Maintaining Relations: Community-owned Hydropower Infrastructure Through Time

Principal Investigator: Prof. Agnieszka Joniak-Lüthi

Core team: Prof. Agnieszka Joniak-Lüthi, Dr. Sibylle Lustenberger, Hannah Plüss

The current energy turn has opened up fundamental questions of how the production and distribution of electricity can be organized more fairly and democratically. “Maintainng Relations” contributes to this discussion by investigating the experiences of local communities, municipalities and families in the Alps and Latin America that have been generating their own electricity for many decades. It asks how these communities and sometimes even individual families have managed to maintain their energy infrastructures over time. We want to find out which relationships and political mechanisms are important for the long-term maintenance of such infrastructures and how the necessary knowledge is passed on over generations and new skills are added. We argue that the experiences of these communities constitute an important resource for the development of empirically substantiated visions for alternative energy futures. Beyond the academic output, we therefore develop a ‘best practice model’ with research participants from all fieldsites, detailing recommendations on how to facilitate the persistence of communal electricity infrastructure over time.

Funding: Swiss National Science Foundation (Grant Nr. 212649)

Duration: 01.02.2024-31.01.2028