Energy transitions in a fractured world: unpacking the political economy of renewable energy deployment in the Global South

As climate action intensifies, renewable energy deployment is increasingly framed as a predominantly technical response to decarbonisation. This commentary argues that, in the Global South, such deployment often reproduces historical patterns of subordination, financial dependence and ecological degradation. While extensive research has examined upstream extractive dynamics in critical mineral supply chains, far less attention has been paid to the downstream processes of infrastructure implementation: who decides, who benefits and who bears the costs. Our central contribution is to shift attention from extractive frontiers to renewable infrastructure itself as a site where global asymmetries and injustices are reproduced, negotiated and contested – singularly in contexts marked by energy precarity, asymmetrical governance and international partnerships structured by uneven power relations. The rapid rise of green hydrogen exemplifies these dynamics. Promoted as a win-win solution and a vector for sustainable development, it often entrenches extractive logics and spatial injustice. On this basis, the article makes a twofold call: to broaden energy transition studies by situating them in the lived realities of the Global South, and to rethink just energy transitions as contested political projects rather than as narrowly technocratic frameworks. It therefore outlines an interdisciplinary research agenda examining renewable energy development through the interconnected lenses of power, territoriality, governance, finance and justice, thereby laying the groundwork for an emerging field of research that critically confronts what recent literature terms ‘green colonialism’.