Paper short abstract:

This paper asks how political economy contexts will shape the adoption of unprecedented innovations in enabling energy technologies and new business models, that have emerged over the past decade, and the resultant nature and pace of a new wave of power sector reforms in Kenya, Namibia and Zimbabwe.

Paper long abstract:

The past decade has seen rapid innovation in energy technologies and business models, especially the breakthrough of low-cost renewable and distributed energy, resources. These innovations are prompting a new wave of reforms on how the power sector should be organised, operated and regulated. We ask how political economy factors will shape the redesign of power markets in Africa that is prompted by the growing share of variable renewables and distributed energy resources. We apply a comparative case study approach of Kenya, Zimbabwe and Namibia and draw on analysis of qualitative data collected through semi-structured interviews. The study draws on three bodies of literature- standard power sector reform, current innovations inducing a new wave of reforms, and political economy as applied to the power sector. We find that of the three countries, only Namibia seems to have a political objective to maintain cost reflective tariffs while in both Zimbabwe and Kenya, political actors favour low tariffs as a means of retaining control and remaining in power especially towards election season. We conclude that the political economy of African countries is best suited to regulatory instruments which avoid privatization but include private participation in some form. This satisfies the dominant nationalist ideology but can achieve good performance. Furthermore, the study shows that effective integration of distributed energy resources requires sending the right economic signals with granularity in space and time. However this requires a level of sophistication that may be beyond reach in the context of African power markets at present.

Paper short abstract:

Social justice concerns are often overlooked in the drive for renewable energy development. Using a spatial justice lens, the study will reveal how land acquisition for the Kipeto wind energy project impacts the wellbeing of communities in rural Kenya.

Paper long abstract:

In many developing countries, social justice concerns are often overlooked in the drive for renewable energy development. This paper will consider aspects of spatial justice in the process of land acquisition for large-scale wind energy project in Kenya. It will explore the case of the Kipeto wind farm in Kenya. Through interviews, this study will compare what official rhetoric suggests about the wind farm with what actually transpires on the ground in terms of community employment, access to electricity, and local socio-economic development in general. Using a spatial justice lens, the study will reveal whether or not the wind farm has practically reduced or increased the precariousness of vulnerable peoples, whose lands have been acquired for energy development. Based on the findings, it will suggest land-related policies that are rooted on local realities, fosters local socio-economic development, and seeks to advance Africa’s land-energy futures as the renewable energy frontier advances across rural Kenya. Locally grounded land-related policies are critical for determining Africa’s energy futures.

Paper short abstract:

With emerging conflicts between the jurisprudence of the Ghanaian Supreme Court and certain arbitral awards providing the backdrop, this paper discusses challenges associated with the internationalization of Ghanaian energy disputes before international arbitral tribunals.

Paper long abstract:

An important feature of Ghana’s gas-to-power value chain, both as a response to the country’s cyclical energy crisis and in anticipation of an abundant supply of gas, has been the rise in the number of power purchase agreements (PPAs) that the Ghanaian government has executed with independent power producers to meet future power generation requirements. The increasing number of such agreements has been attended with overcapacity that has consistently posed as a threat to the Ghanaian economy with excess costs and a glut of installed generation capacity. As a way to confront the situation, successive governments have adopted different policy approaches either to situate Ghana as a net exporter of electricity to the West African power pool or to rationalize the PPAs, renegotiating some and terminating others. Terminating PPAs trigger arbitral clauses and internationalize energy sector disputes. With emerging conflicts between the jurisprudence of the Ghanaian Supreme Court and certain arbitral awards providing the backdrop, this paper discusses challenges associated with the internationalization of Ghanaian energy disputes before international arbitral tribunals.

Paper short abstract:

This paper responds to an imperative imposed by ambiguous government-donor entanglement around transparency norms for Ghana’s energy sector future. It argues that such entanglements reflect a structural dynamic in support ofstakeholder capitalism which precludes alternative neoliberal imaginaries.

Paper long abstract:

Despite the growing invocation of transparency norms as the panacea for addressing the challenges associated with natural resource wealth, there is considerable ambiguity about how they shape market regimes in the global south. Through an in-depth account of government-donor entanglements around the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative in Ghana’s energy sector, this paper recounts the multiple ways that such ambiguities around transparency reforms condition how various actors negotiate the complex web markets in specific extractive and temporal domains. The main argument suggests that donor engagements around the initiative are bound by a more structural dynamic associated with donors’ parallel role as dispensers of global extractive norms and brokers of an anticipatory and illusory form of stakeholder capitalism. This observation underlines changes in the global architecture for aiding the expansion Western capital by forging an expanded network that precludes alternative imaginaries of neoliberal future.

