Afterlives of coal: land and transition dynamics in Central Appalachia

Abstract The US has witnessed unprecedented federal investments targeted to ‘energy communities’ since 2021. Scholars, policy-makers, and activists have long sought to promote policies that ensure that energy transitions bring about just outcomes. However, emerging political frameworks for decarbonization and energy source transition frequently neglect to account for the role of incumbent actors in upholding longstanding legal, economic, and political arrangements that produce uneven distributions of benefits and burdens in energy systems. In this paper, we reflect on ongoing energy transition efforts in Central Appalachia, sharing our experiences from community-based research documenting the localized effects of carbon forestry offsets, solar energy projects, and postmine land uses, such as prisons, that are structurally linked to concentrated land ownership and capture of federal investments by legacy actors who have long dominated local and regional extraction regimes. We argue that the success or failure of broad-based transition policies depends largely on place-based dynamics rooted in land: who controls the land, who has access to land, who benefits from investments in land, and how public revenues flow from land. Empirical analysis of the politics of land from the local vantage point offers insights into how elites who have historically controlled the extractive economy continue to shape the landscape, but also opens up different worlds of possibilities that emerge at different scales.