...is a four-year research project (2024-2028) funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. The aim of the project is to understand how individuals, families and communities in mountain regions in Switzerland and Peru manage small-scale 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 individuals, families and communities that have been engaged in decentral electricity production for many decades are rarely considered a proper resource of knowledge and explored accordingly.
The present project focuses on those initiatives 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 and skills is developed, circulated, passed on and transformed in the process.
On 27 November, we held a workshop followed by a public presentation at CISEPA, Pontifical Catholic University of Peru in Lima. We received many new ideas from both the invited experts and practitioners and the interested audience, which helped us broaden our perspective.
AfDevLives ECRIS Workshop (2025). Ghosts of Bilateralism: Collaborative Research on the Afterlives of a Finnish-Kenyan Water Development Project, Les Cahiers d’Afrique de l’Est / The East African Review , 60. DOI :https://doi.org/10.4000/14g4m
The Unit for Social Anthropology at the University of Fribourg, where project leader Agnieszka Joniak-Lüthi is a professor, is home to the project ‘Maintaining Relations: Community-owned Hydropower Infrastructure Through Time’.
The Urner Institut Kulturen der Alpen is dedicated to the special features of the Alpine region in all their thematic breadth - from prehistoric evidence and specific traditions to the challenges of the present.
The Centre for Energy Ethics tackles one of the most urgent and profound challenges facing humanity today: how to balance our energy demands with our concerns for anthropogenic climate change. Bringing together diverse areas of expertise, including researchers, industry, and communities, it embraces the responsibility of scholars to address and collectively answer big societal questions about how to create a better energy future for us all.
The Centre for Sociological, Economic, Political Science and Anthropological Research (CISEPA), where Hannah Plüss is a visiting researcher in 2025, aims to develop, promote and disseminate academic and scientific research in the social sciences and economics in order to contribute to understanding the national reality and formulating appropriate responses to its most important challenges.