Presentation short abstract

Based on ethonographic fielwork in Wallonia, Belgium, this paper shows how energy investors, landowners, and farmers in negotiate contracts that convert agricultural land into solar farms, reshaping land access, control, and socio-ecological dynamics across landscapes.

Presentation long abstract

Conceptual and empirical work on renewable energy production as a socio-technical transition often disregards the land implications of renewable energy projects and the conflicts they generate at the local level particularly in marginal territories, where opposition to new solar and wind developments is increasing.

Taking these conflicts as an entry point to examine how new energyscapes are assembled and contested, this paper focuses specifically on the development of agrivoltaics in Wallonia, Belgium.

Based on more than thirty semi-structured interviews conducted in 2025, complemented by secondary data analysis, it employs actor-network mapping to trace how energy investors, landowners, and farmers interact at the farm level, and how both formal contracts and informal relations shape the transformation of agricultural land into solar farms. The paper argues that these contractual arrangements constitute a new form of contract farming centred on energy production – one that leaves land ownership formally untouched yet profoundly reconfigures dynamics of land access and control at the farm level and beyond. It concludes by showing how the conversion of agricultural land into solar farms reconfigures socio-ecological relations at multiple scales, indicating that renewable-energy-driven land transformations should be approached not as discrete, parcel-level alterations but as territorially embedded processes shaping broader living landscapes.