Shared value vs plural values. Contesting renewable energy projects of the Enel Group

The energy transition triggers urgent questions about what values are important, who controls transitional processes, and who has the power to define the answers to the climate crisis. Energy companies claim their central role in the development of renewable energy as the ultimate solution. However, communities affected by large-scale renewable energy projects have extensively raised environmental and social justice concerns and denounced the industry's poor practices and abuses. In this article, we analyse 15 socio-environmental conflicts around renewable energy projects owned by the Enel Group, one of the world's largest energy utilities, through the values and valuation languages of the affected communities. We map them onto five dimensions: environmental, health-related, socio-economic, ontological, and political. We build on environmental justice and ecological economics literature on valuation languages and employ counter-accounting to gather bottom-up evidence of grievances. We argue that, while the company claims that RE is the ultimate solution and the ‘Creating Shared Value’ approach is beneficial to all parties, those impacted by Enel's projects question the corporate model of energy transition and defend a plurality of values embedded in relational worldviews that are systematically misrecognised. We eventually criticise the corporate self-attributed moral and value-centred mandate in the energy transition and call for inclusive research about desirable energy futures rooted in plural and relational value systems.