The illusion of green progress: Galicia’s wind power expansion as a state–corporate crime

Unofficial AI-generated summary based on the public title and abstract. Not an official translation.

🔬研究者:Provides a theoretical framework combining green criminology and state-corporate crime to analyze renewable energy conflicts.

🏢実務担当者:Offers cautionary insights for corporate sustainability teams about the social risks of large-scale renewable projects.

🏛政策担当者:Underscores the need for robust regulatory oversight and community engagement to prevent greenwashing and social harm.

There is a well-established body of literature on the socio-ecological conflicts that arise from the imposition of ‘green’ narratives used to justify renewable energy projects that, rather than representing a genuine ecological transition, perpetuate extractivism and consolidate corporate control over territories and resources. Building upon this critical tradition, this exploratory article assesses whether Galicia’s wind-power expansion (1990–2021) can be plausibly conceptualised as a form of state–corporate crime. Employing a qualitative exploratory analysis and a critical theoretical framework that combines green criminology with state–corporate crime theory, the study examines how ‘green transition’ narratives and legal–administrative instruments enable territorial dispossession and reproduce structural inequalities under the guise of sustainability. Focusing on regional policies, regulatory reforms, and a comprehensive review of existing scholarship, this research identifies three analytical categories – land-valuation disconnection, social resistance, and state–corporate articulation – through which the dynamics of environmental harm, legality, and power are critically examined. The findings indicate that Galicia’s wind-energy regime constitutes a clear instance of state–corporate crime (Bernat and Whyte, 2019). It represents a structural configuration in which legal and institutional frameworks not only authorise but also actively reproduce environmental and social harm, sustaining the illusion of ecological progress under the discourse of the green transition. Overall, the article proposes a coherent interpretive framework that redefines Galicia’s green transition as a process of infrastructural colonisation, exposing how state and corporate interests converge to reproduce extractivist logics under the rhetoric of ecological modernisation and laying the groundwork for future research on environmental crime within renewable energy governance.

• openalex https://doi.org/10.1332/26352338y2026d000000068first seen 2026-05-29 04:43:59 · last seen 2026-06-07 04:32:20