Bresnihan, Patrick and Brodie, Patrick (2024) From Toxic Industries to Green Extractivism: Rural Environmental Struggles, Multinational Corporations and Ireland’s Postcolonial Ecological Regime. Irish Studies Review. ISSN 0967-0882

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Abstract

In this article, we analyse the political ecology of Ireland’s industrial landscape in the current era of digital capitalism, which has been posited as the primary engine of an oncoming “green” eco-modernisation via smart technologies. As our research has found over the past several years (see Bresnihan and Brodie 2021a, 2021b, 2023), far from representing benevolent contributors to the planetary transition away from fossil fuels, digital corporations are poised to become primary beneficiaries by funnelling accumulation through green transition strategies into and through their proprietary infrastructures. In what follows, we unravel the ways in which this does not represent a necessarily new development in Ireland, but rather a historical and continuous transition within Irish environmental governance that facilitates the accumulation strategies of multinational companies via a model of foreign direct investment (FDI)-led state development. In so doing, the Irish state not only participates in these activities as they implicate Irish territory within these global extractive regimes, it also enrols Irish land, labour and infrastructure into them in geographically uneven ways. But, at the same time, there have been a multitude of historical and contemporary examples of civil society objection and outright popular resistance to this development model, representing points of friction at which environmental contradictions are negotiated and contested across local communities and the state in often ambivalent ways

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	Preprint
Keywords:	Toxic Industries; Green Extractivism; Rural Environmental Struggles; Multinational Corporations; Ireland’s Postcolonial Ecological Regime;
Academic Unit:	Faculty of Social Sciences > Geography Faculty of Social Sciences > Research Institutes > Irish Climate Analysis and Research Units, ICARUS
Item ID:	17791
Depositing User:	Patrick Bresnihan
Date Deposited:	08 Nov 2023 11:01
Journal or Publication Title:	Irish Studies Review
Publisher:	British Association for Irish Studies
Refereed:	Yes
URI:	Publisher
Use Licence:	This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available here

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