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Paper short abstract:

Engineers saying places have 'no infrastructure' marginalises landscapes of autonomy, and assumes nothing can be learned from existing skilled practice. The paper confronts natural science hegemony in renewable energy innovation, and brings in alternative concepts of Pluriverse thought and practice.

Paper long abstract:

This paper pursues the panel’s interest in making the invisible visible. During years of work with interdisciplinary groupings such as the Durham Energy Institute and the UK Low Carbon Energy for Development Network, it has been an ethnographically notable fact that engineers and natural scientists are prone to declare parts of the off-grid Global South as places where “there is no infrastructure”. This is not simply a highly partial description of technologically marginalised landscapes, it carries with it a brute assumption that there is nothing to learn from existing practices of lifeways, and new interventions can be designed disregarding local knowledge and capacities of skilled practice. This is effectively a techno-colonially constructed terra nullius. The paper confronts the extent of natural science hegemony in renewable energy innovation, and brings in alternative conceptual pathways that belong more to Pluriverse thought and practice. Examples of hybrid innovation from the Himalayas, Africa and Latin America will provide evidence of grassroots capacities for bottom-up technical practice that is embedded in socio-ecological contexts of livelihood resilience. These provide different narratives of change from techno-interventionist approaches in their visible entanglement with diverse layers of social institutions and environmental governance that enable claims of social justice and solidarity to interweave with possibilities for material innovation. The paper emphasises residual issues of socio-political inequality that infrastructure cannot simply pave over.