Australia’s story of the energy transition is most visible in the uptake of large-scale solar and wind farms or now prolific rooftop solar. Less visible is the role of renewable energy in efforts to reinstate life and land to Australia’s Indigenous peoples.
This paper tells the story of off-grid remote renewable energy rollouts in Indigenous communities in Northern Australia.
While the analysis is specific to Australia, it has broader lessons about incorporating Indigenous governance approaches into renewable energy rollouts so that Indigenous communities in financially constrained contexts share in the intended benefit of installed electricity systems.
Using energy sociotechnical imaginaries and energy justice, the paper explores the emergence, impact and contemporary legacy of Bushlight (2002–2013), a government funded renewable energy program delivered by an Indigenous-led non-profit organisation.
Bushlight was part of Australia’s early efforts to build its renewable energy sector, operating with a dual mandate of decarbonisation and community development in Indigenous Homelands communities.
The analysis of sociotechnical imaginaries explains how collectives come together to anticipate and address distributional justice issues through policy development and how these collectives and their vision for renewable energy evolve through implementation.
Tracing how these imaginaries extend into the present highlights the influence of broader socio-political dynamics shaping Indigenous-settler-colonial relations.
The paper’s findings have important implications for decolonisation, supporting Indigenous people to live on and care for Country while retaining their right to essential services.
This paper serves as a reminder that financial constraints can manifest unevenly within as well as between geopolitical segments. Governance approaches need to reflect this internal unevenness and can assist in addressing this unevenness through renewable energy rollouts.
Secondly, this case highlights the influence of governance and regulation in supporting equitable private sector delivery and operation of renewable energy power systems in complex and financially constrained contexts within high income national contexts. This serves as a reminder for donors, policy makers and private sector of the risks that accompany uncritically replicating energy supply arrangements in high income countries, often adopted by multi-lateral finance institutions and donors in the global south.
Thirdly, this paper reflects on energy policy and implementation as a force for supporting or weakening Citizen-State relations.
Finally, this paper provides an account of electrification through renewable energy rollouts that centred on Indigenous ontologies and epistemologies. In doing so, this contributes to a broader understanding of electrification beyond Atlantic-centred “global” histories.
Author: Anna Cain, Australian National University, College of Engineering and Computing and Cybernetics, ACT, Australia, published online 25 January 2024.