Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how the Lao state’s engagement in hybrid governance to facilitate the Nam Nua 1 (NNua1) Hydropower—a Chinese transboundary hydropower within Lao borders—impinges on its political authority in making hydropower decisions and in implementing resettlement programs.

Paper long abstract:

The governance of hydropower projects in Laos has been more hybrid and transboundary since the new government followed the advice of its patron banks to pursue public-private partnerships (PPP) in the 1990s. For many scholars, this hybrid governance of transboundary hydropower implies limited statehood or hollowing out the state. This article, however, argues that the collaboration of multiple actors to govern transboundary hydropower does not totally circumscribe the Lao state’s political authority or domestic sovereignty. Drawing on the case of the Nam Nua 1 (NNua1)—a Chinese transboundary hydropower under the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)—the article presents how the Lao state remains the dominant political actor in manoeuvring transboundary dynamics and in manipulating the engagement of multiple hydropower actors to govern the NNua1 Project. The article also discusses how the Lao state negotiates its transboundary hydropower relationships with various hydroelectric financiers and investors, cooperation frameworks, and other countries that share the Mekong River Basin to achieve its economic goals. It argues that the hybrid governance does not engender limited statehood, but rather limited participation of transboundary environmental publics and resettled villagers. This governance also privileges private-sector actors. The article does not only contribute to the social analysis of cross-border collaborative governance and the Belt and Road Initiative’s local dynamics, but also to the formulation of better policies for improving the recent form of hybrid governance of transboundary hydropower in Laos.

Paper short abstract:

The paper portrays the entanglement of expectations and roles of the stakeholders involved in smart energy communities, arguing that a methodical engagement with issues of (citizen) knowledge, trust and empowerment is necessary to move beyond the transitionist narrative of citizen emancipation.

Paper long abstract:

The EU has framed energy communities (ECs) as collective actions of citizens that enable them to participate in the energy system, contribute to its decentralisation and propel the energy transition. While member countries are now actively coping with ECs’ legislative, technical, and market challenges, the prospect of their social and economic benefits goes largely unquestioned. In this paper, we contend that those benefits actually depend on a tangle of knowledge, trust and empowerment on the part of residents that stakeholders are far from extricating.

We build on qualitative research conducted within the H2020 NRG2peers project to show that the structural tensions in the design and execution of renewable energy ECs are both concealed and partially produced by the transitionsit narratives. Nine communities in diverse phases of maturity and form were involved in the study; however, we focus primarily on a Dutch and Slovenian case (a community-initiated, floating smart-grid urban neighbourhood and a project-initiated self-supply village community, respectively). We tease out the expectations of the different stakeholders involved in the implementation and management of the ECs, and argue that the diverging and converging expectations are both driving and obstructing the work of actually existing ‘transitions’. We conclude by making the case for a shift in the framework for the design of smart ECs, to better negotiate these expectations. By learning how to engage with residents’ values and needs, stakeholders can leave behind the transitionist narrative of citizen emancipation, while actually working to co-create meaningful, albeit iterative, improvements in specific localities.

Paper short abstract:

The ‘Living Well in Low Carbon Homes’ study illuminates the (re)shaping of everyday morality and norms by housing professionals and residents in UK Active Home energy transitions. The STS concept of interpretive flexibility is used to consider conflicting (re)shaping by publics and professionals.

Paper long abstract:

To meet UK decarbonisation and climate change targets, low carbon homes are being realised in different ways, encompassing a range of energy sources, technologies, services, and building materials. Active Homes aim to have zero carbon emissions and to produce and share energy; thereby, disrupting existing socio-technical structures and processes, to provide electricity grid flexibility - through the use of energy commons, such as solar energy. As sociotechnical innovations, for residents to be able to live well in Active Homes, and achieve low-cost energy sufficiency, there may be an expectation among housing developers that some energy practices and other elements of their daily lives will be altered.

The ‘Living Well in Low Carbon Homes’ study explores stakeholders’ roles in developing Active Homes and residents’ experiences of living in them, across five UK sites. Stakeholder and resident interview data illuminate how Active Home housing professionals are mobilizing normative and moral discourses about everyday home energy practices; thereby, expanding the boundaries of their conventional domain of expert authority, the technical, to include new domains of expert authority, the moral and normative aspects of everyday home energy practices. Our data reveals a shift in some housing professionals’ roles from not only how to use home energy technology, but to how residents should or should not live in low carbon homes, from a moral and normative perspective. We use the STS concept of interpretive flexibility to consider how everyday home energy norms are being (re)shaped, in sometimes conflicting ways, by residents and housing professionals.

Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses the potential of LPG gas bottles for clean cooking transitions in Kenya. It argues that gas bottles should not be accounted as technical objects only, rather as entities imbued with social values. Gas bottles deliver promises, but they also impose new challenges to the users.

Paper long abstract:

In the last decade, the adoption of LPG gas bottles has been promoted by the Kenyan government as the ‘magic bullet’ for the transition to clean cooking. Several policies and infrastructural investments have encouraged LPG use to transit away from polluting biomass fuels and kerosene. Nowadays 25% of the population cooks with LPG compared to 3% in 2006. LPG is considered a ‘clean fuel’ because it burns efficiently emitting low levels of black carbon. Gas bottles are easy to transport, affordable, and intuitive to use. In Kenya, adopting LPG is a turning point for users: gas bottles promise better health, freedom from drudgery, and generally safer living conditions. Also, they epitomise users’ ability to upgrade their socio-economic status and to embrace ’modern’ life. This paper is based on 6-months ethnographic fieldwork I conducted in 2021 for my PhD in the informal settlement of Langas. It unpacks the complex set of hopes and expectations placed on the ownership of gas bottles, focusing on how those extend beyond their ability to fulfil the technical purpose of delivering clean energy.

All that glitters is not gold, however: the adoption of gas bottles also poses new socio-cultural and technical challenges – e.g. division between users/non-users and new forms of marginalisation, as well as an ever-expanding dichotomy between energy practices in rural and urban settings. The second section will focus on the disenchantment of clean cooking transitions to shed light on some often-neglected socio-cultural components that may hinder their success.