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Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates how and why SHPPs became the Balkan's dominant response to the dependence on coal. It suggests that renewable energy is not homogeneously green, but that in the current global and regional divisions it has different shades of green for different places.

Paper long abstract:

Types of renewable energy are unequally distributed across the world, and one of the reasons lies in the general tendency of technology to reproduce the wider structural relations of the contexts in which it is implemented. At the moment, thousands of small hydropower plants (SHPPs) are planned/built on the "intact rivers" of the Western Balkans, which sparked numerous mobilizations. Through multi-scalar lenses, this ethnographic paper investigates how and why SHPPs became the region's dominant response to the dependence on coal. The EU accession process, through its requirements for investment in renewable energy, opened-up lucrative opportunities for both political and economic national elites, EU banks and foreign producers of hydro equipment. With the focus on the European periphery, the paper suggests that renewable energy is not homogeneously green, but that in the current global and regional divisions it has different shades of green for different places. The turbines and pipes enclosing water demonstrate "poetics of anti-infrastructure", revealing the competing definitions of what 'renewable', 'sustainable' and 'resource' mean for local activists as well as for national politicians. These are not merely discoursive battles, but rather conflicting visions of, on the one hand, technocratic and dispossessive development of the energy sector, and on the other, grounded modernization project that tries to harmonize sustainability, aspects of locally bounded radical democracy and cooperative economy. Therefore, what rural-urban-transnational activist networks forged against SHPPs managed to articulate is not only a request for more sustainable energy, but an integral vision that challenges the neoliberalization of socio-ecological spheres of life and the uneven distribution of environmental rights.