined in the course of this work. 1.3.1 The historical materialist conception of history and space Historical materialism as a philosophical tradition offers a universalist yet concrete interpretation of society and history. It therefore allows to study social relations, and the material conditions through which they live, as part of a totality, whereby they are determined 12 and which they contribute to determine. According to historical materialism, social relations do not exist in the abstract but in the historicity of the dialectic between forces and relations of production. The dialectical ontology and gnoseology of historical materialism allow to understand geo-historical phenomena through their relationship with a becoming whole, which in its turn can be interpreted precisely because of the unicity of those phenomena. For this very reason, this thesis uses historical materialism to study the specificity of the socioecological relations in and around renewable energy generation and, concurrently, contextualise them within capitalism’s historical geography. From a historical materialist perspective, human societies, including their spatiality, are structured around the organisation of material life and the patterns of power, domination, and inequality this implies. These are not intended as natural facts, but rather as historical, therefore transient, formations. In a similar manner, historical materialist categories are powerful instruments through which to pierce the veil of the abstracting and technicalising rationality that characterise the policy and investment discourses around renewable energy transitions. They make the social relations characterising the extraction and accumulation of surplus value in and around renewable energy generation readable historically, in terms of difference and conflict, privilege and inequality, inclusion and exclusion. For a better understanding of historical materialism as an epistemology, we will now delve succinctly into its major categories. As a philosophical tradition, it is founded on the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Although never explicitly mentioned in any of the works the two co-authored, nor in any that Marx alone authored, a delineation of the concept appeared for the first time in “The German ideology”, a set of manuscripts published posthumously (1970). By reframing Fichte and Hegel’s idealism as well as Feuerbach naturalistic materialism, historical materialism posits humans as creating, and being created by, the material conditions of their existence. Confined within the limitations imposed by nature to their existence, first and foremost the laws of physics, humans produce their material, therefore intellectual, life historically and geographically through a socially regulated metabolic exchange with nature. They so transform - produce à la Smith (2008) - nature and in so doing transform themselves, creating commodities and social structures which are the reified appearance of underlying social relations. From this perspective the ecological crises become the expression of capitalism’s social relations, instead of being the effect 13 of an innate human character. Put differently, they are Capitalogenic rather than Anthropogenic (Moore, 2015; Haraway, 2016). Let us examine Marx and Engel’s own words: “The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organisation of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature. [Humans] can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence [emphasis added], a step which is conditioned by their physical organisation. By producing their means of subsistence [Humans] are indirectly producing their actual material life” (Marx and Engels, 1970 p. 42) As the quote indicates, it is through a material exchange with “the rest of nature” mediated by the capability to “produce their means of subsistence”, or means of production (Marx, 1976), that humans lay the conditions for breaking natural causality and therefore for history to take place. That capability is labour, “a process between man and nature, a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature”, as Marx will explain in “Capital” years later (idem p. 283). Over time, the material organisation of life evolves according to the technological development of the means of production and the socially set rules that preside to their use, or the forces and relations of production (Marx, 1911; 1976). These combinations result into historical modes of productions, such as feudalism or capitalism are. A mode of production, however, designates more than the mere “[…] production of the physical existence of the individuals. Rather it is a definite form of activity of […] individuals, a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life [emphasis added]” (Marx and Engels, 1970 p. 42) By organising their material existence, humans produce life, including its intellectual and cultural determinations, not only through “procreation” but also through labour, that is a “social relationship” (ibidem). Marx and Engels explain that the adjective “social” indicates a relationship of 14 “[…] co-operation [emphasis added] of several individuals, no matter under what conditions, in what manner and to what end. It follows from this that a certain mode of production, or industrial stage [emphasis added], is always combined with a certain mode of co-operation, or social stage [emphasis added], and this mode of co-operation is itself a «productive force». […] the multitude of productive forces accessible to [humans] determines the nature of society, hence […] the history of humanity must always be studied and treated in relation to the history of industry and exchange” (idem p. 50) Every mode of production organises social cooperation through a distinct division of labour, which “determines […] the relations of individuals to one another with reference to the material, instrument, and product of labour” (idem p. 43). Any historical form of the division of labour corresponds to equally distinct forms of ownership and class relations. For instance, in the feudal society the main forms of ownership were landed property controlled by aristocracy, which commanded peasantry or serfs’ labour and the ownership of urban-located productive capital by craftsmen, organised in guilds, and exploiting apprentices and journeymen’s labour. Differently, under capitalism the affirmation of the wagerelation is mirrored by the expansion of capital private ownership -particularly industrial capital, and the relative decline of landed aristocracy (see chapter 3). A capitalist organisation of social cooperation, and exploitation, is structured around the main two social classes of capitalists and wage-labourers. We should also consider that every form of ownership over the means of production is first and foremost a form of ownership over nature 4 , which are the primary source of the means and object of labour (see chapter 3). It follows that every mode of production is a way of organising the material exchange with nature through labour, that is to say a way to organise nature, establishing itself as an ecology (Moore, 2017; 2015), producing specific socionature(s), socioecological relations and socioecological crises (see chapter 3). In conclusion, from a historical materialist perspective the relation between society and nature appears as inextricably interwoven and dialectically co-constructive. In this thesis, such an interpretation has been core to exploring the extraction and accumulation of surplus value in and around renewable energy, from class and factional cleavages to processes enclosing ecosystem spaces, flows and stocks, and, 4 Unless otherwise noted, the term nature is used in the course of this work to indicate ecosystem spaces, stocks and flows. Renewable energy sources are categorised as abiotic flows or biotic services (see chapter 2). 15 on the other hand, to comprehending the socio ecological transformations involved. Along similar lines, it has been crucial to the theorisation of ‘green’ capitalism advanced in chapter 3. Taking this discussion further on, we can contend that every mode of production, charactered by a distinct division of labour and dominant form of ownership, reflects a social relation, between ruling classes, controlling the means of production, that is the material conditions of existence, and subaltern classes. Not only does the division of labour reflect the differences amongst classes and functional relations amongst productive sectors. It also determines the “relations of different nations to one another” (Marx and Engels, 1970 p. 43). Marx and Engels introduce here an important understanding of the international and geo-political implications of the division of labour which will be developed later by dependency and unequal exchange theories, and particularly by Emmanuel Wallerstein’s work (2004b). The international perspective of the division of labour is also foundational in the literature around extractivism. In the course of this research, all these bodies of literature have been fundamental in investigating the function and positioning of the case study regions within the division of labour at the national or higher scales. It is important to notice that in controlling the means of production, the ruling classes also control the production of the “ruling ideas”, which “in every epoch” are the “ideas of the ruling class”. That is to say that “the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force” (Marx and Engels, 1970 p. 64). This consideration will be further developed into conceiving human society as organised into material structures and political and ideological superstructures, that Marx expressed synthetically in the preface to “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy” (1911). The ideological predominance of the ruling class was also analysed by Lenin, who contended through it that the proletariat needed to overcome an ‘economistic’ vision and universalise its ideology to the entire society, by strengthening its hegemony through alliances with other subaltern classes (Lenin and Cox, 1911; see also Shandro, 2014). Gramsci extended this analysis to a general theory of hegemony, opposing versions of historical materialism positing a unidirectional relation from the structure over the superstructure, which he dubbed as ‘economistic’ (Gramsci, 1975; Cospito, 2016). 16 Through the category of hegemony Gramsci explained the importance of the ideological, cultural and intellectual dimensions in the historical dialectic and reframed the relation between the material structure (the forces and relations of production) and the cultural, political and ideological superstructures within historical materialism. To understand hegemony, we need to differentiate the act of ruling [dirigere] from that of governing and by extension the ambit of civil society from that of political society (idem). By governing, a dominating class controls the coercive and repressive power of the State, the political society. Differently, by ruling it shapes and leads the civil society. This is composed of private organisations which do not pertain to the state public sphere. Amongst them we find parties, trade unions, lobbying organisations, private or privatised research and education institutions, religious organisations and the press. A fundamental role is played by intellectuals, who -as an organic expression of a classguide and personify these organisations and enable the dominating class to control the civil society. Through such a process, a class can universalise its ideology and win the subaltern classes’ consensus. Under capitalism, hegemony ensures that subaltern classes peacefully and willingly perform the social functions necessary to both sustain accumulation and perpetuate the capitalist class domination. The control of both the state and civil society gives the dominating class hegemony. Upon this, an organic relationship (idem) between the structure and superstructure can be built and, through the convergence of the socio-economic, socio-political and military supremacy, lead to a historical block which finds political expression into the integral state, inclusive of both the political and civil society. If the dominating class loses its ideological and cultural ruling capability and resorts to the sole use of the coercing government functions, then its hegemony will crumble and an organic crisis will endanger the relationship between structure and superstructure. Under capitalism, Gramsci explains that the proletariat can erode such organic relationship through a war of position, that is a slow and molecular process building an anti-capitalist -and socialistsocial front, with other subaltern classes, through cultural, political and ideological lead, and seek to definitively hegemonize society in view of a war of manoeuvre, the actual revolution. The postulation of hegemony as depending on the deliberate initiative of public and private apparatuses derives from the historical-materialist conception of history as a struggle amongst classes. Hegemony, in other words, is not given. It is rather a process which needs to be consciously nurtured if the dominating class is to maintain its grip on society or a subaltern class is to 17 break it. Gramscian categories of hegemony and historical block have been particularly important in analysing the consolidation of renewable energy governance systems in the EU and the national contexts and regions of case studies, and specifically to explaining the re-functionalisation of early environmentalist critique and contestation into re-legitimation framework of the capitalist mode of production. We are now sufficiently equipped to argue that from a historical materialist perspective, history is a succession of different modes of production, expression of the class struggle as it unfolds through a dialectic between material structure and cultural, political, and ideological superstructures 5 . Every mode of production defines the conditions within which a specific epoque can develop. In “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon”, Karl Marx explains that “[Humans] make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like an Alp on the brains of the living” (2009b p. 1) This apparently contradictory character of the historical process, whereby humans are simultaneously determining and determined by historical -therefore naturalconditions given to their existence, points to a dialectical conception of history which Marx takes from Hegel. All the analysis, both empirical and theoretical, carried out in the present research and thesis build on a Hegelian dialectic logic and ontology. On the one hand, its arguments are constructed first in the abstract through theoretical inquiry and critical analysis of empirical cases found in relevant literature. They are then elaborated, through an empirical critique building on direct observation and multiple iterative rounds of theoretical elaboration, into a synthesis. On the other, all the observed phenomena, both those discussed only theoretically and the case studies, are conceived as resulting from and creating a historical dialectic in the long durée. The foundations of Hegel’s dialectic are outlined in chapter 3. 5 It is important to notice that history should be intended as marked by impurity and overlapping, whereby social relations -and their objectificationsfrom previous modes of production survive into the next one. 18 A final consideration on the spatial dimension of historical materialism closes this epistemological premiss. If social existence is dialectically determined first and foremost by the organisation of material life, then the materiality of social relations has two ontological constituents: time and space (see Harvey, 2018 p. xix). In fact, the social relations that preside to material life, that is to say all social relations, cannot exist but as happening through time and grounded in space. This is therefore where social relations exit the dreamy world of abstraction and enter the concreteness of their becoming as produced space. Essential to this is Henry Lefebvre’s work. In his own words: “There is one question which has remained open in the past because it has never been asked: what exactly is the mode of existence of social relationships [emphasis added]? Are they substantial? natural? or formally abstract? The study of space offers an answer according to which the social relations of production have a social existence to the extent that they have a spatial existence [emphasis added]; they project themselves into a space, becoming inscribed there, and in the process producing that space itself” (Lefebvre and Nicholson-Smith, 1991 p. 129) Hence, space is “the mode of existence” of social relations. Out of space, social relations “would remain in the realm of «pure» abstraction” (ibidem). A historical materialist conception of space as socially produced has informed the thesis theorisation and analysis of the social and spatial transformations 6 , triggered by renewable energy generation under capitalism (see chapter 4). 1.3.2 Defining the key categories of this research: capitalism and ‘green’ capitalism With historical materialism as an epistemological framework, this thesis draws on capitalism and ‘green’ capitalism as core categories. While they are part of its epistemology, they are also an outcome of its theoretical and analytical elaboration. Of them, this subsection presents only the epistemological aspects which have served as instruments to the 6 The centrality of space as an analytical category in the analysis of social relations, and specifically capitalism, has led a number of scholars, including David Harvey, to suggest a reformulation of historical materialism into historical-geographical materialism. Although the analytical process upon which the present research and thesis build is fully grounded on a spatial conception of social relations, the term historical-materialism is preferred throughout this text, with the intent of facilitating the reception of the latter within the wider and transdisciplinary currents of historical-materialism. 19 research process, while other elements resulting from the research process itself will be presented in chapter 3. Capitalism is here intended as an historically situated mode of production tended to the perpetual accumulation of surplus-value. The latter becomes capital as long as it is reinvested perpetually and its characteristic of being value in motion maintained intact. Surplus value is created by labourers through labour, by which they transform use values (ecosystem spaces, stock and flows or qualities) appropriated from nature into commodities, which as a consequence embody an exchange value (a quantity), tradable for money, the universal equivalent (Marx, 1976; Ricardo, 1891). Thanks to the private ownership of the means of production, capitalists appropriate surplus-value from labourers who can only live by selling their labour for a wage. In order to appropriate larger shares of surplus value, capitalists continuously seek to increase labour productivity by investing in organisational and technological change (Marx, 1976; see also chapter 3). This has developed capitalism’s force of production immensely and allowed to extend its ecology or produced nature to the entire globe (Smith, 2008; Moore, 2015; Lefebvre and Nicholson-Smith, 1991; see also chapter 3 and 4). This ‘peaceful’ accumulation process is accompanied by a more overtly violent accumulation by dispossession, entailing the more or less explicit use of force to privatise ecosystem spaces, stocks and flows, as well as other portions of the social wealth, to be converted into capital (Harvey, 2005a). ‘Green’ capitalism is assumed as a hegemonic process in the making. Its success would strengthen capitalism’s resilience to the worsening ecological crises (Ekers and Prudham, 2017; 2018). It would also protect, at least temporarily, the socioecological relations underlaying capitalism from the loss of legitimacy and hence hegemony correlated with the crises. 1.4 Main argument: renewable energy as ‘green’ capitalism in the making The main argument of this thesis is that the extraction and accumulation of surplus value in and around the generation of renewable energy can be regarded as a case of ‘green’ capitalism at work. The thesis maintains that under capitalism the generation of renewable energy expands accumulation frontiers over not yet or ‘inefficiently’ commodified spaces and natures. This process implies the privatisation of ecosystem spaces, biotic services and Chapter 2 – The theories for the ‘greening’ of capitalism: advancing the accumulation frontier 2.1 Introduction How have we come to speak of a ‘green’, ‘ecological’ or ‘environmental' capitalism? And how is it possible that words such as ‘green’, ‘ecological’ or ‘environmental’ have become a suitable adjective for growth, economy or capitalism? These questions are unavoidable if policy initiatives, markets and investments devised, launched or already operating under ‘green’ credentials (Fairhead et al., 2012), such as the transitions towards renewable energy, are to be fully understood. This chapter aims at providing the theoretical instruments needed to answer them and so prepare the discussion that will follow in the next two chapters about the possibility of a ‘green’ capitalism, through the lens of historical materialism. By focusing on a theoretical corpus here defined as the theories for the greening of capitalism (TFGCs), the chapter shows how consistent and more or less specialised debates, within academia -across, sociology, geography and mainstream economicsbut also amongst national and international institutions and private players, have reframed the ‘environment’ and environmentalism as a frontier for private accumulation growth and legitimation rationale. On closer inspection, the TFGCs appear as an attempt to embed an ecological rationality within the social relations of capitalism and so modernise it as a mode of production and system of governance (Jänicke, 2020). In the last three decades TFGCs’ impact has been immense and not only in terms of literature production. When confronted with the mass of global initiatives and the diffusion of policies pivoting on market-based measures for a transition towards a ‘greener’ economy, or comparably towards ecological modernization, sustainable or ‘green’ growth, hardly can the economic performances be understated. In 2018, the whole of the ‘green’ economy was estimated to be worth more than 4 trillion USD and weigh 5 to 6 percent of the global equity market. Of it, more than 56 percent is concentrated in energy related activities, from generation to efficiency enhancing (Clements et al., 2020). If we narrow the focus down onto renewable energy, according to IRENA in 2019 some 11.5 million of people were employed in any of the 28 segments of the renewable value chains (IRENA, 2020). REN21, an influential global think tank, finds that 179 countries had set national renewable energy targets by 2017 (REN21, 2020). Many such countries increased those targets several times. And still, by 2023, the World Bank forecasts that investment in clean technology will peak up to 6.4 trillion USD in developing countries (Jänicke, 2020). Yet, this does not seem to have meaningful effects on the mitigation of ecological multiple crises. World average temperature is rising fast. A report sponsored by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services showed that 20 percent of terrestrial native species have disappeared since 1900 with at least 1000 species threatened by extinction (IPBES, 2019). On the other hand, many ‘green’ economy projects are faced with contrasting reactions. Communities living nearby wind or photovoltaic plants, or also energy crop cultivations, are often split between opponents and supporters, depending on the patterns distributing benefits and burdens amongst their members. Still, indigenous populations, inhabiting areas where some biotic or abiotic ecosystem service is exploited, are exposed to grabbing, appropriations and expulsions (Gilbert, 2016). Despite these contradictions, if there is a common stance unifying TFGCs is that a ‘green’ turn of capitalism is still possible (Jänicke, 2008; Jänicke, 2020; Huber, 2000). This is based on four assumptions. First, similarly to ordinary commodities, ecosystem flows, stocks and spaces have a use value by reason of their utility, and an exchange value, by reason of their tradability. By extension the entire ecosystem has both a use and an exchange value. Second, current models of industrial production and distribution disrupt both ecosystem use and exchange value. Therefore, they are ecologically and economically unsustainable. Third, it is precisely by factorising ecosystem exchange value within the production function that its use value can be protected, and by consequence environmental sustainability ensured. Forth and most importantly, factorising ecosystem exchange value allows to leave capitalist relations of production undisturbed and in fact broadens them by generating new – ‘green’- growth. This chapter explores the TFGC through three sections. The first explains ecological modernisation foundations and its double character of political programme and social theory. The second offers an in-depth description of the debates around the ‘value’ of nature and the functions it plays, or might play if ‘efficiently’ exploited, in production. Towards this 29 purpose it focuses on the notions of natural capital and ecosystem accounting. The third illustrates how the practical applications of ecological modernisation and ecosystem accounting theories expand accumulation horizons. 2.2 Ecological modernisation: leveraging environment protection as an accumulation growth model If the identification of the environment as a policy area is preluded by a multilateral diplomacy (see chapter 1), its full institutionalisation has been prepared by a sociological and theoretical debate merged into a framework known as ecological modernisation. As this section shows, ecological modernisation implies a reframing of the sustainable development category, while underlays the subsequent notions of ‘green’ economy and ‘green’ new deal, both shortly presented at the section end. Sustainable development as it is formulated in the Brundtland report (Brundtland et al., 1987) mainstreamed in the international debate the idea that economic and environmental policy should be integrated into a homogeneous framework. Yet, clear indications on how to translate that into a working system of governance were lacking. In other words, as Gert Spaargaren and Arthur Mol noticed, “the concept of sustainable development [was] based more on opinions than on scientifically based ideas”. A “more analytical and sociological concept” was needed if capitalism was to be modernized in ecological terms (Spaargaren and Mol, 1992 p. 333). An early modernisation attempt was made by the Japanese government, which, in 1974, in the wake of the 1973 oil crisis, advanced the notion of knowledge intensive economy. As an innovation framework, that was meant to ease the country’s dependency on imported energy, by increasing overall efficiency and also mitigate economy ecological impact (for an overview see Han and Lakshmanan, 1994). This example had a significant influence on scholars, especially, sociologists with an interest in environmental issues. A circle which developed a particularly fertile discussion gathered around the Berlin school for environmental policy research. A background was the discontent about the environmental policies in western states and specifically west-Germany (officially known as the BDR or German Federal Republic). Being questioned was an overall conception about the role of the state 30 based on end of pipe and command and control rationalities, whereby environmental measures played a repressive function, aiming merely at repairing damages rather than preventing them (Hajer, 1997). Such a line of argument resonated with the mounting neoliberal criticism against the pervasive role that the state had played in capitalist economies up until the 1970s. A generally increased economic efficiency could come, neoliberals argued, from the withdrawal of the state from the economy, so making space for markets to self-regulate (Mol and Jänicke, 2009). With this background, Martin Jänicke, a sociologist and then west-Germany MP, in a 1982 speech before the west-Berlin parliament advanced the category of ecological modernization. His immediate goal was to criticise Helmut Kohl’s government’s economic policy, arguing that it should be modernised ecologically. The term, which would soon be published in “Preventive Environmental Policy as Ecological Modernisation and Structural Policy”(Jänicke, 1984), appeared initially to label no more than a political approach. A few years before, another sociologist, Joseph Huber, advanced the cognate category of industrial ecology in a book titled “The Lost Innocence of Ecology, New Technologies, and SuperIndustrial Development”(1982). The ecological modernization of capitalism could come, following Huber, from ecologically oriented innovations of industrial policies. Such a modernisation process would disrupt the previous technology regime and system of governance, and replace them with greener ones 8 (Spaargaren and Mol, 1992; Mol and Jänicke, 2009). A major contribution towards establishing ecological modernisation as a thorough social theory came from Mol and Spaargaren’s work (Spaargaren and Mol, 1992; Mol and Spaargaren, 2000; Mol and Jänicke, 2009), which reframed the category of ecological rationality, introduced earlier by John Dryzek (1983; 2013). Differently from the latter, who conceived the category as inextricably interrelating environmentalist action and broader social change, Mol and Spaargaren argue for the “growing independence of the ecological sphere and rationality” (Mol and Spaargaren, 2000 p. 35). This way, the ‘need to protect the environment’ could be isolated from radical social and political implications and re8 This can be read as a reinterpretation of the classical Marxian and Schumpeterian assumption whereby creative destruction is capitalism’s major innovative -and revolutionarycapacity. Therefore, from changes in the productive structure, political modernization would follow. 31 functionalised compatibly with the wider capitalist production relations and system of governance, ‘sanitising’ the conflictual and ideological incrustations of environmentalist debates layered since the 1960s. As a consequence, Mol and Spaargaren could contend that capitalism “does not necessarily contradict significant environmental improvements and reforms”, since it would be an ideological bias to believe that “more production and consumption” might necessarily “have to imply more environmental devastation (pollution, energy use, loss of biodiversity)” (idem p. 36). The process of separation and re-functionalisation of the ecological rationality was instrumental to the normalisation and co-optation of part of the environmental movement within the principles of neoliberal governance. Increasingly, a number of international environmentalist NGOs endorsed an ecomodernist vision, abandoning a conception of environmentalism based on voluntary work, mass participation and contestations, caution towards capital and governments, and tendency to generate counter-knowledges. They rather professionalised, shifting towards an organisational model based on small teams of specialised employees, and a participation based on subscription and donation for nonspecialised audience and good attitude towards cooperation with private capital and public institutions in policy making (for a comprehensive overview see Mol et al., 2009). Today ecological modernisation is a well-recognised theoretical framework and a widespread policy approach that has underlain the emergence of fast expanding economic sectors such as renewable energy production and carbon trading. Jänicke (2020) ascribes its success precisely to the fact that it is an interest-driven approach rather than a normativedriven one. Since its pioneering phase, ecological modernisation is conceived as an attempt at dialogue between ecology and economy, denying the former priority over the latter (Mol et al., 2009). A cognate notion to ecological modernization is that of ‘green’ economy. Its first formulation traces back to a study commissioned in 1989 by the UK’s government to ascertain whether there was a consensus definition on sustainable development, entitled “Blueprint for a Green Economy” (see the updated edition: Barbier and Markandya, 2013). The term was used again by Michael Jacobs in his ‘‘The green economy: Environment, sustainable development and the politics of the future’’ (1993). The notion popularity raised amidst international initiatives to boost the recovery after the 2007 and 2008 financial crises. In 32 2008, UNEP launched the Green Economy Initiative (GEI) “to assist governments in greening their economies by reshaping and refocusing policies, investments and spending towards a range of sectors” 9 based on clean technologies and environmentally minded management. In light of its goals the GEI sponsored a report published in 2009, the “Global Green New Deal” 10 . The ‘green’ new deal is yet another notion floating in the public debate to signify a rather vaguely defined ecological transition compatible with capital accumulation. This section has discussed the affirmation of ecological modernisation as a theoretical framework and political approach reconciling the ecological rationality with the perpetual accumulation growth paradigm and neoliberal governance principles. 