The Case of the Robbins Island Wind Farm: Exploring Contemporary Conflicts With Indigenous Communities in Renewable Energy Projects

Abstract

The intersection between the push for renewable energy as a necessity for our planet’s future livability and the structural hardships experienced by Indigenous peoples is a complex and increasingly relevant topic. In Australia, the government is heavily investing in renewable energy projects. One of these, is a wind farm on Robbins Island, off the coast of Tasmania, where the Peerapper nation and other Indigenous nations have ancestral heritage, cultural and religious. They are resisting the project, though the company in charge, ACEN, has heavily engaged in stakeholder management and best practices. This has led me to explore the reasons for the conflict that has ensued. To understand these reasons, I apply a decolonial theoretical framework comprised of concepts and models from the literature described in the literature review. These are misanthropic skepticism and racial capitalism, which insist on including a focus on structural power imbalance across all societal levels rooted in historic practices, events and beliefs. I add a world-system model for the visualization and conceptualization of worldsystem differences, which helps navigate the concepts of resistance and assimilation. Finally, the concepts of social license to operate and Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) to include a corporate and governance level. Through an exploratory approach to this single case study, I find that the reasons for conflict are deep-rooted and complex. There is an intense resistance due to irreconcilable differences in world-systems, as well as a structural continued push for land acquisition despite reconciliation efforts. There is duality and counterproductive forces in this conflict that has themes of self-determination, of domination and of traumatic history either repressed or remembered, depending on which side is addressed.