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Paper short abstract

Exploring a moral economy of electricity in a region with chronic energy poverty in Northern Pakistan, the paper conceptualizes the contested ‘ownership’ of vital goods, defined through their everyday necessity and material political-economic conditions.

Paper long abstract

This paper analyses diversions of and moral claims to electricity in a context of chronic electricity shortage (20h of load-shedding/daily blackouts) and political marginalisation in the Aliabad, a small-town in Pakistan’s Kashmir region. In Aliabad, a load-shedding plan by the government determines which neighbourhood gets electricity when, structuring production and social reproduction. This is challenged by unbilled 24h ‘special lines’ of the local elite as well as more wide-spread informal ‘second lines’ and daily tinkering with grid transformers that allow a few more on-grid hours in one’s neighbourhood. Residents legitimise their informal grid access and occasional public protests for more energy with the region’s fragmented integration into the Pakistani state and lack of basic civil rights such as voting for the national assembly.

In Aliabad, various actors try to impose their understanding of what electricity is: a commodity, a right, a gift, or a common good? I explore these tensions around electricity access that refute simple categorisations of ownership. Reciprocity does not apply if actors have a different understanding of the property in question. Instead, inbuilt inequalities and small-scale line hooking manifest and morally charge electricity differently. Analysing the production of electricity through small-scale hydropower plants within Aliabad’s micro-grid in relation to the Kashmir conflict shows how justifications of access to energy compete. The socio-material specificities of electricity as limited resource, political infrastructure, and vital good offer insights into how indeterminate properties are made, appropriated, contested and diverted.