Countercurrents to the Green Energy Transition: Contested Development, Procedural Injustice, and Sovereignty Struggles in Tunisia’s Green Hydrogen Contention

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Abstract In the race toward net-zero, Green Hydrogen (GH2) has emerged as a pillar of the Green Energy Transition. Northern industrial countries, with the European Union at the forefront, pursue decarbonization through “win-win” partnerships with Southern counterparts, whose renewable energy potential and industrial ambitions make them eager participants. Beneath this rhetoric of mutual benefit, however, lie local tensions that these green futures have yet to address. Against this backdrop, this article examines grassroots contention against Tunisia’s national GH2 strategy, with a focus on Gabes, a region historically shaped by industrialization and environmental degradation. It traces the collision of top-down, state- and donor-led ‘green’ development trajectories with bottom-up counter-currents emerging from local communities, civil society organizations, and environmental activists. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Gabes and analysis of protest materials, I identify three counter-currents to the GH2 ascent: contested development pathways, procedural injustice, and sovereignty struggles. These counter-currents mobilize historical memory, oppositional knowledge practices, and collective action to contest GH2’s framing, governance, and environmental implications. Situating Gabes within broader debates within environmental political theory and green growth, I foreground the ‘local’ in the socio-political dynamics of the global green energy transition, in showing how resistance from below shapes and constrains global “win-win” visions of the green energy transition.