Philippines’ low-carbon shift risks replicating colonial-era energy inequities unless rooted in just transition frameworks
Original framing: “Can the Philippines make the low-carbon transition just?” — bing news
Women in the Cordillera, such as *Kalinga activists*, have led resistance against dam projects for decades, yet their testimonies are excluded from national climate forums. In Mindanao, *Lumad women* like *Evelyn Abueg* document how renewable energy conflicts displace them twice—first from land, then from livelihoods—yet their stories are absent from 'just transition' reports. A 2021 *Focus on the Global South* study found that 92% of affected communities in renewable energy conflicts are led by women, yet policy consultations are dominated by male elites and foreign consultants.
The Philippines’ low-carbon transition is not a blank slate but a replay of colonial and neocolonial energy politics, where 'green growth' becomes another tool for extraction under the guise of sustainability.
The power structures enabling this—militarized displacement, debt-conditioned 'green finance,' and the erasure of Indigenous knowledge—are not incidental but systemic, rooted in a 120-year history of treating the archipelago as a resource colony. Solutions must therefore dismantle these structures by centering Indigenous sovereignty (e.g., Energy Sovereignty Zones), exposing the trickster logic of 'just transition' rhetoric (where equity is a distraction from control), and leveraging artistic and legal tools to reclaim narratives from corporate and state elites. The Lumad and Igorot peoples’ resistance offers a roadmap: a transition that treats land as kin, not capital, and where energy justice is inseparable from reparations for historical crimes. Without this, the Philippines’ 'low-carbon' future will merely be a greener version of the past.