How Can the EU's Green Energy Transition Avoid Reproducing Colonial Logics of Extraction and Dependency?
Author: Natalie Ho
The below article is one of a series of blogs based on a Policy Brief shortlisted as a finalist for the 2026 Chronos Sustainability Prizes at the LSE.
The EU's green energy transition, anchored in the European Green Deal and the REPowerEU strategy, places green hydrogen at the centre of its path to climate neutrality, with the EU targeting 10 million tonnes of green hydrogen imports by 2030. North Africa, primarily Egypt, Morocco and Algeria, has been identified as a priority supplier region thanks to its strong solar and wind resources, geographic proximity and existing pipeline infrastructure. This brief asks whether that partnership can deliver equitable decarbonisation, or whether it risks reproducing the extractive relationship that has shaped Europe-Africa energy flows since the colonial period.
The issue matters because the EU-North Africa energy relationship is not new. It sits on a long history of asymmetric resource flows in which fossil fuels were extracted for European demand while supplier economies absorbed the environmental costs and became locked into export dependency. Without deliberate intervention, a "green" partnership risks reproducing these same logics in new form, including unidirectional resource flows, suppressed local industrialisation, externalised environmental and social costs, and deepened economic dependency. A dynamic that scholars describe as "green colonialism" or "green grabbing".
My central finding is that these outcomes are not inevitable; they are produced through specific, reversible policy choices. Drawing on two cases, Morocco's Noor Ouarzazate Solar Complex and South Africa's Just Energy Transition Partnership (JETP), I identify three domains where current EU policy risks entrenching extraction but could instead enable a shared development.
First, through financing. Mechanisms such as the Critical Raw Materials Act (CRMA) and the Global Gateway initiative are oriented toward EU energy security rather than partner-country development, creating structural pressure toward maximal exports. Noor Ouarzazate shows that financing conditions can instead embed local content, workforce development and technology transfer as binding requirements (creating roughly 2,000 direct jobs and a domestic solar-manufacturing base).
Second, through technology and knowledge transfer. Green supply chains tend to concentrate high-value activity in the Global North, leaving partner countries as raw-material suppliers, a position green hydrogen risks reinforcing unless transfer is designed in from the outset.
Third, through safeguards. Decarbonisation's environmental legitimacy can crowd out local concerns over water, land and livelihoods, particularly acute in a water-scarce region.
The three key recommendations follow directly:
Reform EU financing and investment frameworks so that Global Gateway and CRMA criteria assess projects against partner-country development priorities and ring-fence a dedicated social-investment stream (modelled on the JETP) under community governance.
Mandate genuine technology and knowledge transfer, including jointly governed R&D institutions and active support for domestic hydrogen use in North Africa, not solely export-oriented production.
Embed binding environmental and social safeguards, making Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) a non-negotiable financing condition and establishing citizen-led monitoring with genuine influence over project decisions rather than advisory status only.
Together these recommendations do not require abandoning EU hydrogen ambitions, they require redesigning the policy architecture so that partnerships serve mutual development, allowing decarbonisation and decolonisation to advance hand in hand.
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Notes
Natalie Ho's policy brief, "How can the EU's green energy transition avoid reproducing colonial logics of extraction and dependency?", won the Postgraduate Chronos Sustainability Prize 2026 and is available here. Natalie is completing an MSc in Environment and Development at the London School of Economics. She brings over four years of sustainability and ESG consulting experience across corporate climate disclosure, assurance and sustainable finance.
Read more on the Chronos Sustainability Prizes at the LSE here.
