The DREAM project aimed to (i) develop multi-disciplinary methodology to analyse renewable energy projects design, implementation, finance and influence on communities; (ii) build up knowledge on the various positive and negative impacts the renewable energy projects have especially at the village level; (iii) improve understanding of qualifications, such as success factors and reasons for failures, of renewable energy projects and; (iv) identify concrete means to increase long-term sustainability of donor-driven energy projects.

Impact assessments used by large-scale development projects are often portrayed as neutral tools providing objective and value-free information to decision-makers. However, scholars widely agree that impact assessments are inherently biased, political, and distorted by power dynamics. Using a forthcoming natural gas project in Mozambique as case study, my ethnographic field research provides important baseline study of the social, relational, and place-bound aspects of wellbeing, often overlooked in impact assessment processes.