2.3 Nature as capital. Political economy debates from nature’s rule to nature’s trading What is the role that nature plays in production and how to account for it? This is a central question around which mainstream debates on the ‘greening’ of capitalism revolve. By the same token, it is the read thread connecting the many themes and discussions presented below, with a focus on the reframing of nature from a repository of use values into a reservoir of exchange values. In modern times, early theses about the role nature plays in creating material wealth trace back to the 18th century French enlightenment. In the wake of this vast rationalist political and intellectual movement, a group of thinkers known as the Physiocrats or les économistes emerged. The term physiocracy, composed of the Greek words physis (nature) and kratos (power), translates literally into nature’s rule. By extension, it designates an economic theory according to which all value comes from nature, and specifically from agricultural soil productivity. Physiocracy influenced classical economics (Steiner, 2003). This, however, in exploring nature’s role in production focused more on the difference between use value, that is the utility of an object in satisfying a human need or purpose, and 9 The full presentation of GEI is available at https://www.greeneconomycoalition.org/members/un-environment-programme-gei#:~:text=The%20United%20Nations%20Environment%20Programme,energies%2C%20water%20services%2C%20green%20transportation 10 The full report is available at https://wedocs.unep.org/rest/bitstreams/11748/retrieve 33 exchange value, that is the value of an object as proportion of another. Useful objects could so be bartered or traded at prices expressed in terms of a universal commodity, that is money. It was the tradability that transformed an object into a commodity (Whaples and Parker, 2013). Adam Smith, a founder of Classical economics, argued that natural agents, for instance soil productivity, appropriated and processed through human labour can produce exchange value in the form of rent (2010). Along these lines, classic economists, such as Say, Ricardo and Malthus, maintained that nature only provides use values with no exchange value per se (Whaples and Parker, 2013). An example can be clarificatory here. If we take the case of a waterfall, it acquires exchange value only when appropriated and exploited through a water wheel. The land wherein the waterfall is located can be rented on the promise of future profits realised by producing and trading, for instance, fabrics woven through water-powered looms. We can deduce that “natural agents”, as Ricardo explains “are serviceable to us, by increasing the abundance of productions, by making men richer, by adding value in use; but as they perform their work gratuitously, as nothing is paid for the use of air, of heat, and of water, the assistance which they afford us, adds nothing to value in exchange” (Ricardo, 1891 p. 271). If Classical economists interpreted “natural agents” as serviceable forces which “gratuitously” add “value in use”, this should not let us think that they considered them as inexhaustible (ibidem). Elaborations such as the Ricardian law on diminishing returns on lands or Malthus population theory, geometrically correlating population growth, resource consumption and economic crisis, all share an embryonic concept of natural -ecosystemlimit. This, unsurprisingly yet contradictorily, makes “natural agents” shift from “making men richer” to actually constraining economic growth (idem). The idea of limit, or rather of the unsustainability of capitalism, runs also through Karl Marx’s historical-materialist critique of classical political economy. To fully understand this, we can rely on John Bellamy Foster’s exegetic work on Marx’s ecological thought (Foster, 1999; 2000). Foster shows how the Trier’s philosopher was deeply influenced by von Liebig’s studies. This is a German agro-chemist who sought to find an explanation, and a solution, to agricultural soil exhaustion, a compelling problem of his times. Von Liebig identified as cause the break of soil nutrient cycles induced by intensive-extensive production and long-distance trading. Industrial agriculture, he held, in order to feed an increasing 34 urban, and industrial, population, made production scales sensibly larger, so demanding ever bigger quantities of nutrients be withdrawn from soils. These, along the food containing them, were shipped to far away urban centres. Here they were eaten, digested and ended up wasted in urban sewages. This way, nutrients would never return to the origin soils, which would become ineluctably impoverished. To the contrary, nutrients would over-concentrate in body of waters or fields, polluting them. When Marx read von Liebig’s work, Foster explains, he correlated England’s soil exhaustion and the exploitation of labourers as both caused by capitalism’s restless drive to accumulation. He therefore interpreted soil overuse and labour exploitation as consequences of the same process: surplus value extraction and its endless accumulation through industrial production (see chapter 3). When Marx argues in the third volume of Capital that “the industrial system applied to agriculture […] enervates the workers there, while industry and trade for their part provide agriculture with the means of exhausting the soil” (Marx, 1993 p. 950), he is saying, according to Foster, that capitalism cannot subsume labour as an instrument of capital accumulation, unless it does the same with nature. Not only is it so because labourers, as humans, are evidently part of nature, but more precisely because labour is a mediation process between man and nature (Marx, 1976). If such subsumption results primarily in the formation of a proletarian class, it also implies that “capitalist production […] on the one hand […] concentrates the historical motive power of society [labourers]; on the other hand, […] disturbs the metabolic interaction [emphasis added] between man and the earth” (Marx, 1976 p. 637), in the ways explained by Liebig. In this context, “large landed property reduces the agricultural population to an ever-decreasing minimum” in the face of “an ever-growing industrial population crammed together in large towns” and so “produces conditions that provoke an irreparable rift in the interdependent process of the social metabolism [emphasis added]” (Marx, 1993 p. 949), that is an inextricably interwoven bound of socioecological relations. While holding that “all progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil”(Marx, 1976 p. 638), Marx describes the geographical and political implications of such art, when a colonising power grabs the colonies’ land to boost its own development. Eloquent is the examples of Ireland, whose soil was “indirectly exported” into England in 35 the form of vegetables “without as much as allowing its cultivators the means for making up the constituents of the soil that had been exhausted” (Marx, 1976 p. 860). Marx’s exploration into capitalism’s revolutionary, and disruptive, power on social metabolism frames capitalism-driven ecosystem disequilibria as a consequence of capital accumulation and interclass power relations. It also offers early references to the irrationality and cost-ineffectiveness of capitalism’s scarce circularity, making it possible, for instance, that in places like “London […] they find no better use for the excretion of four and a half million human beings than to contaminate the Thames with it at heavy expense” (Marx, 1993 p. 195). Yet, although the use capitalism makes of social metabolism may well imply the break of the latter and generate costs for the whole of society, Marx notices that natural processes are appropriated freely by capitalists who control them. In such sense, Marx’s approach is aligned to classical economics, conceiving “natural elements” as only providing use-values, “entering as agents into production, and which cost nothing, no matter what role they play in production”. In fact, these “do not enter as components of capital, but as a free gift [emphasis added] of Nature to capital, that is, as a free gift [emphasis added] of Nature's productive power to labour, which, however, appears as the productiveness of capital, as all other productivity under the capitalist mode of production. Therefore, if such a natural power, which originally costs nothing, takes part in production, it does not enter into the determination of price [emphasis added]” (Marx, 1993 p. 879). It was exactly around the “determination of price” that Classical economists’ theoretical effort failed, so remaining unable to provide exchange value a ponderable dimensionality. In other words, they did not solve the dilemma about why on earth useless commodities, such as diamonds, cost more than vital ones, such as water. A solution came from the so called marginalist revolution, considered as the foundational innovation giving birth to neoclassical economics. Three thinkers, Jevons in England, Walras in Switzerland and Menger in Austria started to elaborate an analytical theory of utility and rational choice in condition of scarcity. Their initially unrelated works came together to state that the cost (price) rational agents are ready to pay for a given good is determined by the marginal utility they derive from an adding unity of that good. Following this argument, diamonds are costlier since they are scarcer than water. Still, in the extreme condition of being dehydrated in a desert, with extreme water scarcity inside and outside the body, rational individuals would 42 condition and trends in the world’s ecosystems and the services they provide” 14 . MA’s outcomes were published in 2005, in several reports that offered a first institutional definition of ecosystem services as the “the benefits people obtain from ecosystems” and categorised them. Therefore, these were organised into four categories: (i) provisioning services (e.g. fresh water, food); (ii) regulating services (e.g. climate and are quality, nutrient control); (iii) cultural service (landscape, spirituality); (iv) supporting services (e.g. soil formation, photosynthesis). Parallelly to MA a System of Environmental-Economic Accounting was developed, as a branch of the System of National Accounts (SNA), which is an international standard framework for national accounts. A very first attempt was the interim version of the Handbook of National Account dedicated to the “Integrated Environmental and Economic Accounting”, also known as SEEA-1993 (UN, 1993). There, we can find another early institutional definition of natural capital as consisting of “biological assets (produced or wild), land and water areas with their ecosystems, subsoil assets and air” (idem p. 8). We can notice that the concept of service is not yet associated to natural assets. This will happen with the UN’s glossary of Environment statistics (UN, 1997), where natural capital is described as the “natural assets in their role of providing natural resource inputs and environmental services for economic production” (idem p. 50). Natural capital definition will be progressively perfected through increasingly quantifiable specifications of ecosystem services, and other subcategories, advanced in the newer revisions of SEEA. As a result of an inter-institutional group including national statistical offices and several international agencies, SEEA-2003 specified that natural capital “is generally considered to comprise three principal categories: natural resource stocks, land and ecosystems” which “all are considered essential to the long-term sustainability […] for their provision of functions [emphasis added] to the economy”(UN, 2003 p. 5). Those functions are classified, into stocks, sinks (absorbing production waste), and services. Such processes culminated with the publication in 2012 of two separated documents. One, called “SEEA-2012 Central Framework”, focuses only on physical flows, intended as “movement and use of materials, water and energy” (UN, 2014 p. 25), and environmental assets, intended as stock of resources “that may provide resources for use in economic activity” (idem p. 134), both considered 14 The official MA website is available at https://www.millenniumassessment.org/en/About.html 43 unrelatedly with each other. The second, the “SEEA-2012 Experimental Ecosystem”(UN et al., 2014) Accounting, centres explicitly on ecosystem services, wherein physical flows and environmental assets are considered only in terms of relations with either each other or the economic activity. The intent was to provide a set of accounting instruments immediately compatible with SNA and therefore usable, so separating them from those still at an experimental stage. The “SEEA-2012 Experimental Ecosystem Accounting” is now being reviewed 15 . Particularly important to international ecosystem accounting is the contribution provided by the European Environment Agency (EEA), through the development of a framework known as the Common International Classification of Ecosystem Services (CICES). This uses the definition of natural capital adopted by the European Union (Maes et al., 2013), according to which, natural capital is composed of two elements, distinguishable by the presence of the breadth of life. On the one hand there is ecosystem capital, wherein living and non-living elements mix in ecosystems, on the other there are “sub-soil assets” and “abiotic flows”, such as wind and solar energy (idem p. 31). Both SEEA and CICES are correlated to “The Economics of Ecosystem and Biodiversity” (TEEB), an intergovernmental global initiative. Besides contributing to ecosystem services systematisation, TEEB’s core mission is to popularise ecosystem services and natural capital as operative concepts amongst target audiences such as modelers, economists, managers and policy makers. It started with a study commissioned jointly by Germany and the EU at the 2007 Potsdam’s G8+5 and coordinated by Pavan Sukhdev (TEEB, 2008), a former Deutsche Bank banker, now head of the World Wildlife Fund (Corson and MacDonald, 2012). In their effort to articulate natural capital and the ecosystem as a viable pattern for accumulation and by consequence make markets for environmental services (MES) fully operational, we can argue, with Corson and MacDonald (2012), that international institutions in coordination with NGOs and business organisations follow two lines of action. One, more metro-technical, is intended to qualify and quantify natural capital. The other, of discursive nature, is meant to legitimise the latter as a governance principle. Following TEEB’s motto as it appears on its official website, “making nature’s values visible” 16 would 15 For further details see https://seea.un.org/content/seea-experimental-ecosystem-accounting-revision 16 TEEB’s official website is available at http://teebweb.org/ 44 seem the only way to convince capitals and politicians to protect it, de facto equating ecosystem privatisation with its protection. A good example of operating MES are carbon markets, such as the one created under the Kyoto protocol or the EU Emission Trading System (EU ETS). These are regulated cap-andtrade mechanisms, whereby an authority, such as a state or an international agency, allocates limited quotas of permits to pollute, or carbon credits, to emitting industries and plants. These can exchange permits on a market, selling them if they emit less or otherwise buying them. Carbon so becomes an asset backing a financial commodity: the carbon credit. Related to MES are Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES). In such market schemes a legal entity is paid to maintain an ecosystem service, such as carbon sequestration. A framework negotiated under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) for the management of forests as carbon stocks is the best point in case. This is known as “Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation and the role of conservation, sustainable management of forests and enhancement of forest carbon stocks in developing countries” (REDD+). Tropical forest countries taking part in REDD+ are paid to reduce (potential) emissions through projects contrasting deforestation or forest degradation. Similar to REDD+ are voluntary offsetting credits, providing emitters the opportunity to voluntarily offset their emission localised somewhere, by financing offsetting projects somewhere else, regulated under private standards. One of the most known is the Verra’s Verified Carbon Standard (VCS), which issues more than 70 percent of its permits against projects in agriculture, forestry, and other land uses (AFOLU). Carbon pricing is not the only operative principle organising MES and PES aimed at decarbonisation. Research, development, and commercial investments can be supported directly through public subsidisation policies. The most eloquent case is that of biotic and abiotic flows, such as wind kinetic potential, photovoltaic radiation, geothermal heat or agricultural soil productivity, providing low-carbon renewable energy. The great majority of such polices are based on a pretty simple mechanism. Governments impose a fiscal levy, often granting partial exemptions to large emitters, with the justification of defending their international competitivity (see chapter 6). The levy is legitimised by the urgent need for decarbonisation. With the raised funds, the government finances private accumulation, which is therefore legitimised, in turn, as the solution to produce ‘clean’ renewable energy. 45 At the same time, a smaller proportion of the funds may be paid back, through fiscal systems or private agreements, to the territorial communities inhabiting the areas where the ecosystem biotic or abiotic flow transformed into renewable energy is located. We will see in chapter 7 and 8 how this raises important questions about the sharing of the burdens and costs related to renewable energy transitions amongst groups and communities. This chapter has discussed the TFGCs, with a focus on notions such as ecological modernisation, natural capital and ecosystem accounting. It has shown in detail that TFGCs postulate the logical equivalence between the protection of the ecosystem and the extraction of value from it, and how that informs the policy frameworks building on them. The next two chapters analyse FGCSs underlying assumptions through a historical materialist framework revolving around the socially necessary labour time theory of value (Marx, 1976; Harvey, 2018b) and the theory about the social production of nature (Smith, 2008). 2.5 Conclusions This chapter has investigated the incorporation of an ecological rationality into the social relations of capitalism as a mode of production. Towards this purpose, the chapter has explored theoretically the rise of a ‘green’, ‘ecological’ or ‘environmental’ capitalism. Specifically, it has identified the TFGCs. This is a corpus of theories whose core function is to reframe categorial systems and discursive frameworks around the environment and environmentalism into instruments for expanding the accumulation frontier and its legitimation rationale over ecosystem spaces, flows and stocks not yet or ‘inefficiently’ commodified. The chapter has discussed the TFGCs by exploring notions such as ecological modernisation, natural capital and ecosystem accounting. It has illustrated that TFGCs postulate the logical equivalence between the protection of the ecosystem and the extraction of value from it, and how that informs the policy frameworks building on them. The next two chapters analyse TGCSs underlying assumptions through a historical materialist framework, with a focus on the socially necessary labour time theory of value (Marx, 1976; Harvey, 2018b) and the theory about the social production of nature (Smith, 2008). Chapter 3 – ‘Green’ capitalism I. A hegemonic project in the making 3.1 Introduction This chapter and its following companion present the theoretical framework for this research. They form an interpretive continuum exploring ‘green’ capitalism as a variant of historical capitalism. Specifically, this chapter analyses ‘green’ capitalism through the socially necessary labour time theory of value, discussing both its philosophical underpinnings and analytical implications, while the companion investigates ‘green’ capitalism spatial dynamics. The following section quite unusually summarizes the entire theoretical framework, so placing at the start what normally appears at the end of a chapter. The intent is to provide from the outset the basic tools to navigate the thorough and articulated discussion that follows and make reading as smooth and fertile as possible. The third section analyses capitalism as a mode of production, basing on the socially necessary labour time theory of value. It illustrates categories largely discussed in historical materialism literature, since, as they are the bedrock upon which the entire thesis rests, they must be framed unequivocally. The fourth section investigates ‘green’ capitalism as a variant of historical capitalism. It first consults Hegel’s philosophy, at the core of Marx’s historical materialism, to clarify the nexus between nature, labour and history. Once solid philosophical grounds are established, the section continues discussing the relation between nature and labour through Marx’s elaborations and Neil Smith’s theory on the production of nature (Smith, 2008). It then delves into the extraction and accumulation of surplus value through ecosystem spaces, flows and stocks vis-à-vis the socially necessary labour time theory of value, concentrating on revenue forms and class dynamics. The section concludes by examining the function a ‘green’ capitalism turn may play in facilitating the reproduction of capitalist social relations, both in economic and political terms, relying specifically on Harvey’s theory of crisis and overaccumulation and Gramsci’s theory of hegemony. 48 3.2 The theoretical framework, an overview This section is a synthetic account of the theoretical framework of this thesis, which will be discussed in depth in this and the following chapter. If we were to indicate three categories around which all the others revolve, they would be capitalism, ‘green’ capitalism and territory grabbing. This research, and therefore its theoretical framework, are intended to contribute and innovate the philosophical tradition of historical materialism. Thereby, all the categories illustrated and examined draw on that tradition and its thinkers, ‘dialoguing’ mostly with Karl Marx, G.W. Friedrich Hegel, David Harvey, Neil Smith, Antonio Gramsci and Emmanuel Wallerstein, amongst others. Our point of departure is labour, which is intended as a process by which humans mediate their exchange with nature. Although labour itself is a force of nature, it is directed by selfconscious will. Labour is therefore a material transformation activity through which humans try to adapt the causality and contingency of nature to their own socially determined wants and needs. By the same token society is part of nature, but it is dialectically differentiated from the latter through history, which results from class and power relations organising the material conditions of existence in historically determined modes of production (Marx, 1976; Marx and Engels, 1970). They are characterised by a specific development of productive forces and relations of production, as well as by cultural, political and ideological systems whose function is to ensure hegemony to the power balances amongst classes underlying them (Gramsci, 1975). It follows that every mode of production is a way of organising the material exchange with nature through labour, that is to say a way to organise itself as an ecology (Moore, 2015; Moore, 2017; Moore, 2018 and see subsection 3.4.2), producing specific socionature(s), socioecological relations and socioecological crises (see subsection 3.4.3) 17 . Capitalism is interpreted as a historically situated mode of production tended to the private and perpetual accumulation of surplus-value. This becomes capital as long as it is reinvested perpetually and its characteristic of being value in motion maintained intact. Surplus value is created by labourers through labour, by which they transform use values (ecosystem spaces, stocks and flows or qualities) appropriated from nature into commodities, 17 See footnote 4. 49 which as a consequence come to embody an exchange value (a quantity), tradable for money, the universal equivalent. Thanks to the private ownership of the means of production, capitalists appropriate surplus-value from labourers who can only live by selling their labour for a wage. In order to appropriate larger shares of surplus value, capitalists continuously seek to increase labour productivity by investing in organisational and technological change (see subsection 3.3.2. See also Marx, 1976; Harvey, 2018b). This has developed capitalism’s forces of production immensely and allowed to extend it as an ecology or produced nature to the entire globe. As a consequence, permanent ecosystem transformations are entailed, which the categories of Anthropocene or capitalocene seek to describe ( see Moore, 2015; Moore, 2017; Moore, 2018 and subsection 3.4.2). This ‘peaceful’ accumulation process is accompanied by a more overtly violent accumulation by dispossession, entailing the more or less explicit use of force, in the disparate and non-mutually exclusive forms of physical coercion or threatening, legal enforcement or economic constraints deriving from market mechanisms, in order to privatise ecosystem spaces, stocks and flows, as well as other portions of the social wealth to be converted into capital (see Marx, 1976; Luxemburg, 2015; Harvey, 2005a and subsection 3.3.3). ‘Green’ capitalism is therefore defined as a hegemonic project in the making, for the transformation of capitalism. A successful outcome of such transformation would strengthen capitalism’s resilience to the worsening ecological crises, occurring as biodiversity loss, climate destruction, heavy pollution and soil artificialisation. It would also protect, at least temporarily, the socioecological relations underlying capitalism from the loss of legitimacy and hence hegemony correlated with the crises (McCarthy, 2015; Ekers and Prudham, 2017; Ekers and Prudham, 2018). ‘Green’ capitalism is characterised by two interrelated dialectics reorganising, on the one hand, the forces and relations of production and, on the other, the cultural, political and ideological superstructures. As a result of the first dialectic, forces and relations of production are reorganised suitably for expanding the accumulation frontier over unexploited or partially exploited ecosystem spaces, flows and stocks and transforming them into ‘green’ goods and services (commodities). The adjective ‘green’ indicates the latter’s branding as potentially resolutive towards the ecological crises. This takes place through technological and organisational innovation, which entails the creation of entirely new industries. 50 This also requires the incorporation and commodification of the targeted ecosystem use values, through mapping, valuation, enclosures and grabbing (Vandergeest and Peluso, 1995; Corson et al., 2013). The targeted use values are situated in places or areas part of historically determined socionatures here defined as territories, which ‘green’ investments re-signify as reservoirs of use values and reconstruct as the built environment of ‘green’ accumulation. The transformation of territorialised used values into, and their direct marketisation as, ‘green’ commodities enable the extraction and accumulation of surplus value. This is realised as either a profit or as a rent, in this last case by using ‘green’ commodities as a collateral. The extraction of value through territories is organised in valueextraction chains, which unequally allocate the value extracted to actors, classes and factions of a territorially based alliance depending on the power relations amongst them (Wallerstein, 2004b; Harvey, 2018b). A relatively low or null level of integration and a relatively scarce or null quantity of value redistributed to local capitals, factions of the labour class or local institutions can be useful to determine if a ‘green’ investment scheme, or the system of investments, is an extractive enclave. Incorporation and commodification extend to socioecological relations living through territories as territory grabbing. This is a process whereby a territory, or places of it, is abstracted from its stratified historical identity, reduced to exchange value (actual or potential) and transposed as costs and revenues into the accumulation function of an investment scheme, to the benefit of factions of the capitalist class. In expanding the accumulation frontier, ‘green’ capitalism and specifically ‘green’ investments serve as a spatiotemporal fix to capitalism’s systemic drive towards overaccumulation crises (see Harvey, 2018b and subsection 3.4.3). As a result of the second dialectic, cultural codes, political institutions, and ideological apparatuses are restructured primarily through the detournement and re-functionalisation of environmentalist claims and contestations potentially disruptive for enduring private accumulation and the social order underlying it (Azzarà, 2020; Hajer, 1997). Thanks to conceptual frameworks such as natural capital, ecological modernisation and ecosystem accounting ‘green’ capitalism has hegemonized alternative meanings of sustainability and has been asserted as the solution to ecological multiple crises (Mol and Jänicke, 2009; Costanza et al., 2014; Schumacher, 1973 and chapter 2). These frameworks have 51 performed a twofold function. They have reframed the urgency of mitigating the multiple ecological crises as an opportunity for more accumulation, this time painted in green. They also have posited capitalist accumulation, and the system of governance it implies, as the only possible solution to the crises (see subsection 3.4.3). Basing on a combined analysis of the above two dialectics, it is possible to define ‘green’ capitalism as a socioecological fix. Besides contributing to stave off the risk of overaccumulation crises, as a spatiotemporal fix, ‘green’ capitalism discloses, at least theoretically, the possibility to mitigate aspects of the ecological crises through technological innovations, with substantial implications in terms of legitimation (see subsection 3.4.3). The outcome of ‘green’ capitalism as a hegemonic project depends largely on the cleavages internal to the capitalist class, and specifically on the success of ‘fossil’ capitalist factions’ resistance to their hypothetical, yet possible, decline 18 . Theoretical elaboration and empirical analysis (see chapter 2, 3, 7, 8 and 9) indicate that should ‘green’ capitalism succeed as a hegemonic project, its pivoting on the perpetual accumulation of surplus-value based on the private ownership of the means of production is likely to reproduce patterns of inequality similar to historical capitalism (see McCarthy, 2015; Ekers and Prudham, 2017; 2018). 3.3 Capitalism without the green This section takes the first step towards our analysis of ‘green’ capitalism by focusing on capitalism per se. Following historical materialism, it shows that capitalism is based on the private ownership of the means of production. The section will present the most important categories of Marxist theory. Towards this purpose, it will particularly rely on quotations from Marx’s works, making his categories dialogue with their interpretations by David Harvey. The section is organised into four subsections. The first explores commodities as objectified social relations. The second interprets capitalism through the socially necessary labour time theory of value. The third introduces the category of primitive accumulation and accumulation by dispossession. The last advances a definition of capitalism and introduces the related categories that are central this thesis. 18 For a definition of ‘fossil’ capital factions see chapter 3 and Malm (2016). 58 capitalism and non-capitalist modes of production” through “the predominant methods [of] colonial policy, an international loan system—a policy of spheres of interest—and war” (ibidem). On the existence of an “organic link” between the two realms David Harvey has built his analysis of neoliberal capitalism (Harvey, 2005b p. 175). He contends that the latter internalises violent accumulation methods using them not only as an instrument of imperialist expansion towards not-yet or peripheral capitalist contexts, but also within advanced capitalist societies. Harvey defines this on-going and internal variant of primitive accumulation as accumulation by dispossession, particularly referring to privatization, forced de-industrialisation, welfare dismantling (idem) 21 . We can conclude that accumulation by dispossession is “dialectically intertwined” (ibidem) with “expanded reproduction”, that is to say sustained accumulation taking place once the wage-labour relation has been fully established. These two aspects of the “dual character of capital accumulation” (ibidem) can happen synchronically and contiguously. Moreover, they concern all forms of contemporary capitalism, even the ‘green’ ones. From this perspective, wide-scope accounting efforts of ecosystem services preluding to their privatisation (Corson, 2011), including the enclosures of lands through which renewable energy can be produced (McCarthy, 2015), can be interpreted as forms of accumulation by dispossession. This entails specific spatial dynamics which will be interpreted in the following chapter. 