Indigenous Energy Futures

Indigenous Energy Futures is a multi-sited ethnographic project examining infrastructure planning and energy transitions in rural Mapuche territories in La Araucanía, Chile. The project investigates how energy governance reshapes relationships between indigeneity, citizenship, and democracy in the context of contemporary socio-environmental transitions.

Building on prior fieldwork and collaborative partnerships, the research examines energy poverty from an intercultural perspective, focusing on structural conditions that shape access to energy infrastructure and public sustainability programs. These include irregular land titles, unresolved water rights, fragmented infrastructure, and long-standing patterns of state neglect. Rather than treating energy transitions as purely technical processes, the project explores how infrastructure planning becomes a site of negotiation over territorial autonomy, environmental governance, and Indigenous self-determination.

Using a multi-sited and multi-scalar ethnographic design, the project compares three energy systems—biomass heating, community solar initiatives, and large-scale wind generation. Through long-term fieldwork, policy analysis, and geospatial research, the project traces how these systems generate new forms of political engagement, collaboration, and conflict among Mapuche communities, state institutions, and private energy developers.

By foregrounding everyday practices of planning, maintenance, and resource management, Indigenous Energy Futures examines how communities shape alternative models of development grounded in territorial governance and collective care. In doing so, the project contributes to broader debates on energy transitions, Indigenous sovereignty, and socio-environmental justice, highlighting how infrastructure becomes a key terrain for imagining democratic futures.