A key strategy in the European Union’s ambition to establish an ‘Energy Union’ that is not just clean, but also fair, consists of empowering citizens to actively interact with the energy market as self-consumers or prosumers. Although renewable energy sources (RES) prosumerism has been growing for at least a decade, two new EU directives are intended to legitimise and facilitate its expansion. However, little is known about the full range of prosumers against which to measure policy effectiveness. We carried out a documentary study and an online survey in nine EU countries to shed light on the demographics, use of technology, organisation, financing, and motivation as well as perceived hindering and facilitating factors for collective prosumers. We identified several internal and external obstacles to the successful mainstreaming of RES prosumerism, among them a mismatch of policies with the needs of different RES prosumer types, potential organisational weaknesses as well as slow progress in essential reforms such as decentralising energy infrastructures. Our baseline results offer recommendations for the transposition of EU directives into national legislations and suggest avenues for future research in the fields of social, governance, policy, technology, and business models.

More than 20 years after the Earth Summit of 1992, which introduced important social and ecological principles for policy-making and institutionalised participation, citizens are still largely excluded from decision-making processes that affect them. The internet was expected to change the balance of power in global politics. It has provided a platform for the presentation of alternative discourses and facilitated the organisation of social movements that clamour for a voice in global decision-making. The recent phenomenon of digital mobilisation has enthused the media, politicians, scholars and internet users alike. Could this be global democracy in the making? This article takes a critical look at the current dynamics of online participation, in particular the recent trend of online mass mobilisation, and will analyse the discourse, claims and practices of the web’s largest movement, Avaaz, in an attempt to assess the democratic quality of an organisation that insists it is “people-powered” and “member-driven”.

This article offers an exploratory operationalisation of the concept of land sovereignty applied to land politics in 2 agro-territories from different countries and continents sharing a common language and deeply linked histories: Portugal and Brazil. These display a similar model of agricultural development, representing a contradiction between the promise of profit based on aggressive exploitation of the territory and the marginalised condition of its population. How this agricultural model took hold in each country and manifested the agrarian question differs according to key socio-historical factors, such as the role of each in the colonial history that links them. Today, however, these agro-territories face similar challenges: human rights abuses, environmental destruction, lack of sound territorial management and fair policies, coupled with the dilapidation of socio-economic infrastructures. This makes them especially vulnerable to climate change, unemployment and poverty, while also caught in a clash between development models: a hegemonic hyper-intensive production model and the peasant-based model that has been resisting the advances of the former. This double jeopardy has prompted us to speak of ‘depressed and contested agro-territories’. Our study shows how, in the case of Brazil, despite physical violence and threats to life, social movements are propelling land reform, linking it to the concept of the social function of land. In Portugal, in contrast, the country’s alignment with neoliberal development has civil society divided about how to contest land use. Our analysis indicates that in both cases: (i) today’s land politics are heavily biased towards a neoliberal, export-based, hyper-intensive agriculture controlled by large corporations, with weak legislation in place to defend both social and environmental rights; (ii) land reform based on land sovereignty and the social function of land is deemed crucial to assist agro-territories in regaining socio-ecological balance and to attain democratisation of land politics by regaining control over land, natural resources and local markets.

Agroecology is being increasingly promoted as a pathway toward more sustainable agri-food systems, but its systemic and multidimensional nature makes agroecological assessment particularly difficult. While several frameworks have been developed to evaluate agroecological compliance, little is known about how agroecology is currently implemented and evaluated at the national level. This study examines 34 agroecological research and advocacy initiatives in Portugal using the Agroecology Criteria Tool (ACT), representing, to our knowledge, the first national-level application of a similar framework. The analysis shows that only a few initiatives considered fully adopt a systemic approach to agroecology, with most demonstrating only partial integration of the agroecological principles. Clear differences appear between types of initiatives: projects focused on agroecosystems tend to highlight ecological aspects, while food-system-focused initiatives mainly act as social and institutional facilitators rather than as leaders of comprehensive agroecological transformation. Meanwhile, applying the ACT reveals its usefulness and limitations, especially regarding overlaps among criteria and how elements are organized, which somehow restricts its ability to capture the dynamics within the groups of initiatives. Based on these results, we suggest targeted improvements to the tool to improve its clarity and usefulness. Overall, the study emphasizes the need for strong, transparent, and context-sensitive assessment frameworks to support evidence-based decisions and effectively guide the transition to agroecology.