Presentation short abstract

New low-carbon energy infrastructures are pioneered across Africa, trafficking anew colonial and capitalist relations. This paper theorizes creative reworkings of emergent energy infrastructures in rural Zambia as decolonial technopolitics, a de-linking of electrified life from colonial capitalism.

Presentation long abstract

Amid escalating climate risks and growing demands to electrify rural geographies, new low-carbon energy infrastructures are pioneered across Africa, yet energy transition initiatives often reproduce rather than unsettle extractivist, exclusionary and colonial logics. As electrification remains largely driven by international capital in conjunction with its political membrane, the state, new forms of dependency, dispossession, co-optation arise, and communities resisting or otherwise subverting the grids of electrified capitalism are mostly rendered technocratic problems to be “managed”. Drawing on ethnographic research in communities undergoing electrification in rural Zambia – either through mini-grid installations or the extension of the national grid, both with surreptitious ties to international capital – this paper takes refusals, reworkings, and disruptions of emergent energy infrastructures as ontological stances to be taken seriously as pivots for political prefiguration and counter-theorization. We build on – and fuse – Science and Technology Studies (STS), political ecology and political economy to rethink energy infrastructures as sociomaterial alloys that emerge from a process of assembling recalcitrant human and non-human actors to constitute, embody, and enact particular political orders. As such, social inequalities are both stabilized and destabilized as electric power systems gain material solidity, gather dust, or decay. Resistance works through (not from outside) these ultimately unstable infrastructural assemblages, reworking energy transition projects into highly dynamic spaces of technopolitical contestation. From these contestations, we move towards a decolonial technopolitics – practices of de-linking electrified life from colonial-capitalist relations – as a counter-conjecture to the anti-political apparatus currently pushing rural electrification in Southern Africa.