3.3.4 Capitalism and Capitals In conclusion and basing on the above discussed categories of commodity, money, capital, value and primitive accumulation, we can propose a definition of capitalism as a historically situated mode of production based on the private and perpetual accumulation of surplusvalue. To that purpose surplus-value is continuously hoarded and reinvested, so becoming capital. From this historical materialist perspective, surplus value is created by labourers which transform use values (or qualities) that nature provides into commodities with an exchange value (a quantity). By owning the means of production, the capitalist class can appropriate surplus-value from labourers who can only live by selling their labour. This 21 For an account accumulation by dispossession actual impacts on people’s everyday life see Hodkinson and Essen (2015). 59 ‘peaceful’ accumulation process is accompanied by a more violent accumulation by dispossession, entailing the more or less explicit use of force to privatise ecosystem spaces, stocks and flows, as well as other portions of the social wealth, to be converted into capital. Subordinated to the above definition, and the socially necessary labour time theory of value underlying it, are the several categories that will be used in the course of this thesis. They are presented in what follows. If we focus on value, we can identify variable capital and constant capital. In the first category we find capital anticipated by capitalists to buy labour-power from labourers, by paying wages. As we have seen above variable capital offers the opportunity to appropriate surplus value and realise a profit. It follows that the capital invested in wages is variable because undergoes a quantitative variation. This variation is defined as absolute surplus value, realised as average profit, when it results from extending the working day duration. Differently, the variation becomes relative surplus value, realised as excess profit, when the rate between surplus value and total value is expanded without changing the working day length. This can be achieved by cutting wages, compressing living costs or increasing the productivity of labour, that is diminishing the time needed to produce a given quantity and/or quality of a commodity. Differently, constant capital includes “the raw material, the auxiliary material and the instruments of labour” (Marx, 1976 p. 317), whose value is assumed constant during the process of production. If we take capital circulation as a perspective, labour-power, raw materials and auxiliary materials are defined as circulating capital. Differently, the instruments of labour become fixed capital. In effects, they “never leave the sphere of production, once they have entered it”, since they are the “portion of the advanced capital-value” which “becomes fixed in [the] form determined by the function of the instruments of labour in the process” (Marx, 1967 pp. 160–161). It is also important to notice that while variable capital corresponds to living labour, as labour performed by living labourers, fixed capital embodies dead labour, or the labour expended to produce instruments, which crystallise the value produced by labour in an earlier moment. In order to stay alive in the market, capitalists must at least realise average profits. Yet, if they want to reduce the risk of being driven out of business by competitors who 60 accumulate faster, they must keep up with competition. This translates into the need of realising ever larger excess profits. An easy way to achieve this is to increase productivity by improving their fixed capital efficiency. The gains they realise by innovating, tend to disappear as long as competitors adopt similar techniques and technologies. This in short is the reason why, according to Harvey, technological change is an ephemeral fixture for capitalists, who nevertheless are constantly driven to resort to it (Harvey, 2018b p. 31). On the other hand, monopolising access to an ecosystem space, flow and stock, - or a ‘force of Nature’ as Marx has it (Marx, 1976) - and enrolling them to a productive process, can serve as a permanent fixture (see subsection 3.3.2 and Harvey, 2018b p. 335). Instruments that are incorporated into land represent a special kind of fixed capital. Amongst them we find all the immovable infrastructures needed for production, but also distribution, consumption and disposal to run smoothly. As Harvey advances, they form part of a built environment which “[…] functions as a vast, humanly created resource system, comprising use values embedded in the physical landscape [and which] has to be regarded as […] as a geographically ordered, complex, composite commodity [emphasis added]” (Harvey, 2018b p. 233). The built environment includes other capital elements, such as land capital, the portion of fixed capital turned into agricultural infrastructure, as well as non-capital elements. If we take the perspective of the activity field, we can distinguish amongst industrial capital, merchant capital and interest-bearing capital (see Marx, 1993 pt. 4). While the first is specialised in production and the second in exchange and circulation, the third operates in both spheres. Its accumulation process rests on the extraction of an interest from money or a financial asset. This kind of capital can accumulate an interest by specialising in investing and lending to production-related activities or to consumers, so facilitating overall capital circulation. In this section we have investigated the categories of commodity, money and capital. We have defined the latter as value in motion and contended that it is created through the exploitation of wage labour. We have illustrated that the wage relation results from the privatisation of the means of production by capitalists, initially through primitive 61 accumulation. We have concluded the section by offering a definition of capitalism. How this combines with the ‘green’ as a restructuring of the relations of production and their legitimation will be taken up in the following section. 3.4 Capitalism with the ‘green’: a new story? Having defined capitalism basing on the socially necessary labour theory of value, we can turn our focus onto investigating the possibility of a ‘green’ capitalism variant. As a departure point, we can notice that the mainstream TFGCs discussed in the previous chapter postulate the inclusion within capitalist production relations of ecosystem spaces, flows or stocks which are found to be not yet or ‘inefficiently’ commodified. The combined effect of an extended accounting of the ecosystem still ‘untapped’ potential (for accumulation) and a modernisation of productive cycles towards ‘greener’ technologies and production techniques would alleviate the ecological impact of perpetual economic growth, so boosting it. This would come as a result of regulatory and institutional reforms oriented by the principles of neoliberal governance and legitimised by a rationality building on the emergency to mitigate the socioecological crises through market efficiency (Mol et al., 2009; Dryzek, 2013). For such theories, not only is a capitalism’s ‘green’ turn an actual possibility, but it is already an ongoing process. What needs clarifying, however, is the meaning of the adjective ‘green’. Considering the paradox of high economic performances of the ‘green’ sectors coupled with insufficient results in terms of ecological crises mitigation and, on the other hand, basing on the TGCS’s conceptual assumptions, ‘green’ seems rather indicating an accumulation expansion over the ‘green’, that is over the ecosystem, promoted through suitable rationalities and regulations. We can consider this as a preliminary working definition of ‘green’ capitalism which will be further expanded throughout the following subsections. The first of them discusses the philosophical foundations of the nexus between nature, labour and surplus value accumulation. The second explains the mediating, regulating and creative relationship between human labour and nature materiality, investigating ‘green’ capitalism revenue patterns and class relations. The third frames ‘green’ capitalism within historical materialist theories of crisis, focusing specifically on the category of spatiotemporal fix and socioecological fix, from the perspective of the Gramscian theory of hegemony. 62 3.4.1 The dialectical unity of nature and labour. A Hegelian explanation What is the relation of ‘green’ capitalism with nature and how is that different from ‘normal’ capitalism? We will address this question by consulting the philosophical system that is foundational to Marx’s historical materialism: Hegel’s dialectical idealism. Three are the relevant categories. The first is the dialectic as both an ontological and gnoseological category. While this lies at the heart of Marx’s philosophy of history (see below), it offers important clues towards the question we are addressing. The second is that of second nature. It allows to fully comprehend the relation between nature and society, and so prepares the ground to the discussion of Neil Smith’s theory of production of nature in the next subsection. The third is the bondsman-lord dialectic. This is decisive to the comprehension of Marx’s philosophy of history, shedding light on the nexus between the enclosure of ecosystem spaces, flows or stocks, the privatisation of the means of production and the perpetuation of capitalist relations of production. Our point of departure is an apparent contradiction in Marx’s theory of value and the doubts it raises. If labour is the universal source of value, on the other hand, it is not “the source of all wealth”. Marx makes this point in a late work, the “Critique to the Gotha programme” (2009a p. 1), specifying that “Nature is just as much the source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as labour, which itself is only the manifestation of a force of nature, human labour power” (ibidem) As Marx explained in the first volume of Capital, wealth or better material wealth is equivalent to the entirety of use values, including those “provided in advance by Nature” and those produced through the labour process. This is composed of “simple elements”, such as a “purposeful activity, that is [labour] itself, […] the object 22 on which that [labour] is 22 Object of labour [Arbeitsgegenstand], also translated as subject of labour is the entity to which labour is applied. Marx’s own words can help clarify: “the land (and this, economically speaking, includes water) in its original state in which it supplies man with necessaries or means of subsistence ready to hand is available without any effort on his part as the universal material for human labour. All those things which labour merely separates from immediate connection with their environment are objects of labour spontaneously provided by nature, such as fish caught and separated from their natural element, namely water, timber felled in virgin forests, and ores extracted from their veins. If, on the other hand, the object of labour has, so to speak, been filtered through previous labour, we call it raw material. For example, ore already extracted and ready for washing. All raw material is an object of labour, but not every object of labour is raw material; 63 performed, and […] the instruments of that [labour] 23 ” (Marx, 1976 p. 133). Beyond these few certainties, we are unsure about whether there is a clear demarcation between labour and nature in the creation of material wealth, and -by extensionbetween labour and nature in the formation of society, that is to say between society and nature. It is here that our digression through Hegelian dialectical idealism begins. In a mechanistic -we can Say Cartesianperspective, the separation between nature and society is sharp and follows the strict rules of an Aristotelian linear logic based on the principle of (non) identity: A=A thereby A≠B. This puts society, the fruit of the Cartesian cogito, at one end and nature at the other. Along a similar line Kant’s Reason is clearly dichotomised from causal nature (for a comprehensive discussion see Abbagnano, 2003). Hegel’s philosophy breaks this barrier and puts the subject, the Idea, in a dialectical relation with the object, Nature, from which a new, self-conscious, comprehensive, subject arises, the Spirit. First, we can observe the Idea-in-itself, that is the totality of the logical determinations of what is real. As its absolute character becomes negated -alienatedin the finitudes of space and time, it turns into the Idea-for-itself. Through a further negation, that is bound to be overcome by a new superior subject, which includes the initial subject, the Idea-initself, and its opposite, the Idea-for-itself. Now the Idea has so returned to itself as Spirit, that is the humans as self-determined beings. They embody Nature’s spatiotemporal finitudes, as mortal animals, and their opposite, that is the absolute character of the Idea, visible in spiritual products, such as the laws, art or philosophy. Hegel explains in the Phenomenology of Spirit that the real must not be thought as something external to the subject, as an alterity, a separated object, but rather as something indissolubly interwoven with it (Hegel, 1977). His intent was to depart from previous metaphysical traditions, which hypostatised the absolute relegating it to a perfect empyrean of which the real was but a rather imperfect or perfectible reflection. To the contrary, as we have seen, the real is composed of both the absolute and its negation, that is the finite phenomenal the object of labour counts as raw material only when it has already undergone some alteration by means of labour” (Marx, 1976 p. 284). 23 According to Marx: “an instrument of labour is a thing, or a complex of things, which the worker interposes between himself and the object of his labour and which serves as a conductor, directing his activity onto that object […] Leaving out of consideration such readymade means of subsistence as fruits, in gathering which a man's bodily organs alone serve as the instruments of his labour, the object the worker directly takes possession of is not the object of labour but its instrument. Thus nature becomes one of the organs of his activity, which he annexes to his own bodily organs” (Marx, 1976 p. 285). 64 manifestations. This explains Hegel’s famous statement according to which “The truth is the whole” where AI= (A; B). The absolute therefore exists as the becoming of a dialectical process, through which the subject uncovers its own objectivising character through history. It is exactly this process of self-fulfilling, that is processual self-revelation, that implies the correspondence between the dialectics as an ontological law, positing the absolute as a becoming, and the dialectics as a logical law that permits to know it as a becoming. Hence, history is a dialectical becoming where the abstract (Idea-in-itself), through negation (Idea-for-itself), becomes concrete (Idea-in-itself and for-itself), and so on. The Hegelian dialectic becomes through an endless positing of antitheses, or determinate negations, and their resolution, or sublation [aufhebung], into new synthesis. In short, the real is a synthesis of opposites. Without negating certain parts of itself, the Idea-in-itself would remain an undefined totality that is a nothingness, causing the finitudes of nature and history to be impossible. A basic example for that is life as becoming, a synthesis of living and dying in a simultaneous process (Abbagnano, 2003; Houlgate, 2005; McKenna, 2011). We can now introduce the Hegelian category of second nature. In Hegel’s own words, this is the “immediate being of the soul” which is both an immediacy arising from senses or feelings and, and its negation, a mediacy inherent to the “determinacies of representation and of the will”. Thanks to this, humans can interiorise habits as if they were natural mechanisms, pushing them to the sphere of needs and so free the soul “to other activity and occupations” (Hegel and Inwood, 2007 sec. 410 R) 24 . Habits range from relatively simple faculties, such as walking, to complex and refined activities, such as piloting a plane or painting. In fact, they are “the most essential feature of the existence of all spiritual life” (ibidem). Hegel establishes a continuity between simpler habits pertaining merely to the inner individual life and other characterising the external social life (Lumsden, 2016). By transforming an act of the will -stimulated by a sense or feelinginto a natural automatism, habit formation can lead “religious content, moral content, etc., to belong to [the spirit] as this [emphasis in the original] self […] in its very being” (ibidem). In other words, habits form into custom and values of a culture, which are transmitted through education, a process through which cultural and societal codes are inscribed within individuals. In fact, 24 In all Hegel quotations, ‘R’ abbreviates Remark, while ‘Z’ abbreviates Zusatz. 65 although a produced nature, second nature is “still a nature, something posited that assumes the shape of immediacy” and therefore “something not corresponding to free spirit” (Hegel and Inwood, 2007 sec. 410 Z). From this perspective, cultural codes as historical superstructures of a mode of production become a second nature to which humans respond. The category of second nature is fundamental in understanding Marx’s interpretation of society and nature through history. However, that is so only if second nature is interrelated with another Hegelian category, that of recognition within the bondsman-lord dialectic. Through this, Hegel explains the foundation of society and history as the alienation of humans from the state of nature, triggered by the desire to “raise their certainty of being for themselves to truth” (Hegel, 1977 p. 114), that is breaking the bonds with, and becoming independent from, natural causalities. A “self-consciousness”, as Hegel explains, “exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another; that is, it exists only in being acknowledged [emphasis added]” (idem p. 111). The mutual and equal recognition, though, can only happen as a result of a dialectical process, which is defined as the lordbondsman dialectic. Hegel illustrates that through a myth. At first, there are two equal individuals, or self-consciousnesses, which desire “to become certain of itself as the essential being” (ibidem). To achieve that means for each “to supersede the other” and seek “the death” of the other (ibidem). Nonetheless, intended by each as a way to affirm their own self-consciousness, the death of the other would erase any chance of success of mutual recognition and hence of a self-consciousness affirmation. Things change when one of the two, fearing for its own life, accepts to subjugate itself to the bondage of the other so to stay alive. Through this mediate negation, the process of recognition is maintained. A lord is now recognised by the bondsman as a pure self-consciousness, while the bondsman only lives as a reflection of the lord, being an “immediate consciousness, or consciousness in the form of thinghood” (idem p. 115). Not only is the bondsman a thing, but he is also left to relate with the thing. In other words, the bondsman is forced to manipulate the material world so to ensure to the lord the enjoyment he or she seeks, but for which he or she does not want to work. Labour is therefore imposed to the bondsman’s “discipline of service and obedience” (idem p. 119). Gradually, however, the lord realises that he or she is recognised by a self-consciousness, that of the bondsman, which “is not an independent 66 consciousness, but a dependent one” (idem p. 117). So, the lord becomes unsure about the essentiality and independence of his or her own consciousness. It is clearer and clearer to him or her that he or she is a dependent consciousness, since he or she needs the bondsman’s labour for the satisfaction of his or her desire. To the contrary, the bondsman by establishing a manipulative relation with the material world through labour which “forms and shapes the thing [emphasis added]”, becomes conscious of “his own independence [emphasis added]” (idem p. 118). The conclusion is as simple as revolutionary: “Through this rediscovery of himself by himself, the bondsman realizes that it is precisely in his [labour] 25 that he acquires a mind of his own” (ibidem). If the struggle for recognition breaks the subjugation of first nature over humans, it is only labour that elevates the bondsmanlord dialectic to a recognition amongst equals, so realising -negation by negationabsolute freedom, as a form of universal self-consciousness or absolute spirit. Armed with the three Hegelian categories discussed above, we can draw some preliminary conclusions on the relation between nature and capitalism. First, under capitalism the private ownership of the means of production, as both a cultural and juridical objectification of capitalism’s relation of production, becomes a second nature inscribed in cultural codes, societal norms, and political institutions, especially for the subaltern classes. As Marx explains “The advance of capitalist production develops a working class which by education, tradition and habit looks upon the requirements of that mode of production as self-evident natural laws [emphasis added].” (Marx, 1976 p. 899) By interiorising private ownership as a natural, therefore moral, fact, the workers interiorise that very device that make them “the slave of other men who have made themselves the owners of the material conditions of labour [emphasis added]” (Marx, 2009a p. 1). Second, as we learn from the bondsman-lord dialectic labour is the only activity through which humans can fully realise and free themselves. If the conditions of labour depend all indissolubly on nature which provides all use values, including labour-power, we can 25 The word work was here replaced with labour in order to ensure the terminological consistency of the text. 67 deduce that controlling nature translates necessarily into controlling labour and establishing class domination. Basing on this, the expansion of capitalist relations over not yet or ‘inefficiently’ commodified ecosystem spaces, flows and stocks inherent to a ‘green’ capitalism inevitably extends class domination pushing further away the possibility of a society of equally free members. 3.4.2 The production of nature On the Hegelian dialectics Marx built his theory of history and, therefore, capitalism. Yet, Marx criticised Hegel’s idealism, branding it as a “mystical shell” (Marx, 1976 p. 103). He contended that idealism was wrong in positing the Idea as “the creator of the real world” and, consequently, the real world as “the external appearance of the idea”. If the dialectic “rational kernel” is to be discovered, “it must be inverted” (idem p. 102), he maintained, since “The ideal is nothing but the material world reflected in the mind of man, and translated into forms of thought” (ibidem). In short, it is by applying the very principle of determinate negation that Marx turns Hegel’s dialectical idealism into a dialectical and historical materialism. According to this philosophical tradition, as we have seen in chapter 1, society and history begin only when humans start to purposefully and socially produce their material existence through a sensuous and manipulative activity: labour. It is through it that the “material world” is “reflected in the mind of man” and assimilated to human needs and wants. Indeed, to explicitly answer the question at the start of this section, we can argue that through labour humans transform nature in “the source of all wealth” (Marx, 2009a p. 1). If from this perspective there cannot be history without labour, labour also connects humans and nature in a dialectical unity rather than separating them, since it is “a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature [emphasis added]. He confronts the materials of nature as a force of nature [emphasis added]. He sets in motion the natural forces which belong to his own body, his arms, legs, head and hands, in order to appropriate the 74 historical materialist framework of reference suggests that the parcel only has a fictitious exchange value. The adjective fictitious was used by Marx to define fictitious capital and indicate the latter’s capability to earn its owner a financial rent only underlain by a claim on productive processes yet to occur 29 . This entails that a capitalist buying or renting a raw land parcel has a reasonable and rational expectation that the use values on the parcel can be turned into a permanent fixture and originate excess profits in the future (Harvey, 2018b). In a situation of this sort, raw land is treated as a pure commodity and, as Marx explains “it functions in [the capitalist’s] account as interest-bearing capital [emphasis added], since he reckons the income he receives -as rent from the land or as debt interest from the governmentas interest on the money that it cost him to purchase the title to his revenue” (Marx, 1993 p. 946) Along a similar line of reasoning, Harvey maintains that under capitalist relations, “land becomes a form of fictitious capital” which is nothing more nothing less than a “a pure financial asset which is bought and sold according to the rent it yields” (Harvey, 2018b p. 347) . And exactly like a government bond or a corporate share, land carries a value not underlain by any actually occurred productive process, which is therefore fictitious value. In land transactions “what is traded is a claim upon future revenues, which means a claim upon future profits from the use of the land or, more directly, a claim upon future labour [emphasis added]” (Harvey, 2018b p. 347) Now that we have come to an answer to the first of the initial questions and clarified the rentier character of investments on unproduced ecosystem spaces, flows or stocks, we can delve deeper into their revenue structure. 29 Karl Polanyi also used the adjective to identify objects that are unproduced or not produced for the market but still traded as if they were, terming them fictitious commodities. Within this category the Polish thinker included land, labour and money explaining how capitalism, that he calls the market economy, dis-embeds them from the socio-historical context from which they originate, and re-embeds them within market as mere objects of exchange (Buğra et al., 2007). 75 3.4.2.4 ‘Green’ capitalism as a rentier regime If we now consider rent on land with improvements thereon, we can define it as land that has been fully or partially transformed into a built environment. As seen above, according to Harvey, the latter is a “geographically ordered, complex, composite” (idem p. 233) object resulting from the merging of fixed capital, space and nature’s use values for the purpose of enabling production, distribution or consumption and which so becomes a sort of super instrument, or a produced nature and space a la Smith. Investigating such an object allows to identify the rent components combining with ground rent. To the purpose, we can use again the example of renewable energy production. If we take the case of a wind energy plant, we can easily regard it as a built environment for renewable energy production, composed of instruments and infrastructures incorporated in a land plot and developed around wind kinetic energy. The wind plant will earn the owner a ground rent determined by land and wind characteristics proportionally. If the land is easily accessible in terms of communications routes and, on the other hand, the winds blowing on it offer productive anemometric features, revenues will be expected to be higher and the ground rent set accordingly -provided all agents have equal access to information. The plant will also earn a rent (interest) on capital, that is on wind turbines and other infrastructures. This reflects a claim on the future revenues that the renter capitalist will realise by producing renewable energy through it. There is a caveat, however, which directs our discussion towards a third rent component. So far, we have implied that the average price of energy production is higher than that for generating wind energy. In reality things stand at the opposite. In fact, rarely do wind energy plants reach the grid parity with conventional energy sources 30 . It follows that they are often unprofitable and therefore pointless vis-à-vis capital accumulation. The gap can only be filled through an exogenous capital inflow by an external entity, that is the state. It may raise the necessary liquidity through taxes and channel it to capitalists, for them to produce renewable energy. This value can be distributed in the form of monetary 30 According to Gu Choi et al (2015 p. 718) grid parity is generally defined as: “the time point at which the decreasing cost of electricity from a renewable energy technology due to its technological advances intersects the cost of electricity generated from conventional fuels, such as coal and natural gas, and it is generally thought that, without any subsidies, a renewable energy technology will have cost-competitiveness in the market when the technology reaches the ‘grid parity’ point”. 76 subsidies, with the legitimation of decarbonising the ecosystem, a higher and general good. Besides enabling the exploitability of a use value, in this case wind kinetic energy, otherwise unusable under capitalism’s relations of production at a given technology historical stage, subsidies can be considered as a specific type of rent on fixed capital, paid by the state on privately-owned fixed capital used to produce renewable energy, with the legitimation of mitigating the climate crisis. By implication, they serve as a claim on future revenues, in this case a claim on public money transfers paid for a length of time 31 , known in advance and set in binding terms. To be sure, what will be reflected in the final rent is the subsidy portion yet to be paid out. That alongside rent on fixed capital (additional to that paid as subsidies) and ground rent will form a final a composite rent. In light of all the above considerations, we can now advance an answer to the second of the questions posed in the previous subsection, as to how to reconcile Smith’s theory on the production of nature and the socially necessary labour time theory of value in the ambit of ‘green’ investments. Regardless of either the persistence of immutable natural laws or the exploitation of unproduced ecosystem flows or stocks, the innate capitalism drive to universalisation and abstraction produce, that is initially to signify the entire nature, including human society, as the stage for accumulation. From this perspective, the reality is potentially bound to be entirely financialised, that is attached a fictitious exchange value and earn a rent, that is an interest, as a claim on future appropriations, that is on future labour. This does not preclude that financialization may also lead to material alterations, that is a material production of nature. In this sense all nature is immaterially and materially produced as an object of capital. After investigating the relation between nature’s use value and labour-created value, we are now equipped to investigate the class relations that all this entails. 3.4.2.5 Rent, profit and class relations Harvey argues that “landownership has achieved its true capitalistic form” (idem p. 347) only when land is treated as a financial asset. Yet, in reality an array of intermediate forms exists, especially when a new wave of accumulation and investments penetrates geographies with a marginal role in the division of labour at national or higher levels. This is 31 Usually, subsidisation periods range from 10 to 20 years. 77 particularly visible with renewable energy generation. Since renewable sources have a scarce power density (Smil, 2008) 32 , their production is intrinsically decentralised, dispersed in plants most often located in rural regions. In fact, the latter’s peripherality to capitalist centres may imply that land and landownership have only partially achieved their full capitalist form (Harvey, 2018b p. 345 and following). This interplays in complex ways with class relations between investors and landowners, as these relations depend largely on the existing landownership regime, the macroeconomic context of specific geographies and the access to information. In geographies characterised by a combination of socio-economic marginality and a fragmented landownership regime the average land rent may be cheaper as a consequence of a weaker landowners’ bargaining power. Moreover, the character and profitability of the investment might be obscure to landowners, preventing them from increasing land prices accordingly. With a weak bargaining power, it is likely that landowners become trapped in some sort of “adverse” incorporation (Hickey and Du Toit, 2013). In such circumstances they may perform a substantial function to a ‘green’ investment scheme or value chain, while receiving unproportionate small fractions of the extracted value as a consequence of the actual power relations. Different is the situation where a socio-economic marginality is coupled with a concentrated landownership regime. In this case landowners’ bargaining power might be stronger, yet still dependent on the level of information they access. A thorough, empirical discussion on this is conducted in chapter 7 and 8 as part of the analysis of our two case studies. 