Antonio Fronteddu
Department, Institution: Greenwich Business School, University of Greenwich & James Hutton Institute of Aberdeen
UBEL Pathway: International Development
Supervisor: Luca Tasciotti, Simone Piras
About Me
My name is Antonio, I was born and raised in Nuoro, central Sardinia.
I pursued a BA in International Relations and Development Studies at SOAS, an MSc in Governance of Sustainability at Leiden University, complemented by an exchange at the Colegio de México (COLMEX) after receiving the AMEXCID scholarship.
I was raised helping my dad’s small business throughout every sunny Mediterranean summer.
From then, my professional experiences have varied from diplomacy to environmental consultancy, and most recently in due diligence and 3T mineral traceability in the African Great Lakes Region.
Before embarking on this PhD, I returned to Sardinia, where I decided to put theory into practice: I ran for the Sardinian regional Parliament with a last-minute candidacy. On the platform I had built thanks to the electoral campaign, I continued engaging in activism, and thanks to my thesis on the Sardinian energy transition, I advocated with committees and grassroots movements for a fair and decolonial energy transition process in Sardinia.
My Research
The study examines how large scale wind farm projects affect rural communities in Scotland and Sardinia, where the environmental benefits of renewable energy are shared nationwide but the local costs—loss of farmland, top-down policymaking, biodiversity and visual landscape—fall on sparsely populated areas already facing economic decline. It asks whether existing policies and compensation schemes fairly address residents’ concerns, and it compares the actual socio economic impacts of current wind farms with what locals say they would accept as compensation.
The shift to renewable based energy systems was originally seen as fostering new forms of energy governance that could treat energy as a common good and seek to demarketise access to it. Nevertheless, governments are concentrating their strategies on innovating raw resources—sun and wind—rather than on governance, perpetuating the extraction of energy from peripheral regions.
Impact of My Research
The research aims to close the divide between policy understanding, formulation, implementation, activism and scholarly inquiry in the energy transition. Citizens in peripheral regions are sometimes dismissed as “NIMBY” or climate denialist, yet in many peripheral regions, a legacy of top down policymaking, colonial style policy design, and the marginalisation of territories, communities, languages and cultures shapes the perception of the energy transition as a foreign agent of change.
Instead, the ecological transition can be reframed as a catalyst for spatial justice, new forms of democratic governance and sustainable growth. By conducting fieldwork, consulting stakeholders and interviewing activists, politicians and administrators, the study will pave the way for a truly bottom up energy transition in peripheral territories such as Sardinia and Scotland.