Maybe it's time to let the old ways die: investigating resilience strategies at Brazilian eletricity sector
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2026-04-06
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Miguel, Priscila Laczynski de Souza
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Resilience has become a central concept in debates on electricity systems such as climate change, extreme events, and increasing socio-technical complexity challenge the stability of critical infrastructures worldwide. Despite its widespread use, resilience remains conceptually fragmented, particularly in research on electricity systems, where technical, institutional, and socio-ecological perspectives often evolve in parallel. This doctoral thesis investigates how resilience is constructed, stabilized, and constrained over time in the Brazilian electricity industry, a large-scale, highly regulated, and nature-dependent system characterized by strong institutional coordination and exposure to climatic variability. The thesis adopts an integrated research design composed of three complementary studies. First, a machine-learning-enhanced bibliometric and semantic analysis maps the epistemic structure of resilience research in electricity systems, revealing the coexistence of weakly connected epistemic regimes that frame resilience in fundamentally different ways. Second, a historical analysis examines the long-term evolution of the Brazilian electricity industry, showing how infrastructural choices, governance arrangements, and hydropower dependence have produced path-dependent resilience trajectories oriented toward system stability and continuity. Third, an interview-based qualitative study analyzes how resilience is perceived and enacted by key sector actors, highlighting the predominance of compliance-oriented practices, short-term coordination, and reactive responses to climate-related risks. Across the three studies, the thesis demonstrates that resilience in the Brazilian electricity industry has been predominantly stabilized around logics of control, coordination, and operational reliability. While these logics have supported system continuity, they have also constrained anticipatory learning, cross-scale integration, and transformative responses to slow-moving ecological dynamics associated with climate change. The findings show that resilience operates not only as a technical or organizational capacity, but as a historically and institutionally embedded process shaped by dominant epistemic framings and governance practices. By integrating insights from supply chain management, social-ecological systems, and energy governance, this thesis advances resilience theory by conceptualizing resilience as a multi-level and ambivalent phenomenon that can simultaneously enable stability and limit transformation. Methodologically, it demonstrates the value of combining bibliometric analysis, historical inquiry, and qualitative research to study complex infrastructure systems. Empirically, the thesis provides insights into the challenges of governing resilience in naturedependent and highly regulated electricity systems under conditions of accelerating climate change.