Progressive contextualisation of energy practices and trajectories: A case study in Thailand

Dwindling amounts of fossil fuels, climate change, environmental impacts of energy production and consumption and other energy-related issues play an increasingly important role in shaping the human and physical landscape of modernisation and development. More than a mere technical and economic challenge, these issues ask for a multidisciplinary approach that can connect energy production and energy consumption practices on different scales. This paper is an attempt to develop an approach to study energy transitions, based on the political ecology and energy practices literatures. The paper starts off from an empirical case study of a rural village Mae Kampong in Thailand. Rather than taking a high level approach, the starting points are the individual village history and its local energy practices. This village has moved stepwise from no access to electricity at all, to having its own micro-hydropower generators, and finally to a dual system of both hydropower and electricity from the national grid. By progressively contextualising these changes, a link can be made between the local energy trajectory and the shift to modern energy practices and the closing rural-urban divide; the marginalisation of micro-hydropower in Thailand; and debates about centralised versus decentralised forms of electricity production worldwide. This paper concludes that there is a need for more study on changing energy practices and politics on different scales. Furthermore, it highlights the role of the social sciences to develop novel methodologies to understand the complexities of the transition towards more sustainable energy systems.