• 1 In 2010, 2012 and 2015, three consecutive Memoranda of Understanding were signed between the Greek (...)
• 2 The names of the municipality as well as those of our interlocutors in this text are all pseudonyms (...)
• 3 The place we have called Klisthenis is a municipality located in the west of Athens, between the po (...)
• 4 The two EU funded programs were: a) the CLEAR project (2017-2020), a training program intending to (...)

1This article explores the dynamics created in the small and medium enterprise (SME) sector by the introduction of a green entrepreneurial ethos through the concept of circular economy (CE) after the exit of Greece from direct international economic supervision in 2018 and during the pandemic that followed.1 Our aim is to focus on the ambivalent ways local businessmen engage in new ways of agency, combining market liberalization with climate protection and digital technologies, promoted by the EU and the Greek state as alternatives both to austerity and to carbon-based economy. The ethnographic data concern the ways small entrepreneurs in Klisthenis,2 a low-middle class suburb of Athens,3 react and reflect on two EU projects on CE circular economy and on the post-pandemic European Recovery and Resilience Fund (RRF) (2021-2026) that prioritizes the development of green and digital economy.4

• 5 shore Cris, durao Susana, “From a Political Anthropology to an Anthropology of Policy: Interview wi (...)

3Regarding our methodology, the field-site of Klisthenis was selected because it is a municipality relatively active in promoting eco-friendly and energy saving activities since the 2010s. At the same time, it is a low-middle class urban setting where people and business have been – relatively – heavily hidden by the decennial socio-economic crisis. Last but not least, Mimina Pateraki has a long-standing professional relation with Klisthenis. She has been working as a public servant at the municipality for almost twenty years, alongside her teaching and research activities. Since 2012, she has specialized in European projects’ management and took part in the conception and implementation of the two CE projects examined here. Aliki Angelidou is an academic scholar specializing in economic anthropology. She was introduced to the field via Mimina and has followed the programs throughout their implementation. Interviews with the participants in the two CE projects and other local businessmen were initially conducted between 2018 and 2020, during the projects’ implementation, and some others followed after the pandemic. Both authors agree with Cris Shore that a site like Klisthenis, where researchers have the background to mingle anthropological theory with professional practice, can be fruitful. It can thus bring new angles on the anthropological study of (economic) policies and their receptions from local economic actors.5

• 6 For further information on Circular Economy, see Ellen MacArthur Foundation, https://ellenmacarthur (...)
• 7 EU Circular Economy Action Plan 2015, p. 2: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?ur (...)
• 8 Stratigea Anastasia et al., “Engaging Citizens in Planning Open Public Space Regeneration: Pedio Ag (...)

4The concept of circular economy has emanated from the world of big industry and international institutions and is mostly used by technocrats, policy makers and environmental activists in their effort to promote a new business model and state policies that support it. It implies a new business and consuming pattern that shifts its focus from creating value by making and selling a product to creating value by delivering a service through a product. CE also implies the abandonment of a linear economic model that depends on the extraction of natural resources, manufacture and use of an object, and finally retirement as “waste” in favor of a cyclical model in which profit is issued through the repair, reuse, lease and continuous circulation of existing products.6 According to the EU’s Circular Economy Action Plan (CEAP), a circular economy is one “where the value of products, materials and resources is maintained in the economy for as long as possible, and the generation of waste minimized.”7 In addition, some proponents expect circular economy to contribute “to citizens’ empowerment and community development and [to] establish new principles for democratic dialogue, mutual understanding, sharing, responsibility, commitment, and awareness-raising in societies.”8

• 9 See Neely Andy, “What is Servitization?,” Andy Neely blogspot, http://andyneely.blogspot.com/2013/1 (...)

5Along the same lines, servitization – that is keeping products in use through their servicing – implies a shift towards an extended services’ model where producer-consumer relations are reshaped through after-sales maintenance services that allow consumers to reuse various products – from a dress to an airplane –, reduce waste and save energy.9 Servitization is facilitated by new modes of communication between producers and customers in that it uses possibilities offered by digital technology. It is thus seen as a reinvention of consumption to meet the CE’s aspiration to keep products in circulation. Among economists, politicians, EU and other international technocrats, both CE and servitization are portrayed positively as win-win socio-economic practices that combine market profit with social engagement and environmental sustainability.

