RAPID: Tracking Emerging Trans-regional Energy Initiatives

Temple University, Philadelphia PA

Investigators

Abstract

This RAPID grant establishes the foundations for long-term ethnographic fieldwork examining an ambitious renewable energy development project in North Africa. The umbrella organization for a complex nexus of public and private investors, seeks to connect Europe's power grid to a series of solar and wind farms with claims that this 400 billion euro "super grid" of electricity production may be able to supply 15% of Europe's energy needs by 2050. This grant allows for urgent research on the construction and bringing online of the initial solar farm. The research will examine how residents and the organization officials experience and understand the launch of this first critical component. The researcher will conduct approximately ten weeks of interviews and preliminary ethnographic fieldwork first with organization staff at its headquarters and those of its affiliates, then with local officials and community. The ethnographer will examine the cultural perspectoves that operate in the planning of the development of energy resources of Northern Africa and compare these to how local people and communities living near the initial site understand the implications of environmental investment and development. What kinds of material, infrastructural, and cultural differences are brought together in this ambitious trans-continental project, and how are they experienced and negotiated by people involved "on the ground." How are complex political relationships, and transfers of capital and technology, between European and North African stakeholders, structured and managed? What comparisons and contrasts may be relevant in weighing Europe's historically colonialist interventions against its current development of North African renewable energy resources? This ethnographic study will help us to understand the trans-cultural dynamics, ethical issues, and lived realities of a new generation of trans-border, trans-regional energy development.