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Paper short abstract

Tracing Greece's shift from coal to solar, I analyze energy regimes as layered landscapes of outsourcing. Risk and responsibility is delegated "downward" to territory, "upward" to the state, and "inward" to households, creating uneven and contested configurations of visibility and vulnerability.

Paper long abstract

Based on long-term ethnography in Western Macedonia, Greece, this paper conceptualizes energy transitions as historically layered landscapes of outsourcing. Tracing the region’s shift from state-owned carbon-based electricity production to solar mega-projects and energy cooperatives, I analyze outsourcing not as unidirectional spatial relocation for profitability, but as a core political mechanism for defining and redistributing risk, responsibility, and labor across public, private, and domestic realms.

Indeed, each energy regime rearticulates outsourcing in distinct but overlapping ways. The restructuring of a state-owned carbon company transformed public provision into outsourced operations, fragmenting both accountability and labour while displacing risks onto subcontractors and local populations. Contemporary solar developments intensify this logic by outsourcing socio-ecological costs downward to the territory and migrant labour while simultaneously outsourcing infrastructural and systemic costs and responsibilities upward to state-owned grids and public investment/subsidies. Finally, energy cooperatives, mostly based on kinship networks, extend outsourcing into the sphere of social reproduction. As households assume long-term financial risk, organizational labor, but also moral responsibility for energy provision, the "limits of the outsourceable" are tested, blurring the line between energy production and making a living.

By mapping these transformations within a single territory, the paper advances an analytical understanding of outsourcing as a dynamic process of evasion where responsibility is continually displaced rather than resolved. Recurrent uneven energy regimes produce contradictory configurations of visibility, where the omnipresent energy source (carbon mines and solar panels) relies on the invisibility of the labor, debt, and environmental degradation required to sustain it.