• 10 Alexander Kelly, “When Food Waste Goes to Work. A New Flavour for the EU’s Circular Economy,” Socia (...)
• 11 Isenhour Cindy, Reno Joshua, “On Materiality and Meaning: Ethnographic Engagements with Reuse, Repa (...)
• 12 Berry Brieanne, Isenhour Cindy, “Linking Rural and Urban Social Economies through Reuse and Repair, (...)
• 13 O’Hare Patrick, “Cambridge, Carnaval, and the ‘Actually Existing Circularity’ of Plastics,” Worldwi (...)
• 14 O’Hare Patrick, Rams Dana (eds), Circular Economies: Between the Promise of Renewal and Unequal Glo (...)

6From the anthropological perspective, the concept of circular economy has been scrutinized only recently as part of a renewed attentiveness to environmental issues. Some anthropologists have been positively disposed to CE, for example to the repurposing of discarded food in “zero food-waste” restaurants that not only feed poor citizens and undocumented migrants but create job opportunities and enable new forms of welfare and care.10 In other cases, the “circular economy” advanced at the policy level has been critiqued through ethnographically-driven studies on the reimagination and revaluation of discarded goods through repair and reuse;11 on the rural-urban link through reuse and repair;12 and on plastic (re)use and disposal. As these authors argue, there are forms of “actually existing circularity” that provide an alternative to the circular economy schemes premised on retained corporate ownership.13 This anthropological critique is being consolidated,14 with attention to various lived experiences and offer numerous grassroots understandings of equity, sustainability and mutuality that effectively unveil the power relations still embedded in the “new” commodity chains of CE. They come to challenge in that way the dominant business-friendly visions on circular economy.

• 15 Vetta Theodora, “De-Carbonized Futures: Struggles over Ecological Distribution in Greece,” Capital (...)
• 16 Argenti Nicolas, Knight Daniel M., “Sun, Wind, and the Rebirth of Extractive Economies: Renewable E (...)
• 17 Vetta, “De-Carbonized Futures,” art. cit.
• 18 Knight Daniel M., “Green Economy and Promises for the Future in Greece. Whose Green?,” Allegra Lab, (...)
• 19 Corvellec Hervé, Towell Alison, Johansson Nils, “Critiques of the Circular Economy,” Journal of Ind (...)
• 20 Knight Daniel M, “The Green Economy as a Sustainable Alternative?,” Anthropology Today, vol. 33, n^o(...)

7In the context of the decennial socio-economic crisis in Greece, a handful of anthropologists have followed the recent interest in the discipline on environmental issues. Although CE hasn’t been a central theme, studies have critically approached green economy and energy transition in the Greek context. As Vetta notes, since the 1990s an energy restructuring has been taking place under the common EU energy and climate policies, involving a new energy mix where natural gas and renewable sources gained a growing importance. This restructuring was combined with consecutive waves of privatization and state-backed boost of private investments.15 During the last decade of crisis, both the opening of the Greek economy to multinational investors16 and the exploitation of nature have intensified, by the expropriation of protected public land for touristic development and gold mining, or by green grabbing for commoditized conservation and large wind farms.17 As it has been exposed by Knight, green alternatives to austerity policies were promoted as a complementary source of market liberalization and climate protection with great potential. However, “the movement towards the green economy in a time of crisis has encouraged a repetition of the neoliberal model of privatization, short-term accumulation, rentier agreements and resource extraction. This is contrary to views that cast ‘crisis’ as an incubator of economic strategies that may feed green ecological transformations of the economy leading, ultimately, to sustainable growth.”18 This is the case for CE too. As Corvellec, Towell and Johansson note, the EU has developed a quite vague definition of circular economy and an essentially technocratic policy approach with clear economic ambitions, but more diffuse goals regarding social justice and environmental protection.19 Perhaps vagueness is why this “neoliberal approach to the green economy seems to be failing across Europe, reinforcing social inequalities and serving the interests of multinationals instead of truly investing in a sustainable transition to new forms of energy production and environmental protection.”20

• 21 Ιbid.
• 22 Fairhead James et al., “Green Grabbing: A New Appropriation of Nature?,” The Journal of Peasant Stu (...)
• 23 Argenti, Knight, “Sun, Wind, and the Rebirth of Extractive Economies,” art. cit.
• 24 Petrou Michael, “Diverging Sociocultural Visions of the Rural and Land Use Conflicts in Times of Cr (...)

