Recent efforts in the EU’s shift towards climate neutrality, strategic autonomy, and diversified supply chains have sparked a major investment surge in peripheral and so called ‘left-behind’ regions. Numerous green transition projects have been launched aiming to strengthen strategic autonomy in the extraction, production, and recycling of critical resources and technologies within Europe, thereby reducing the EU’s reliance on key suppliers such as China and the US. Prominent examples include large-scale semiconductor and electric vehicle battery factories, extensive infrastructure landscapes for the production and storage of sustainable energy such as wind, solar, and hydrogen, as well as new mining projects focused on the extraction of critical raw materials like copper and lithium. These projects are accompanied by highly speculative dynamics: while promising new growth narratives, they are equally marked by conflicting (geo)political, ecological, and societal tensions. We understand “extractivist speculations” as the combination of resource extraction, large-scale infrastructural transformation, and financialised expectations of future value creation that position peripheral regions as strategic green frontiers.

This thematic issue takes these ambivalent developments in Europe’s peripheral(ised) regions as a starting point to critically interrogate the role of planners and urban and regional policymakers in the context of new extractivist speculations. It starts from the hypothesis that planning, administration, and policy professionals face increasingly complex implementation processes in the context of new green transition projects. Planning and approval procedures are complex, protracted, and conflict-ridden, shaped by the interplay of institutions across scales and cultural contexts. Mounting resistance from diverse actor groups–including environmental activists, local residents, and far-right as well as right-wing populist movements–further intensifies these challenges. These developments raise fundamental questions for planning theory and practice: To what extent is planning and the role of planners and/or policymakers reduced to enabling and accelerating strategic projects? Under which conditions can planning processes as well as professionals act as mediators of territorial justice and socio-ecological transformation? How do planners and policymakers negotiate the dangers of becoming entangled in speculative logics that they struggle to regulate?

Against this backdrop, both the futures of peripheral regions and the socio-ecological transition itself appear increasingly contested. Discussing these economic, environmental, and (geo)political contestations of green transition projects invites planning scholars to question particular visions of a sustainable future that were long taken for granted by many, opening up new spaces between hope and disillusion. We welcome contributions that advance conceptual debates, provide empirically grounded case studies, or offer comparative perspectives across regions and scales. Interdisciplinary approaches and innovative methodological reflections are equally encouraged. By critically examining planning in the face of extractivist speculations, this thematic issue seeks to rethink the role of planning in Europe’s contested green transition. Rather than assuming sustainability as an uncontested horizon, we aim to explore the tensions, contradictions, and transformative potentials emerging in Europe’s peripheral regions.

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