| Summary: | Community owned renewable energy generation (electricity and heat) is often associated with improving reliability and affordability of supply, increasing local wellbeing, empowering through new revenues, business opportunities and capacity building, and reducing environmental impacts. Similar motivations for renewable energy projects are observed in the case of Canadian remote indigenous communities that target activities that improve their socioeconomic conditions and mitigate socioeconomic-political-cultural impacts resulting from colonization, while having minimal influence on the environment and traditional activities. However, the slow transformation of remote indigenous communities’ diesel-powered electricity systems through the introduction of renewable energy technologies (RETs) between 1980 and 2016 called for an examination of factors that influence the transition to more sustainable electricity options. The purpose of this dissertation was to improve understanding of the technical, contextual, and social complexity associated with the introduction of RETs into Canadian remote indigenous community electrical systems, explain the diffusion of RET projects within these systems to date, and examine the implemented governance processes and how these processes were modified to encompass indigenous perspectives. Improved understanding enables identification of pathways and development of policy recommendations for the transition to more sustainable energy systems. These objectives were achieved through: (a) a review of prior academic and non-academic documents on the introduction of RETs into remote communities, the examination of 133 community electrical systems in Yukon, NWT, Nunavut, British Columbia, Ontario, Quebec and Newfoundland and Labrador, and the identification of RET projects undertaken between 1980 and 2016, (b) an empirical study in the context of northern Ontario, Canada, and (c) an analysis of events related to the introduction of RETs through, first, the multi-level perspective (MLP) ...
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