Maintaining Relations

Community-owned Hydropower Infrastructure Through Time

...is a four-year research project (2024-2028) funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. The aim of the project is to understand how people in mountain regions in Europe and Latin America maintain community-owned and family-owned hydropower plants and electricity supply networks over time.

The ongoing debate on decarbonized energy systems has opened up fundamental questions of how the production and distribution of electricity can be organized more fairly and democratically. However, although community renewable energy (CRE) initiatives are broadly discussed, the experiences of communities that have managed their own electricity production for many decades are rarely considered a proper resource and explored accordingly. The present project analyzes such experiences to contribute to designing empirically substantiated visions for alternative energy futures. We want to find out which social relationships and political mechanisms are important for the long-term maintenance of such infrastructures, and how the necessary knowledge is passed on from generation to generation and new skills developed in the process.

Project Summary