3.4.3 The fixes of ‘green’ capitalism as a hegemonic project Having interpreted the mechanisms through which surplus value is extracted in and around ‘green’ investments exploiting unproduced ecosystem spaces, flows or stocks, it is now possible to open our investigative attention to the role ‘green’ capitalism may play in the overall reproduction of capitalist social relations. To this purpose, we will first analyse 32 An energy carrier’s power density can be defined as its rate of energy flow (power) per unit volume, area or mass. 78 ‘green’ capitalism through Harvey’s historical materialist theory of capitalism’s crises. We will then introduce the category of spatiotemporal fix and apply Gramsci’s theory of hegemony. Historical materialism concedes that capitalism has allowed to develop the forces of production to an unprecedented efficiency in human history. Nonetheless, their organisation under a private ownership regime for the pursuing of equally private profits is deemed responsible for the irrationality of this mode of production, as evidenced by its cyclical crises. While damaging or even destroying capitalism itself, and therefore capitalist classes’ capacity to accumulate, those crises could in fact undermine the socioecological relations that support it, that is the ecosystem and society as such. In Marxian terms, capitalism is doomed to an irremediable contradiction between forces and relations of production. On these premisses, historical materialist scholars have developed a copious literature investigating capitalism crises 33 . If we were to identify a red thread connecting these works, this would be a tenet shared with classical political economists, such as Smith, Ricardo, Malthus and Stuart Mill, maintaining that capitalism in the long-term tends to plateau on a null accumulation state. Nevertheless, differently from the latter, historical materialist scholars understand crises as endogenously caused by capitalism’s contradictions and indeed strictly related to capitalism’s law of value, rather than caused, as classical and neoclassical 33 Historical materialist debate on capitalist crises can be divided into three different analytical strands. The first strand, known as “profit squeeze”, focuses on the relation between labour organisation and surplusvalue extraction. Its major tenet is that a combination of successful class struggle and labour scarcity would push wages to a level so high as to erase any accumulation margin and tear down the system as a whole (Glyn and Sutcliffe, 1972). The second strand is based on the underconsumption hypothesis. Through class struggle, capitalists would successfully achieve to compress wages and reinvest the accumulated surplusvalue in ever-increasing productive capacity. This would lead to a chronic over production and commodity glut exacerbated by an insufficient aggregated demand, caused by the very capitalist class’s success in compressing wages and spending power. As a consequence, a general devaluation would ensue. The ‘underconsumptionist’ thesis is at the core of Keynesian economic policy approaches, whereby demand should be artificially sustained through public spending especially during downturns (Sweezy, 1968). Connected to this is Minsky’s financial instability theory, whereby a demand chronically weaker would be sustained artificially by finance capital issuing credit money for consumption and this would lead to cyclical financial crises (Minsky, 1992). The last strand was advanced by Marx in the third volume of capital and rests on the law of falling rate of profit (Marx, 1993). According to this, in the strive to increase labour productivity through technological change, with the rate of exploitation checked by other factors, fixed capital will increase in the total value composition diminishing the weight of variable capital. In other words, competition through technological change would irremediably result in machines replacing more and more labourers. Since the latter are the very source of value, hence of surplus value, their shrinking numbers would lead to a proportional disappearance of profit margins and therefore into a progressive and irreparable crisis. 79 economics hold, by some natural or external factor (for a comprehensive review see Whaples and Parker, 2013). Harvey has innovated the historical materialist debate, through his theory of overaccumulation. Provided that capital is value in motion, Harvey explains, an aggregate ever increasing productive capacity would result in ever-larger quantity of capital that cannot be profitably reinvested, that is kept in motion. As long as overaccumulated capital remains under or uninvested, it stands to be devalued. In summary, the contradiction mentioned above implies a subordinated one between the tendency to accumulate ever increasing quantities of capital and the limited capacity to allocate them profitably. Overaccumulation can take many forms in the real world. Amongst others, it can be manifest as commodity gluts and therefore as underconsumption and deflation, as monetary surpluses and generate credit bubbles or inflation, it can appear as surplus capital channelled into the built environment or emerge as excess of labour-power and unemployment. As long as overaccumulation is let free to run, it will lead to a crisis, which “is the name for phases of devaluation and destruction of the capital surpluses that cannot profitably be absorbed” (Harvey, 2018b p. xxiv) The dialectic between overaccumulation and devaluation is strictly correlated to another between competition and technological change. Competition forces capitals, individually or collectively, to continuous technological change, which leads to increased productivity, therefore overproduction and, potentially, to devaluation. The latter can be warded off only by finding profitable investment opportunities for the overabundant capital. Investments are profitable, by definition, when the advanced capital becomes larger after a turnover time. It follows that, profitable investments absorb overaccumulated capital only by further expanding it, along a trajectory outstretched ad infinitum. Basically, a crisis caused by the contradiction between the systemic tendency to produce ever larger quantities of capital and the limited capacity to allocate them profitably can only be avoided by displacing it to a superior level (Harvey, 2018b p. 190 and following). Transforming surpluses into new productive capacity offers a solution to overaccumulation in both temporal and spatial terms. In other words, and this is one of the most important 80 contribution by Harvey, capital responds to overaccumulation through spatiotemporal fixes (Harvey, 2018b; Ekers and Prudham, 2017). For ease of explanation, we will for a moment consider separately the two dimensions of the category. Temporal fixes take place mainly through the capital markets, orchestrating both private and public credit. Through them capital surpluses are gathered and channelled to profitable sectors in need of liquidity and, hence, invested effectively. Spatial fixes coordinate the allocation of overabundant capital through space. Both the temporal and spatial moment interpenetrate each other. We can imagine spatiotemporal fixes as a sort of relief valve, coordinating throughout time the fixing of overabundant capital into space, and the ecosystem, that is to say transforming it into new fixed capital. As Harvey has recently explained: “A part of the capital has to be fixed in order for the rest of capital to keep in motion” (Harvey, 2018a p. 461). In this process, it is not ‘mere’ machines that are built, rather entire landscapes are erected, as gigantic composite objects made of space, ecosystem functions and instruments. In Harvey’s own words: “when we go beyond the image of fixed capital as mere machine, we find ourselves conjuring up a picture of capital building whole landscapes of cleared fields and factories; of highways and railways; of ports, harbors and airports; of dams, power stations and electric grids; of gleaming cities and massive industrial capacity” (ibidem) Thanks to Glassman’s work (2007), we can distinguish two distinct dynamics in spatiotemporal fixes. When they evolve through a centralising dynamic, surpluses are used to enhance internal markets absorption capacity, by either improving production, distribution or consumption infrastructures or supporting the reproduction of capitalist social relations by financing education, research or health care. When fixes follow a decentralising dynamic, surpluses are invested in outer geographies where potential profitability is higher thanks to territorialised socioecological factors. Amongst them we find lower land and labour costs 34 . These geographical differences, at the very basis for higher profitability margins, are continuously recreated as capitalism’s historical geography (Glassman, 2007; Ekers and Prudham, 2017), through the interplaying between centralisation and decentralisation. As an example, we can consider the opening of new internal markets for ‘green’ 34 The case studies of this research are a clear example for that (see chapter 7 and 8) 81 commodities, such as renewable energy, and observe how it mirrors the fixing of capital in outer geographies, such as renewable energy plants in rural or remote areas. The contradiction between the fluidity of capital and the need for it to be partially fixed to ward off devaluation engenders uneven geographical development (Harvey, 2018b p. 415). Capitalism cannot avoid it as much as it cannot avoid crises, because “[…] capital builds a whole landscape [emphasis added] adequate to its needs at one point in time, only to have to revolutionize that landscape, to destroy it and build another one at a later point in time in order to accommodate the perpetually expansive forces of further capital accumulation” (Harvey, 2018 p. 461) Uneven geographical development structures around centrality-marginality cleavages, where centres, peripheries or semi-peripheries are functional to expanded reproduction and interconnected along the division of labour at the global, regional, national and subnational scale (see chapter 4). Yet, since spatiotemporal fixes are unfixable in time, being ephemeral as much as technological change, they produce space unevenly, and, following Smith’s theory on the production of nature, they so produce nature. A similar argument is systematised by Ekers and Prudham (2017; 2018) under the category of socioecological fix, combining different historical materialist frameworks. On the one hand, it incorporates Harvey’s spatiotemporal fix. On the other, it contributes to understanding how a ‘green’ capitalism may allow to reproduce the ecological and social conditions needed for accumulation to run smoothly, by building on O’Connor’s second contradiction theory (O’Connor, 1998) and Gramsci’s hegemony theory (Gramsci, 1975). As seen in chapter 1, Gramsci’s theory explains that a dominating class keeps its hegemony on society only when it informs the ruling ideas. Otherwise, the control of the productive structure and coercive institutions would not be enough to preserve its class dominance. Focusing more on instability and change, O’Connor argues that capital accumulation undermines progressively the reproduction of its own existence conditions, both the ecosystem and social ones. Building on the notion of scarcity or limit, O’Connor argues that crises result from capitalism’s endogenous tendency to overcome social and ecological limits, which in turn are considered as exogenous. 82 Against this backdrop, we can see that besides allocating of overaccumulated capital, a socioecological fix restores ecological conditions for accumulation and legitimises the social relations enabling accumulation. ‘Green’ investments and ‘green’ transitions in general can be interpreted as socioecological fixes to the extent to which they result from the re-functionalisation of the 1960s and 1970s contestations, turning environmentalist claims as they were framed within a wider social critique, from a potential threat to the order of capital, into a field of opportunities for a ‘green’ accumulation. From this perspective, ‘green’ capitalism can be interpreted in Gramscian terms as a hegemonic project in the making (on 'green' rhetoric as hegemonic project see Fairhead et al., 2012). An organisational and technological transformation, towards ‘greener’ forces and relations of production in the structure, should correspond to the affirmation of a legitimation rationality building on the ‘greening’ as the core of the ideological, political and cultural superstructures. If such a historical block (on this category see chapter 1) would come into being both accumulation and hegemony would be ensured by the sheer fact that capitalism can produce more and sustainably. Nevertheless, the success of ‘green’ capitalism as a hegemonic project is far from being predictable. We can take the example of the renewable energy generation. While it is has been shown to be theoretically possible to replace all fossil fuels with renewables (Jacobson and Delucchi, 2011; Jacobson et al., 2016), this largely depends on how willingly those factions of the capitalist class whose accumulation strategies depend more heavily on fossil fuels would undertake a full transformation of their businesses (Malm, 2016). Their resistance could benefit from the cooperation of sectors of the labour class involved in fossil value chains and participating through their organisations, the trade unions, to the factional struggle. The state would play a major role in determining the outcome of this process, not as an arbiter, but rather as the site where the factional struggle would unfold around the control of regulatory mechanisms and coercive apparatuses 35 . 35 For an example of how social coalitions opposing the renewable transition have formed in Germany see Cumbers and Becker (2018). 83 Although the future of ‘green’ capitalism as a hegemonic project is still unpredictable, some of its effects are already tangible, including the re-legitimation of class power balances and the inherent inequality patterns under ‘green’ credentials (Corson et al., 2013; Dryzek, 2013). An example is the subsidisation of renewable energy generation, which are generally financed through fiscal mechanisms, such as a surcharge in the electricity bill. If a fiscal system is scarcely progressive, lower incomes will pay a heavier relative cost for decarbonisation. Such inequality is further worsened by the fact that subaltern classes, by reason of their lower incomes, bear predictably a smaller responsibility to the climate crises. In fact, by reason of their limited consumption they emit less GHG (Kartha et al., 2020). By the same token, the systems financing renewable subsidies such as those in place in Italy and Germany, as we will see in chapter 7 and 8, exacerbate this inequality even more by granting heavy emitters substantial exemptions from the levy imposed to finance the renewable transition. It is possible to deduce that an institutionalised ‘green’ discourse, nurtured across both the civil and political society apparatuses, can legitimise fiscal mechanisms, imposed by the coercive power of the state, which protect the accumulation schemes of the ‘fossil’ and most emitting factions of the capitalist class, while financing ‘green’ accumulation, by unjust bottom-up fiscal redistributions. In conclusion, following Ekers and Prudham (2017; 2018) it should be noticed that the making of ‘green’ capitalism as a hegemonic project builds on class cooperation or conflict cleavages that are inherently performative. In the case of ‘green’ investments and ‘ecologically’ modernising processes, this has entailed a cooperation amongst international institutions, researchers and research institutions, lobbying organisations and international NGOs in systematising the operative categories of the ‘greening’ within the already hegemonic rationality of the neoliberal governance. These alliances can be reproduced at the many scales of ‘green’ investment geographies, from the international to the territorial, extending therefore down where ‘green’ commodities are produced. We will discuss in the next chapter how this implies processes of territorialisation (see also McCarthy, 2015), whereby the targeted territories are enrolled in large scale projects and policies designed and implemented through technicalised and centralised mechanisms side-lining territorial 90 capitalism’s patterns, in a dialectical nexus connecting marginality, profitability and extractive organisation. Although the category of ‘green’ extractive enclave does not seem to be explicitly associated in the literature with the analysis of either ‘green’ capitalism or renewable energy and biomass production, extractive and enclaving processes are identified, and sometimes associated with each other, when analysing ‘green’ investments. Howe and Boyer (2016) have investigated the correlation between a hegemonizing rhetoric around the ‘greening’ and surplus value extraction in Southern Mexico. They show that national energy transition policies can collide with community-based mechanisms for collaborative energy production and indeed favour large and internationalised capitals’ extractive schemes. The role of state institutions in enabling ‘green’ extractivism around wind energy in the Mexican state of Oaxaca and repressing local populations’ resistance is analysed by Dunlap (2018), who discusses the legitimation of counterinsurgency practices through ‘green’ discourses. Along similar lines, Argenti and Knight (2015) document how Greece’s renewable transition policy , combining with policy responses to the country’s sovereign debt crisis since 200, encouraged rent extractive schemes in and around solar energy generation. Similarly, Siamanta (2017; 2019) investigated the implications of the Greek renewable transition policy at several scales, contextualising rent extraction through wind and photovoltaic energy within a socioecological fix process to both Greece’s sovereign debt crisis and the climate emergency. 4.2.3 Value-extraction chains from local to global While the extractive enclave category enhances the analytical capacity of this thesis, as we will see in chapter 7 and 8, it implicitly entails cooperation and conflict patterns amongst classes, factions or actors, whose investigation requires further analytical instruments to be developed. Towards this purpose, a useful departure point is the category of commodity chain that in the context of the World-system theory is intended as “a network of labor and production processes whose end result is a finished commodity” (Hopkins and Wallerstein, 1986 p. 159). As Jennifer Bair explains in a magistral review, the category is crucial to explain the contradiction between “the centripetal forces of the world capitalist 91 economy […] and the organization of the geopolitical order into individual countries” (2005 p. 156). Any chain includes several production-distribution-consumption nodes which can be intersected simultaneously by other chains, as it is the case, for instance, for intermediate commodities manufacturing (fixed capital). Transposing the socially necessary labour time theory of value to international political economy, the commodity chain category allows to investigate the dialectic between material flows and the division of labour along core-periphery relations. Most importantly, it makes possible to quantify the extracted surplus value and assess the patterns through which it is redistributed along the chain geographies and nodes. Combining the commodity chain conceptualisation with insights from organization sociology, Gereffi et al. (1994) advanced the category of Global Commodity Chain (GCC). The authors so initiated a focus shift, away from the capitalist world-economy towards the study of inter and intra firm relations, so leading to a further category, that of Global Value Chain (CVC). This was first proposed by Humphrey and Schmitz (2000), who revisited the GCC approach through the lens of international business literature and Porter’s value chain model (Porter, 2001). While the GVC approach aims at supporting managers and regulators’ decision making, it departs substantially from the world-system theory and the underlying socially necessary labour time theory of value. In fact, GVC exponents identify value as created by capital. Nonetheless, some of GVC approach features are useful to the analysis of ‘green’ accumulation schemes, and specifically the attention to meso and micro levels and the emphasis on value flows. Against this backdrop, this thesis advances the category of value-extraction chain. Similarly to Hopkins and Wallerstein’s commodity chain, a value-extraction chain is intended as “a network of labor and production processes” (1986 p. 159), whose result is the extraction and accumulation of value rather than simply a commodity. 4.2.4 The territorially based alliance between capital mobility and immobility If the extractive enclave category allows us to study the subalternity of a productive system within the global and lower scales accumulation patterns, that of value-extraction chain helps to clarify how an enclave may be integrated within those patterns. Nevertheless, the 92 dynamics of faction and class cooperation within enclaves and value-extraction chains still remain overshadowed. In other words, what needs further discussing is how the fixation of capital into specific portions of space, with a specific positioning in the global division of labour, can result into productive systems involving specific actors and relations. David Harvey explains this process through the category of territorially based alliance (Harvey, 2018b pp. 423–424). Through it, factions of the capitalist and labour class, local bureaucracies and territorial state articulations cooperate in the extraction and accumulation of surplus value in and around a commodity or service production. More specifically, factions of the capitalist and labour class engaged in a specific commodity or service production may find it convenient to negotiate common grounds, in order to reduce the social conflict which may disturb accumulation and, on the other hand, improve labour conditions. Local state articulations could grant regulatory and fiscal simplified regimes in exchange for a tax revenue or, in some case, personal gains, in the form of bribery for local bureaucracies. Since a territorially based alliance can be intended as a localised truce of the class struggle, it will last until some event changes its internal equilibrium, hitherto guaranteeing the redistribution of wealth and privilege to its members. When this happens, as Harvey stresses, the alliance breaks. The most mobile capital factions, such as financial capitals, will most certainly divest quickly and try to minimise losses or even realise more profits. The less mobile capital factions which are more dependent on fixed capital such as landowners or industrialists, would probably be slower in divesting, being exposed to heavier losses. Contrastingly, workers, local bureaucracies and institutions will be completely subaltern to capitals’s choices and be net losers, unless they engage in some sort of organised conflict. The category of territorially based alliance is particularly relevant to renewable energy generation. Since this is a highly subsidised sector, territorially based alliances are likely to form quickly around it (Siamanta, 2017; 2019; Dunlap, 2018), aiming at seizing the composite rent generated by renewables plants, and mainly financed by subsidies. Similarly, if subsidies are too generous compared to other revenue streams, or too concentrated in time, they may exacerbate rent-seeking behaviours minimising productive investments. Hungry rent-seeking investors may flock in a territory and run away when subsidies are reduced or terminated, triggering the sort of localised devaluations this research describes (see chapter 7 and 8). 93 This section has introduced and discussed the categories of extractive enclave, value extraction chain and territorially based alliance and explained their usefulness in the interpretation of the spatial dynamics of ‘green’ capitalism. In what follows, we will problematise the category of space vis-à-vis capital accumulation and the underlying power mechanisms. 4.3 The territory between spatial abstractions and ‘green’ extractions When an area is targeted to house a ‘green’ investment, only the characteristics instrumental to value extraction and accumulation are relevant to the investing capitals and other the actors of the territorially based alliance. If we take the case of wind energy or biomass production, enabling productive conditions are the presence of good anemometric characteristics or adequate soil productivity. As a second step, other elements are considered to assess the investment feasibility, such as land costs, communication routes, subsidisation policies, regulatory frameworks, and the overall investment environment. Other characteristics specific to the area social and ecological identity with no function in value extraction and accumulation are simply disregarded or regarded as impediments. The area is therefore re-signified into a mere quantifiable reservoir of a selected pool of use values and abstracted from the social relations living through it as space. This section introduces three categories to investigate the penetration of ‘green’ investments and its interrelation with pre-existing socioecological relations and systems of meanings. The section is organised into three subsections. The first discusses space as socially produced and introduces the category of territory. The second and the third explore different conceptualisations of territory and territorialisation. 4.3.1 Space: the mode of existence of social relations Our first step is to discuss Henri Lefebvre’s theory on the production of space (1991). According to the French philosopher, space is where and how social relations exist, which means that social relations can only be spatial and that space is for humans only social space. In other words, in the act of assigning social meanings and purposes to space humans produce it as a social relation. Consider, as an example, a church, an armoury, a park or a stadium. These are such only within human society, or, in Lefebvre’s words, they 94 “[…] are produced. The 'raw material' from which they are produced is nature” (Lefebvre and Nicholson-Smith, 1991 p. 84) If we apply Marx’s categories to Lefebvre’s theory, we can argue that space is nothing less than the transformation of nature materiality into useful qualities (use values) giving them social sense through the agency of labour. In fact, Lefebvre goes on to explain that social spaces “[…] are products of an activity which involves the economic and technical realms but which extends well beyond them for these are also political products, and strategic spaces. The term 'strategy' connotes a great variety of products and actions: it combines peace with war, the arms trade with deterrence in the event of crisis, and the use of resources from peripheral spaces with the use of riches from industrial, urban, state-dominated centres” (idem p. 85) While space and nature overlap completely outside social relations, space only becomes “concrete" through the dialectical synthesis of the “perceived-conceived-lived triad” (Lefebvre and Nicholson-Smith, 1991 p. 40), which makes space “at once a precondition and a result of social superstructures”. All these considerations lead Lefebvre to the conclusion that space is a “social relationship” (idem p. 85) “[…] which is inherent to property relationships (especially the ownership of the earth, of land) and also closely bound up with the forces of production (which impose a form on that earth or land); here we see the polyvalence of social space, its 'reality' at once formal and material [emphasis added]. Though a product to be used, to be consumed, it is also a means of production [emphasis in the original]; networks of exchange and flows of raw materials and energy fashion space and are determined by it. Thus this means of production, produced as such, cannot be separated either from the productive forces, including technology and knowledge, or from the social division of labour which shapes it, or from the state and the superstructures of society” (ibidem) On these grounds, Lefebvre develops a “long history of space [emphasis in the original]” (Lefebvre and Nicholson-Smith, 1991 p. 116) through which he identifies three different forms taken by space throughout history. The first is absolute space, that is the transfiguration of the nature experienced by peasant and nomadic populations into a sacred delimitation. The second is historical space during which the conditions for capital 95 accumulation start to consolidate in geographies “dominated” by the “town of the west” as a historical subject, and “the countryside under its control” (idem p. 49). Under historical space, nature is appropriated, although not yet dominated, by labour. In this process of “becoming independent” from nature, “labour fell prey to abstraction” turning into “abstract social labour” (idem). Throughout this separation, secularisation and commodification process, exchange value as a foundational abstract relation expanded first through the use of the money form, then through capital, coming to produce the third space form, that is abstract space. Emerging through the geometrical and linear codes of the renaissance, abstract space becomes distinctly visible since the XIX century, when a maturely internationalised capitalism produced it as incorporating “[…] the «world of commodities», [capitalism’s] «logic» and its worldwide strategies, as well as the power of money and that of the political state” (idem p. 53) Abstract space appears as dialectically incorporating the law of value and its hegemonizing power. Lefebvre explains that abstract space “[…] as a product of violence and war, […] is political; instituted by a state, […] is institutional. On first inspection it appears homogeneous [emphasis added]; and indeed it serves those forces which make a tabula rasa [emphasis in the original] of whatever stands in their way, of whatever threatens them - in short, of differences” (idem p. 285) Yet, abstract space appears “homogeneous” only “on first inspection. In fact, like capitalism as a mode of production, it is trapped in the contradiction between centralisation and dispersal, unity and fragmentation. Therefore, abstract space “is not homogeneous; it simply has [emphasis in the original] homogeneity as its goal” (idem p. 287). 4.3.2 Space abstraction between power, counterpower and accumulation If we apply the category of abstract space to ‘green’ investment areas we can contend that these are the abstract spaces of ‘green’ accumulation. Following Lefebvre, they result from abstraction processes which are “political” and “instituted by the state” and that are traversed by power as much as they are by exchange value and capital. 96 Such processes through which a sovereign power asserts its sovereignty on spaces, so transforming their socio-historical identity - producing them, are discussed in two different literature strands through the notions of territory, territoriality and territorialisation. The first strand, represented by a well-established tradition of mainly anglophone scholars, focuses more on the strategies of a preeminent entity - which we might define as sovereign but not necessarily with a state character - aimed at extending or maintaining its domination over a geographical area. The second strand, developed particularly by francophone, italophone and Latin American scholars, regards territory as a dialectical interstitial spatiality and positionality defined by stratified historical dialectics between powers and counterpowers in the long durée. Both of them are relevant to this thesis and will be treated in what follows. 