This project reframes discussions of a just energy transition. Analysing connections between deindustrialization and decarbonization in Europe’s shift towards renewable energy, it advances a critical, empirically grounded theorization of transitional labour regimes, semi-peripheral development, and moral economies. To do so, the project brings together extensive ethnographic and archival material collected in the Sulcis region of Sardinia over the past three years. Some of this material provides the basis for pipeline articles, yet only its combination in a book-length publication allows the necessary scope to ground the theoretical ambition and shape an agenda-setting contribution to the field.

The ongoing energy transition is rolled out not across a blank canvas, but an already existing, unevenly structured socio-economic landscape tying together situated histories with national, regional and global environmental commitments (Buier & Franquesa, 2022). Decarbonization efforts substantially intersect with processes of industrial reorganization and de-industrialized, ‘left behind’ areas often re-appear as attractive sites for the deployment of renewable energy infrastructure (Franquesa, 2018, 2022; Mah, 2025; Pike et al., 2024; Rodríguez-Pose, 2018).

Building on this observation, the project deepens our historical perspective on the green transition. While contemporary discourse is rife with notions of a ‘transition’, critics argue that we are merely facing an energy ‘addition’. This project develops a third and alternative spatio-temporal frame: the seesaw (Silver, 2003; Smith, 2010, pp. 175-205). This framing situates the present within repeated cycles of uneven capital mobility affording a productive view of the energy ‘transition’ as another turn in the churning processes of “territorial abandonment and valorization” (Cowan et al., 2023). This contributes much needed historical depth to the rapidly growing field of energy transition scholarship, as well as a better understanding of semi-peripheral experiences with an increasingly contested energy transition.