Indigenous peoples energy futures

small village on the island of Mindanao Philippines

An understudied niche within the family of energy transition efforts is the area of indigenous energy futures, which refers to indigenous community energy initiatives around renewable energy production and  consumption. It emphasizes empowerment through active engagement, participatory decision making and shared community values for outcomes, such as local ownership. 

Although these initiatives come in many forms, common amongst them is the sense of shared purpose and collective ownership of the energy activity. Recent forays into indigenous energy futures suggest that they can help indigenous communities achieve energy independence, alleviate poverty, and bolster community resistance to the manifold threats. Examples of threats are land grabbing, encroachment, development aggression, and climate change. Meanwhile the initiatives can align local renewable energy activities with biodiversity and ecological resilience. More attention for and better understanding of indigenous energy futures could potentially accelerate change.

The project team tackles this question by adopting a variety of disciplinary lenses alongside indigenous knowledge systems and practices guiding our community partners in Merasap (West Kalimantan, Indonesia) and in Southern Bukidnon (Mindanao, Philippines). Working with and in community, we propose to dedicate the seed funding to co-create a trans-disciplinary approach which aims to shed light on:

 

  • The implications that indigenous energy has for the socio-ecological systems in which they are embedded, particularly bio-diversity, ecological resilience, and indigenous governance systems
  • The implications that being embedded in a nested, polycentric global policy making system has for indigenous energy experiments, with a special eye to the mediating role that NGOs may play in this regard

The research team, led by dr. Frank van Laerhoven (UU) and dr. Le Anh Nguyen Long (UT), will combine literature and case studies with raising awareness for the concept of indigenous energy futures, a novel subject for the UU.