Dragan Đunda

Dragan Đunda's project deals with the political ecology of hydropower infrastructure in Serbia––with its contradictions, path dependency, and alternatives. The doctoral thesis positions hydropower energy in the broader context of socialist modernization, promises and issues with the energy transition under the EU integration, and regional economic unevenness. Through the frame of policy, archival, and ethnographic methods, it examines the role of energy infrastructure in forging political and economic projects in the past and today. While the project analyzes the distinctive logics of governing the environment, populations, and capital as part of Yugoslav modernization and EU-led development, respectively, it also illuminates how the socialist model surprisingly became the foundation for the post-socialist model of the energy transition.