• Critical discourse analysis of 21,636 media items on Colombia's energy transition. • Three discursive fields — institutional, media, community — coexist in tension. • Five thematic categories structure the debate from 2014 through 2025. • Green extractivism emerges as analytic category at the friction between fields. • Just transition risks reproducing fossil-era enclave logics under green discourse. Colombia's energy transition has unfolded across three consecutive policy cycles between 2014 and 2025, advancing from the establishment of a formal regime for non-conventional renewable energy sources (FNCER) to the articulation of a Just Energy Transition (TEJ) agenda. This article examines how this transition has been narrated across three discursive fields — institutional, media and community — and how the friction between them produces the emergent analytic category of green extractivism. Drawing on a structured analysis of policy documents, normative instruments and a media corpus of 21,636 items systematized through the Media Presence Index (IPM = 25.4), we identify five transversal thematic categories structuring the debate: sustainability-decarbonization, energy security-sovereignty, efficiency-market, participation-justice, and extractivism. The cross-tabulation reveals systematic asymmetries: the institutional and media fields converge in technocratic-economic framings, while the community field privileges territorial, cultural and distributive concerns. Three structural tensions traverse the corpus: (i) technocratic management versus territorial dispute; (ii) fossil-fiscal security versus climate urgency and social justice; and (iii) the Just Transition discourse versus the lived persistence of enclave logics. The article argues that the displacement of extractive logics from fossil to renewable substrates emerges not within any single field but at the friction between them, with implications for energy justice scholarship in resource-dependent Global South economies. The conceptual model — green extractivism as emergent category at the friction between discursive fields — offers a heuristic for contexts where renewable frontiers overlap with histories of extraction, suggesting that avoiding its reproduction requires intervention in the discursive scaffolding of governance.
Cardona et al. (2026) studied this question.