8Most ethnographies note a lack of grassroots engagement21 related to a strong mistrust and depreciation both from people as well as from national and local authorities based on the absence of “social and ethical calculus”22 and the predominance of market logic. In some cases, like the Aegean island of Chios and the plains of Thessaly in central Greece, there are even negative perceptions of renewable energy initiatives that are widely seen in terms of foreign “conquest” and “occupation” not through warfare, as in the past, but through economy23: the technology used in these projects is predominantly German or Chinese and the energy produced in the Greek countryside is not for local use but is exported to the national urban centers or northern Europe. Usually such projects are administered by multinational companies or big Greek enterprises and not by SME or community collectives. This is why local populations either enter into internal conflicts and divisions around the possibility of changing the use of their land from agriculture to energy parks24 or develop harsh opposition towards such economic activities in their territory, as they feel that green projects do not meet their expectations for employment and individual as well as collective prosperity.

• 25 We do not have access to specific data about unemployment in Klisthenis. Indicatively, in 2019 the (...)
• 26 According to the EU definition very small SMEs employ fewer than ten persons. See, European Commiss (...)

10Regarding the socio-economic situation of the city of Klisthenis, unemployment represents a serious problem during the last decade.25 Another important feature of the local economic activity is the tertiarization of business. Nowadays 75.14% of local companies are active in the tertiary (service) sector and only 22.18% in the secondary (manufacturing). As a result, and in contrast to previous decades, 83% of employees work in the tertiary sector, while only 16.5% are employed in the secondary sector. Activities with particular growth within the limits of the city are those of retail commerce (such as clothing and footwear, food and beverages, pharmacies or electronic appliances), services (such as telecommunications, hair and beauty salons, accounting or IT services) and leisure (coffee shops, bars and restaurants). In their totality, business in the municipality of Klisthenis are small and very small enterprises, mostly owned and staffed by family members.26

• 27 In EU jargon, a “multiplier event” is a public event that each partner in an EU funded project must (...)
• 28 The coordinator of the program was the Universitat per a Majors (Senior Citizens University) / Jaum (...)
• 29 For an anthropological approach of the anti-middleman movement in Greece during the crisis, see Rak (...)

12On 10 December 2019 a “multiplier event” took place at the Municipal Hall of Klisthenis.27 The event was a training session that presented local citizens, businessmen and voluntary organizations engaged in recycling activities with the first CLEAR modular digital toolbox.28 Potential participants were identified through the city’s Trade Association; more than 100 local businessmen were invited and 30 accepted to participate. A few companies from different parts of Athens that were already involved in CE were also invited – mostly companies of new technologies focused on designing and developing innovative solutions (applications of internet technologies, smart IT devices and data value chains) in the fields of waste management, recycling and sustainable development. Additionally, a group of ten food producers attended the event. These were participants in the monthly municipal action “Sunday with No Intermediaries” (Kyriaki Horis Mesazontes) which had been running for almost ten years.29 They produce and sell flour, honey, coffee, fruits, vegetables, wine, eggs, cheese, milk, olive oil, which they bring to the city in a local open public market. The main difference with other open markets operating in different neighborhoods of Klisthenis is that they sell their products directly, without using traders as intermediaries. Alongside the other participants, the ten food producers were invited because of their efforts to promote “alternative” economic practices.

• 30 In Greece, the prefectures and the municipalities are responsible for garbage collection.

17The mistrust and negative stance towards CE worsened during the period that the pilot biowaste management project was implemented. Since 2019, Greece’s new government and the new mayor in Klisthenis, have both prioritized biowaste management as a growth lever after the crisis, and a pilot biowaste management project became a top priority in the municipal strategy for sustainable development. Actually, the biowaste management was planned to be the first hands-on experience of the circular economy in Klisthenis and a plan for the municipality’s biowaste management was to be set up. The plan foresaw that the municipality would systematically collect private and municipal biowaste through the installation of brown bins, deliver it to the prefecture’s collection point for treatment and receive in return either compost for private and public gardens or biofuel for the municipality’s cleaning cars.30 The main objective of the pilot project was to inform the local entrepreneurs about biowaste management and its benefits for their business; it needed their collaboration to install brown bins for collecting the biowaste on their premises.

• 31 The first lockdown was imposed in March 2020 and lasted almost two months. A second one that starte (...)

