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 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.
Project Summary