Abstract

Photovoltaic (PV) and agrivoltaic systems are increasingly deployed to address energy access, land-use efficiency, and climate resilience challenges across Africa and the Global South. However, long-term system performance frequently remains constrained by workforce capability gaps, weak institutional integration, limited community participation, and fragmented socio-technical design approaches. This study proposes a multi-layer biomimetic socio-technical architecture that integrates energy systems, competence infrastructure, community co-development, biomimetic intelligence, and resilience mechanisms within a unified engineering framework. Rather than treating these dimensions as external influences, the architecture conceptualizes them as interacting subsystems within an adaptive and evolving renewable energy ecosystem. Competence infrastructure is formalized as an endogenous system variable influencing deployment capability, while cross-layer interactions capture feedback, coordination, and adaptation across technical, ecological, and social domains. The resulting architecture models PV and agrivoltaic systems as nonlinear, time-evolving socio-technical systems in which overall performance emerges from subsystem interactions rather than isolated technical optimization. The framework provides a scalable basis for renewable energy deployment planning, environmental management, policy design, and long-term system sustainability in resource-constrained environments and developing economies.

Keywords: Agrivoltaic Systems, Biomimetic Socio-Technical Architecture, Competence Infrastructure, Community Co-Development, Photovoltaic Systems, Renewable Energy Transitions, Resilient Energy Systems, Environmental Management