Paper short abstract:

Energy transition in Greece rests on an uneven ecological regime informing multiscalar conflicts, entitlements and legitimacies. Tracing the social and moral tensions over authority and redistribution, this paper discusses the conditions of possibilities for acting and imagining an eco-just future.

Paper long abstract:

Since the 1990s, the Greek energy sector has undergone radical transformations as the EU project of common energy market and climate change policies met the orthodoxy of austerity: a system of social and spatial redistribution of resources, authority, responsibility and debt. Energy restructuring involved qualitative changes in the energy mix, due to growing natural gas and renewable sources’ input. It also directed major shifts in the ownership status of capital via recurrent waves of privatization and state-backed boost of green private investments. Based on long ethnographic fieldwork at the coal-mining region of Kozani, this paper discusses the energopolitics of austerity linking global logics of accumulation to the lived experience of workers and farmers involved in energy production and consumption. The expropriation of surrounding-the-mine villages, the big-scale investments for solar and wind energy, the transformation of agricultural land into photovoltaic parks, and the budgeting of EU’s Just Transition Fund have fueled profound moral struggles and social antagonisms: what is a just energy transition and who gets to speak for it? The current uneven ecological regime informed multiscalar conflicts, entitlements and legitimacies between energy producers and consumers, land property and labor rights, the public and the private. These tensions over authority and ecological redistribution have, in their turn, shaped the conditions of possibilities for acting and imagining an eco-just future.