Off the Grid: Relational Infrastructures for Fragile Futures

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The creation of resilient infrastructures to meet basic human needs is a major environmental, economic and political challenge for our time. Confronted with fiscal and ecological crises the question of what infrastructures for health and energy will look like, in particular, is of great significance for our future wellbeing. Yet our ideas about infrastructure are changing. Across very different global contexts of wealth, economic growth and chronic poverty the connection of people to infrastructural grids - both literally (to wires, cables and pylons) and metaphorically (to planned, national systems of service provision) - is no longer seen as a sustainable or achievable model for delivering health and energy. From spaces of alternative living in Scotland, to spaces of social entrepreneurship in India, to spaces of state fragility in Papua New Guinea we find the proliferation of de-centralised models for accessing health and energy that are not premised on the connection of people to grids but on the capacities of their social networks. The idea of being, living and sustaining life 'off the grid' has become immensely influential, mobilising people, driving policies, shaping politics and attracting finance. Yet there is an urgent need for further empirical research on the relationships that determine whether infrastructures succeed or fail in these places and how inclusive and sustainable those infrastructural relationships are. As concepts such as 'resilience' are criticised within the social sciences the academy needs to develop new concepts for theorising 'off the grid' infrastructures and new ways of communicating these concepts that makes them accessible and deployable by key stakeholders.Over its 18-month timetable this project will build up three case studies of health and energy infrastructure in three radically different places that are constructed, imagined and experienced as off-the grid. This is an empirical starting point for theorising all infrastructures as relational (that is, as the complex of historic interactions and exchanges between people, technologies and the material environment that structure and sustain human life) and for exploring what kinds of relationships may constitute future infrastructures for health and energy. By comparing 'off the grid' living in contexts of wealth (Scotland), growth (India) and poverty (Papua New Guinea) this project seeks to encourage academics and policy makers to consider what can be learnt in the UK from other global contexts and to transcend traditional boundaries between the social and economic study of developed and developing countries. In doing so the project will transform our conceptual vocabularies for talking about infrastructure across the social sciences and make 'relational infrastructure' a major new object of social scientific enquiry.The questions driving our comparisons include: what makes relational infrastructures resilient or fragile? Are they fair or do they perpetuate inequalities? How does life 'off the grid' remain dependent on grids for transportation, telecommunications, and governance? What can our case studies tell us about how infrastructures operate in times of crisis?The project lays out a pathway to impact by visualising and communicating theory and research in accessible ways. A collaboration between two anthropologists and a digital theorist lies at the heart of the project. Collaborations with practising artists and infographic journalists will be built into the project from the outset. The visual tools and anthropological visualisations that result are intended to make the idea of 'relational infrastructure' available to health and energy policy makers as they seek new conceptual tools to plan for fragile futures.