Politics of Green Investments: The Green Transition and Recognition of Colonial Relations in Greenland and Sápmi

The green transition requires a dramatic upsurge in critical mineral extraction. Extraction is part of colonial histories in Greenland and Swedish Sápmi, which have large deposits of such minerals. Their Indigenous Inuit and Sámi inhabitants, however, are resisting the further sacrifice of their lands for the green transition, indicating a clash between the moral imperative to extract for the green transition and the moral imperative of a reckoning with past and ongoing colonial injustices. This paper presents a new research project designed as a comparative case study between Greenland and Swedish Sápmi which seeks to understand how these clashing imperatives are negotiated between ruling elites and local populations in green extractive investments. It aims to do so by identifying and comparing different forms of recognition (legal, socioeconomic, cultural) between ruling elites and local populations, asking how forms of recognition are activated or ignored in, and affect, the negotiation of imperatives in concrete investment cases.