When wind becomes a commodity: territorial conflicts and the dark side of green transitions in La Guajira, Colombia

My latest article "Development in global production networks? Wind energy and socio-ecological conflicts in La Guajira, Colombia" has just been published in the Journal of Economic Geography. Here's what it reveals about the complexities of renewable energy transitions in indigenous territories.

La Guajira, Colombia’s northeasternmost department, has become a hotspot for wind energy investment. With average wind speeds of 9.8 m/s – regarded among ‘the best in the world’ – the peninsula attracts international corporations seeking to capitalize on what they frame as an ‘unused’ natural resource. But this narrative of empty land waiting for development obscures a more complex reality: a territory where 270,000 Wayúu people have lived for centuries, and where wind is not merely a resource to be extracted, but a being with agency embedded in cosmological and social relations.

In January 2022, then-President Iván Duque inaugurated the Guajira-1 wind farm from atop an 80-meter wind turbine, declaring Colombia and La Guajira among the most attractive places for international investment. The spectacle was telling—but so was what remained hidden: the Colombian military had to secure the area against potential sabotage. This image captures the fundamental tensions at the heart of Colombia's renewable energy transition.

Today, seventeen corporations have submitted applications for fifty-seven wind farms across the peninsula. International capital dominates, with companies from Spain, Italy, Portugal, France, Canada, Brazil, the Netherlands, and the United States driving the wind rush. Yet despite this "green" boom, most Wayúu communities continue living below the poverty line, without access to running water or – paradoxically – electricity.

Existing wind energy facilities in La Guajira

Beyond strategic coupling: territory as practice vs. territory as fixed space

My research brings global production network (GPN) theory into conversation with relational concepts of territory to understand why wind energy development has sparked such intense conflicts. While GPN scholarship typically focuses on how regional assets can be ‘strategically coupled’ into global production networks, the case of La Guajira reveals something more fundamental: ontological incommensurabilities that cannot be resolved through better governance or more inclusive institutions.

The key lies in understanding how different actors conceptualize territory itself. Global production networks operate by fixing spaces – transforming territories into bounded, quantifiable assets that can be positioned for capital accumulation. Wind speed becomes a measurable regional asset; land becomes available space for infrastructure; territory becomes a container for resources.

But Wayúu territory operates as practice rather than container – a fundamentally relational space constructed through daily activities, kinship networks, spiritual connections, and mobility patterns. Territory is continuously (re)produced through interactions between humans and nonhumans, including the winds themselves. This relational territoriality cannot be easily bounded or quantified for integration into global production networks.

Through fieldwork conducted with Kristina Dietz between 2023 and 2024, including ethnographic engagement with Wayúu communities and interviews across Bogotá and La Guajira, I traced how these different territorial logics create conflicts that go far beyond distributional concerns to encompass fundamental incompatibilities between ways of understanding space, nature, and development.

Territorial Dimensions in Conflict: Material, Ideological, and Political

Following Pachoud et al.’s framework, my analysis reveals how conflicts emerge across three interconnected dimensions of territory, each highlighting different aspects of the incompatibility between corporate wind development and Wayúu territorial practices.

Material dimensions center on water, land, and infrastructure access. Water scarcity intensifies conflicts, particularly given the legacy of El Cerrejón –Latin America's largest open-pit coal mine – which diverted rivers and consumes thousands of liters daily. Many Wayúu fear wind farms will exacerbate these problems, despite corporate promises that connected hydrogen projects with desalinization plants could provide solutions.

Land use patterns also generate friction. Wayúu livestock farming requires spatial mobility across territories that corporations perceive as ‘wasteland.‘ As one clan leader explained to me: “This is not wasteland as they call it. The heart, the life of this territory is the animals. It revolves around everything, because it's our economy.” The historical context shapes contemporary responses. Having experienced centuries of extractive activities – from colonial pearl harvesting to coal mining to marijuana trafficking – many Wayúu view wind energy as another iteration of external exploitation. “History is repeating itself,” one interviewee observed.

