Wind Struggles: Grabbing Value and Cultivating Dignity in Southern Catalonia

Abstract

ABSTRACT In Spain, wind energy development has followed a centralized, extractivist model, with wind farms concentrated in peripheralized and impoverished rural territories. Wind developers benefit from these regions’ low land value and lack of political power, thus reproducing patterns of geographical hierarchy and strengthening processes of uneven development. This paper examines these dynamics as they have unfolded in Southern Catalonia, a poor, rural area that concentrates a vast array of energy infrastructure. My ethnographic description focuses on what I call practices of devaluation: the variety of mechanisms through which wind energy companies erode both the economic value and the cultural worth of these regions, especially the land and the livelihoods it supports. Resistance to wind energy development in Southern Catalonia thus emerges as a reaction against these practices of devaluation, that is to say, as struggles to assert worth and preserve value. Overall, I argue that local experiences and cultural frameworks surrounding energy infrastructure reveal the inequities of existing processes of energy transition while foregrounding alternative logics to the dominant extractivist model.