Presentation short abstract

Northern Greece’s shift from coal to renewables relies on cheapened land, precarious labour and financialised care. Tracing how these valuation regimes intersect is key to understanding when resistance emerges—and why it often remains weak or structurally constrained.

Presentation long abstract

This paper approaches energy restructuring in contemporary Greece through a state–finance nexus that reshapes how land, labour and care are valued and mobilised in so-called green transitions. Drawing on ten years of ethnographic research in Northern Greece’s lignite-mining region, I analyse how the area is being reconfigured as a new frontier of environmental fix where various regimes of valuation converge: land formerly organised around state-led extractive industries becomes reimagined as a speculative asset for supranational renewable infrastructures; labour in green infrustucture, framed through narratives of innovation and green upskilling, is increasingly marked by precarity and disorganisation, particularly among displaced miners and racialised newcomers; and care— sustained until the financial crisis through intergenerational credit arrangements within working-class families—has been increasingly channelled through green loans and family energy cooperatives, reconfiguring relations of dependency between households, banks and the state.

Situating the Greek case within broader dynamics of global accumulation—post-crisis austerity, the production of Greece as a European periphery, and efforts to reposition the country as a renewable-energy exporter—I argue that energy transitions function as multi-sited projects of value transformation. They reveal a field of extraction that extends beyond the technical realm of energy into territorial governance, social reproduction, and financial speculation. Mapping these interconnections is essential for understanding both the conditions that enable resistance and the structural forces that suppress or constrain it.