Resisting fossil fuel extractivism: mapping diverse perspectives and their transformative possibilities

This paper proposes a typology to analyse the diverse politics of contemporary mobilisations that are explicitly focused on challenging fossil fuel extractivism. It argues that such efforts predominantly draw on one of three distinctive but overlapping perspectives – supply-side policy, just transition and environmental justice – which are characterised by variations in their primary motivations, actors involved, and arguments and strategies employed, as well as the challenges and critiques they face. The elaboration of these perspectives highlights the different ways in which they incorporate a vision for broad-based ecosocialist transformation focused on systemic drivers of the climate crisis and fossil fuel-based economic growth. The paper’s discussion of anti-coal mobilisations in India further illustrates how this typology can be applied to analyse diverse efforts to contest fossil fuel extraction within a specific empirical context, and the context-specific limits and possibilities for building transformative resistances to fossil fuel extractivism.