In the framework of the current global debates regarding climate change, sustainability and energetic transition, the shift from a carbon-based to a green energy industry seems inevitable. While calls and resolutions towards ending fossil fuels slowly and irregularly make their way into the global diplomacy (e.g., COP26), the shift towards the electrification and digitalization of industrial, communication and transport sectors is creating an increasing global dependency on the extraction and processing of new resources. This is the case, for instance, of lithium (often dubbed the ‘oil of the future’) and graphite, essential components for the manufacture of batteries for cell phones, computers and electric cars, for instance. At the same time, ‘clean technologies’ such as green hydrogen, liquefied natural gas or renewables are presented as safe paths towards decarbonization and reduction of GHGs However, the study of the social, political and environmental consequences of the transition is still incipient. Such transformations, while they are generally positive steps towards energy sustainability and climate change adaptation, are generating new industrial sites, new complex economic relations and political mobilizations with socio-environmental consequences that need to be charted and studied from a social scientific perspective. We are talking specifically about environmental impacts of the new energy industry, its material and infrastructural articulations, conflicts over land property and use, political (public-private) articulations, labor and commercial opportunities, etc. In this framework, a new, energy-related geography is unfolding, complexifying the traditional cartographies of power based on North-South, postcolonial distinctions. This illustrates the increasing political centrality of such industries, both in terms of transnational diplomacies – the role of Nord Stream pipelines in the current Russia-Ukraine conflict being a case in point – and of crea...

The project proposes a bottom-up perspective on socio-environmental conflicts, focusing on the theoretical relevance of working people’s ‘livelihood dilemmas’. The research perspective combines a social reproduction framework with a political ecology approach to develop a comparative study of livelihood practices, popular ecologies and socio-environmental conflicts. Industrial and post-industrial cities in Italy and Portugal have been selected to carry out in-depth ethnographic investigations. Unveiling connections and frictions between grassroots ecologies and global dynamics, the project aims at outlining a framework for thinking potential forms of grassroots agencies in creating spaces for sustainable socio-ecological transformations.

In the last decade Portugal had three governments with very different political orientations and proposals for the legislative organization of society, each one claiming to initiate a process of transformative politics that would have a positive impact upon Portuguese society. Social policies, legislation on labor, health, education, housing and security have been profoundly altered with each legislative change, impacting in different ways upon the institutions concerned and upon people’s lives. Furthermore, the economic crisis has engendered a crisis in the European model, which are inter-related and reveal a breakdown of social reproduction which puts into question redistribution models both at the macro (market, State), meso (mediating institutions and actors) and micro-scales of social interaction (families, social networks). LIVEPOLITICS focus on the different ways citizens experience the policies which govern their lives in a daily basis, how they implement them and what kind of negotiations can take place in the framework of moral economies. Through a detailed examination of the ways by which specific actors in diverse sectors of society experience legislation and policy orientations through a range of institutions, this project focuses on how perceptions of the legitimacy of policies emerge through policy implementation and negotiation within a wider analytical context of the workings moral economies. The project will focus on: 1) Livelihoods, policies, everyday life strategies; 2) Grassroots economics – definition, value and care regimes, interpretation and ways out of crisis; 3) Public policies, from conception, implementation and impact upon institutions and citizens. The project aims at reflecting on how different sectors of the Portuguese society experience their livelihoods through a permanent relation with state institutions throughout a decade of profound sociopolitical transformations. The strategies to overcome difficulties of provision under an au...