4.3.2.1 Territory, territorialisation and land grabbing This subsection discusses the literature strand that conceives of territory as a political space controlled by the state -or powers legitimised by itand extended through processes of territorialisation in the context of the capitalist mode of production. It also explores the related notions of land grabbing and ‘green’ grabbing. Territorialisation can be directed to and originate from political or economic organisations, such as a state or a multinational corporation, whose origin is external to the targeted space (Elden, 2013; Sassen, 2008; Sassen, 2013). Yet, particularly in the case of a state, strategies of territorialisation can be deployed over areas of an internal territory which are not fully under state’s control or which it endeavours to re-functionalise to different productive or strategic purposes. This phenomenon is defined by Vandergeest and Peluso (1995) as internal territorialisation aimed at “establishing control over natural resources and the people who use them” (idem p. 1). Since then, the category has been explicitly and implicitly applied to study the appropriation of ecosystem flows, stocks and spaces for value extraction and accumulation (Sivaramakrishnan, 1197; Brenner, 1999; Peluso and Vandergeest, 2001; Buch-Hansen, 2003). More recently, the focus has expanded to the role that non-state actors play in territorialisation processes. Relevant literature has shown that capitals or non-capital private organisations can enact forms of ‘private’ territorialisation under some sort of legal and political legitimation supported by the state hegemony 97 (amongst others Corson, 2011; Gayer, 2014; Rasmussen and Lund, 2018). This is often read as a result of state-actors’ capability to influence policy and regulatory processes, also leveraging discourses around development, conservation or decarbonisation (Corson and MacDonald, 2012; Corson, 2011). This strand of literature intends territorialisation as correlated with the phenomena, and analytical categories, of land enclosure and land grabbing whereby communities or individuals previously living those spaces are forcibly expelled or incorporated into value-extraction chains and enrolled to accumulation schemes of one or more investment entities. Although land enclosure and grabbing are not always explicitly associated with territorialisation, they are most often read as driven by state and non-state actors’ strategies to extend and strengthen their control over a geographical area. As seen in chapter 3, land enclosures and grabbing were first identified by Karl Marx as the two epiphenomena characterising capitalism’s primitive accumulation (Marx, 1976). Building on the categories of imperialism as elaborated by Luxemburg (2015) and Lenin (Lenin, 1999) and in line De Angelis’s work (2001), Harvey has identified a process of accumulation by dispossession as a core dynamic of neoliberal capitalism, alongside ‘normal’ sustained accumulation (Harvey, 2005b p. 137 and following). This debate has further consolidated the prominence of enclosure and land grabbing as analytical categories key to historical materialist and critical studies on space and ecosystem dispossessions. Outside academic debates, the term land grabbing was popularised by a number of press and activist contributions published at the end of the 2000s. It was used to describe a sustained acquisition trend of vast tracts of land in the global South since the end of the 2010s, linked to the 2007-2008 financial and food crises (for a comprehensive overview see Franco et al., 2013). As analytical categories, land grabbing and enclosure have been applied to the study of fields as different as global agribusiness, energy, financial and tourism industry, housing and expansion of urban sprawls, environmental conservation and climate change mitigation programmes (GRAIN, 2013; McMichael, 1994; Borras and Franco, 2012; Cotula, 2012; Hall, 2013). Particularly relevant to this thesis are land and resource appropriations that are legitimised through ‘green’ credentials (Fairhead et al., 2012) and defined as cases of ‘green’ grabbing (amongst others Fairhead et al., 2012; Corson and MacDonald, 2012). The 98 term was coined by the Guardian journalist John Vidal (2008) seeking to picture the controversial aspects of environmental conservation. An extensive discussion connecting the sourcing of ‘green’ commodities in marginal areas and peripheral countries to meet demand from the global North was conducted by Fairhead et al. (2012). A more nuanced contextualisation of ‘green’ grabbing as “the materialisation of natural capital” is advanced by Corson et al. (2013 p. 1). The notion of ‘green’ grabbing has also been applied to the study of specific ambits. Territorialisation and grabbing have been related to the convention on biological diversity and the actions it envisages (Corson and MacDonald, 2012; McAfee, 1999). Along similar lines, conservation and ecotourism have been studied as drivers of ‘green’ grabbing (Corson, 2011; Ojeda, 2012). Finally but most importantly to this thesis, ‘green’ grabbing has been correlated to renewable energy generation. Backhouse (2016; 2014) describes as ‘green’ grabbing the enclosing of Amazon lands for biofuel production. Aha and Ayitey (2017) illustrate how investments in biofuels cultivations undermined Indigenous populations customary land use and tenure in Ghana. Cases of ‘green’ grabbing related to renewable energy have been documented also in core nodes of global capitalism and specifically in the EU. Amongst others, Brunner (2019) interpreted the combination of agricultural subsidisation under the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy and energy crop cultivation as a driver of ‘green’ grabbing on eastern Germany lands. The interplay between promotion policies and investments on wind and photovoltaic energy in Greece was explained through the categories of enclosure and ‘green’ grabbing by Siamanta (2017; 2019). 4.3.2.2 Territoire, territorio, territory The literature illusrated above is underlain by two assumptions. First, territory is such insofar as it is dominated by a preponderant power. Second, in the very act of domination clear boundaries are set, which are defended against external or internal potentially countervailing powers (Halvorsen, 2018). Although this literature is perfectly capable of detecting conflicts between dominating and dominated groups or classes, it seems to conceive of territory as a monolithically established entity, resembling more to a platform waiting for the next preponderant power to plant its flag on, rather than a lived space à la Lefebvre. Building on similar arguments, Agnew (1994) attempted to innovate the territorial paradigm of international relations scholarship by theorising the existence of a territorial trap. 99 This conceptual loophole would induce international relations theorists to think of territory as an ahistorical, fix category, completely overlapping with that of territorial state and merely serving as a “container of society” (p. 60). By contrast, the interpretations which we are going to discuss in this subsection all share an understanding of territory as a produced social space, wherein practices, knowledges and relations stratify and come to live through material and immaterial cultural forms. This perspective is particularly developed in francophone, italophone and Latin American literature. Therefore, we will refer to these different, yet dialoguing, traditions by using the word for territory in the original language, so as to differentiate from the anglophone literature and its pivoting on sovereign territoriality. In Francophone literature le territoire is connoted by the social relations living through and as it. Following Raffestin’s argument, we can contend that le territoire, as it is molecularly traversed by power, is a system of meaning through which a community or a group communicates its intensions and “material reality”, or -in other wordsrealises its culture and relations through the production of a space, which tends to be hegemonic. As Del Biaggio notices, in an enlightening article comparing anglophone and francophone conceptions of territory, le territoire is “qualified by society” (2015 p. 40). This is echoed by Debardieux who explains that le territoire is “[…] a social construct that connects a material base made of a geographical space to a system of values that gives multiple and combined meanings to each component of this space (the places [lieux], but also the spacing [espacements] and the discontinuities it encompasses” (in ibidem). From a similar perspective, Bourdeau maintains that le territoire reflects the cultural identity of a community and is reflected by the cultural identity of a community. If the cultural identity of a community is inherently territorial, then the cultural signification of a space into a territoire is a process of cultural appropriation, whereby the sense of belonging to a territoire and the sense of care for it are established (idem). In the italophone literature, elaborations about il territorio point to two interrelated tendencies. The first is represented by Alberto Magnaghi, the founder of the Italian territorialist school. Magnaghi is an urbanist architect by education and his deep knowledge of 106 choice was to narrow the focus down onto a specific ambit of the ‘greening’ of capitalism and analyse renewable energy generation within the context of the EU capitalism. While the generation of renewable energy is a core sector for both the ecological transition and the ‘greening’ of capitalism, the EU market offers the opportunity to observe its organisation in a fast-developing, heavy-subsidised market (for an overview see Solorio and Bocquillon, 2017). In the light of these preliminary delimitations, the actual formulation of the research main goal and questions, and the identifications of methods, was prepared through a critical analysis based on the categories of historical materialism and empirical literature on renewable energy generation (amongst others see Howard et al., 2013; Yenneti et al., 2016; McMichael, 2009; Hamelinck, 2013; Hadjimichalis, 2014; Sullivan, 2017; Siamanta, 2017; Argenti and Knight, 2015), both within and without the EU. From it emerged that assuming the enclosure of ecosystem spaces, stocks and flows, for the renewable energy generation, as epiphenomena of capitalism ‘greening’ -or ‘green’ capitalismwould imply the study of three interrelated ambits. Specifically, based on the investigation of value extraction and accumulation patterns, an analysis of the involved social relations as they exist through space should be developed, including the construction of governance systems through processes of de-regulation and re-regulation, underlain by hegemonizing narratives around a ‘green’ growth (Castree, 2008b; 2008a; Corson et al., 2013; Ekers and Prudham, 2017; 2018). The complexity of the three ambits and the intention to study them in depth, including the visions and perceptions of the actors involved, suggested to further simplify the analysis scope and study them at the subnational level, by adopting a case study approach, through a plurality of qualitative methods and the support of descriptive statistics. This choice made possible to apply a historical-materialist dialectical logic throughout the phases of both data collection and analysis. In fact, a case study approach allows to frame the geographical difference as interrelated with broader socio-historical dynamics. Through a constant juxtaposition of micro and macro observations and an iterative dialogue between hypothesis and results, the unicity of any case study can be analogised, compared and contrasted with similar phenomena happening in different contexts. Following Hegelian dialectic, we should notice that while difference negates universality by its very existence, 107 universality is such because includes all differences, that is all its negations. By consequence, the unicity of the phenomena under investigation, such as value extraction and accumulation around localised systems for the generation of renewable energy, can be found in places different from those studied by this research. In other words, their unicity does not coincide to any extent to a monadic singularity (Castree, 2005). The techniques used for case study selection and sampling will be discussed in the next section. Here suffice to say that in order to build a solid and composite evidence base two different renewable sources were selected. One is wind energy, the other biogas from energy crops. They were studied and analysed through two distinct case studies conducted between 2016 and 2020, respectively on four provinces of the Italian southern Apennine, such as Avellino, Benevento, Potenza and Foggia, and in Brandenburg and MecklenburgVorpommern, two states of the eastern part of the federal republic of Germany. Against these premises, we can now turn our attention to the research main goal. This is to investigate the extraction and accumulation of surplus value as it takes place in and around the generation of renewable energy at the level of production areas or territories (see chapter 4), the enclosure and transformative processes it triggers, the class and factional cooperation, or conflict, patterns it entails, and the governance processes to which it is associated in terms of both hegemonic narratives and institutional structures. In order to achieve its main goal, this research theoretical and empirical investigation is oriented by four questions: - How it is possible to understand the consolidation of the governance systems regulating renewable energy transitions in the EU and national contexts and regions of the case studies through the historical materialist categories of sublation (refunctionalisation) and hegemony? - How can we interpret the extraction and accumulation of surplus value in and around renewable energy in terms of the socially necessary labour time theory of value? What are the implied distribution, cooperation and conflict patterns amongst class and class factions and groups? - How does the enclosing of ecosystem spaces (lands), stocks and flows targeted for renewable energy generation take place? Is force organised through legal frameworks, physical violence or market mechanisms, or a combination of the three? 108 - How does the extraction and accumulation of surplus value in and around renewable energy transform socioecological relations in the production areas, in terms of class relations and space and nature commodification (abstraction)? 5.3 Case studies and data collection This section describes the structuring of the case studies, from their initial identification to the methods used for data collection. It is organised into three sections. The first presents the techniques used to identify the case studies. The last two discuss the data collection methods applied to each of the case studies. 5.3.1 Case study identification and structuring The identification of the case studies was conducted through a purposeful sampling methodology, guided by the research epistemology (see chapter 1) and tailored to its main goal and questions. It was also intended to allow for building an overarching triangulation system and formulating some valid generalisation. Towards this purpose, it was chosen to conduct multiple case studies and to include both renewable sources from biotic services and abiotic flows (see chapter 7 and 8). Table 5.1 Case studies identified at an early research design phase Renewable energy system location Germany - states of Brandenburg, Mecklenburg Vorpommern Italy - provinces of Foggia, Benevento, Avellino, Potenza Greece - Macedonia, region of Thessaly Energy source/carrier Energy-crops/biogas Wind Sun Key facts After reunification in 1990, privatization of public lands in eastern Germany has triggered a "rush to land" driven by land price differentials , incentives on biomass/biofuels production and agricultural subsidies under EU Common Agricultural Policy Lucrative incentives and a simplified permitting and fiscal regime has triggered investments by national and international investors Sovereign debt crisis has forced farmers to sell out their land or develop renewable plants through borrowed funds, relaying on public incentive that were cut at a later stage leaving farmers with unsustainable debt Land enclosure dynamics Market mechanisms Regulatory/market mechanisms Regulatory/market mechanisms Incentive scheme Tax breaks; feed-in-tariff/premium; agricultural subsidies Tax breaks; feed-in-tariff/premium Tax breaks; feed-in-tariff/premium Main features of the investment entities National and multinational companies National and multinational companies. Investments from armed capitals (mafias) has been documented Investors from Spain and Germany. Local SMEs installing photovoltaic panels Opposition/resistance Small and young farmers’ organisation trying to influence public debate on land privatisation through campaigning/demonstration. The term “land grabbing” is used Awareness campaigns and demonstrations from civil society organisations engaged in environmentalist and anti-capitalist movements at a multiple scale Awareness campaigns and demonstrations from civil society organisations engaged in antiausterity/anti-capitalist movements at a multiple scale 109 As a first step, three selection criteria were identified, such as the presence of a renewable energy production system, a documented or debated processes of land enclosure and concentration related to renewable energy generation, the existence of movements contesting or resisting the renewable energy system or parts of it. The latter was considered a key element towards broadening the heterogeneity of the sample for observation and interviewing. The sampling strategy for the identification of the case studies was further refined by spatial criteria reflecting historical materialism’s categories. Specifically, the classification advanced by Wallerstein’s world system theory was applied (2004a). According to this, the capitalist world-economy is characterised by a transnational division of labour, whereby geo-political units, such as world-regions, states, or subnational regions, may play core, periphery and semi-periphery functions in global accumulation patterns. Thanks to this, it is possible to study (the positioning of geo-political units within) global flows of value, labour and commodities, as they structure geographies of power and inequality along dependency and extractive dynamics and connecting geo-political units, such as world-regions, states or subnational regions. Initially three potential case studies were identified: the production of biogas, and of the energy crops used as fermentation substrata, in Brandenburg and Mecklenburg Vorpommern in east-Germany; the generation of wind energy in four provinces of the Italian southern Apennine across the regions of Campania, Basilicata and Puglia; the conversion of solar radiation into electricity in the Greek region of Thessaly. The first case involves a renewable resource from a biotic ecosystem service, agricultural soil productivity, located in country at the core of the EU’s division of labour, the second concerns an abiotic flow, wind kinesis, in a semi-peripheral country, the third also focused on an abiotic flow in a peripheral country. The determination about the centrality or peripherality of the countries was based on macroeconomic fundamentals between 2011 and 2017. In order to simplify the sample and make it researchable in the course of a four-year PhD, it was decided to actually conduct two case studies. This time the selection was based on a combination of purposive and convenience criteria. The case studiy on biogas in Brandenburg and Mecklenburg Vorpommern was maintained, since it was the only one including a biotic ecosystem service. Of the two involving an abiotic flow, that on wind energy in 110 the Italian southern Apennine was kept. My identity of Italian native speaker was deemed crucial in facilitating data collection and analysis. The study of the two cases was conducted by mixing qualitative methods, descriptive statistics, and rudimentary economic modelling. For the qualitative part, I used methods including direct observation, loosely structured interviews with renewable projects stakeholders, documentary analysis of objects such as investors’ position papers, regulatory documents, policy frameworks, local authorities’ plans of action, grassroots organisations’ items. For the descriptive statistics part, I analysed data provided by national statistical offices, specialised agencies, and consulting companies. For the economic modelling part, I relied on information retrieved from regulatory frameworks or automated modelling systems provided by public agencies, in order to generate data on investment revenue structure and profitability. 5.3.2 Case study A – data collection on wind energy in southern Italy This subsection describes in detail the conduction of the case study on wind energy in southern Italy and the methods that were used for data collection, as they were applied between February 2018 and June 2018. The first research activity was to conduct a documentary analysis focusing strictly on energy and wind energy data, which allowed to further delimit the fieldwork area to four provinces. These include the province of Foggia located in Puglia region; the provinces of Benevento and Avellino located in Campania Region; the province of Potenza located in Basilicata region. The four provinces form a contiguous territory stretching over a sector of the Italian southern Apennine known as Apulo-Campano Apennine. They house 41 percent of Italy’s wind installed capacity distributed in large and smaller plants (see chapter 7). As the fieldwork area was definitively delimited, a months-long period of documentary research started in the period between the end of 2017 and the beginning of 2018 leading to the actual conduction of fieldwork activities. In this phase, three aims were achieved. The first was to clarify the historical and socio-economic context of the case study; the second was to frame the fieldwork region within the wider Italy’s path towards the institutionalisation of the environment as a policy area; the third was to form a general 111 understanding of wind energy investment in the fieldwork region. The former two were addressed through the investigation of academic and non-academic literature, while the last through the analysis of reports from institutions and descriptive statistical elaborations. During this period also a logistic activity was carried out to establish partnerships with local universities and scholars. A solid and working relationship with local scholars was deemed crucial in order to enhance data collection and analysis as an iterative process throughout all the fieldwork phases. As a result, two partnerships were agreed, with the University of Salerno and the University of Naples Federico II, which hosted me as a visiting PhD researcher. 5.3.2.1 Preparatory interviews with specialised scholars The knowledge base built through the preparatory documentary research was further extended through a round of loosely structured interviews with six scholars from Italian Universities, by reason of their expert knowledge on either wind energy production, the fieldwork region or both. Table 5.2 provides a full list of the preliminary interviews which have been pseudonymised in order to protect participants’ identity. Pseudonym University Interview period AC/IT-1 Università degli Studi Suor Orsola Benincasa di Napoli Winter 2018 AC/IT-2 Università degli Studi di Napoli "Federico II" Winter 2018 AC/IT-3 Università degli Studi di Salerno Winter 2018 AC/IT-4 Università di Pisa Winter 2018 AC/IT-5 Università degli Studi di Napoli "L'Orientale" Winter 2018 AC/IT-6 Università degli Studi di Palermo Winter 2018 Table 5.2 Preparatory interviews with experts for case study A 112 The interviews had a double aim. On the one hand, they were used to start collecting data towards the four research questions and triangulate them with the information gathered in the preliminary documentary research. On the other, they provided insights and information which proved crucial in preparing an orderly and effective course of fieldwork activities. This was so especially with regard to cultural and geographical characteristics; potential risks and difficulties; best strategies to conduct direct observation and access interviewees (see following subsection and 5.3.2.3). During the interviews, potential gatekeepers for interview with wind energy projects stakeholders were discussed and identified. 5.3.2.2 Interviews with project stakeholders Interviews with wind energy project stakeholders were a core method for the collection of primary data. By project stakeholder it is here intended any individual that by reason of the social function he or she performs, or the place he or she inhabits, has an interest potentially or actually either benefiting from or damaged by a windenergy project or system of projects. The selection of potential participants was carried out through a combination of purposive and snowballing sampling. As a first step, three gatekeepers were identified, with whom a double round of interviews was carried out. The first took place as an open conversation intended to identify other participants. Differently, in the second-round gatekeepers were interviewed as normal participants. By combining evidence from preliminary research and information from gatekeepers, potential informants were organised into six categories: (i) Activists opposing or contesting wind energy projects, reported in table 5.3 and elsewhere in the text as Activists (ii) Individuals with an expert knowledge on either wind energy production, the fieldwork region or both, reported in table 5.3 and elsewhere in the text as Experts (iii) Investors in any of the productive segments or productive cycle of a wind energy project, reported in table 5.3 and elsewhere in the text as Investors 113 (iv) Landowners from before the implementation of a wind energy project, reported in table 5.3 and elsewhere in the text as Landowners (v) Local politicians with or without operative links with wind energy production or energy crops cultivation as a result of their professional activity reported in table 5.3 and elsewhere in the text as Local politicians (vi) Project area inhabitant, reported in table 5.3 and elsewhere in the text as Inhabitants Pseudonym Narrative pseudonym Interview period Activist-1 Cettina Spring 2018 Activist-2 Winter 2018 Activist-3 Spring 2018 Activist-4 Giuseppe Spring 2018 Activist-5 Winter 2018 Activist-6 Alessandro Winter 2018 expert-1 Winter 2018 expert-2 Winter 2018 expert-3 Spring 2018 Expert-4 Winter 2018 Expert-5 Francesco Spring 2018 Inhabitant-1 Winter 2018 Inhabitant-2 Winter 2018 Inhabitant-3 Winter 2018 Inhabitant-4 Winter 2018 Inhabitant-6 Winter 2018 Investor-1 Alfonso Winter 2018 Investor-2 Arianna Winter 2018 Investor-3 Winter 2018 Investor-4 Winter 2018 Landowner-1 Winter 2018 Landowner-2 Winter 2018 Landowner-3 Winter 2018 Landowner-4 Winter 2018 Landowner-5 Margherita Spring 2018 Local politician-1 Winter 2018 Local politician-2 Winter 2018 Local politician-3 Enrica Winter 2018 Local politician-4 Winter 2018 Local politician-5 Gianni Winter 2018 National politician-1 Winter 2018 National-level environmentalist NGO's member-1 Winter 2018 Table 5.3 List of interviews for case study A 114 Through a further purposeful selection of the information provided by the gatekeepers a list of 49 potential participants was compiled, of which 31 were actually contacted and interviewed (see 5.3). A balance amongst the six different categories of participants was maintained as much as possible in the evolving fieldwork conditions. In this respect, it is important to notice that the initial list of potential participants changed many times and that in the majority of cases they were contacted and interviewed as a result of direct observation sessions. Two participants were interviewed that do not belong to any of the above categories. Although the level of information they provided would suggest they should fall within the expert category, the function they perform is directly related to their capability to provide this information and was also key in interpreting it. For these reasons, it was decided to include them under the distinct categories of national politician and national-level environmentalist NGO’s member. All interviews were pseudonymised on several levels to protect participants’ identity. A narrative pseudonym was assigned to participants from whose interviews fragments were taken and quoted in the thesis, in order to preserve the narrative integrity and fluidity of the text. The interviews were developed to last up to an hour. They were designed following a ‘tree and branch’ structure (Rubin and Rubin, 2011). Specifically, the interviews were conceived of as composed of blocks each addressing a different aspect of the research goal, as indicated by the research questions. Their aim was to capture information, as well as opinions and perceptions, to be interpreted, compared and validated through multiple triangulations. An indicative list of questions is provided in appendix A. The main body of the interview was designed to be the same for all categories of informants. Although this was a main feature of the interview process, intended to ensure comparability through heterogeneity, after the first interviews were conducted it appeared necessary to formulate specific questions for each category of participants, in order to collect perceptions and interpretations correlated to the social positioning of every participant. 5.3.2.3 Direct observation Direct and participant observation played a major role in contacting and interviewing projects stakeholders. Apart from this, through direct observation gradually emerging findings and evidence were elaborated and reflected upon, by making sense of the actual spatiality of the fieldwork region. During the five months that I spent living in the case study region 115 and travelling from a village to another, every detail of the immersive experience concurred to the analysis and interpretation of the gathered information. This holds true obviously for the moments that were ‘formally’ part of data collecting, such as listening to the answer provided during an interview or analysing written information. Yet, the interpretive activity was to some extent more intense during moments that were ‘informally’ part of the research. Specifically, insightful were observations of the landscapes vis-à-vis information provided by participants, but also the participation in convivial events where I could enjoy open conversations with inhabitants not expressly focused on the research questions, but still relevant to the construction of a broad-based knowledge. While this ‘informal’ activity was extensive in time length, it also was considerably dense in terms of early processed information. During observation, both shorter and longer field notes were written. 5.3.2.4 Documentary research The data collection phase was supported by a constant iterative process of triangulation with documentary analysis. Seven categories of documents were analysed, such as regulatory documents from local, regional and national institutions, court judgements, press reports and articles in written or video form, minutes of local institutions and specialised agencies boards, parliamentary hearings, companies and investors reports. 5.3.2.5 Descriptive statistics Where possible, qualitative information was interpreted, cross-checked, and complemented through descriptive statistics. Used resources included public databases such as those provided by ISTAT, Italy’s national statistical service, and EUROSTAT, EU’s statistical service. Data were complemented with databased provided by public specialised agencies. A private database provided by www.windpower.net was also used. 5.3.2.6 Economic modelling Value extraction and distributional patters of wind projects were assessed through the economic modelling of two hypothetical projects WP1 and WP2. The information needed to quantify the cash flow from subsidisation was sourced through the analysis of the relevant laws and regulations. For a full explanation of the methods used to the modelling see appendix B. 122 calculator provided by the Board of Trustees for Technology and Building in Agriculture eV (KTBL) 38 . That is a research institution under the aegis of Agency for Renewable Resources, which is a branch of the Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture. Additional information retrieved from relevant regulations was used. 5.3.4 Data analysis As this research is founded on a historical materialist epistemology, the data analysis process was informed by the categories of that philosophical tradition. The most important implication is that methods and techniques for analysis were selected and designed following primarily, yet not uniquely, a deductive reasoning. This approach was also deemed the most effective toward this research overarching purpose of contributing to historical materialist debate both in general terms and with specific reference to the research goal and questions. On this premises, a comprehensive approach based on deductive coding was applied to the analysis of the evidences obtained from the methods described above (Potter and Levine-Donnerstein, 1999; Hsieh and Shannon, 2005). The first step was to identify key categories and variables from the broad historical materialist framework and adapt them to the research goal and questions. As a result, five raw analytical categories were identified, such as hegemony building mechanisms; territorially based class cleavages; alliances around value extraction; enclosure mechanisms; socioecological transformations. These purely theoretical categories were applied to documentary analysis in order to derive themes refined through secondary information from documents. The themes were then used to approach the analysis of interviews. The formation of analytical elaborations on interviews was a multi-layered process started in the very moment interviews were conducted. Nevertheless, the density of analytical elaborations increased substantially with the transposition of interview notes or voice recordings into organised transcripts. This was an ongoing recursive activity, which allowed to build a grid of codes and themes, incrementally refining its capability to capture finegrained details while contextualising them within the wider geo-historical dialectics. 