Debt Beyond Credit: Exploring the rise and impacts of arrears on utility bills in Greece

Abstract

The thesis is about the rise and impacts of utilities-based indebtedness (UI). It centres on the political-economic context of the Greek debt crisis (2010-2015) and its aftermath (2015-2019) to explore the under-studied phenomenon of proliferating utility arrears as UI and trace its emergence and impacts on the social reproduction of households in the city of Thessaloniki. The thesis outlines a feminist political economy framework that mobilises social reproduction as a lens. Crucially, this framework foregrounds social reproduction as an everyday process of life-making that is dialectically linked to the dynamics of capitalist accumulation to argue that UI emerges from a broader crisis in social reproduction in neoliberal capitalism and the lived experiences of UI are manifestations of this crisis. In so doing, it brings the structural transformations in social reproduction which create the conditions for the rise of UI in dialogue with the everyday experiences of households. Methodologically, the thesis combines a macro-structural 'top-down' approach to UI with a 'bottom-up' approach that centres on the experiences of households. Drawing on policy and legal document analysis as well as 18 original interviews with household members who have experienced UI in Thessaloniki, it offers a grounded, nuanced and original analysis of UI as both a macro-structural and a lived and embodied phenomenon. The thesis offers the first political-economic study of UI, which theorises and documents the dynamics of, and households' experiences with, UI from the lens of social reproduction. Through this main original contribution to knowledge, the findings and insights of the thesis make significant contributions to feminist political economy and cross-disciplinary literatures focusing on social reproduction and indebtedness in Greece and beyond. The thesis demonstrates that the rise of UI has its roots to the management of the Greek debt crisis and the neoliberal organisation of social reproduction it engendered. This process facilitated the rise and proliferation of UI by: a) offloading the costs and risks of the crisis from the state and banks to households; and b) entrenching, expanding and intensifying the commodification and marketisation of social reproduction and cementing thereby individual and familial responsibility as the primary means for its maintenance in the long run. In documenting and analysing the lived experiences of UI, the thesis clarified that UI re-orders the reproduction of/in households by instilling a financial logic to it that scripts the meeting of needs into a calculative exercise of assessing present and future social reproductive needs against debt payments. The material needs, the everyday practices and financial strategies and personal relations of household members became enveloped in this logic. The thesis, finally, showed while living with UI, household members negotiated and navigated relations of wage labour, gender, kinship and solidarity, which underpin social reproduction. In documenting how UI reproduced class- and gender-based inequalities and hierarchies and re-textured relations of kinship and friendship, the thesis emphasised the importance of the latter relations which, although are often overlooked by political economists, are key axes for support for those who live with debt.

Date of Award	31 Dec 2022
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The University of Manchester
Supervisor	Ian Bruff (Supervisor) & Adrienne Roberts (Supervisor)