Abstract
Based on a study of Kenya’s geothermal-energy development in Baringo-Silali, we explore how and with whom government actors and local communities in rural and peripheral areas interact when planning and implementing large-scale power plants. Starting from a comparison of decentralized and centralized energy systems, we demonstrate that the development of this large-scale infrastructure project and the associated investor-community relations are governed by various cross-scale linkages. To this end, we adapt the concept of cross-scale linkages from the literature on natural-resource governance to explore actors, rules, and practices at local, regional, national, and international levels.
Highlights
Centralized electricity generation, with large-scale power plants feeding into national grids, is mainly associated with top-down planning, centralized control and negative, often unsustainable local impacts at the generation facilities’ sites
We argue that cross-scale linkages in the implementation and governance of large-scale electricity generation and associated investor-community relations need to be taken into account in order to understand the local impacts of centralized energy systems
We illustrate some of the practices and institutions that have emerged in the negotiations of the investor (GDC), local communities, and other stakeholders with a focus on corporate social responsibility (CSR) measures, community responses, and local practices
Summary
Centralized electricity generation, with large-scale power plants feeding into national grids, is mainly associated with top-down planning, centralized control and negative, often unsustainable local impacts at the generation facilities’ sites. The expansion of geothermal-energy provision in Kenya provides an interesting case to study such linkages in centralized electricity generation because it has become the most important source of gridconnected electricity in the country and has a great deal of potential It is, one of the main pillars of Kenya’s ambitious development strategy, Vision 2030, with far-reaching implications for economic and social development in the country’s (semi-)arid and periph-. Our approach is inspired by recent research on large infrastructure projects which demonstrates that such projects are the result of combining technology with diverse actors, rules, and practices (Harvey, Jensen, & Morita, 2017; Sovacool & Cooper, 2013) Such complex, multilayered, and heterogeneous structures do not follow clear plans and cannot be implemented and governed in a straight-forward and top-down manner.
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