38 The calculator is available at https://daten.ktbl.de/biogas/navigation.do?selectedAction=Startseite#start 123 Specifically, once the first transcripts were completed, the themes derived through theoretical and documentary analysis were applied and disassembled into codes. As the number of coded transcripts increased, the codes progressively improved in sophistication. Once coding was completed, codes could be reassembled into new, empirically tested, overarching themes. As a further step, the interrelations amongst them were traced with the aim of drawing conceptual maps. On these maps particularly evocative interview excerpts were also included, so as to create a reconstruction coherently dialectical, by anchoring within a single visual tool empirical material and analytical elaborations. On this basis, it was possible to let new questions, gaps and avenues for research emerge. These were investigated through further rounds of purposefully oriented theoretical and documentary analysis, supported through descriptive statistics, and continuously maintained in dialogue with the interviews. Furthermore, the analysis of field notes and the writing of ongoing reflections was an extremely valuable source of insights which helped complement and strengthen the whole analytical process by allowing iterative interpretation, clarification, and reframing. 5.4 Ethical and positionality aspects of this research This section discusses the ethical and positionality implications of this research and the actions undertaken to address them. It aims at clarifying how ethical and positionality considerations influenced the methodology and therefore the findings of this research (Silverman, 2013). 5.4.1 Ethical aspects and actions to address them The research was designed and conducted in accordance with the Research Ethics Policy of University of Leeds and the applicable UK and international law. As a result, the principles of a prior and informed consent; protection of confidentiality and minimisation of risks in which both the subject-participants and the researcher may incur were observed throughout the research cycle. A part of the interviews was audio-recorded, while another was recorded through written notes. For a small number of them no audio or written record was taken at the moment the interview was taking place. All audio-recordings or written notes containing sensitive 124 personal information, such as details on identity was stored in line with the requirements of the Research Ethics Policy of University of Leeds. In the case of audio-recorded interviews, participants’ identity was pseudonymised at the moment of transcription which in some case happened days after the interview. In the case of written-recorded interviews participants’ identity was pseudonymised immediately after interviews. In both cases a double level pseudonymisation was carried out, so to ensure a higher level of protection to participants’ identity. 5.4.2 Reflections on my positionality The concept of positionality implies that the historical, geographical, social and cultural conditions throughout which a researcher personality and expertise have developed influence the research process itself (Hammersley and Atkinson, 1995; Malterud, 2001). This should be read in relation to that of rigour, which is an inescapable condition for every credible piece of research and scientific work. It is beyond doubt that this rests on a sound and coherent research process, from ideation, to design, conduction and writing. Yet, this can be hampered by overt or veiled claims of neutrality and the absence of an open discussion about the researcher’s social background. If everything is inherently contradictory, following Hegel (1969), then there is no such a thing as neutrality. Historical materialism as a philosophical tradition is particularly familiar with such an understanding. It stems from the critique of the naturalisation of social phenomena, and by extension, class differences and inequalities. By using historical materialism as a theoretical framework and epistemological approach I have chosen a precise positionality within the debates in human geography and more broadly social sciences and humanities. Such a positionality is that of research looking at reality as a dialectical socio-historical processes in which there are deeply rooted social inequalities. Although research is conceived as an autonomous activity, the very act of knowing is intended as profoundly transformative and by implication inherently political. In this regard, memorable are Gramsci’s writings on the role of intellectuals in the construction of hegemonic mechanisms (Gramsci, 1975). My positionality as a researcher has been deeply influenced also by a two-decade active participation in social and environmentalist movements. This facilitated substantially the organisation of fieldwork activities. Thanks to activist networks of which I have been part 125 or with which I have been in contact, I could identify some of the participants. As an activist I gained more easily the trust of participants who were also activist. On the other hand, especially in the phase of analysis I needed to make myself fully aware of my positionality as an activist in order to thoroughly interpret and triangulate information from interview. 5.5 Conclusions This chapter has provided a comprehensive explanation of the methodology for this research. The second section has illustrated the long intellectual process of research ideation with a focus on research design, main goal and guiding questions. The third section has presented the research methodology for both data collection and analysis. The fourth section has discussed the researcher’s ethics and positionality. Now that full information about the theoretical and methodological structure of this thesis are provided, its empirical analysis and findings can be presented in the next three chapters. The first and following one focuses on the political-economic patterns that have enabled the extraction and accumulation of surplus value in and around renewable energy in the EU and the national contexts of the case studies. Chapter 6 – Ecological modernisation and renewable energy governance in the EU and the case study national contexts 6.1 Introduction This chapter explores the emergence of ecological modernisation as a policy approach to the governance of renewable energy generation in both the EU and the national contexts of the case studies of this research. It aims at explaining the regulatory and institutional systems, and the historical processes from which they result, enabling the extraction and accumulation of surplus value in and around renewable energy, as ‘green’ capitalism in action. The chapter is organised into three sections. The first shows how the consolidation of the ‘environment’ as a policy field and accumulation horizon has informed the renewable energy governance as it takes place today in the EU. The second and third illustrate the rise of ecological modernisation as the dominant policy approach and theoretical framework informing the renewable transitions both in the Italian and German contexts, with a specific focus respectively on wind energy and biogas generation. They show how government’s concerns for energy security and early environmental contestations, especially around the use of nuclear energy, have combined with the national and EU regulations in making ‘green’ accumulation around renewable energy possible. 6.2 Ecological modernisation in the EU This section discusses the formation and evolution of a renewable energy governance in the EU. It is organised into two subsections. The first describes the rationality underlying the EU environmental policy, as the broader field wherein the renewable energy governance is framed, by exploring the Environmental Action Plans (EAPs). The second concentrates specifically on renewable energy governance delving into the dialectic between historical and political dynamics and policy making. 128 6.2.1 From costly burden to accumulation horizon: the ‘environment’ in the Environmental Action Programmes of the EU EAPs are programmatic, non-legislative documents providing the medium to long-term goals in the area of EU environmental policy. Although they do not have the force of binding regulations, they set out the strategic policy frameworks on which actual regulations are based. For this reason, they represent a formidable observation field through which to interpret the tendencies and transformations of environmental discourses within the EU institutions and in the member states overall. The 1958 Treaty of Rome establishing the European Economic Community (EEC) did not include the protection of the environment amongst fields for common regulation. It took until the 1972 Paris Summit for EEC member states to take a clear step towards environmental protection, inviting the EEC’s institutions to prepare a “programme of action” on the field within one year of declaring in the summit final statement that “Economic expansion is not an end in itself […] particular attention will be given to intangible values and to protecting the environment, so that progress may really be put at the service of mankind” (Bulletin of the European Communities, 1972 p. C 112/5) The first EAP was presented in 1973 and combined environmental protection with an approach oriented to economic efficiency (Baker, 2007; Machin, 2019). More specifically, it introduced the ‘polluter pays’ principle, stating that “the cost of preventing and eliminating nuisances must in principle be borne by the polluter [emphasis added]” (Official Journal of the European Communities, 1973 p. C 112/6). Yet, this principle was qualified by a wider belief that “environment policy can and must be compatible with economic and social development [emphasis added]” (ibidem). This caveat established a hierarchy of commitment, recognising socio-economic policies as taking priority over environmental ones, and laid an early rational basis for the systematization of sustainable development within the framework of ecological modernisation (Machin, 2019). At this initial stage, the rationalities underpinning the EU environmental policy were reparatory and repressive, emerging more as a reaction to major polluting events than from a comprehensive ex-ante 129 programmatic approach. An eloquent example is the Seveso Directives 39 meant to control the hazards deriving from the use of chemical dangerous substances 40 . The turning point was the third EAP between 1982 and 1986, which for the first time envisaged potential economic benefits of environmental protection on the EEC’s industrial policy: “[…] certain measures, for fighting pollution and exploiting waste, could stimulate technological innovations and so contribute to improving the competitiveness of the Community's economy” (Official Journal of the European Communities, 1983 p. C 46/5) As Machin (2019) notices, this marked an epochal change in environmental and economic policy terms. The environment was no longer framed as a source of costs generated by its protection, but instead as a reservoir of revenue opportunities. As a guiding principle definitively established for all future legislation, environmental policy was now an instrument to enhance the EEC’s, and later EU’s, economic competitiveness, and must be integrated within the wider economic policy framework. This simple yet revolutionary principle signals the irreversible affirmation of ecological modernisation as the dominant framework for the EU environmental policy. This had become even more visible with the fourth EAP (1987-1992), with employment creation now mainstreamed throughout to underline the expansive potential of the environment as an accumulation horizon. Particularly evocative is an introductory paragraph of the document: “[…] environmental protection policy can contribute to improved economic growth and job creation [emphasis added]. In the past environmental requirements have often been seen as merely imposing regulations and costs [emphasis added] on industry, agriculture, transport, etc. Now, in a world where higher environmental standards are more and more being required, the achievement of such standards must increasingly be seen as an essential element in the future economic success of the Community [emphasis added]. The European Council went on to affirm its determination to give [environmental] policy the dimension of an essential component of the economic, industrial, agricultural and social 39 The Seveso directives are as follows: Council Directive 96/82/EC; Seveso II and III 2012/18/EU. 40 The directive name comes from Seveso, a town in the surroundings of Milan in northern Italy. There, in 1976 an explosion in a chemical manufacturing plant caused the dispersion of a dioxin cloud over a large area. 130 policies implemented by the Community and by its Member States” (Official Journal of the European Communities, 1987 p. C 328/7) The fifth EAP (1993-2000) makes an explicit reference to sustainable development in its very title, which is “Towards sustainability” (Official Journal of the European Communities, 1993). The international debate triggered by the publication of the Brundtland report in 1987 (see chapter 1) and the changes brought by the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 were reflected in the EAP with the “tolerance limits of the environment” (Official Journal of the European Communities, 1993 p. C 138/96) explicitly mentioned and correlated with social inequalities. The EEC acknowledged that its own inhabitants consumed a “disproportionate share of the world's resources” (idem, p. C 138/20), and that the industrialised countries would need to make “[…] a substantial change in consumption patterns so as to reduce their share in the use of the world's natural resources, while at the same time ensuring a steady improvement of the quality of life” (idem, p. C 138/84). Yet, apart from these declaratory statements, the main novelty of the fifth EAP lies somewhere else: for the first time it introduced in the ECC institutional debate the definition of the ecosystem as a “natural capital stock” whose “value” should be preserved though “cost/benefit evaluation criteria” (idem, p. C 138/12). The sixth EAP (2001-2010) expanded the notion of natural capital by framing it in conjunction with that of ecosystem service accounting. It also introduced a classification of policy priority actions, such as: climate change; nature and biodiversity; environment, health and quality of life; and natural resources and waste. This coupled with a set of new measures setting overarching objectives and different cross-cutting strategies and plans, which however lacked an effective implementation and monitoring system, translating into poor results. In 2014 the seventh EAP entered into force until 2020. Along the lines of the previous ones, the EAP established ecosystem accounting and decarbonisation through technological innovation as the core objectives of the EU’s environmental policy. The strategies envisaged to achieve these objectives were fully framed around a growth of ‘green’ investments and an ancillary integration of environmental policy into economic policy goals. 131 In this section we have analysed the emergence of ecological modernisation as a policy approach in the EU using the Environmental Action Programmes as a field of observation. In the next section we will discuss its application to the governance of renewable energy generation. 6.2.2 The EU’s governance of renewable energy generation This section analyses the EU governance of renewable energy generation as it is framed within the broader neoliberal architecture of the European Single Market. Specifically, it shows that the framing of renewable energy transition, within a general process of energy production and distribution liberalisation, has been shaped by frictions between the EU’s institutions and the member states, reflecting a repositioning of capitalist class factions around the new accumulation opportunities opened by the transition itself. The section is organised into three subsections. The first and the second review the regulatory basis of the renewable energy generation governance, which in turn is discussed in the concluding subsection. 6.2.2.1 The legal and institutional basis Up until 1987 the EEC’s environmental legislation consisted in single measures lacking a clear systematisation within the Community juridical framework. Specifically, norms setting the procedures for, and therefore the institutions in charge of, producing environmental policies, as well as indicating their ranking in the hierarchy of sources, were not in place. The legal vacuum was filled by the 1987 Single European Act (SEA). This major revision of the Treaty of Rome elevated environmental protection to the rank of a general provision of the reformed treaty. A power to legislate on environmental matters was then entrusted to the Community institutions, although it was shared with member states. Environmental matters to be normed at the Community level could be identified through an unanimity procedure and then regulated through a qualified majority. Further changes were introduced by the Treaty of Maastricht in 1993. The unanimity procedure was restricted to fewer matters, streamlining legislation mechanisms. Importantly, the Treaty of Maastricht marked the evolving of the environmental policy towards an ecological modernisation framing, as signalled by the introduction of sustainable growth as a guiding concept (Official Journal of the European Communities, 1992). With the reforms brought with the 234 followed by Brandenburg and Saxony with respectively 36 and 32 percent 103 . Moreover, in 2017 half of the east Germany agricultural area was controlled by supra-regional nonagricultural investors. Combining Tietz’s work and fieldwork research, it is possible to deduce the existence of two distinct types of investors in the fieldwork region land market. Regional agricultural farmers, with a more traditional and less finalised business model, on the one hand, cooperate or compete, on the other, with corporate capitals using agricultural operations, and specifically energy crops production, to diversify their asset portfolio. This difference resounds with the words spoken by Ulrich 104 : “We are a medium-sized agricultural coop. Our core business is producing corn, rye and milk. We also make biogas and sell part of the electricity we generate through it to the local grid. It’s good money and is important for our coop, but it’s not our main thing. All our business revolves around land and agriculture. Once, our neighbourhoods were more or less like us, but things are changing fast…It’s known that multinational companies like the Steinoff Group or the Lindhorst group originally specialised in sectors as different as furniture production or real estate -all of a suddendiscovered an interest in agriculture. You can hear about this sort of people buying land everywhere around here the truth is that they consider land just as another investment. Today they are here because returns are good, but they will flee away as soon as the tide changes” (Ulrich – Farmer/DE-4, Autumn 2018) An example of a national highly financialised agricultural company once active throughout east Germany and the fieldwork region is KTG agrar. Before it filed for bankruptcy in 2016 with a debt exposure of €600 thousand million, KTG agrar was the largest agricultural holding in the EU controlling some 46 thousand ha, 38 thousand of which located in east Germany and the rest in Lithuania and Romania. Its story starts from Putlitz, a northern Brandenburg village surrounded by cultivations of potatoes, run under the DDR by a stateowned company (see above). With land privatisation after 1989, the VEG was replaced by a company named PAE-Gruppe. Siegfried Hofreiter, a farmer from Bayern, the richest amongst all Germany’s federal states, bought the PAE-Gruppe at the turn of the 103 Smaller but considerable were also the figures for Thuringia and Saxony-Anhalt with 23 and 22 percent. 104 For details about Ulrich as a participant to interviews see subsection 8.2.1. 235 millennium and established KTG agrar. The company grew rapidly thanks to an astute accounting and financial engineering, combining high debt leveraging, with cash flows from subsidies and continuous acquisitions of cheap lands and smaller companies. Bioenergy production was important in KTG agrar’s business structure so that in 2012 it created an ad-hoc subsidiary company named KTG energie. KTG agrar and KTG energie were now owned by KTG Gruppe. The importance of biogas generation is described by Hofreiter in an interview he gave to the magazine Die Welt (Euler, 2013) “Die welt: Rapeseed and cereal price fell by up to 30 percent compared to the previous year's [2012] and the downturn could be not over yet. Hofreiter: Such fluctuations do not give us too much of a headache, because we only sell a part of our products on the world market, where we must live with the normal cycles. We use the majority of this in energy production through biogas plants [emphasis added] and in product refinement. This way, we have built up an in-house hedging. In addition, the cost side works in our favour: energy, fertilizer and seed goods became cheaper. Die welt: What's next for biogas? Hofreiter: At the moment we have an output of 40 megawatts. This would provide energy to a city of 300,000 people. Sales amount to 50 million euros, which corresponds to a doubling in just two years – with an operating margin of more than 15 percent. By 2015, we want to produce 50 megawatts and increase sales again.” Thanks to its size, KTG gruppe was a large recipient of renewable and agricultural subsidies. Such a conspicuous and stable financial flow sustained the company’s stock value protecting its reputation with creditors and stockholders, while keeping its access to capital markets open until it bankrupted (KTG Agrar, 2012; Euler, 2013; Zinke, 2019). In conclusion, we can argue that against the backdrop of cheap and easily appropriable (fictitious) fixed capital (land), subsidised biogas generation opened a new accumulation horizon, intercepting both the agricultural and energy value extraction chains. This also entailed the sociotechnical integration of large-scale monocultural farming and biogas generation (interview with business developer, Braunschweig, 28-08-2018). One of the 236 tangible effects of this is the enhancement of corn as an industrial crop, as it is clarified by the Frank’s testimony, a business developer at a seed enhancement company: “Corn is perfect for biogas generation not only for its high gas yield. It is also very easy to farm intensively. To give you an idea, whilst apple cultivation requires around 20 chemical application and oilseed rapes about eight, corn only needs an herbicide and insecticide a year. And…on top of that, just consider that since the end of the 1990s it is mainly hybrid corn being farmed around here, which is resistant to herbicides and insecticide and with yields, today, ten times higher than 10 years ago…” (Frank – Investor/DE-3, Summer 2018) What remains to be seen is how such mass of value is appropriated and by whom. This is what we are going to address in the next section. 8.3.4 Surplus value distribution and uneven development This subsection investigates the patterns through which the value extracted in and around a biogas plant is redistributed to the classes, factions and groups of the territorially based alliance. Specifically, through the modelling of two projects it discusses the revenue structure of biogas plants, focusing on the redistribution of profits, wages, interest, rent and taxes. The subsection analyses also the relation between capitals’ mobility and immobility, intended as the rapidity with which capitals are able divest, as a driver of uneven geographical development at the territorial level (see chapter 3 and Harvey, 2018b). Table 8.1 Simulated revenue distribution amongst members of a biogas territorial alliance Substrata suppliers 46.54% 38.15% Substrata suppliers Substrata supplier 1 43.34% 26.08% Operating service providers Substrata supplier 2 3.20% 1.88% Maitenance Plant developers 17.22% 20.30% Other imputs Operational service providers 17.19% 2.34% Heat supply Maitenance 6.83% 1.56% Other services Other imputs 8.76% 21.44% Plant operators Other services 1.60% 10.45% Plant developers Plant operators 13.32% 2.98% Financial and insurance service providers Financial and insurance service providers 3.95% 2.29% Financial serveice providers Financial serveice providers 3.03% 0.69% Insurance service providers Insurance service providers 0.92% 0.90% Workers Workers 1.78% BP1 BP2 237 The major revenue source for a plant producing biogas, whether converting it to electricity in situ or upgrading it to biomethane, flows from public subsidies. Their direct recipients are agricultural companies producing biogas and pure biogas producers. If we take the case of a plant converting biogas into electricity 105 , commissioned in 2012 and receiving feedin premium subsidies (see chapter 6) 74 percent of revenues come from subsidization. It follows that it is impossible to speak of profit, since income from the electricity selling excluding subsidies cover less than 30 percent of total costs. As seen above, such a fact in energy economics is captured by the concept of grid parity 106 . Whilst with solar or wind systems, technology progress and cost reduction make the utility-scale grid parity reasonably foreseeable in the medium-to long term (Gu Choi et al., 2015), with biogas that is far from being achieved, “because economies of scale are impossible: corn price and biogas engine prices are stable over time and quantity” (interview with farmers, Nauen, 24-202018). The intensity of subsidies remains substantial also at a higher segment of the value extraction chain, where agricultural companies produce energy crops, with agricultural subsidies on production covering 51 percent of average farm income 107 . Summing it up, we find that renewable energy subsidies directly sustain energy-producers (both agricultural and pure biogas producers) and indirectly energy-crops suppliers, who, on top of that, receive agricultural subsidies. However, the cash flow generated by subsidies is also redistributed to the rest of territorial alliance members. Consider that relative weights of energy and agricultural subsidies over investors’ revenues vary depending on the field of activity, whether it is agriculture or energy production, on which their productive specialisation rests. Plant developers and technology manufacturers are more dependent on energy subsidies. On the other hand, agrochemical companies benefit more from agricultural subsidies, and so do landowners, whist financial players indirectly extract value from both segments. State articulations collecting taxes related to renewable energy 105 Estimates are based on a feasibility calculator was used. It is provided by The Board of Trustees for Technology and Building in Agriculture eV (KTBL). See footnote 38 and 108. 106 See footnote 30. 107 The calculation is based on the EUROSTAT Economic Accounts for Agriculture and considers subsidies on production (Date accessed: 20-04-2020). Those are directly linked to products, such as coupled payments, while ‘other subsidies on production’ refers to any other subsidies paid to farmers not linked to products, such as decoupled payments, wage subsidies, interest subsidies, environmental payments, less favoured area payments, over-compensation of VAT and disaster relief payments. Figures on subsidies weight on farm income would probably be larger if subsidies on product and intermediate consumption were taken into consideration. 238 plants and the factions labour class employed in relevant productive cycles too receive a share of the value from both subsidy schemes, with diverse intensities and combinations. Let us now delve further into the value redistribution patterns. To simplify the task and make analysis results more readable, two projects have been hypothesised from now BP1 and BP2. The former generates biogas and transforms it into electricity in situ feeding into the grid 4.8 GW p.a. The latter upgrades biogas into biomethane for a total of 8.8 million mn3 p.a. It is assumed that operating and management (O&M) operations are performed by the plant owner. This choice allows to investigate the two main operative models characterising industrial scale biogas generation in the fieldwork area and analyse relevant subsidisation schemes and revenue structures. Table 8.1 108 shows that the segments that absorb much of the value captured by both BP1 and BP2 is energy-crops supply. This is particularly meaningful and if juxtaposed to the fieldwork region concentrated land regime and describes the depth of the structural relationship between energy subsidies and the agricultural sector. However, substrata supply is operated often by a plurality of companies, while if we consider the largest value share captured by a single investor, plant operators are at the top. In both BP1 and BP2, value channelled into wages is the smallest share in the ranking. In BP2, where the production scale is sensibly larger 109 , value to wage ratio is even smaller, weighing half of BP1’s. At the bottom of the ranking, we find municipalities and local communities, which receive less than 1 percent of the project revenues 110 . Let us now consider capital mobility with respect to the different kind of investors and actors in the territorially based alliance. We can start by noticing that energy-crop suppliers (intended as farmers) and plant operator companies with a local or subregional scale are 108 The assumed commissioned year is 2012, so to fall within the 20-year standard EEG subsidisation period. Warmth and fertilisers selling are excluded for reasons of simplification. For the calculations and estimates a feasibility calculator was used. It is provided by The Board of Trustees for Technology and Building in Agriculture eV (KTBL). Municipality shares were calculated basing on the fiscal regime in force as of May 2020. The calculator is available at https://daten.ktbl.de/biogas/navigation.do?selectedAction=Startseite#start. 109 Bruns et al. (2011) notice that below 1000 NM3 the inherent economies of scale significantly sensibly reduce revenue margins. 110 To this should be added property taxes paid by famers supplying energy crops. This is one of the channels through which renewable energy value is flows into municipalities’ budget. The other one is trade tax. Both are calculated by multiplying the taxable base by the municipality coefficient. In the fieldwork areas municipality coefficients are amongst the lowest in Germany, to attract investments. 239 mainly immobilised into the territory. The nature of their business and their scale do not allow for divesting and relocate quickly or to such an extent that the effects of place-specific devaluations can be avoided or mitigated (Harvey, 2018b). In this, labour and local institutions follow a similar fate; although they command no capital, they are ingrained in biogas territorially based alliances and value extraction chains, on which their incomes depend partially or fully. As a result, their narrow room for manoeuvre only let them to adapt to decisions of dominant capital’s factions, unless they engage in some form of organised conflict. Differently, financialised capitals, whose scale is supra-regional, national or international, controlling assets in technology manufacturing, plant owning, operating, insurance or any other segment of the value extraction chain, are by definition more mobile. In fact, their scale and nature allow for relocating rapidly without posing any existential threat to their accumulation strategies. The distinction between capital mobility and immobility is useful to interpret the place and sector specific devaluation that hit Germany’s biogas industry since 2012, shedding light on its consequences in terms of uneven geographical development at the territorial level (see chapter 6). Changes in the legislation and subsidisation mechanisms have initially slowed down biogas accumulation pace and eventually triggered an actual devaluation (see chapter 6 and Pfeiffer and Thrän, 2018). The changed market conditions drove speculative rent-seeking strategies, leveraging cash flows from subsidies to raise funds on the capital markets, to financial difficulties and in many case bankruptcy (Lajdova et al., 2016; Hubik, 2016). A paradigmatic case is that of AC Biogas is. This large agro-energy company, which owned and operated 9 large biogas plants in the fieldwork region, evolved from being a biogas leader at the EU level to file for bankruptcy in 2014. The story of AC biogas is exemplary of a speculative business model based on rising capitals in financial markets, immobilising them and fleeing away when rent sources go drained. AC Biogas was indeed a highly internationalised and financialised investor, achieving its pinnacle in 2011 when Alinda, a US equity fund specialised in infrastructure injected €300 million into agri.capital group SA, the parent company of AC Biogas. With this move Alinda became the owner of 75 percent of the Agri.capital SA group. While that was just the largest capital injection from non-agricultural players that agri.capital SA group seized, it was 240 not the first. In 2009 a group of investors led by the TWC a blue-chip 111 asset management corporation provided €60 million in new equity. All the members of the group were purely financial players specialised in asset management and equity investment and only one had a recognisable link with Germany: Deutsche Bank Securities Inc., the investment banking and securities arm of Deutsche Bank AG in the United States. The good relationships of agri.capital group SA and therefore AC Biogas with large financial players sink their roots back to its foundation. Then, the company’s sole shareholder was an offshore company registered in the Cayman Islands under the name of United BioFuels Europe Cayman Holdings Ltd. This company was registered with the US Security and exchange commission as a securities issuer. Amongst its founders, there is Mr Kevin Parker, who was Global Head of Deutsche Asset Management from 2004 – 2012. As an experienced and high-level financial officer, Mr Parker connected global, mainly us capitals, with the German, highly subsidised, biofuel market. The attitude of AC Biogas is pictured by Ulrich 112 : “they bought and built biogas plants, without paying the due attention to management and maintenance, just to make easy money from subsidies. They were «megalomaniac». They bought everything there was, because they didn’t know where to put all the money they received from investors” (Ulrich – Farmer/DE-4, Autumn 2018) The biogas AC case shows a mix of mobilities and immobilities within the corporate structure itself. If fixed capital immobilised in plants was devalued as consequence of plant closures or sales, mobile investors owning AC biogas shares, could mitigate their losses by either divesting timely or enacting financial edging strategies thanks to the sizes of their asset portfolio. The immediately visible effects of such dynamic to the wider territorial socioeconomic fabric is fix capital (machineries) and variable capital (jobs) destruction interpretable as signs of uneven geographical development from ‘green’ capitalism at work. 111 According to the Cambridge American dictionary a blue -chip company is “considered to be a safe investment for your money because is well-established and has performed well in the past”. 