Renewable Energy and the Politics of Flow: Sovereignty, Ecology, and the Ethics of Water in the River Basin.

This article develops the concept of ecological sovereignty toexamine how states negotiate legitimacy, control, and ethical responsibilityin the governance of renewable energy and riverine systems. Centred onPortugal’s 2023–2025 proposals for hydric resilience in the Tagus River Basin,it interprets these initiatives as an event through which the boundariesbetween ecology, infrastructure, and politics are redrawn. Drawing frompolitical theory, environmental humanities, and hydropolitics, the studyshows how the dominant language of sustainability and resilience oftenreinforces infrastructural sovereignty—an ethos of control that subordinatesecological flows to economic and energy imperatives. In contrast, ecologicalsovereignty is proposed as a relational and ethical mode of authoritygrounded in the capacity to sustain the conditions of shared life across humanand more-than-human communities. Through interpretive analysis ofgovernmental documents, environmental NGOs, and civic memoranda, thepaper traces how competing discourses of water and energy articulatedivergent imaginaries of justice, responsibility, and belonging. It argues thatrecognising rivers as agents of political life transforms the conceptual terrainof sovereignty and environmental governance, suggesting that politicallegitimacy in the Anthropocene depends on sustaining, rather than mastering,ecological relations. The Tagus case thus illuminates a wider transformationin the politics of renewable energy, inviting a redefinition of sovereignty ascare, reciprocity, and coexistence across planetary ecologies.