Cultivating the Sun: Solar Energy Between Tunisia and Europe

In the early twenty-first century, solar energy has become the object of significant political ambition. Across the world, governments and corporate consortia have advanced large-scale infrastructural visions to harness solar irradiation at tremendous scales. Focusing on the work of European energy companies developing utility-scale solar projects in Tunisia, this dissertation examines the transnational relations through which large-scale solar energy development unfolds. Drawing on three years of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork and archival research in the United Kingdom and Tunisia, I argue that solar infrastructures are not built where the sun shines most strongly, but where networks of knowledge, capital, and institutional power intersect with technological and environmental imaginaries to produce the conditions of possibility for solar power. In tracing the practices of developers, engineers, day laborers, and state agents, I trace how solar energy is cultivated through contested speculations about future social, economic, and environmental contexts. I further show that the prognostic frameworks and environmental epistemologies through which certain landscapes appear as sites of energy potential are themselves the product of longer transnational histories, forged through colonial scientific networks, international development institutions, and postcolonial aspirations for sovereignty. By tracing these histories alongside the ethnographic present, I demonstrate how contemporary renewable energy projects both reproduce and rework older geographies of extraction, while generating new ways of seeing, knowing, and ordering space. In doing so, this dissertation offers a new framework for understanding how power is produced, not through the identification or extraction of resources alone, but through the work of cultivating the conditions under which its production can be sustained.

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