112 For details about Ulrich as a participant to interviews see subsection 8.2.1. 241 8.3.5 The abstraction of the fieldwork region into a horizon for ‘green’ accumulation as territory grabbing In the fieldwork region, value extraction around biogas rests on a strict relation between heavy subsidisation and cheap and concentrated land. The commodification of the latter underlies the accumulation of surplus value flowing from the former. Simple as it may appear, this mechanism triggers deep transformative processes abstracting biogas production areas and the territories wherein they are located into the built environment of ‘green’ capitalism. These alterations are observable at multiple levels, from the complexity of the territorial sociotechnical organisation to the immediate tangibility of landscapes. Yet, all of them revolve around the inextricable nexus between agriculture and bioenergy production. We will discuss them in what follows. With biogas generation the socioecological relations around land, and its double function of space and agricultural soil, are reframed over a horizon of meaning stretching from food to renewable energy production. The discursive logic of such a process builds on a dialectic rationality between distinct socioecological emergencies and the possibility to tackle them through the modernising efficiency of subsidised private accumulation within the principles of neoliberal governance, with two underlying storylines. The first alleges that energy crops are a renewable and sustainable source, regardless of the specific socioecological conditions in which they are produced. As a consequence, risks posed by the monocultural methods used to farm them industrially, such as soil nutrient depletion, large-scale chemical contamination, and ILUC related emissions, may be underplayed or disregarded altogether (Emmann et al., 2013). The second implies that readjusting the sociotechnical systems organising agricultural production to renewable energy generation can be a ‘win-win’ game. As a consequence, different factions of the capitalist class would cooperate accumulating value and redistribute part of it to factions of the labour class and articulations of the state, while originating positive externalities for actors and organisations external to the territorially based alliance and value extraction chain. The pervasiveness of this rationality is observable at several levels from the national down to the regional and local ones. Specifically, in the context of the fieldwork region marginality, an abstractly universalist rationality, informing ecological modernisation theories and relevant policy approaches, conjugates the emergency to mitigate the ecological crises 242 with the urgency to modernise the agricultural sector and, on the other hand, alleviate the divide with the richest Germany’s regions. This narrative was particularly pervasive during the biogas booming years between 2002 and 2012. Mantras urging a transformation ‘from food farmer to energy farmer’, or still defining the ‘farmer as energy economist’ and ‘ energy manager’ (Breitschuh et al., 2004; Scheffer, 2005; Dänzer, 2006) were used in public and academic debates to state the necessity to modernise farmers’ traditional role and fully integrate them within the renewable energy industry. This can be considered as the outcome of a long-term normalisation dynamic making renewable energy sources, and therefore also biogas, compatible with the relations of production of capitalism (see chapter 3). In this regard, particularly evocative are the words spoken in 2007, by Gerd Sonnleitner, who was then president of the powerful German Farmers’ Association (DBV): “In addition to food producers and landscape managers, our farmers have long been energy managers [emphasis added]. According to them, their program today would be grain power instead of nuclear power [emphasis added]” (El-Sharif, 2007) This quote exemplifies the outcome of a discursive processes re-functionalising the opposition to nuclear power, deeply rooted in the Germany’s environmentalism imaginary -the context where early debates on renewable sources started (see chapter 6)- to an ecological modernisation argument. Once sanitised from its subversive potential and made compatible, it can be used to legitimise the expansion and intensification of the accumulation frontier over the ‘green’, and -specifically to biogasover agriculture and agricultural soil. As a major result, farmers in the fieldwork region changed their business models to adapt to the new role of energy crops and biogas producers, establishing simultaneously organisational path dependencies which put them in jeopardy when subsidies for biogas were cut in 2012 and a place and sector specific devaluation started. Peter who runs an agricultural company nearby Neubrandenburg in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, pictures clearly the parabola of biogas in the fieldwork region: “We started with biogas in 2007, when the subsidies were very generous. Biogas seemed the right thing to do. Corn is easy to farm and with biogas 243 it became more profitable. We have a 500Kw biogas facility, which needs some 200ha to be fed. In order to make as much money with cash crops we would need 1200 ha. Bioenergy is one of the few options available for farmers. When they started to cut subsidies for biogas, in 2012, farmers were left with really few options. Stockbreeding is poorly profitable also because land prices are rising. In the years of the boom, it was convenient to buy or rent land even at disproportionately high prices to produce energy-crops. This pushed up average prices, making it very difficult especially for small and young farmers to access the market or borrow money from banks” (Peter – Farmer/DE-2, Autumn 2018) As we can read from the quote, Peter assumes a correlation between the constant rising of land prices in the fieldwork region and biogas subsidisation policies. Yet, we should notice that there is no agreement in specialised literature around the magnitude of the effect biogas subsidisation has had on land prices (Emmann et al., 2013; Appel et al., 2016). Nevertheless, this contrasts with a widespread perception emerged from interviews with farmers correlating the bioenergy and biogas sector growth to a land price surge (interviews with Farmers-1, 4, 5, Autumn 2018). A second important element emerging from Peter’s words is that bioenergy and biogas contributed to a structural change making traditional farming operations more difficult, whilst exacerbating famers’ dependency on energy subsidies. This affects particularly small and young farmers, along a macro-trend characterising the agricultural sectors in the broader EU context (Borras Jr et al., 2013; Herre, 2013; van der Ploeg et al., 2015). The effect on young farmers is sharply described by Kora. She is member of a small collective running a farm in Brandenburg, 80 km north of Berlin. The land they farm belonged to her family and was collectivised in 1949. After reunification a restitution process gave Kora the land back. Kora is a radical leftist militant and sees farming not only as a way to make her and her comrades a living, but also as a path towards a radical change, opposed to industrial farming. She is also member of the German small farmers’ association Arbeitsgemeinschaft bäuerliche Landwirtschaft (from now ABL). Within the ABL’s youth branch she and others launched a campaign against land grabbing in Germany, under the slogan stop-landgrabbing.de 113 : 113 The pressure towards greater concentration that prices exert is intensified by the operative framework of BVVG, the institution managing the privatisation of former DDR’s land that is still owned by the state. Whereas in the first decade after reunification BVVG both sold and rented land, the orientation changed in 250 9.2 Territorialised accumulation: cooperation in a rentier regime This research demonstrates that the extraction and accumulation of surplus value from the production of renewable energy in the studied territories implies the privatisation of ecosystem spaces, biotic services and abiotic flows, and their abstraction -that is commodification and financialization - into forms of fictitious capital. It follows that, in contrast with approaches based on marginalist economics, this thesis reconciles the socially necessary labour time theory of value with political ecology, contending that commodified spaces and natures do not innately provide value, but rather serve as a collateral to capture - by way of rent - portions of surplus value produced in society at a different point in time and space. The extraction and accumulation of value is organised through territorially based alliances coordinating the cooperation amongst classes and class factions and redistributing value according to geographically and historically determined power balances. This section advances a theory of territorialised value extraction and accumulation around renewable energy in marginal geographies. This is based on three elements: (i) the revenue sources of a renewable energy plant or system; (ii) the situation of a renewable energy production area and territory, relative to the division of labour at the national or higher geographical scales; and (iii) the patterns of cooperation and conflict organising, boosting, or hampering the extraction and accumulation of value. 9.2.1 A composite form of rent as a revenue source When discussing the revenue sources of renewable energy production, we should consider, as a general condition of the market, that the average price for renewable energy production is higher than that for non-renewable energy. In other words, rarely does renewable energy production reach a grid parity 114 . We have observed this directly in the case studies. Neither a wind plant in southern Italy nor a biogas production system in eastern Germany would make a profit, in conditions of free competition. By elimination, the revenue that these renewable energy plants produce is a form of rent, constituted of three distinct components: rent on fixed capital paid as subsidies; ground rent; and rent on fixed 114 See footnote 30. 251 capital, additional to that paid as subsidies (see chapter 3). Let us now summarise each of them. Subsidies can be regarded as a specific form of rent on fixed capital, paid by the state on privately-owned fixed capital, used to produce renewable energy and with the legitimation of decarbonising the ecosystem. Subsidies are the most important of the three components by reason of the enabling function they perform. Without them no capitalist would invest in producing renewable energy, unless seeking to incur a certain loss. Indeed, with grid parity out of reach, a transition policy based on private investment can only work by financing the returns on those investments through an exogenous flow of surplus value, that is subsidies. These are raised by the state through the fiscal system and channelled to capitalists. If the owner of a renewable plant rents, or sells, the plant to a third party, subsidies contribute to determining the final price since they are a claim on future revenues from public money transfers paid for a length of time 115 , known in advance and set in binding terms. When the production of renewable energy is based on energy crops, subsidies paid for renewable energy production might combine with subsidies for the agricultural sector. As we have observed with biogas generation in eastern Germany, this amplifies cost-effectiveness, therefore the magnitude of the value extracted and accumulated and the attractivity of a renewable energy source as an investment option (chapter 8). The second component, ground rent, is the rent paid on land regardless of improvements thereon. This is determined by land locations and other characteristics specific to the energy source. If we consider our two case studies, ground rent reflects the conditions for accessing land in terms of communications routes, but also, anemometric features or soil fertility, depending on whether the energy source is wind or energy crops for biogas. The third component is rent on fixed capital, additional to that paid as subsidies. We have seen in chapter 3 that a renewable energy plant is to be considered a built environment for renewable energy production. It is composed of instruments and infrastructures incorporated in a land plot, for the exploitation of a use value from either an abiotic flow, such as wind, or a biotic ecosystem service, such as soil fertility. Renting this “geographically ordered, complex, composite commodity” (Harvey, 2018b p. 233), following Harvey’s built 115 Usually, subsidisation periods range from 10 to 20 years. 252 environment definition, earns the owner interest, reflecting a claim on the future revenues that the renter will realise by producing renewable energy through it. 9.2.2 Territorial marginality as a cost-effectiveness enhancer The marginality of a renewable energy production area, and the territory wherein it is located, relative to the division of labour at the national or higher geographical level contributes to increasing the cost-effectiveness of a renewable energy production investment. The marginality, which is therefore functional to a sustained level of accumulation, is efficiently exploited through the organisation of a value-extraction chain, that is a “network of labour and production processes” (Hopkins and Wallerstein, 1986 p. 159). This may entail, as with our case studies, the relegation of a production area, and territory, to the function of extractive enclave through which surplus value is extracted, and from which it is to the greater extent channelled towards external capitalist centres. We have documented that the socio-economic marginality of the Italian Apulo-Campano Apennine, and Brandenburg and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, has played a crucial role in compressing the average ground rent or selling prices of lands yet to be converted to renewable energy production. This has served as a powerful pull factor for investors, reinforcing the enabling function played by subsidies. 9.2.3 Territorially based alliances and the excluded The extraction and accumulation of value around renewable energy production is organised through territorially based alliances. This system of territorialised production relations regulates the cooperation, and settle the conflicts, both between capital and labour, and within these classes, amongst their factions. It also coordinates interactions with local bureaucracies and articulations of the local state which preside over permitting and control functions. The case studies in this thesis have shown that the marginality of a renewable energy production area, and territory, favours the dominant external capitals within the alliance and along the value-extraction chain. The adjective ‘external’ designates the externality of capitals’ headquarters to the production area or territory. The adjective ‘dominant’ indicates the capability of a player or group of players to capture the largest surplus value shares 253 redistributed along the chain, mainly related to its or their specialisation in processes of that chain with higher average profitability. The marginality of the production area, and territory, makes the presence of local capitals with a magnitude and productive sophistication suitable for seizing the most remunerative processes highly unlikely. The case studies have also shown that in a condition of marginality, local capitals are likely to be specialised in lower added-value or activities with lower average profitability. Moreover, local capitals’ smaller magnitude does not allow a degree of assets financialization and differentiation suitable for absorbing shocks from possible localised devaluations. Specifically, as the case study on biogas in eastern Germany shows, local and less mobile capitals, in a subaltern position, are likely to be disproportionately damaged by external shocks such as changes to subsidisation policies and volumes. In both case studies, the acquisition of lands giving access to the targeted renewable source and the fulfilling of permitting procedures have proved to be operative areas where mediating functions are indispensable. These functions have been performed, and sold as services, by specialised agents, relying on either a techno-managerial knowledge or an embedded knowledge about the cultural codes characterising the territory and the sector. In the Italian case study, translating and mediating functions are performed by business developers with a varied degree of professionalisation. In the German case, similar functions have been fulfilled within two distinct capital factions: biogas technology expansion throughout the countryside has been fostered by professional energy service providers, whilst agricultural land conversion to energy crops has been boosted by the managers of companies pre-existing to the biogas boom. Subordinate to the capitalist class are factions of the labour class employed in the segments of the value-extraction chain. Not only are they redistributed a fractional share of the value they contribute to produce, they also are more exposed to the damage of localised devaluations, because of their scarce mobility and their exclusion from decisions around business strategies, which in fact crucially impact on their employment stability. Local bureaucracies and articulations of the local state are also in a subordinate position. The latter participate in value redistributions through taxation of renewable energy plants. Contrastingly, the former are normally not entitled to be allocated any value share. Yet, 254 they can seek to trade segments of the permitting or control procedures which they oversee in return for a bribe, as it has been observed in the case of wind energy in southern Italy. Excluded from a territorially based alliance are inhabitants, activists, and non-inhabiting citizens which, regardless of the class to which they belong, do not participate directly to value redistribution. 9.3 Land enclosure and grabbing, from formal to real abstraction The research shows that the process of appropriation of the lands needed to access a renewable energy source is articulated in three distinct phases. Initially lands are formally abstracted as an object of capital. In the second phase they are actually grabbed and enclosed. In the final phase, through a process of territorialisation or real abstraction, lands are systematised within the function that the territory wherein they are located plays in the division of labour at the national or higher levels. This implies the transformation of intermediate forms of ownership into fully capitalist ones and therefore of those lands into financial assets. In other words, the process of appropriation is also one of abstraction, whereby the spaces targeted for accumulation around renewable energy production are transformed from lived spaces into abstract spaces of capital (Lefebvre and NicholsonSmith, 1991). From irreducibly different qualities they are commodified into comparably standardised quantities measured on a monetary scale. In our case studies, the formal abstraction phase started with an intertwined process of technological experimentation and spatial exploration directly managed and funded by public institutions. Categorisation and mapping characterised these initial processes evolving with increasing precision. Once technology reached a commercial maturity and subsidisation policies were introduced, accumulation became a real opportunity, triggering an actual rush to land. This expansive phase evolved in the Italian Apulo-Campano Apennine or Brandenburg and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern through distinct patterns because of the different historical backgrounds and the specificities of each renewable energy source. Yet, it entailed in both cases the organisation of force through a combination of economic constraints deriving from market mechanisms and legal arrangements. 255 Starting with the Italian case, a combination of socio-economic marginality and an information asymmetry between investors and landowners facilitated land enclosure. This exquisitely market-based mechanism incorporated landowners adversely into a value-extraction chain which redistributed to them a small fraction of surplus value extracted through wind production. In 2003, landowners’ bargaining power was further weakened by the introduction the decree 387/2003. Through an extensive interpretation of the 2001/77/CE European directive on the promotion of renewable energy (see chapter 6), the decree conferred on renewable plants the attribute of public interest, urgent and non-delayable works, and therefore entitled investors to invoke compulsory purchase and compel landowners to sell their land (see chapter 7). The ownership regime in Brandenburg and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern is characterised by a highly concentrated land ownership regime and a historical specialisation in the cultivation of grains, also in connection with the presence of large stock breeding operations. Renewable energy subsidisation policies in general and the additional bonus that between 2004 and 2012 rewarded electricity produced through agricultural biomasses and created the opportunity to profitably devote Brandenburg and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern’s large landholdings to energy crop monocultures, particularly corn. As a result, a long cycle of land acquisitions started, taking place mainly through either agricultural companies’ shares acquisitions, in order to circumvent restrictions on direct land buying, or purchases of land from BVVG, the institution charged with the privatisation of DDR’s public lands (see chapter 8). Similarly to the Italian case, the marginality of the Brandenburg and MecklenburgVorpommern to the German capitalism played an important role in containing land prices and favouring landowners’ willingness to sell their lands or participate to the value-extraction chain around biogas. In both cases, once lands have been enclosed and transformed into the built environment of renewable energy production, they, and the territories where they are located, are stably assigned a precise function within the division of labour at the national or higher level, which amounts to saying that they are fully territorialised or abstracted as objects and spaces of ‘green’ accumulation. In the process of land enclosures and subsequent territorialisation we have described, the territorial hegemony of the state plays a primary role. As David Harvey argues “the 256 developmental role of the State goes back a long way, keeping the territorial and capitalistic logic of power always intertwined” (2005b p. 145). This has two implications. The first is that the function that is assigned to production territories within the division of labour crystallises, at least temporarily, historically determined inequality and uneven development patterns and their decisive role in compressing investment costs and facilitating land appropriation. The second is that the lands forming part of the built environment of renewable energy production are brought under a pure capitalist form of ownership and as such they can be traded as financial assets (Harvey, 2018b). 9.4 Socioecological transformations and territory grabbing This research interprets space as socially produced (see chapter 4). As a major implication, the rural lands, which for investors are merely assets for accumulation, are here regarded as fragments of a territory. This is a stratified socionature living through and as history; constructed as both human and more-than-human; composed of places and distances; visible as landscapes (for a full definition see subsection 9.4.4). Based on these premises, this research has evidenced that the abstraction processes described above extend to the wider territory (or places of or in it), transforming it and its multi-layered geo-historical stratification. The following three subsections offer an account of the most significant transformations around landscape and biophysical processes; socioeconomic fabric and related class dynamics; territorial democracy and political subjectivation. The last subsection provides an extended definition of the category of territory grabbing and enclosure. This has been devised as a theoretical and analytical instrument to contribute to the understanding of such transformative processes and presented in chapter 4 in a preliminary form. It is here extended basing on the findings of the case studies. 9.4.1 Alterations to landscape and biophysical processes Landscape is the visive manifestation of a territory, through which the abstraction of a rural territory into the built environment of industrial ‘green’ energy can be appreciated. The wind-turbine forests cramming the ridges of the Italian Apulo-Campano Apennine, or the planes and mounds of Brandenburg and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern tinted in the green 257 and dark yellow of corn cultivations, stretching as far as the eye can see, are testimonies to a new cycle of ‘green’ accumulation expanding over rural, and marginal, territories, and their transformation into new industrial energy districts. Although our senses catch some of these transformations, they cannot gather them in full. Some transformations elusively occur beneath the soil or in realms so microscopic that we can only grasp them through instruments or by observing their macro-effects, including contamination and diseases. Wind turbines have foundations that go as deep as three meters underground, whilst the territories’ orographic heterogeneity and biodiversity is transformed by roads, electric substations and all the array of infrastructures that the wind energy value extraction chain requires to function effectively. Similarly, the productivity of intensive-extensive energycrop monocultures necessitate the use of phytochemicals to keep up with competition and market trends, and in so doing reframe the biophysical characteristics of the soil, to the point where chemical contamination and nutrients depletion have sapped its fertility and contribute to desertification. 9.4.2 Reconfiguration of the socioeconomic fabric and class dynamics For a value extraction chain to work effectively, its several segments must be interconnected, and correspondingly the factions and actors that are part of the territorially based alliance must cooperate. This implies a transformation of the socioeconomic fabric of the territory where the chains operate. In our two case studies, the establishment and expansion of wind energy or biogas value extraction chains generated a demand for goods and services that induced the reorganisation of territorialised sociotechnical systems, including local institutions. As a result, new businesses were created and older ones converted to seize the newly offered opportunities, while others disappeared. For their part, local institutions, started to receive fresh money through the normal functioning of the fiscal system or according to specialised agreements with the investing companies. The reorganisation and specialisation of productive cycles related to value flows from renewable energy production has been significant in both case studies in establishing sociotechnical path dependencies. Their intensity became clear when those value flows shrank. In both cases, a change in the regulatory and subsidisation framework compressed the demand for the goods and services provided by 258 the restructured businesses or local institutions. In the Italian case, the outlawing of the widespread practice of conditioning the issuing of building permits to the payment of royalties by investors has pushed many municipalities’ budgets on the brink of insolvency. In the German case, the substantial reduction of biogas subsidies in 2012 led, as we have discussed above and diffusely in chapter 6 and 8, to a quick divestment from larger, more internationalised and financialised capitals. 9.4.3 Reframing risk and efficiency: political subjectivation and contestation The emergence and expansion of a renewable energy value extraction chain may induce transformations in the local communities’ democratic life, also prompting process of political subjectivation. In this regard, it is important to consider that, as we have argued in the course of this thesis, the legitimation rationale of renewable transition policies based on capital accumulation is underlain by a discursive dialectic between the perceived risk and emergency posed by the ecological crises and the assumed efficiency to tackle them through private investment. In our two case studies this has intertwined with socio-economic marginality in constructing a storyline whereby, through private investment in wind energy or biogas, territories could be modernised, and the risks posed by their marginality addressed, so alleviating low levels of per-capita income, depopulation, and unemployment. On the other hand, the case studies have shown that such a legitimising dialectic can be reframed through processes of political subjectivation and organisation, intended to oppose or reclaim control over a territorialised renewable energy production. In the Italian case study, a grassroot network known as “No Eolico Selvaggio” – which translates into “no to wild wind energy”, where “wild” is to be interpreted as “difficult to control”, expanded the concept of risk and emergency to include the urgency to defend their territory from speculation around wind energy production. Efficiency has been hence resignified as the broadening of territorial communities’ democratic capability to self-determine their own paths towards sustainable development (see chapter 7). A similar process can be observed in the German case, where initial advocates of biogas turned at a later stage into critics of it, such as -amongst othersarticulations of the green party at multiple levels, coining the term of vermaisung. The word points to the maizification of landscapes 259 by corn monocultures (see above and chapter 8) and is used to reinforce the denunciation of industrial scale biogas as a source of ecological risk and a cause of social injustice around the regime governing access to land 116 . 9.4.4 Territory grabbing – a full definition The processes observed and analysed in the two case studies of this research trigger geohistorical transformations that re-signify renewable energy production areas, territories, and regions as objects of capital and specifically as reservoirs of energy, investment assets and value extraction platforms. These transformations are here defined as territory grabbing. This is a process whereby a territory, or places of or in it, is abstracted from its stratified historical identity and transposed into costs and potential revenues within the accumulation function of an investment scheme, to the benefit of factions of the capitalist class. As a result, a territory, or places of or in it, is re-signified into an object of capital, whether as a reservoir of (‘green’) energy, or as composite and extended instrument (fixed capital) for production, or as a space for the expansion of capital’s built environment, for production, distribution, consumption or waste disposal. Territory grabbing implies the incorporation within capitalist production relations of a territory’s use values. This process engulfs all the socioecological relations whose occurring or non-occurring is needed for, or indifferent to, accumulation to be sustained. Territory grabbing is a process that takes place through the phases of exploration, enclosure, extraction, and disposal. Although these may follow a chronological order, clear delimitations amongst them should not be implied. They should rather be thought as overlapping and reiterating. During the exploration phase the targeted use values of a territory are categorised, located and mapped. Their exchange value is therefore assessed also as a collateral for the extraction of composite forms of rent. This phase is also meant to determine the social and legal conditions to access the targeted use values and their impact on investment costs. As a 116 Rudolph and Kirkegaard (2019 p. 642) analyse the siting of wind farms in rural Denmark through the category of mobilisation of “territorial stigma”. They document how that is “used to legitimise the purchase and demolition of properties in marginalised rural areas”. 