Social Dispossession, the Real ‘Benefit’ of Green Projects in Yucatan

One of the most repeated notions in the governmental, business, and even academic narrative around wind and solar megaprojects in Yucatan is that of the supposed ‘shared social benefits’, which assumes that these developments, based on a capitalist economic model of profit accumulation, seek to ‘share’ economic and social advantages with the communities. Among the supposed ‘social benefits’, the companies and promoters of these types of projects list, for example, payment for the usufruct of land, the installation of ‘open houses’, or the construction of small public infrastructure projects such as the roofing of sports fields. However, as I point out in this brief reflection, these are social practices and mechanisms conceived and narrated from a situation of marked economic-political inequality and based on the needs and interests of companies that serve to reinforce their access to stock market financing and gain social legitimacy, co-opting social mobilization under these mechanisms necessarily paid for through dispossession. Therefore, in this article, I seek to begin drawing and questioning the edges of the ‘benefactor discourse’.