Given how energy ‘sufficiency’ or energy conservation has been an ingrained part of everyday life for many countries in the global South, how can we reconceptualize energy sufficiency to address its inherent top-down agenda?
Long abstract:
Energy conservation practices have been a long-established fact of everyday life for many from countries in the global South. From cooking to heating water and homes, low-tech or no-tech ways of working with energy, to living with electricity shortages and power cuts, energy ‘sufficiency’ is what many people live with as energy inadequacy or energy poverty. Sufficiency has also meant providing minimum safety standards for human wellbeing. A debatable area of energy justice research is on how much energy that is deemed to be termed as sufficient, and for whom (Monyei et. al., 2018). Where are the boundaries between energy poverty and energy sufficiency, between what is determined as sufficient versus what is adequate or inadequate?
When sufficiency – defined by the IPCC as avoiding or reducing demand for energy and resources - is already the de facto status quo, how do we then understand and conceptualize energy sufficiency, given how renewable energy policies are prioritized and promoted by many international organizations through top-down agendas on the behalf of the global south? This paper will use the example of clean cooking policies and examine the energy sufficiency paradox through the narrative of clean cooking in development contexts.