Contemporary transregional energy infrastructure projects aim to increase global connectivity and envisage seemingly borderless flows of energy. However, political science and sociology mostly still struggle to make sense of transregional entanglements beyond nation-states. Global planning agencies – in cooperation with governments and international financial institutions – have become key actors in pursuing such infrastructural expansion. This global production of an intricate and renewed energy infrastructure network – from wind and solar energy plants to power grids and transmission cables – is rapidly transforming the connections between the Global North and South.
This project develops a deeper understanding of the relationship between transregional infrastructure and the political actions of various actors in the planning, management and implementation of this infrastructure.
While such infrastructures are increasingly transregional, both in material terms as border crossing ‘hardware’ and in replicating similar design across the globe, a deeper understanding of the relationship between transregional infrastructure and the political agency of different actors in its planning, governance, and implementation is lacking. Infrastructure master plans increasingly look alike to match imaginaries of infrastructures as instruments of modernity, fulfilling aspirations of ‘progress’. Such projects overwhelmingly rely on global quality measurement, organizational logics of financialisation and generic design such as ‘development corridors’.
Efforts at integrating different national electricity grids into larger (trans-)regional super-grids not only quite literally connect regions anew, but also aspire to very similar socio-technical imaginaries. While colonial legacies of infrastructure and expertise may inform infrastructural ambitions, power asymmetries between postcolonial states and global infrastructure ‘players’ are often addressed as intrinsic deficits of the Global South.
Based on two cases of transregional energy infrastructure projects, namely attempts at connecting power grids between North Africa and Europe via submarine cables (MedGrid), and the creation of one interconnected North- and Central American power grid (SIEPAC), this project asks:
- In which ways do transregional infrastructure projects transform local, national and transnational political agency?
- What is their effect on democratic and/or authoritarian practices of governance?
The project
(1) combines global infrastructure and governance studies to explore the continuum between democratic and authoritarian practices in transregional infrastructure expansion, and particularly, the role of global planning agencies, in infrastructure expansion. It provides an in-depth understanding of the political consequences of infrastructure expansion for a global energy transition.
(2) institutionalizes an interdisciplinary research platform on transregional infrastructure, to overcome disciplinary and nation-state boundaries, which such projects so clearly transcend.
Who?
Alke Jenss is PI for this project and Senior Researcher / Head of Contested Governance Cluster at Arnold-Bergstraesser Institute. Her focus in the project includes tensions around large-scale dams, defense of land, links between Infrastructure Studies, political economy, authoritarian neoliberalism literatures, Southern Mexico-Guatemala border region, Costa Rica, and SIEPAC.
Alessandra Bonci is a post-doc researching energy infrastructures and governance in Tunisia. Her focus in the project includes authoritarianism and conservative religious movements, political Islam, Gender Studies, social movements and resistance, energy infrastructures between Europe and North Africa (solar plants), North Africa, and Tunisia.
Benjamin Schütze is an associated researcher with the project and leads a German Research Foundation (DFG) project on Renewable Energies, Renewed Authoritarianisms? The Political Economy of Solar Energy in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).
SIEPAC Central American Energy Transmission
SIEPAC, in operation since 2014, is the electricity grid of the Mesoamerican Project, a giant infrastructure plan between Mexico, Central America and Colombia. Funded by the Inter-American Development Bank and others, it has a capacity of 300 MW. Its operating entity and constructor, the multinational EPR, is held by the Central American and Mexican public-private electricity grid operators such as Costa Rican Electricity Institute (ICE) or the the Mexican Electricity Commission (CFE), engaging different actors and geographically disparate sites. The project focuses on SIEPAC-connected sites in Costa Rica and Mexico.
The international electricity transmission line stretches over 1830 km from Panama northwards to the Guatemalan border with Mexico and aims to allow unhindered energy flows, scaling up power generation and -sharing. SIEPAC in fact connects large-scale energy generation with the electricity demand by (agro-)industrial and energy-intensive economic activities. The Mesoamerican Project infrastructure plan was a transnational, "regional proposal" (AMEXCID, 2017) from inception, invoking Latin American unity. The official infrastructural imaginary around SIEPAC focuses on the competitive generation of and access to electricity, yet protest movements employ a language embedded in larger narratives on colonial global economy and war. Grassroots initiatives claim people have been displaced and endangered by projects that generate energy for export and have repeatedly fought against such projects.
If we consider the multiplicity of agents involved in its creation and use, and the framing by counterpublics, the material infrastructure is not the only element that reveals the conflictive social relations around the project, nor are the pylons with an appreciable impact on the physical landscape the only connective dots. In fact, then, SIEPAC reaches far beyond the countries in which its material infrastructure is built.
The Tunisia-Italy Electricity Connection
In 2017, Transnational Institute analyst and campaigner Hamza Hamouchene denounced the construction of the energy infrastructure project of the TuNur solar project in Tunisia as a case of “energy colonialism”, like Desertec and the Ouarzazate solar plant in Morocco. Fears are that Tunisia will run a fate similar to Morocco, experiencing structural water stress. Energy projects are also feared to undermine local employment, so farmers may contest the construction of solar plants. Our inquiry explores the perceptions of the local communities concerning energy infrastructure projects.
This research explores the TuNur solar plant and the latest Italian-founded electric grid in Tunisia. Indeed, an energy connection is planned between Italy and Tunisia, between the Cap Bon peninsula and Sicily, via a submarine electric grid project and developed by Terna and STEG, the Tunisian electricity grid operator. As we learn from the project website, "the new connection will link the Partanna electrical substation (in the province of Trapani) with a corresponding substation in the Cape Bon peninsula in Tunisia. The project will ensure greater energy supply security and facilitate increased energy production from renewable sources." This project analyzes who will actually benefit from such upscaled energy production, what information and perceptions prevail among the local population, and how the energy infrastructure may affect the local fishing economy. In a tense political frame, where Tunisia must respect the IMF guidelines, energy infrastructure can be a prism to address questions of governance, democracy, authoritarianism, and social claims.