Paper short abstract:

This paper traces the history of Somaliland’s post-war electricity infrastructure from 1991 to the mid-2010s, tracing how private businesses established an electricity grid for Hargeisa after the city's infrastructure was destroyed.

Paper long abstract:

This paper traces the history of Somaliland’s post-war electricity infrastructure from 1991 to the mid-2010s, tracing how private businesses established an electricity grid for Hargeisa after the city's infrastructure was destroyed. At first, a highly fragmented makeshift system of provision developed, based upon small, limited grids supplied by diesel engines. Over time, micro-grids merged, and the geography, economy and politics of electricity provision in the city was reshaped. By documenting the history of the city’s electricity network, I examine how local companies in Somaliland's electricity sector mobilized local connections and transnational ties to protect their market power and status as service providers. I examine how companies on the one hand worked to delegitimize potential new entrants to the market while maneuvering to ensure their own access to globally sourced finance and expertise. By altering their corporate structure, merging, and asserting the importance of actively proving commitment to local communities, successful companies worked to ensure donor and investor capital was used to further embed their power as locally grounded entities. Amidst the contemporary focus on foreign investments in the electricity sector across the African continent, my paper assesses the importance of electricity's multidimensional status as a public service, a commodity, and part of an infrastructural base in shaping capital flows into electricity markets.

Paper short abstract:

Why Nigeria is dependent on heavily subsidized imported petrol? This paper argues that Nigeria is trapped in a system where subsidized imported fuel replaces electricity infrastructure for Nigerians to sustain their daily lives due to the degraded infrastructure and heavy external dependence.

Paper long abstract:

Why Nigeria, as a major crude oil-producing country in the world, is dependent on imported fuel for its domestic consumption and the government is heavily subsidizing it? This paper argues that Nigeria is now trapped in a system where subsidized imported fuel replaces electricity infrastructure as a quasi-public good for Nigerians to sustain their daily lives due to the declining infrastructure and heavy external dependence. This system is constructed by an unplanned combination of domestic electricity demand, international finance capital hegemony, and domestic political and commercial capital alliances. The system is further strengthened and reproduced by the increasing dependence on domestic fuel consumption for electricity, which reinforces the lack of government incentives to promote infrastructure reforms, and compels the government to spend more petrodollars on fuel imports and subsidies. However, this system is inherently unstable and unsustainable. The instability of the system lies in the fact that the government is exposed to both international fuel market prices and exchange rate fluctuations providing subsidized imported fuel, which makes the cost of imports and subsidies unpredictable. As for the unsustainability of the system, Nigeria’s heavy dependence on imported goods, including fuel, has led to continued capital outflows, making it more and more difficult and expensive for the government to afford large amounts of budget for fuel imports and subsidies.

Paper short abstract:

What do oil infrastructures tell us about resistance to multinational oil corporations’ activities in extractive enclaves? How do we make sense of how communities relate with oil infrastructures? How do images of oil infrastructure make meanings to inhabitants of resource enclaves?

Paper long abstract:

What do oil infrastructures tell us about resistance to multinational oil corporations’ activities in extractive enclaves? How do we make sense of how communities relate with oil infrastructures? How do images of oil infrastructure make meanings to inhabitants of resource enclaves? This paper interrogates the place of climate politics in the ethnographic mapping of energy practices by paying attention to how community members respond to images of infrastructure within their communities. The paper aims to bring into focus the important role that oil infrastructure can play in making meanings of resistance to the activities of oil corporations in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria. The paper suggests that climate politics and physical infrastructure can help in not only mapping environmental problems in countries rich in natural resources but also gauging responses to an energy future that incorporates community participation in resource enclaves. Thus, the paper uses oil infrastructures to establish a connection between climate politics and an energy future without oil.

Paper short abstract:

Rooted in mission histories and recent changes to national energy policy, a growing number of rural convents in Tanzania own and operate small hydropower dams. This paper analyzes these "sisters electric," and the intertwined material and spiritual economies of their presence in local landscapes.

Paper long abstract:

Across Tanzania, a number of religious sisterhoods—Benedictines, Franciscans and others—have constructed small scale hydropower dams, often using them to power their own convents, dispensaries, and schools. In some cases, they are extending out minigrids to surrounding areas and acting as a local utility. This paper contextualizes such “Sisters Electric” in relation to a history of mission infrastructure and enclaves, changes in Tanzania’s neoliberalized regulatory environment, and the growing popularity of off-grid solutions to rural electrification. Drawing on preliminary ethnographic research, it compares and contrasts ‘faith based’ provisioning with other models (community, private, cooperative, state), focusing on how a gendered, “Catholic Social” ethics of charity and service shapes flows of current and currency. Finally, it offers reflections on small scale hydropower, with its cycles of abundance and shortage, as a site of encounter between Christian religiosity and ecological ethics in an African context.

