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 |
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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 |
Related URLs: | |
URI: | https://mural.maynoothuniversity.ie/id/eprint/17791 |
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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