“It’s Not Our Energy”: Confronting Media Representations and Insider Perspectives of Hydroelectricity in Guatemala

• In Event: Power, Drivers, and Narratives in Sustainable Energy Transitions - I

Abstract

As part of a project studying the conflicts around the hydroelectricity expansion in Guatemala (Ponciano, 2017) from a sociotechnical perspective, it was performed a software-assisted content analysis of opinion articles in news media in Guatemala and then its results were confronted with a series of in-depth interviews with key informants related to the Guatemalan hydroelectric sector. The first part, which compared a corpus of opinion articles on hydroelectricity from Guatemala and Colombia, was made as a way to identify media representations of hydroelectricity that were distinctive to Guatemala, since Colombia has roughly the same type of environmental conflicts as Guatemala (Lea, Del Bene, & Martínez-Alier, 2015) and also because of the similarities (colonial past, language, indigenous population) between both countries. A corpus of 565 opinion articles published between 2010 and 2015 was collected and analyzed using content analysis software based on statistical techniques that use the bag-of-words approach (Tuzzi, 2010). On a second stage, the results of the first inquiry were confronted with five in-depth interviews with Guatemalan journalists, activists, environmental consultants and hydroelectric project developers. The analysis of the information gathered showed that even though the representation in Guatemalan digital media of hydroelectric conflicts is highly influenced by political and social concerns, the people involved in them are highly reflexive regarding their role in the conflicts, especially when discussing their sociotechnical dimension, an aspect that is barely discussed in the articles reviewed.

Author

• Renato Ponciano, Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala