Gaming the system: exploiting regulatory and institutional loopholes for accumulation in Southern Italy's wind energy sector

Amid ordinary regulatory and market mechanisms, southern Italy's energy transition has developed through a less visible terrain of corruption, coercion, and legal ambiguity. This article investigates how the expansion of industrial-scale wind energy has been enabled by the tactics of investors and entrepreneurs seeking to mitigate regulatory uncertainty and accelerate project permitting. The implications extend beyond Italy, as energy transitions worldwide risk reproducing inequality and compressing democratic participation. Addressing the limited qualitative research on how licit and illicit practices shape the development of green infrastructure in Europe, the article conceptualises a grey zone: a social arena where legality and illegality intersect through corruption, threatened or inflicted violence, and the judicialization of social conflict. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork (2018–2023) in the provinces of Avellino, Benevento, Foggia, and Potenza, and interviews with project stakeholders, the analysis shows how these tactics convert regulatory uncertainty into opportunities, allowing powerful actors to remove bureaucratic obstacles, neutralise opposition, and secure economic rents. Within a fragmented institutional environment—marked by overlapping competences, inconsistent laws, and chronic administrative weakness—business actors, public officials, and criminal organisations coordinate interests to “game the system” and boost accumulation. Findings reveal how wind energy plants materialise through everyday negotiations of power, blurring boundaries between public authority, private interest, and criminal organisations. The article advances energy and political geography by theorising a contradictory convergence of the developmental logic of the state and the expansive drive of capital, showing that energy transitions unfold not despite, but through, the contradictions of law and governance.