Project Summary

The war in Ukraine has shown how dependent we are on a few politically and economically powerful actors for our electricity supply. At the same time, social anthropological research tells us that although mega hydroelectric power plants or large wind farms produce renewable energy, the burden of these mega infrastructures all around the world often lies on marginalized communities. The profit as well as the generated electricity is received by others. Small power plants powered by wind, sun or water, on the other hand, enable communities, households and families to build their own energy infrastructures and thus supply themselves with electricity independently of large suppliers.

‘MAINTAINING RELATIONS: Community-owned Hydropower Infrastructure Through Time’ is a four-year research project (2024-2028) funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. Our aim is to understand how such Communities of Energy have been able to maintain their small hydropower plants and power grids over decades or even centuries. We want to investigate three Communities of Energy in the Swiss Alps and Latin America: How was the knowledge needed to maintain the infrastructure passed on? How have the relationships, ownership and power relations within these communities around the small hydropower plants changed? Which political mechanisms, legal structures and social conventions have helped to maintain the infrastructures over generations? We hypothesize that emotionally significant relationships such as kinship are central to maintenance.

With this project, we want to combine debates about energy infrastructure, which are often characterized by technical concerns, with insights from anthropology on kinship and care. In doing so, we not only enable a better understanding of the mostly invisible labor of maintenance; we also extend the insights of infrastructure research by focusing on the dialectical relationship between community and infrastructure maintenance and the role of kinship in this context.

In collaboration with these communities, we will create a best practice model to enable other communities to build decentralized electricity infrastructures.