Knowing one's place in transformation - Power geometries and subjectivities of innovation in the making of African energy futures

Doktorsavhandling, 2026

Efforts to transform energy systems, for example through innovation, could in principle involve almost anyone or anything. However in practice, such efforts are often associated with certain kinds of processes, people and places above others. These imbalances have material implications in terms of who shapes and benefits from efforts to transform systems. Given the prevalence of innovation and transformation within contemporary discussions of desirable energy futures, it is necessary to investigate the assumptions bound up in how transformations are understood and enacted, in particular those related to geography.

This thesis explores how diverse actors shape and are shaped by power-laden flows related to innovation and oriented towards transformation. These flows encompass knowledge, finance, technology, and materials. To investigate how actors make sense of and enact innovation and transformation, I draw on the concepts of interpretative framing and agency, spatial relations, power geometries, subjectivities, and coloniality. The analysis is grounded in human geography and engages with scholarship including sustainability transitions, science and technology studies, and post-structuralist theory. Empirically, the thesis focuses on energy system transformation in Africa, particularly Rwanda. I examine academic knowledge production about innovation and transformation, geographically distributed actors engaged in Rwanda’s energy transition, an innovation-oriented institution in rural Rwanda, and flows of capital for technological innovation from Europe through Rwanda to sites across Africa. In the thesis, I conceptualise Africa less as a fixed location and more as a shared and perceived identity, as well as a designated target of transformation efforts.

Across the thesis, innovation and transformation emerge through multiple and overlapping power geometries. These are sets of spatial relations between actors and locations that are stabilised through flows of knowledge, technology, capital, and materials. Different geometries recognise particular forms of value and expertise and confer legitimacy in ways that make some actors and locations appear more central to transformation than others. Stabilised to varying extents through actors’ articulations and practices, these geometries produce subjectivities as actors come to know their place within transformation. At the same time, agency emerges relationally through the practices by which actors inhabit and negotiate these positions, as well occasionally reshaping them.

A persistent tension runs through the empirical material between more universalist and more situated power geometries, and the framings, flows, and subjectivities associated with each. Universalist geometries, organised around globally recognised technological frontiers, remain dominant. These concentrate legitimacy, visibility, and resources among actors possessing the requisite mobility, capital, and proximity to knowledge networks centred outside Africa. In doing so, they reproduce spatial hierarchies that echo longer histories of coloniality. However, practices including local fabrication, repair, and collaborative design simultaneously stabilise more situated geometries and subjectivities, positioning actors who might otherwise appear peripheral as catalysts of transformation. Transformation therefore emerges as a multilayered and contested process with ambivalent effects, involving both the continual reproduction of dominant spatial hierarchies of legitimacy and the ongoing emergence of alternatives.

Through this analysis, I contribute a spatially grounded theorization of participation in transformation and an empirical account of engagements with innovation and transformation related to Rwanda, showing how unequal opportunities to participate are both reproduced and challenged. I further demonstrate how academic knowledge production participates in shaping what counts as innovation and where it is understood to occur. Ultimately, this thesis argues that transformations towards African energy futures are made through subjective spatial relations between people and places, even as these transformations simultaneously remake those relations.