Powering Global Development? The evolution of planning, monitoring and evaluation of Norway's development aid to the energy sector 1980-2010

A mobility grant will enable a 5-month visiting fellowship with the renowned Department of History and the interdisciplinary Program in Science, Technology and Society at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, the home institution of the applicant's acade mic co-supervisor, Professor Gabrielle Hecht. In addition to obtaining key resources in U.S. archives and libraries, a visit to this department will expose the phd project to new and challenging research collectives. This will enable critical comments and vital discussions of thesis article drafts already in progress. Upon return to Oslo, the applicant will have deepened and expanded the already-established relation to professor Hecht and her research groups as well as to other senior and junior scholars in fields of relevance to both her phd project and her home institution. This travel will bring the applicant much closer to finishing a first draft of the thesis, to be presented at the home institution. More broadly, the visit will contribute to streng thening the connection between the host and home departments, enabling future research cooperation that may have clear benefits to research development in both Norway and the United States. The phd project will investigate a set of case studies in an his torical perspective in order to explain how the transnational and interrelated fields of energy aid and aid accountability have developed during the past 30 years. Albeit its clear national features, Norwegian energy aid and aid accountability are truly t ransnational fields where especially U.S.-based institutions have had a strong impact. The applicant's phd project seeks to understand these dual processes of transnational knowledge building: on the one hand, the efforts to transfer energy expertise abro ad in the form of aid projects; and on the other, to examine the specifics of how knowledge of these projects is developed and distributed through transnational systems of monitoring and evaluation.