Spectral governance: hydropower, conservation, and the politics of deferred futures in Martin Brod in Bosnia and Herzegovina

This article examines how incomplete sustainability interventions function as governing devices in post-socialist and post-conflict settings. Drawing on ethnographic research in Martin Brod, Bosnia and Herzegovina, it analyses two projects introduced in the early 2000s: a hydropower concession that was never constructed and a national park that remains only partially enacted. Rather than treating these as failed implementations, the paper conceptualises them as ghost infrastructures—projects that derive power from their incompletion, shaping imaginaries, expectations, and everyday life through their administrative presence and symbolic visibility. Building on critical infrastructure studies and ethnographies of speculative governance, the article develops the notion of spectral governance to describe how authority is exercised through anticipation, ambiguity, and deferred transformation. Situated within the legacies of socialist planning, neoliberal transition, and international intervention, these dynamics reveal how sustainable development in Bosnia and Herzegovina operates less as a coherent policy framework than as a legitimising discourse embedded in institutional fragmentation and suspended futures. The analysis contributes to efforts to rethink sustainable development through postsocialist lenses, showing how infrastructural absence can become a durable mode of rule.