Why Some Fossil Fuel Campaigns Win: New Study Reveals the Power of Deactivation Networks

Why do some campaigns manage to stop fossil fuel projects while others, seemingly just as passionate and well-organized, fail? A new study published in Geographica Helvetica offers a striking answer drawn from two decades of conflict at a single Italian power plant: protest alone is not enough. Success came only when activists forged ties with trade unions, public officials, and political parties capable of blocking permits and decisions. The researchers call this configuration a deactivation network, and their findings could reshape how climate movements think about strategy.

The study, conducted by Daniel Delatin Rodrigues and Marco Grasso of the University of Milan-Bicocca and Giuseppe Calignano of the University of Bologna, examines Enel’s power plants in Civitavecchia, a long-standing fossil energy hub near Rome. The authors introduce what they term the deactivation network approach, a framework that treats conflicts over fossil infrastructure as relational struggles between two antagonistic logics of action. On one side stand practices of continuity and legitimation, through which a fossil network works to keep infrastructure running. On the other stand practices of destabilisation and disruption, through which a heterogeneous coalition attempts to shut it down.

The empirical heart of the research is a natural experiment of sorts. Civitavecchia experienced two contested fossil-to-fossil conversion cycles with opposite outcomes. Between 2000 and 2010, Enel pursued an oil-to-coal conversion that succeeded despite local opposition. Between 2018 and 2023, the company proposed a coal-to-gas conversion that was halted, with the plants slated for closure in 2025, although that closure has since been postponed under pressure from the energy-security concerns raised by the Russia-Ukraine war and a broader European rollback on climate ambition. Comparing these two episodes allowed the researchers to ask what structurally distinguished failure from success.

Methodologically, the team took an intentionally asymmetrical approach. They mapped only the deactivation network, treating the fossil-support network as a structuring context that shapes political opportunity rather than reconstructing it as a second network. Using event-based social network analysis, they defined ties between actors by co-participation in deactivation events such as meetings, demonstrations, strikes, and joint communiqués. They then triangulated these structural patterns with eight interviews, documentary sources, archival materials, and digital ethnography of online spaces. Enel itself declined to be interviewed or otherwise collaborate with the research.

The structural results are initially puzzling. The deactivation network remained almost unchanged across the two periods: 220 ties in 2000-2010 and 216 ties in 2018-2023, with nearly identical average degree, very low density, and 95 percent of possible connections absent. The two networks are, in structural terms, essentially equivalent. Yet the outcomes diverged dramatically. The key difference lay not in how dense the network was but in who belonged to it and how intensely they collaborated.

In the first period, the network was dominated by activists, who accounted for more than half of all components and occupied the top positions in degree centrality. Institutions, political parties, scientific and health organizations, and trade associations played marginal roles. Crucially, trade unions were entirely absent. Interpreted through the framework, this configuration produced destabilisation without disruption: activists effectively denaturalized fossil fuel use, mobilized moral and scientific arguments, and challenged the legitimacy of the oil-to-coal conversion in public discourse. But these efforts remained disconnected from the institutional and organizational arenas where continuity practices were actually enacted. Destabilisation was never translated into disruption, and the conversion went ahead.

The second period tells a different story. While activists remained central, the network expanded and diversified with the entry of trade unions, with seven participating components, alongside political parties, institutions, trade associations, a technical group, and a media company. The density-by-groups analysis reveals a dramatic reconfiguration: ties within the activist group collapsed from 96 to 18, while ties between activists and unions rose by 20. Unions occupied a bridging position with high inter-group connectivity. The analysis of tie intensity, measured by the number of joint event participations, showed that groups established markedly stronger relationships in the second period, and that certain actors with few direct ties achieved high eigenvector centrality by connecting to well-connected parts of the network, exerting indirect influence.

The qualitative evidence explains why the union entry mattered so much. Unions have historically defended jobs against environmental closure, embodying the classic jobs-versus-environment dilemma. In Civitavecchia, however, the interviews and documents show that unions did not merely join an existing coalition. They rearticulated health, labour, and territorial futures as a single just-transition problem and co-produced, with technicians and ecological committees, a concrete industrial alternative to the gas conversion, notably offshore wind tied to local shipyard and port employment. This discursive and projectual work dissolved the very opposition on which the fossil network’s legitimation rested, converting relational proximity into disruptive capacity. As the authors put it, the network analysis locates the hinge; the qualitative analysis explains why it held.

The study also clarifies what network measures can and cannot do. Metrics such as density, centrality, and fragmentation describe relational configurations but do not register the meaning or strategic intent of practices traveling through ties, nor asymmetries of power. Tie frequency is not equivalent to influence. The deactivation network approach therefore treats social network analysis as one of two complementary operations: mapping how the network was configured and how it changed, while qualitative materials interpret what circulated through those ties and how relational proximity became political and administrative effect. It is this combination, the authors argue, that moves beyond a simple protest-event count or a stand-alone ethnography.

The broader implications reach into debates on supply-side climate politics and infrastructural power. Fossil fuel infrastructures, the authors emphasize, are never merely material objects; they exist through the relations they support and actively organize asymmetrical conditions of visibility, access, and intervention. They concentrate power while dispersing responsibility, normalizing continuity as a taken-for-granted background condition. Deactivation networks, by contrast, remain relationally exposed and politically contingent. The Civitavecchia case demonstrates that deactivation becomes plausible not when destabilisation intensifies in isolation but when it is relationally articulated with disruptive capacities, lawsuits, policy provisions, strikes, blockades, and alternative investments, capable of interfering with an infrastructure’s operational and institutional viability. For climate movements everywhere, the lesson is sobering and empowering at once: large demonstrations do not necessarily translate into substantial change, but broad alliances that reach into the arenas where permits and decisions are made can.

Subject of Research: Network dynamics of activist coalitions contesting fossil fuel infrastructure conversion in Civitavecchia, Italy

Article Title: From destabilisation to disruption: deactivation network dynamics in an Italian fossil infrastructure conflict

Article References: Delatin Rodrigues, D., Calignano, G., & Grasso, M. (2026). From destabilisation to disruption: deactivation network dynamics in an Italian fossil infrastructure conflict. Geographica Helvetica, 81(2), 347-360. https://doi.org/10.5194/gh-81-347-2026

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.5194/gh-81-347-2026

Keywords: fossil fuel infrastructure, deactivation network, social network analysis, climate activism, energy transition, trade unions, just transition, Civitavecchia, Enel, coal-to-gas conversion, political opportunity, phase-out