18However, the biowaste management project started in spring 2020, just as the Covid-19 pandemic began and two national lockdowns were imposed.31 The first lockdown required the cancellation of a key information meeting between the local authorities and local businessmen. Since no gatherings were permitted, the municipality informed the city’s Τrade Association about the program by phone. The businesses located in the city’s main square who were asked to participate in the project were also contacted by phone. In these phone discussions, some of the participants were open to information and to the new ideas proposed. Kimon, owner of a bakery commented: “We try to follow the legislation and take actions that will help our business and the environment. We are open to the proposals of the municipality and we want to enter programs that will benefit our business. Recycling is a good thing both for our business and for the city.” Actually, the restaurant businessmen located around the central square of the city had already started to recycle the oils used for cooking in collaboration with the private companies that recycle them. Others did the same with large packaging: “We did not need any incentives from the municipality, the state or the EU to do this, it was a way to get some revenue from our garbage,” commented Marios, a restaurant owner. Still, all these discussions were more about recycling and waste management in general than about CE and biowaste in particular. CE remained an unfamiliar notion to the many who had difficulties in finding concrete ways to apply the model to their business.

• 32 According to the 2019 Annual Report of the Small Enterprises’ Institute of The Hellenic Confederati (...)
• 33 Annual Report of the Small Enterprises’ Institute, op. cit., p. 17, 135, 145-148 and 152-153.
• 34 Annual Report of the Institute of Middle Enterprises of The Hellenic Confederation of Professionals (...)

20Both the CLEAR trainings and the biowaste management projects started under the cloud of previous stressors on SMEs. The CLEAR trainings were introduced just as Greece started recovering from a decade of structural adjustments. Greek SMEs proved enduring to the crisis, due to their relatively low exposure to the global economic environment32 and to bank credits,33 and to their reliance on family resources. Some were thus looking for new opportunities to further stabilize and develop their activities. However, before having the time to recover, another crisis, related to the pandemic, occurred – challenging anew their endurance and viability. This time, the viability of a SME sector that had withstood austerity well – tourism and food-service establishments34 – was also called into question. The biowaste management project that concerned this sector specifically, started just at the moment that the pandemic burst out in Greece and the lockdowns were imposed.

• 35 Alpha Bank, Weekly Bulletin of Economic Developments. Directorate of Economic Studies, 22 July 2021 (...)

22After the pandemic, with the inflation and energy shortage problems that followed, small businesses, especially those operating in sectors that were most affected by the restrictive measures (retail commerce, restaurants and bars, tourism, transportation, and to a lesser extent industrial production), were at greater risk of being permanently shut down. In principle, SMEs are eligible for support from the European Recovery and Resilience Fund (RRF) until 2026, and the Greek government has also scheduled the Recovery and Resilience Fund “Greece 2.0.” The Greek fund gives emphasis to structural reforms that aim to strengthen the business environment, the green economy and the digital transformation in both the public and the private sector. Officially, the government considers the very small size of most Greek enterprises a problem, and its RRF should provide incentives to SMEs to develop partnerships, mergers or acquisitions, in order to enhance their productivity and international competitiveness, to improve their products and services and to create jobs. In addition, it provides investments to improve the energy efficiency of small and medium-sized enterprises (energy upgrading of buildings, production processes, etc.) and their digital transformation (integration of new technologies, electronic payments, remote work, digital office, digital marketplace, cybersecurity, etc.). Finally, special tax incentives are given in order to enhance green investments (e.g. in equipment related to adaptation to climate change, recycling and reuse of materials, etc.).35

• 36 For the major contribution of household economy, kin networks and interpersonal relations in gettin (...)

26Neither local projects on CE nor the RRF are considered by local businessmen as the proper lever of transformation in order to face the multiple crises and envisage a viable future. In what follows we explore how small entrepreneurs in Klisthenis, in their effort to stay economically active in the context of a free market economy, navigate between two different ways to project themselves into the future that seem difficult to combine. Although not negative towards more ecological business practices, the majority of them find future-oriented green projects – like sustainability and circularity in production and consumption – to be incompatible with the urgent, short-term survival needs of their business and of their family under conditions of chronic crisis. In this perspective, and given the lack of substantial state and/or EU support, they consider that their family, kin and interpersonal networks can provide the best long-term backing.36 Family and interpersonal relations have proved successful to bypass difficult economic periods in the past and are expected to endure in the future. In this sense, the persistence of the family business model should not be considered as a relic of a traditional way of entrepreneurship but as a longue durée successful mode of integration in the free market economy.

