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

News and Events

After five months of online meetings, the three of us were finally able to meet in person again on 6 August to discuss our experiences in the field, the focus of our research and the next steps of our project. Thank you, Elisabeth, for your hospitality! See you soon for joint field research in Peru!

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Latest Publications

AfDevLives ECRIS Workshop (2025). Ghosts of Bilateralism: Collaborative Research on the Afterlives of a Finnish-Kenyan Water Development ProjectLes Cahiers d’Afrique de l’Est / The East African Review , 60. DOI :https://doi.org/10.4000/14g4m

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