Renewable energy transitions are accelerating in the global South, yet many large-scale renewable energy infrastructures are developed on public lands with unknown impacts on commons access and usage. The Gujarat Solar Park is situated on 2,669 acres of forest commons, which has historically been used by female pastoralists for firewood collection. The enclosure of forest commons to develop the Gujarat Solar Park has dispossessed resource-dependent women of access to firewood and grazing lands, which reinforces asymmetrical social power relations at the village scale. Using an intersectional lens, I demonstrate how affected women embody this dispossession through inter and intra-village emotional geographies that cut across caste, class and gender boundaries.
