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Short abstract:

Tajikistan inherits an electricity grid built for cheap provision. Now international donors push to marketize electricity for export abroad, while there’s still a limit for rural areas in winter. I study the perceptions of rural residents, NGO workers and grid workers of anticipated reforms.

Long abstract:

During my four months of ethnographic field work in Tajikistan (2023/2024) I studied how the looming transformation of Tajikistan’s electricity infrastructure is approached by different actors connected through one grid. My research relates to temporalities, as in my case the materiality and experience of ‘the past’ acts as moral conspirator against future transformations. While the past promise for public provisioning of hydroelectricity lives on in the practices and expectations of residents, different planners and NGO workers try to responsabilize the commons to free up future capacity for ‘green’ export. On the one hand, especially rural residents who face limits in winter demand electricity to stay a cheap public good. Through state promises of “energy independence” and “the palace of light”, residents negotiate citizenship. On the other hand, international actors and NGOs push for responsibilisation of electricity to enhance sustainability. In a paradigm of future climate resilience, a transmission line is built to export “green electricity” from Tajikistan to Pakistan. What everyone including the president can easily agree on is the ultimate failure of the bankrupt state electricity company Barqi Tojik, which fails to meet both the demands of consumers and of its donors. In this panel, I plan to present my preliminary research results.