“Green colonialism”
The charge that climate/renewable projects reproduce colonial dispossession
Sámi leaders and scholars label Nordic wind-power development on reindeer-herding lands “green colonialism”; the term is also applied to Western Sahara and Global-South mineral extraction for the energy transition. Norway’s 2021 Fosen ruling — that two large wind farms violated Sámi cultural rights — became the emblematic case. The debate is whether “colonialism” accurately names a rights conflict inside a democratic state.
What happened
Norway’s Supreme Court unanimously ruled that operating licenses for the Storheia and Roan wind farms (Europe’s largest onshore complex) were invalid because the turbines violated Sámi reindeer herders’ right to enjoy their own culture under Article 27 of the ICCPR. The turbines nonetheless kept running for years, prompting protests.
In Fosen, this means wiping away an entire culture, bit by bit, all in the name of sustainable electricity. (Silje Karine Muotka, President of the Sámi Parliament of Norway)
Under each definition
No foreign metropole administering the territory; Norway governs its own recognized minority within its borders.
Supporters frame ongoing encroachment on Sámi land as continuous settler-colonial dispossession; critics note there is no new settler population replacing the Sámi.
Not a post-independence external-control relationship (though foreign energy investors are involved).
“Green colonialism” is an explicitly analogical coinage.
The case that the label applies
Advocates argue the pattern reproduces colonial logic: a state and outside investors expropriate Indigenous land for resources (now “green” electricity), override consent, and offer money in place of cultural survival — “renewing historical colonial patterns,” even under the banner of climate virtue.
The case against
Critics note this occurs within a democratic state bound by law — the Sámi won at the Supreme Court under human-rights conventions — with no metropole, no settler replacement of the population, and consultation mechanisms in place; so it is a domestic Indigenous-rights and land-use conflict for which “colonialism” is a rhetorically powerful but arguably loose label.
In their words
A grand chamber of the supreme court unanimously found an interference with this right, and ruled the wind power licence and the expropriation decision invalid.
nonconsensual encroachments by so-called ‘green’ industries on Saami reindeer herding lands is a form of ‘green colonialism’.
The verdicts above are how each definition would most likely classify this situation — illustrative guidance, not court rulings. Colonialism has no treaty crime, so no application is a legal “finding”; every characterization is attributed to the person or body that made it. The lenses diverge most on two questions — whether there is a “metropole” and who counts as “indigenous” — and on the difference between a historical judgment and a moral analogy. See the Definition tab for each definition’s full text. Inclusion is documentation, not a finding.