1 - Place-based Environmental Activism in Resisting Large Infrastructure: Decolonization, Resistance, and the Limits of Energy Transition in Taiwan

The emergence and development of, and transition to “green energy” to replace nuclear power in Taiwan facilitates the government and private corporations to search for appropriate places to build large infrastructure hydropower plants, which is considered as the “clean” energy. Geographically situated in marginal locations in the mountainous region, the traditional territories of the Indigenous Peoples often become the targets of the energy policy. Place-based activism and local forms of resistance against hydropower plants reveal the tension and conflicts between nation-oriented and community-based energy transition. The paper focuses on the current politics of resource exploitation and environmental injustice encountered by the Indigenous Sediq People in Hualien, Taiwan.
Theories of environmental justice have not yet been seriously deliberated about the decolonizing resistance of the Indigenous Peoples to have greater control over the decision-making process. In the settler-colonial contexts, the colonial legacy of national energy projects and the limits of state legal structure results in further marginalization of the Indigenous population. This study calls for a transcending Western mainstream philosophy of knowledge production, both ontology and epistemology, to enlighten a more sensitive to ethnic difference, more radical and emancipatory theory of environmental justice, and to recognize the Indigenous sovereignty and the legitimacy of relational ontologies applied by the Indigenous Sediq People.