Ideological dimensions reveal the most fundamental ontological differences. While corporations and state actors frame wind as a quantifiable resource measured in meters per second and positioned for capital accumulation, Wayúu ontology understands wind as irreducible to resource metrics. Guerra Curvelo’s research identifies at least eight types of winds that intervene in Wayúu territory – some male and female mythological beings with different abilities. Jouktai doesn‘t simply translate to ‘wind‘ but names a deity that has accompanied the Wayúu since they first settled on the peninsula.

These differences extend to territorial organization itself. Wayúu territory is based on sacred sites, primarily cemeteries, which serve as both places of ancestors and determinants of territorial claims. The fluidity of this spatial organization poses challenges for wind farm companies seeking fixed boundaries and permanent installations. As the director of the Superior Council of Palabreros explained: “if tomorrow they dream that we have to go where there is a windmill, or the windmill has to be dismantled, will they take down that windmill? They won’t do that.”

Political dimensions play out around consultation processes and territorial recognition. Colombian law requires free, prior, and informed consent for projects in indigenous territories, but implementation remains deeply problematic. Among the Wayúu, legitimate authority follows matrilineal lines marked by ancestral cemeteries – the ‘ancestral authority.’ However, the state requires consultation with ‘traditional authorities‘ who must be formally documented, creating a fundamental mismatch between Wayúu territoriality and state recognition politics. This legal uncertainty has prompted some communities to develop autonomous consultation protocols such as the Autonomous Protocol for Free, Prior and Informed Consultation of Cabo de la Vela, published in 2023. Many communities also complain about lack of transparency, with one clan leader asking: “How can you agree to something if you don't have all the information?” For example, the , directly addresses the companies. This tension between indigenous territorial logics and state recognition is not unique to Colombia – similar dynamics have played out in Argentina’s lithium regions, where constitutional reforms have privileged extractive industries over indigenous rights.

Wayúu leader overlooking her territory

Implications for Global Production Networks

These findings have broader implications for how we understand global production networks and strategic coupling. First, they reveal how ontological frictions fundamentally challenge assumptions that local resources can be unproblematically integrated into global circuits. Some territorial logics may be inherently incompatible with integration into global production.

Second, the research extends ‘dark side’ critiques of GPNs beyond distributional concerns to encompass the systematic marginalization of alternative knowledge systems. The commodification of ontologically contested resources – wind as regional asset versus wind as cosmological being – creates not merely economic conflicts but fundamental incompatibilities between territorial logics.

Third, by analyzing territory through material, ideological, and political dimensions, this approach contributes analytical tools for examining how resource-based GPNs interact with diverse territorial logics and multiple ways of valuing nature.

Fishermen in Cabo de la Vela

Rethinking energy transitions: extractive continuities and alternative pathways

The wind energy boom in La Guajira illustrates what happens when renewable energy transitions reproduce extractive logics rather than transforming them. Despite corporate claims to be “different from coal,” persistent structural challenges remain. The protection of the Guajira-1 inauguration by the Colombian military, the dependence on Cerrejón's private transmission lines, and the lack of energy access for local communities all reinforce extractive continuities. Yet some companies are attempting different approaches. Jemeiwaa Ka'i (AES Colombia), for instance, has maintained a regional office in Uribia since 2009 and tries to foster long-term relationships with communities through ethnic consultants and regular workshops. While accompanied by higher project costs, this approach has generated more modest counterprotests – though it doesn’t resolve the fundamental ontological tensions.

This research suggests that truly ‘just‘ energy transitions require more than ensuring better distribution of benefits or more inclusive consultation processes. They demand recognition that some territorial logics may be fundamentally incompatible with integration into global production networks organized around capital accumulation. For La Guajira, this means acknowledging that wind is simultaneously a regional asset for renewable energy production and a cosmological being embedded in Wayúu social relations. Rather than seeking to resolve these differences through technical solutions, perhaps the challenge is learning to work with ontological multiplicity – recognizing that territories can sustain different ways of knowing and being without requiring their integration into singular development paradigms.

The Wayúu struggle against wind energy projects ultimately poses a broader question: Can renewable energy transitions proceed without reproducing the extractive logics they claim to transcend? The answer, I suggest, depends on whether we can move beyond seeing indigenous territories as sites for strategic coupling into global production networks, and instead recognize them as spaces of ontological diversity that offer alternative visions of human-nature relationships in an era of climate crisis.