• 37 Goddard Victoria, Gender Family and Work in Naples, Oxford and Washington D.C., Berg, 1996; Yanagis (...)
• 38 Narotzky Susana, “Regulation and Production in a Globalized World: What Ethnography Brings to Compa (...)
• 39 Gudeman Stephen, Hann Chris (eds), Oikos and Market: Explorations in Self-Sufficiency after Sociali (...)
• 40 Yalçın-Heckmann Lale (ed.), Moral Economy at Work: Ethnographic Investigations in Eurasia, New York (...)

27Actually, since the 1980s landmark works of (mostly feminist) anthropologists on firm, family and social reproduction have shown that domestic economy and small family business have been an integral part of the capitalist productive model in southern European countries like Spain or Italy throughout the twentieth century. They have analyzed the entanglement of economic goals with non-economic settings (family, kin, community), feelings (trust, love) and values (cooperation, sharing, friendship) and have focused on intra-family and intra-class relations in order to challenge the often romanticized interpretations of family-based entrepreneurship.37 More recent anthropological literature discussing the local aspects of the global crisis in Southern Europe38 or the relationship between the market and household economy,39 as well as the concept of moral economy,40 in the East European and Asian contexts, have also scrutinized the contribution of small family business in the changing geometries of global capitalism and in its expansion and consolidation worldwide.

• 41 Equally, in the EU nine out of every ten enterprises is an SME. European Commission, User Guide to (...)
• 42 This percentage is very high in comparison to the average of OECD countries, which is 29% of the wo (...)
• 43 Ibid., p. 2.

28Coming back to Klisthenis, the domination of the family business model is far from an exception. Small family enterprises have a long presence and great significance for the Greek economy: 99,9% of businesses are SMEs and family businesses in all economic sectors,41 and very small enterprises employ half of the working population of the country.42 In addition, Greece has a relatively large percentage of self-employed (31.9% in 2019), compared to the average of OECD countries (15.7%).43 In Klisthenis, the majority of small businesses are not industrial units but retail commerce business, cafés and restaurants. These family enterprises are characterized by multiple kin ties and emotional bonds between the owner of the enterprise and its workers, who in most cases are members of his family. As a result, the survival and prosperity of the business is identified with the survival and prosperity of the family. It is the well-being of the family that constitutes the long-term horizon of economic action.

• 44 Knight Daniel, “Opportunism and Diversification: Entrepreneurship and Livelihood Strategies in Unce (...)
• 45 Ibid., p. 1.

29At the same time, individuals and families that own such small businesses prove relatively flexible to adapt in periods of crisis, as they use their resources and human capital to assure their survival and well-being, by focusing on short-term financial gains and shifting business activities. As Knight notes, in a context of severe socio-economic uncertainty “people feel that they cannot plan for long-term futures.” Instead, they “focus on feeding the family only for ‘tomorrow’” and “prioritise short-term solutions.”44 As he shows in the case of Trikala in central Greece, “crisis has also created dynamic spaces for entrepreneurial opportunism and diversification resulting in social mobility, relocation, shifts in livelihood strategy and a burgeoning informal economy.”45 And he explains,

• 47 Loperfido, “The Entrepreneur’s Other,” art. cit.
• 48 Yalçın-Heckmann, Moral Economy at Work, op. cit.
• 49 Loperfido, “The Entrepreneur’s Other,” art. cit.

30Moreover, the recent anthropological literature on SMEs approaches entrepreneurialism not only as an (individual and family) economic project but also as “a symbolic space of identification”47 invested with numerous moral values, which has been severely dispelled during the decennial global crisis.48 As Loperfido notes for the case of Veneto, in Northern Italy “unlike the Schumpeterian notion of entrepreneurship, which mainly revolves around creativity and the courage and ability to innovate both economically and socially, Venetian understandings [of entrepreneurship] rested upon most individualistic notions of the self-reliance, autonomy and independence of the businessperson.”49 This self-representation has collapsed as many businessmen and businesswomen realized how alone and dependent they were on banks and the state in their efforts to save their firms from bankruptcy during the global turmoil of the 2010s. This sense of the “entrepreneurial self” as self-reliant and a master of his own destiny is also very common among small businessmen in Greece (and in Klisthenis), where it is coupled with the sense that the consecutive socio-economic challenges of recent memory work against such autonomy. By trying to maintain (or create anew) self-employment for themselves and their family members, local entrepreneurs also resist the loss of autonomy and self-pride that they associate with turning towards a salaried job.