Contribution short abstract

Solar power in arid Tunisia accelerates groundwater overexploitation. It mainly benefits wealthy farmers with private boreholes, challenging claims of a socially just energy transition. It also goes together with the grid or hopes of future connection, undermining the very notion of ‘transition’.

Contribution long abstract

Tunisia has pursued a policy to develop renewable energy, framed as a “socially just energy transition”. While early solar policies targeted residential consumption, the 2010s saw the rise of solar-powered irrigation outside state programmes, especially in arid regions where groundwater is critically overexploited. Yet the justice dimensions of this emergent solar energy–groundwater nexus remain largely unexamined.

This paper focuses on the agricultural region of Gabès Sud, where since 2015 solar energy has enabled new irrigated areas in spaces framed as empty but historically shaped by pastoral livelihoods. These expansions unfold amid declining groundwater tables and deepening inequalities, themselves the outcome of long-standing policies that produced and structured groundwater scarcity. The hydro-social territory is characterised by two coexisting models: (1) a collective groundwater management system in which smallholders (<1 hectare) share groundwater access via a collective borehole, and (2) a private system in which farmers (8 to 200 hectares) irrigate from private borehole.

We analyse the socio-technical and political conditions that enabled solar irrigation to develop and its consequences for groundwater. We show that solar investment drives the expansion of irrigation, benefiting wealthy farmers using private boreholes while excluding smallholders reliant on collective infrastructure. We conclude by questioning the very notion of “transition,” where solar functions as a stopgap or as an infrastructure of hydrosocial intensification. This contribution thus calls into question the Tunisian government’s narrative of a socially just, wealth-creating, and sustainable energy model.