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Abstract In designating its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the United Nations invoked the “water–energy–land (WEL) nexus” to emphasize the interconnections between different policy sectors and accentuate the importance of an integrated approach to human and environmental welfare. Identifying the WEL nexus draws attention to the interplay of technical and moral values, the intersections or overlaps between these values, and the areas where values conflict, tradeoffs happen, and priorities are set or shifted. And within this WEL resource nexus, the development and expansion of renewable energy technologies has the potential to redefine and reorder the balance of values. The archipelago of Zanzibar, a semiautonomous protectorate within the East African nation of Tanzania, is currently making complex energy choices that highlight the significance and fragility of this resource nexus and the role of renewable energy in reshaping it. In this article, I draw on ethnographic research in peri‐urban Zanzibari communities to consider how the WEL nexus in Zanzibar is generated by and generative of complex gradations of value and to explore how the development of renewable energy technologies, particularly solar technology, is both entrenching and transforming the linkages between energy, water, and land in Zanzibar. 

This article considers the entanglements revealed by the recent and rapid influx of solar technology on the archipelago of Zanzibar. Following a technical failure that left the islands without electricity for three months in 2009–10, the Zanzibari government has pursued several avenues to increase energy autonomy, including solar power. However, the future of energy independence promised by solar development is complicated by a legacy of political conflict and new relationships of dependence and inequality. Drawing on interviews with domestic energy users, government officials, state engineers and NGO activists, and situated within the unique post-revolutionary context of Zanzibar, this article explores how solar innovations and investments contribute to the reimagining of social, economic and political entanglements while simultaneously reproducing persistent discourses of hierarchy, inclusion and exclusion.