Will to ‘enlighten’: the Politics of Forging and Fracturing Alignments in Energy Projects in India

There is a growing turn towards the involvement of non-state actors in the provision of basic services in developing countries. Focusing on this turn, this paper advances the knowledge of the politics of assembling energy for development projects by non-state actors. Building on Tania Murray Li's ideas on trusteeship, and drawing on assemblage theory, this paper argues that meanings of electricity are central to forging and fracturing alignments within energy assemblages. Trustees mobilise particular meanings of electricity to forge alignments with other actors and assemble projects. They connect electricity to development through the provision of electric lights and evoke the metaphor of enlightenment. People's alternate meanings of electricity result in fractures in the assemblage. Actors that agree on meanings, converge, and those that disagree, diverge. Meanings play an important role in assembling and reassembling energy assemblages. The paper is based on an ethnographic study of two community-based energy projects in India. This ethnographic research was done in 2012-13 in five villages in Bihar, an eastern province of India. Participant observations, interviews and group discussions were used to collect data, in addition to data collected from project websites and reports.