Im Rahmen des Projekts fanden folgende Workshops statt:
Workshop: The Energy Infrastructure-Democracy Tension?
Thu, 03/16/2023 - 12:00 - Fri, 03/17/2023 - 12:00
How can we shed a new light on authoritarian practices by looking at energy infrastructures? Geopolitical aspects seem obvious, but scholars and journalists have also recently highlighted the paradox of "undemocratic" aspects of infrastructure within democracies. In the past few months, the United Kingdom and Germany for example, have been practiced unprecedented preventive detentions to the expense of numerous climate activists.
We contend that infrastructures play a crucial role within the authoritarian/democratic balance. Political practices profoundly influence the conditions under which the implementation of energy infrastructures takes place. We ask to what extent democratic and authoritarian practices shape North/South energy infrastructure relations. Actors contesting or supporting infrastructure energy projects is also part of this inquiry. Which values do they embrace? What repertoires of resistance do those contesting such projects employ in the face of potential coercion? Accordingly, the workshop will revolve around social movements, transregional relations, and a political economy approach.
The ABI team hosted scholars on energy infrastructures from Europe, North Africa, and Latin America, to discuss the recent literature on the subject. The main objective was to offer an innovative perspective on how to rethink transregional practices in the potentially authoritarian politics of energy infrastructures. The participants focused on a specific phenomenon linked to authoritarianism and energy infrastructures in the contexts of the MENA region, European Union, and Latin America around social movements, the transregional aspects of energy infrastructures, and infrastructure's Political Economy.
Venue: Freiburg
Workshop: Afrontar las crisis desde América Latina: Autoritarismo en Democracia, Perspectivas transregionales e históricas sobre espacios en disputa
Tue, 09/20/2022 - 12:00 - Thu, 09/22/2022 - 12:00
Alke Jenss, Fabricio Rodríguez
The Platform for Dialogue Authoritarianism in Democracy which took place in Mexico in September 2022 scholars invited by Alke Jenss, Fabricio Rodríguez and Javier Alemán analysed the relation between the crisis of democracy in Latin America and the adaptation and privatization policies of the last three decades from a transregional perspective. The workshop aimed at being a space of dialogue and reflexion about the convergence between authoritarian and democratic practices and their scalar reach for different perspectivies and between disciplines such as political science, geography, sociology and global history. The workshop also took the stance that to analyze authoritarian practices, we need to know more about the strategies of social movements and non-state actors, frequently organizing across national borders to confront the diverse strategies of authoritarianism. The workshop was funded by the Centre for Advanced Latin American Studies (CALAS) Merian Centre.
Venue: CALAS, Headquarters Guadalajara - Auditorium Rosario Castellanos, Mexico
Both Alke Jenss and Alessandra Bonci participated in a number of conferences, workshops and talks, presenting and discussing their empirical and conceptual work in the "Promises of Democratic Connection" project.
Alke presented co-authored work from the project on the Political Economy of Electricity in Costa Rica and Tunisia, invited by the Departmental Seminar of the Institute for Political Science at Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen (24.01.2024).
Both Alke and Alessandra discussed their project work in a workshop organized by Benjamin Schuetze at the Arnold Bergstraesser Institute in January 2024.
Alessandra discussed the project's first outputs at the Atelier Schumann at Laval University in Canada "Défis énergétiques et enjeux géopolitiques contemporains – Perspectives transatlantique et internationale" (3rd November 2023).
In September (6th to 9th, Potsdam), Alke Jenss and Alessandra Bonci participated in the European International Studies Association (EISA) Pan-European Conference and presented a co-authored paper on their project work in the Section on Infrastructures and Global Order ("The (Authoritarian) Management of National Energy in Costa Rica and Tunisia"). Alke presented her paper on Reworking Hierarchies in Hydropower in Costa Rica in the same section.
At the Arnold Bergstraesser Institute's internal discussion round, Alessandra and Alke presented a preliminary version of a co-authored paper (7th August 2023).
Alessandra presented her ongoing work in the project at the BRISMES conference (2th-5th July 2023) at Exeter University (UK) in a panel entitled "New energy infrastructures, old hierarchies of power? Renewable energies and the reconfiguration of governance practices in the MENA".
At the International Relations Section Conference of the German Political Science Association (DVPW-IB, 14th-15th June 2023), Alke presented her co-authored work with Benjamin Schuetze, Prefiguring Politics. Transregional energy infrastructures as a lens for the study of authoritarian practices (published in Globalizations, 2023).
Alessandra also taught in the Political Science Department at University of Freiburg (“Social Movements in the MENA Region"), Winter Semester 2023-2024; Alke taught a class twice a week in summer term 2023 on "The Politics of Energy Infrastructures".
Alke Jenss & Benjamin Schuetze (2023) Prefiguring politics: transregional energy infrastructures as a lens for the study of authoritarian practices, Globalizations, DOI: 10.1080/14747731.2023.2181545
Julia Gurol, Alke Jenss, Fabricio Rodríguez, Benjamin Schuetze & Cita Wetterich (2023) Authoritarian power and contestation beyond the state, Globalizations, DOI: 10.1080/14747731.2022.2162290
Alke Jenss (2023) Fantasies of Flows and Containment: The Technopolitics of Security Infrastructures in the Americas, Antipode, online first: https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12991
Alke Jenss (2021) Infraestructuras Transnacionales de Energía en América Latina. Perfiles Latinoamericanos 29(58):1-27. DOI: 10.18504/pl2958-007-2021
Funded by Fritz-Thyssen-Stiftung