266 While these considerations have been developed around wind energy in southern Italy and biogas in eastern Germany, they can be extended to the overall renewable energy transitions in the two countries and provide analytical insights to the analysis of transitions in other countries or at different geopolitical scales. Seminal in this regard are two articles by of McCarthy (2015) and McCarthy and Thatcher (2019), investigating processes of territorialisation in and around renewable energy production, through the category of socioecological fix. The articles provide a consistent evidence base illustrating the efforts by international organisations at the highest level, such as the World Bank and UNEP, to encourage and help countries, especially in the global south, to map their renewable energy potential in terms of space and resources. We can conclude that ‘green’ capitalism as it has been observed in the two case studies of this research can be defined as a hegemonic project in the making. In Gramscian terms, it can strengthen the organic cohesion between the productive structures and the political, cultural and ideological superstructures (Gramsci, 1975). In this respect, we should consider that both case studies have shown an interpenetration of the renewable energy industry in the accumulation patterns of the respective national and EU’s division of labour. This is particularly visible in the energy sector where large utilities, traditionally specialised in fossil energy production, have developed new operations devoted to renewable energy, seizing the opportunities created by national renewable transition policies and the EU’s drive to liberalise energy markets. As a result, the European energy market concentration has strengthened, coming to be dominated by a small number of utilities, which through an intensification of cross-border operations have formed a deeply integrated energetic complex controlling both fossil and renewable energy generation (see chapter 6 and Pollitt, 2019). This interpenetration between ‘fossil’ and ‘green’ capitalist factions could signal the actual consolidation of an organic hegemony, ensured by, under other conditions, the re-functionalisation and legitimation mechanisms that have been discussed above. 9.6 Final considerations and future directions The first and most evident lesson is that environmental and climate justice are inseparable from a broader and radical social justice. Isolating the ecological rationality from other 267 rationalities for social change and embedding it within the socioecological relations of capitalism reproduces and indeed extends the patterns of inequalities and injustice that are consubstantial to this mode of production. Trivially enough, we need renewables. Yet - and this is the second lesson - we do not need speculation on renewables. The cases of wind energy in the southern Italian Apennine and agricultural biogas in Brandenburg and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern show that the production of renewable energy within the paradigm of perpetual private accumulation transforms it into an extraction and accumulation device, prone to become unsustainable in social or ecological terms. Seen from this perspective, it should be no surprise that territories where renewable energy is produced become mere investment platforms or collaterals through which to grab surplus value, by abstracting space and nature into financial assets and seizing public funds from subsidisation policies. If there exists a collective interest to ‘save our house from fire’ and destruction, then a fire extinguisher as vital as renewable energy sources should be defended from being distorted, depowered, and ultimately delegitimised by the irrationality of capitalism. As a mode of production pivoting on the ontological prominence of dominant classes’ interests, and of dominant factions and groups amongst them, capitalism continuously engenders inequalities, being constitutively unfit to protect and promote collective priorities, other than class greed. Removing renewable energy transitions from the extractive logic of capital accumulation implies that their ownership regime and governance systems, particularly in the field of energy production and distribution, should be grabbed back and put under forms of public and democratic control. The word public, here, implies a combination of statal, cooperative and collective forms of ownership. Correlatedly, the word democratic points to mechanisms guaranteeing an equal distribution of the power to influence the governance systems as well as the distribution of the relevant burdens and benefits, amongst classes, races, and genders. Although the full operativity of models working through those principles at a regional, national, or supranational scale is nothing but a theoretical exercise, existing processes 268 restoring local public ownership for the management and delivery of public services provide the most advanced, yet contradictory and fragmented, example of how those models could be organised. A recent report published by TNI (Kishimoto et al., 2020) has documented 1,408 cases of remunicipalisation of assets previously under private ownership between 2000 and 2018. While these cases are concentrated mainly in western Europe and to a minor extent in other contexts such as countries of north and south Americas, as Cumbers and Paul explain, they represent “both a broader systemic pushback against privatisation, but also an uncertain conjunctural political moment where many pathways are possible as the neoliberal terrain shifts” (2021 p. 21). As they originate from the capability of local coalitions, reuniting progressive movements and networks, to steer the political agenda by exploiting spaces for manoeuvre available within “local political-economic trajectories” (ibidem) and institutional frameworks, they also provide insights to the debate on the global commons. Specifically, they speak to the theorists of the absolute autonomy of civil society and the related necessity to construct the global commons against and beyond the state (amongst others Holloway, 2005; Hardt and Negri, 2009), rather suggesting that, as Cumbers signals, “the engagement with reconstituted forms of state ownership” (2015 p. 74) may be necessary to expand projects intended to revert the privatisation trend. Specifically, a dialectical relation with the state may advance those projects by combining a Gramscian war of position with more open forms of social conflict, so producing counter-hegemonies simultaneously within the civil and political society (Gramsci, 1975; see also chapter 1), and therefore realising them also through the state. Along these lines of reasoning, Routledge and others maintain that while the building of “another state is not only possible but necessary [emphasis in the original]” it also is “insufficient” (2018 p. 80). Interpreting such insufficiency from a historical materialist perspective, we should notice that the state is the site where the struggle amongst classes is reified into laws and institutions through which the dominant classes govern society. Therefore, transformative projects in and through the state are insufficient when merely relating to the state (political society) within its administrative mechanisms but without seeking to rebalance the underlaying class relations by acting in the civil society (Gramsci, 1975 and see also chapter 1). This poses, on the other hand, a question of scale. If actions in civil society can translate into transformations in the political society, also the reverse is true. Processes restoring public ownership at the local level are subject to the administrative hierarchies of the 269 nation state. In other words, change brought within the local state might be easily undone or prevented by subnational, national or supranational state articulations. From this perspective, attempts aimed at building another state locally may prove insufficient if not framed within broader projects for change with a national and supranational scope. Long and uncertain as such a trajectory may appear, it makes a capillary reorganisation of subaltern classes in order to mediate their often conflicting and contradictory demands and needs indispensable. This should happen through forms of mass organisations capable of coordinating and projecting the militant particularism of spatially and socially dispersed struggles at the scales of either the nation state or higher-level political formations. In a context of this sort, it is possible to envisage a horizon where burdens and benefits involved in renewable energy transitions and the power to deliberate about them are distributed across both communities of use and communities of place, as involved at any stage of energy production, distribution and consumption patterns. Inescapably, this would entail the framing of renewable transitions not in mere technocratic terms, but rather as genuinely social, political and cultural processes which can be steered towards the construction of an energy democracy (Burke and Stephens, 2018). In the last decade, such a concept has catalysed an international social movement, interpreting it as a collective effort “advancing renewable energy transitions by resisting the dominant energy agenda while reclaiming and democratically restructuring energy regimes” (Stephens et al., 2018 p. 43). Seen from this thesis’s perspective, a historical materialist analysis can contribute substantially to the actual building of an energy democracy. On the one hand, renewable energy sources can be conceived as commons increasingly enclosed within capitalism’s social relations through its ‘green’ restructuring. On the other, the operationalisation of energy democracy principles presupposes a thorough and consistent class analysis, so as to rest any action for energy de-commodification and democratisation on a rational and just basis. With these premises, this thesis points to two future directions. The first aims at broadening the comprehension of ‘green’ capitalism as a regime of accumulation. Future studies applying the categories of historical materialism to (i) different productive and geographical contexts for renewable energy generation, (ii) other sectors of ‘green’ capitalism, and 270 (iii) ‘green’ capitalism spheres different than production, such as distribution, financing and disposal will be crucial. The second looks at better understanding the role that an engagement with nation state structures may play in scaling up the democratisation of energy regimes, from existing locally based practices and experiments to the subnational, national and supranational levels. After all, if the ‘green new deal’ is increasingly purported by world leaders as a new growth strategy, only on environmental and climate -that is socialjustice can a subalterns’ class consciousness be rebuilt and the egalitarian, sustainable and inclusive society of tomorrow be imagined. Appendix A – Questions for semi-structured interviews with project stake holders. Below are presented the questions prepared for interviews with project stakeholders as they were devised after the first round of interviews with experts (see chapter 1). They should be regarded as indicative as they were adapted iteratively in the course of interviews. Policy makers - Introductory questions. Have you participated in any of the project phases, from approval to enforcement, of your country’s legislation on renewable energy? If so, what role did you take in it? - Questions about the perceptions of renewable energies. Do you think climate change is real? Do you think it is a problem everyone should contribute to mitigate? What do you think about diverting agriculture or forest land use to renewable energy production? Do you think investing in renewable energy projects is a good strategy to make money? Do you think local populations benefit from renewable projects and how? - Questions about specific projects. How would you define the plant? Have you ever visited it? - Questions about regulations and incentives. Do you think a legislation that sets market mechanisms to promote renewable energy development is an effective instrument to mitigate climate change? Do you think a legislation promoting renewable energies can have perverted effects such as speculative behaviours or land grabbing and concentration? Do you think it is fair to use legal instruments to force landowners or users to give their land for renewable energy production? - Questions about relations with local populations and civil society organisations. Has the any difficulty arisen in seizing the land needed to develop the project/s? Has the project/s encountered any resistance from owners/users/local authorities/civil society organisations? Would you define the resistance as a NIMBY 119 behaviour? How do you think the project/s can compensate owners/users/local 119 For a definition of NIMBY see footnote 73. 272 populations for the loss of land? Is any compensatory scheme in place? Do you think the project/s brings any benefit for the local community or it just contributes to general climate change mitigation? - Questions about territorial transformations. Do you think the political organisation of an area or territory can be changed by investment in renewable energy? Has your cooperation network with a territory or area where a strong investment in renewable energy exists been expanded or reduced as a consequence of such investment growth? Local authorities - Introductory questions: Do you live nearby the plant? Is it visible from where you live? Have you taken any role as a public authority in the planning and realisation of the project/s? - Questions about the perceptions of renewable energies. Do you think climate change is real? Do you think it is a problem everyone should contribute to mitigate? What do you think about diverting agriculture or forest land to renewable energy production? Do you think it would be fair to use legal instruments to force landowners or users to give their land up for renewable energy production? Do you think investing in renewable energy projects is a good strategy to make money? Do you think local populations benefit from renewable projects and how? - Question about the project/s. How would you define the plant/s? What role have you played as an administrative authority in the project/s planning and realisation? Do you think local the project/s is beneficial or rather detrimental for local community or a specific group of it? (If the project/s is deemed beneficial) In case the project/s was opposed by landowners/users, would you use any legal mean to seize control of the land? (if project/s should turn out to be illegally permitted/detrimental to local community interests) Would you support opposition/resistance claims? - Question about regulations and incentives. Do you think the incentive scheme used to realise the project/s is suitable for promoting renewable energies? Do you think it may cause perverted effects such as speculative behaviour? Do you think 273 the regulatory framework promoting renewable energy fulfils the most national or local goals, public or private interest? - Questions about class and factional cooperation. What are the professionals that are specialised in developing the contacts with public authorities? Are they from locals? How do you think local enterprises are included in renewable energy investments? And local workers? - Questions about territorial transformations. Has this area or territory been changed by the expansion of renewable energy plants? If so in what terms? How do you think these changes are compatible with the socioeconomic fabric of the area? Has the administration you work for or preside over signed any kind of compensation agreement with renewable energy investors? Investors - Introductory questions: What sector is your company specialised in? What function do you fulfil within the company? What role did you take in project planning and realisation phases? - Questions about the perceptions of renewable energies. Do you think climate change is real? Do you think it is a problem everyone should contribute to mitigate? Do you think investing in renewable energy projects is a good strategy to make money? A company investing in renewable energy projects, should seek profit as such or rather accept lower returns for higher environmental efficiency? Is climate change more a problem or a profit opportunity? - Questions about the project/s. How would you define the plant/s? Have you found any resistance in seizing the land needed to develop the project/s? Have authorities been cooperative in authorisation procedures? Is the energy produced sold to the national grid or is it exported to other countries? Does the grid need to be enhanced to transport the energy produced? - Questions about investment profitability and incentives. Does the project benefit of any public-funded incentive scheme? If so, how important is the scheme for the viability of the investment? Where are largest returns coming from, energy market or incentive scheme? 274 - Questions about class and factional cooperation. What are the professionals and from what sectors with whom you cooperate the most when planning/building/operating a plant? Do the people you hire to planning/building/operating a plant come from the areas or territory where the plant is located? What kind of contracts do you mainly use to hire people employed in planning/building/operating a plant? - Question about relations with local populations and civil society organisations. Has the project/s encountered any from difficulty in seizing the land needed to develop the project/s? Has the project/s encountered any resistance from owners/users/local authorities/civil society organisations? Would you define the resistance as a NIMBY 120 ‘syndrome’? How do you think the project/s can compensate owners/users/local populations for the loss of land? Is any compensatory scheme in place? Do you think the project/s brings any benefit for the local community or it just contributes to general climate change mitigation? - Question about land enclosure. Have you been able to rent or sell the land needed for the project easily? Have landowners resisted or contested the acquisition? Have you used any legal procedure to facilitate the acquisition process? - Questions about territorial transformations. Has the area or territory where you invested been changed by the expansion of renewable energy plants? If so in what terms? How do you think these changes are compatible with the socioeconomic fabric of the area? Has the company you work for or run signed any kind of compensation agreement with local authorities presiding over the area of investment? Previous users/owners - Introductory questions: Do you live nearby the plant? Is it visible from where you live? What activity were you carrying out on that land? Are your current activities somehow related to the plant? - Questions about the perceptions of renewable energies. Do you think climate change is real? Do you think it is a problem everyone should contribute to mitigate? Does the land you used/owned is contributing to mitigate climate change? Do you think investing in renewable energy projects is a good strategy to make money? 120 For a definition of NIMBY see footnote 73 275 - Questions about the project/s. How would you define the plant? Is there any specific name different from wind farm/solar park you call it? Have investors bought the land or rented it out? Were you forced to sell/rent out the land by the law? Have you been forced by violence to sell/rent out the land? Have you ever felt in danger if you were not to sell/rent the land out? - Questions about incorporation and incentives. Are you participating in the investment? And how? If so, have you developed the wind farm/solar park yourself to sell electricity to a company? Have you borrowed funds from banks? Are you getting a fair return compared to what you have earned before? Was participating in the investment the only possible option in order to make your land profitable/earn an (extra) income? Are you receiving public incentives to run the investment? Was incentives amount reduced since the initial phase? If the amount of incentives paid at investment launch was the same as the current, would you still divert your land to energy production/borrow money to develop the project/s? - Question about land enclosure. Have you sold or rented your land willingly? (If there are legal arrangements forcing landowners to sell), have you felt to receive an injustice when being legally forced to sell or rent your land? - Questions about class and factional cooperation. what are the types of professionals that have contacted you to negotiate the selling or renting of the land? Are you part of any organisation lobbying to protect users/owners’ interests? If so, what role do you take in the organisation? What are the aims of the organisations? Is the organisation in a broader network linking it to other entities? At what scale? Is the organisation liaising with other civil society/environmentalist organisations? - Questions about territorial transformations. Has the area or territory where you invested been changed by the expansion of renewable energy plants? If so in what terms? How do you think these changes are compatible with the socioeconomic fabric of the area? Project area inhabitants - Introductory questions: Do you live nearby the plant? Is it visible from where you live? How were your activities related to that land? Are your current activities somehow related to the plant? 282 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jup.2016.02.013. Argenti, N. and Knight, D.M. 2015. Sun, wind, and the rebirth of extractive economies: Renewable energy investment and metanarratives of crisis in Greece. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. 21(4),pp.781–802. Armiero, M. and Barca, S. 2004. Storia dell’ambiente: una introduzione. Roma: Carocci Editore. Armiero, M., Gravagno, F., Pappalardo, G. and Ferrara, A.D. 2019. The Nature of Mafia: An Environmental History of the Simeto River Basin, Sicily. Environment and History. Azzarà, S.G. 2020. Il virus dell’occidente: Universalismo astratto e sovranismo particolarista di fronte allo stato d’eccezione. Mimesis. Backhouse, M. 2014. Green grabbing—the case of palm oil expansion in so-called degraded areas in the eastern Brazilian Amazon In: K. Dietz, B. Engels, O. Pye and A. Brunnengräber, eds. The Political Ecology of Agrofuels. Routledge, pp. 181–199. Backhouse, M. 2016. The Discursive Dimension of Green Grabbing: Palm Oil Plantations as Climate Protection Strategy in Brazil. Pléyade. Revista de Humanidades y Ciencias Sociales. Bair, J. 2005. Global Capitalism and Commodity Chains: Looking Back, Going Forward. Competition & Change. 9(2),pp.153–180. Baker, S. 2007. Sustainable development as symbolic commitment: Declaratory politics and the seductive appeal of ecological modernisation in the European Union. Environmental Politics. 16(2),pp.297–317. Baker, S. 2012. The evolution of European Union environmental policy In: The politics of sustainable development: Theory, policy and practice within the European Union., pp. 89–104. Baran, P.A. 1957. The political-economy of growth. Monthly Review Press. Barbagallo, F. 2017a. L’industria al nord, l’esodo al sud. La Repubblica.,pp.14–15. Barbagallo, F. 2017b. La questione italiana. Il Nord e il Sud dal 1860 a oggi. Laterza. 283 Barbagallo, F. (ed.). 1997. Storia dell’Italia repubblicana: II. La trasformazione dell’Italia: sviluppo e squilibri: 1. Politica, economia, società. Einaudi. Barbagallo, F. 2011. Storia della camorra. Laterza & Figli Spa. Barbagallo, F., Sales, I. and Becchi Collidà, A. 1989. L’affare terremoto. Libro bianco sulla ricostruzione. P.C.I. Comitato Regionale della Campania. Barbaro, E. 2016. Eolico selvaggio: la commissione approva la linea Iannace. il Ciriaco. [Online]. Available from: https://www.ilciriaco.it/11/03/2016/eolico-selvaggio-lacommissione-approva-la-linea-iannace-individuare-siti-non-idonei-e-sospenderenuove-autorizzazioni/. Barbetti, T. 2016. L’eolico in Italia spiegato bene. Quanto è, chi lo fa e perché ha un futuro. RIENERGIA. [Online]. Available from: https://rienergia.staffettaonline.com/articolo/32848/L’eolico+in+Italia+spiegato+be ne.+Quanto+è,+chi+lo+fa+e+perché+ha+un+futuro/Barbetti+. Barbier, E.B. and Markandya, A. 2013. A new blueprint for a green economy. Routledge. Barca, F. and Trento, S. 1997. La parabola delle partecipazioni statali: una missione tradita In: Storia del capitalismo italiano dal dopoguerra a oggi [Online]. Roma: Donzelli. [Accessed 21 July 2020]. Available from: https://iris.unitn.it/handle/11572/72141#.Xxb35J4zZEY. Barca, S. 2009. Pane e veleno. Zapruder: Rivista di storia della conflittualitá sociale. (24),pp.100–107. Bauerkämper, A. 2005. Die Sozialgeschichte der DDR [Online]. München: Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag GmbH. [Accessed 15 May 2020]. Available from: http://www.degruyter.com/view/books/9783486701562/9783486701562/9783486 701562.xml. Bauerkämper, A. (ed.). 1996. ‘Junkerland in Bauernhand’? Franz Steiner Verlag. Bauerkämper, A., Danyel, J., Hübner, P. and Ross, S. (eds.). 1997. ‘Gesellschaft ohne Eliten.’ Führungsgruppen in der DDR. Berlin. Metropol. BAYER n.d. Farming Forward - Sustainable Agricultural Solutions | Bayer Crop Science. 284 [Accessed 16 May 2020]. Available from: https://www.cropscience.bayer.com/people-planet/global-impact/forwardfarming. Becchi Collidà, A. 1988. Catastrofi, sviluppo e politiche del territorio: alcune riflessioni sull’esperienza italiana. Archivio di studi urbani e regionali. (3),pp.3–36. Beck, U. 1992a. From industrial society to risk society. Theory, culture & society. 9(1),pp.97–123. Beck, U. 1992b. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. SAGE Publications Ltd. Becker, G. 2015. Econometric analysis of the wealth gap between East and West Germany. Beckmann, V. 1995. De-collectivisation policies ans structural changes of agriculture in eastern Germany. ,pp.133–152. Berger, S. (ed.). 1983. L’organizzazione delgi interessi nell’Europa occidentale: pluralismo, corporativismo e la transformazione della politica [Online]. Società Ed. il Mulino. [Accessed 16 July 2020]. Available from: https://www.amazon.it/Lorganizzazionedegli-interessi-nellEuropa-occidentale/dp/8815003150. Von Bertalanffy, L. 1968. General system theory. George Braziller. Bhatia, S.C. 2014. Issues relating to biofuels In: Advanced Renewable Energy Systems. Elsevier, pp. 688–718. Del Biaggio, C. 2015. Territory beyond the Anglophone Tradition In: The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Political Geography., pp. 35–47. Bianchi, S. 2004. Settantasette (S. Bianchi, ed.). DeriveApprodi. Bloomfield, J. and Steward, F. 2020. The politics of the green new deal. The Political Quarterly. 91(4),pp.770–779. Bonelli, F. 1978. Il capitalismo italiano : linee generali d’interpretazione. Einaudi. Bonesio, L. 2012. La questione epistemologica e il linguaggio : territorio, luogo, paesaggio In: A. Magnaghi, ed. Il territorio bene comune [Online]. Firenze University Press, pp. 57–69. [Accessed 24 July 2019]. Available from: https://www.torrossa.com/it/resources/an/2504480. 285 Borras Jr, S., Franco, J.C. and van der Ploeg, J.D. (eds.). 2013. Land concentration, land grabbing and people’s struggles in Europe [Online]. TNI. Available from: internalpdf://187.28.216.84/land grabbing_in_europe-jun2013.pdf. Borras, S.M. and Franco, J.C. 2012. Global Land Grabbing and Trajectories of Agrarian Change: A Preliminary Analysis. Journal of Agrarian Change. [Online]. 12,pp.34–59. Available from: file:///C:/Users/gysli/Dropbox/Knowledge/PhD/Commons and land grabbing/Theoretic debate and textbooks/Global Land Grabbing and Trajectories of Agrarian Change.pdf. Borsa Italiana 2017. Il vento (nuovo) dell’energia. ,pp.2015–2017. Bösch, F. and Graf, R. 2014. Reacting to anticipations: Energy crises and energy policy in the 1970s. An introduction. Historical Social Research. 39(4),pp.7–21. Brand, K.W. 2014. Dialectics of institutionalisation: The transformation of the environmental movement in Germany In: Environmental Movements: Local, National and Global. Taylor and Francis, pp. 35–58. Brand, U., Ashley, B., Becker, S., Ceceña, A.E., Charitsis, A., Velegrakis, G., Knottnerus, R., Kucharz, T., Leon, J., Mhinda, A.M., Omar, S.M. and Tricarico, A. 2013. Energy Policy and Resource Extractivism In: M. Gensler, ed., pp. 24–26. Bratsis, P. 2014. Political Corruption Under Transnational Capitalism : The Marxist. XXX 3(September). Breitschuh, G., Reinhold, G. and Vetter, A. 2004. Wirtschaftliche Bedeutung der energetischen Nutzung nachwachsender Rohstoffe fur die Landwirtschaft:: Der Landwirt als Energiewirt-Potenziale fur die. Brenner, N. 1999. Globalisation as reterritorialisation: The re-scaling of urban governance in the European union. Urban Studies. 36(3),pp.431–451. Bromley, D.W. and Cernea, M.M. 1989. The management of common property natural resources: Some conceptual and operational fallacies. World Bank Publications. 57. Brown, T. 2016. Sustainability as Empty Signifier: Its Rise, Fall, and Radical Potential. Antipode. 48(1),pp.115–133. 286 Brundtland, G.H., Khalid, M., Agnelli, S., Al-Athel, S. and Chidzero, B.J.N.Y. 1987. Our Common Future [Online]. New York. Available from: http://library1.nida.ac.th/termpaper6/sd/2554/19755.pdf. Brunner, J. 2019. Land Grabbing in Ostdeutschland: Ursachen, Auswirkungen, Widerstand. Berlin. Bruns, E., Ohlhorst, D., Wenzel, B. and Köppel, J. 2011. Renewable energies in Germany’s electricity market: A biography of the innovation process. Buch-Hansen, M. 2003. The territorialisation of rural Thailand: Between localism, nationalism and globalism. Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie. 94(3),pp.322–334. Buğra, A., Ağartan, K. and Jessop, B. 2007. Knowledge as a Fictitious Commodity: Insights and Limits of a Polanyian Perspective. Reading Karl Polanyi for the Twenty-First Century.,pp.115–133. Bullard, R. 1990. Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class and Environmental Quality. Boulder, CO: Westview. Bulletin of the European Communities 1972. Statement from the Paris Summit. Burke, M.J. and Stephens, J.C. 2018. Political power and renewable energy futures: A critical review. Energy Research and Social Science. [Online]. 35(October 2017),pp.78– 93. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2017.10.018. Bürklin, W.P. 1985. The german greens: The Post-Industrial Non-Established and the Party System. International Political Science Review. 6(4),pp.463–481. Camilli, D. 2018. Assediata la centrale, guerriglia a Montalto. [Accessed 15 July 2020]. Available from: http://www.tusciaweb.eu/2018/10/assediata-la-centrale-guerrigliamontalto/. Campione, G. 2019. Eolico, troppi incentivi nel Foggiano, il business attira «buoni e cattivi». La Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno. [Online]. Available from: https://www.lagazzettadelmezzogiorno.it/news/home/1154894/eolico-troppiincentivi-nel-foggiano-il-business-attira-buoni-e-cattivi.html. 287 Campisi, D., Gitto, S. and Morea, D. 2016. Effectiveness of incentives for wind energy: Models and empirical evidences from an italian case study. Journal of Sustainability Science and Management. 11(2),pp.39–48. Campisi, D., Gitto, S. and Morea, D. 2018. Shari’ah-Compliant Finance: A Possible Novel Paradigm for Green Economy Investments in Italy. Sustainability. [Online]. 10(11),p.3915. [Accessed 8 October 2020]. Available from: http://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/10/11/3915. Caneppele, S., Riccardi, M. and Standridge, P. 2013. Green energy and black economy: Mafia investments in the wind power sector in Italy. Crime, Law and Social Change. [Online]. 59(3),pp.319–339. [Accessed 12 October 2020]. Available from: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10611-013-9418-1. Caporale, A. 2011a. Controvento, il tesoro che il Sud non sa di avere. Mondadori. Caporale, A. 2011b. Terremoti Spa. Rizzoli. Carson, R. 1965. Silent spring. Penguin Classics. Castree, N. 2008a. Neoliberalising nature: processes, effects, and evaluations. Environment and planning A. [Online]. 40,pp.153–173. Available from: internalpdf://152.0.8.181/Neoliberalising_nature_Processes_effects_and_e.pdf. Castree, N. 2008b. Neoliberalising nature: the logics of deregulation and reregulation. Environment and planning A. [Online]. 40,pp.131–152. Available from: internalpdf://178.88.128.153/Neoliberalising nature_the logics of deregulat.pdf. Castree, N. 2005. The epistemology of particulars: Human geography, case studies and ‘context’. Geoforum. 36(5),pp.541–544. Castronovo, V. 2013. Storia economica d’Italia. Einaudi. Ceres, M. 2016. Viaggio nell’Irpinia del terremoto e dei nostri giorni. Il dramma, i pregiudizi, la rinascita. Delta 3. Checchi, V.V. and Polo, M. 2020. Blowing in the Wind: The Infiltration of Sicilian Mafia in the Wind Power Business. Italian Economic Journal. [Online]. 6(2),pp.325–353. [Accessed 8 October 2020]. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40797-020- [Document text truncated for crawler view.]