Paper short abstract:

Electricity storage has become an everyday phenomenon in urban Africa, e.g. as rechargeable lighting or in-home battery systems. Yet, the prevalence and diversity of battery use in Nairobi raise questions about energy/ environmental justice and the electro-infrastructural future of the city.

Paper long abstract:

Transitions to renewables, technological advances, and geopolitical ruptures have brought energy storage to the forefront of political and academic debate. For the case of electricity storage – i.e. batteries of various types and scopes – techno-managerial disciplines, e-mobility, and smart city imaginations of the global North and East dominate. Yet, especially within heterogeneous and/ or erratic infrastructural configurations – such as much of urban Africa – electricity storage can be a highly quotidian, individual practice ‘on, off, below and beyond’ the grid. Also considering the digitalization of and in African cities – but going beyond single devices, i.e. phones and laptops – electricity storage has become an infrastructural necessity for both, an erratic ‘networked city’ and its post-networked counterparts of ‘standalone’ or ‘off-grid’ systems.

Building on recent academic provocations on infrastructural containment, confinement, and capture, my contribution explores the everyday storage of electricity by households in Nairobi, a city with rather high levels of connectivity but frequent interruptions and soaring power prices. Based on qualitative research in 2021/22, I unravel the prevalence, typologies, and underlying reasons for domestic electricity storage and its individual dispositifs across the city. Focusing on two key forms – rechargeable lighting, and in-home battery systems – my contribution discusses the implications, contestations, and entanglements of individual electricity storage, in particular: a) opportunities and pitfalls for energy justice and availability, b) concerns around the environmental impact of battery production and disposal, and c) possible futures of Nairobi’s electro-infrastructural configuration and geography.

Paper short abstract:

This paper addresses the tensions in the relationship between a South African local municipality and renewable energy 'Independent Power Producers' (IPPs) with regard to the 'local community development' commitments of the IPPs as mandated by the South African national government.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines the significant investment in renewable energy that is currently taking place in the semi-arid Northern Cape Province of South Africa, as part of South Africa’s Renewable Energy Independent Power Producer Procurement Programme (REIPPPP). This paper addresses the tensions in the relationship between a local municipality and renewable energy 'Independent Power Producers' (IPPs) with regard to the 'local community development' commitments of the IPPs, through a case study of the rollout of six wind and solar plants in the local municipality. It draws particularly on the institutional, infrastructural and financial challenges facing the local municipality with regard to its responsibilities for local electricity distribution, and on the ad hoc and generally uncoordinated manner in which IPPs have gone about initiating the local community development projects they are required to support. The disjuncture has to be understood in relation to the history of electricity in twentieth-century South Africa and the disjointed and hotly contested manner in which policies on energy access, South Africa's energy transition, and local government have been developed since 1994. The paper stresses the importance of reconceptualising the contribution of renewable energy projects as not only about meeting South Africa’s commitment to reducing carbon emissions but also about benefiting local households, especially energy-poor households in towns hosting renewable energy projects. This paper concludes with proposals for how IPPs can be held more accountable to local constituencies with regard to their community development mandate.

Paper short abstract:

Pipeline disruptions remain key to Africa's future-making as they entangle citizens' economic, social and political experiences, especially the youth. Hence, there is a need to understand Africa's future-making through the lens of energy infrastructure disruptions.

Paper long abstract:

Crude oil cooking, a form of pipeline disruption, involves refining illegally tapped crude oil from pipelines in creeks and bushes of local communities using homegrown technology, resources, and skills. The practice entangles people's everyday social, political, economic, and cultural life within the Niger Delta. Studies attribute this illicit economic practice to the activities of groups of youths who use crude technology in makeshift infrastructure to redefine energy practices that compete with multinational oil corporations and provide a source of livelihood and wealth for themselves. Other studies contend that the practice is not poverty induced but a product of the country's mode of extractive governance that fails to resolve the contested issues of ownership and benefit sharing. Hence, many youths continue to enter this illicit economic space despite its precarious nature. Those involved in crude oil cooking are increasingly sandwiched between the risky possibility of related explosions and the government’s attempt to stop the practice by burning cooking camps and boats with products. The study addresses the questions, what does the practice of crude oil cooking mean to the youths? How do they navigate the hazardous environment of crude oil cooking? What are the everyday experiences of creating wealth and livelihood through crude oil cooking? The study draws from my ongoing doctoral research to understand future-making through the lens of energy infrastructure disruptions. It uses ethnography, informal conversations, and visual methods to illuminate the everyday life of youths and future making around spaces of artisanal oil cooking.