Mechanisms of an Unjust Transition: Brazil’s and India’s Dependent Wind Sectors

The institutionalised framework of just transitions built by international agreements has recently evolved to encompass the necessity of clean energy technology transfer to developing countries to foster sustainable development and poverty eradication (Johansson, 2023). This process ran parallel with a fledgeling scholarship discussing the numerous dimensions necessary for building a just transition. Among them is the necessity for distributional, procedural, and cosmopolitan justice to provide to all human beings, regardless of their nation, fair, equitable and sustainable access to the benefits of clean energy technology while allowing them to take part in formal and informal decision-making (Delina and Sovacool, 2018; McCauley et al. 2019). This article argues that these institutional and theoretical developments enable an assessment of the rising global green division of labour (Lachapelle et al., 2017) to unveil mechanisms of an ongoing unjust transition. It has been argued that technological transitions tend to be embedded with capitalism's uneven development feature, enforcing core-periphery technological transfer dynamics (Perez, 2002). This, in turn, unfolds into rent capture and concentration of decision-making mechanisms that benefit firms localised in core countries (Cardoso and Falleto, 1969). Thus, the possibility of attaining distributional, procedural and cosmopolitan justice in the current energy transition rests undermined by those unjust mechanisms. To further this hypothesis, this article will analyse the dynamics of technology innovation and production in two developing countries' wind sectors: Brazil and India. Brazil’s wind industry has experienced an annual growth rate of 15% since 2010 (Herrera et al. 2018), triggered by Foreign Direct Investment (FDIs) from multinational companies that keep R&D and technological adaptation activities in their home countries (Gandenberger and Strauch, 2018). A ‘bureaucratic led’ policy inducing wind generation plant construction (Hochstetler, 2020) increased the demand for turbines, squeezing local production and increasing Chinese imports. That canvasses Brazil’s wind sector, which is laying off workers and closing industrial plants. We argue that this can be explained by the rent capture and decision-making concentration mechanisms produced by the country’s patterns of patent registration and trade inflows.