Remaking renewable energy in the Blue Pacific

Abstract

Energy shapes contemporary worlds and future possibilities yet is largely invisible. Its management has become a pressing concern for policymakers who, in the face of worsening climate change, are engineering an urgent transition to renewable energy without always weighing benefits against costs. In the Blue Pacific, governments have set a series of ambitious renewables targets that have proved difficult to deliver. Yet their attempts - through large-scale projects financed by global capital, accompanied by energy sector marketisation - entail profound political, cultural and practical consequences. The social dimensions of renewable energy, meanwhile, like other aspects of climate mitigation, are understudied. While two research traditions, one broadly materialist, the other idealist, have provided important critiques and alternative framings of renewables over several decades, these have not engaged meaningfully with the Pacific. Nor have they attended closely to the practices of renewable energy professionals, the heterogeneous elites we might consider 'the unacknowledged legislators of our technological age' (Winner 1990:59). Laura Nader once asked, in an earlier ([1981] 2010:200) ethnography of energy professionals, 'What do people think is possible? Why are people so tightly constrained?' I ask similar questions here of the energy professionals working in the Pacific, before asking how projects might be approached differently, to better support Pacific priorities. In so doing, I draw on older and more recent scholarly traditions, including Pacific decolonial theory, framing contests, serious games, and plenary design. Data are drawn from three case studies, which I shadowed as a participant observer over 12 months in 2023: (1) a regional energy policy conference in Vanuatu; (2) a large, donor-funded electric transport project in Samoa; and (3) a smaller, Pacific-led effort to develop an alternative battery chemistry in Samoa. These case studies are supplemented by interviews with 20 regional energy experts between 2023 and 2025 and a close reading of more than 40 energy policy documents over a similar period. I make three overall findings. First, practitioners are actively contesting hegemonic and harmful approaches to renewable energy in the region through various techniques of resistant and re-existent reframing. Second, reframing efforts can be understood as moves in wider serious games. While some of these games reproduce modernist policy hauntologies (Lea 2020), others prefigure an alternative, more caring approach to renewables implementation. Third, antihegemonic and more equitable renewables projects are already being designed and delivered in the Pacific. These projects are underpinned by inclusive cosmologies, expansive conceptions of sustainability, and fresh approaches to resourcing, governance, and delivery. Such approaches include plenary practice traditions of contextualising, including and connecting. My findings provide a deeper understanding of renewables implementation 'on island'. They contribute to debates over meaning-making and the limits of agency. Finally, they offer several pointers towards more inclusive Pacific energy futures. Show more