Paper short abstract:

The emergence of devolved governance of low carbon energy challenges the hegemony of conventional energy sector. The paper analyses actions in three cities in India through the lens of power and governmentality to understand role of Indian cities in its low carbon energy transition.

Paper long abstract:

The shift in global attention towards urban clean energy implementation engenders involvement of new actors, technologies and strategies, ushering 'decentralised dynamics' and reconfiguring political authority. Given this context, the urban becomes a 'political arena' where friction over visions and values of transition, decision making, and mode of implementation are bound to arise.

To explain actions and inactions of cities, literature has frequently delved into the different factors that influence governance like technical and financial capacities, autonomy and coordination. I argue that there is a need to explore the understandings of political power to explain urban scale and speed of energy transitions, especially in a multi-level governance context. Governance when viewed as 'orchestration of distinct modes of power' can foreground these deeper mechanisms that shape the grounds and rationalities of decision making. Further, Governmentality studies have showcased how governance can be achieved from a distance where acquiescence of different actors and norms of the possible and impossible can establish the 'conduct of conduct'.

Taking a comparative case study approach, I study three cities of India to understand sustainable energy decision-making using the lens of political power. I build an analytical framework drawing from the scholarships of urban energy and climate governance and wider critical urban governance literature. Based on interviews and documents analysis across the three cities, I apply this framework to understand clean energy implementation in cities. The framework attempts to capture both direct and indirect forms of power, their operationalisation and manifestation on the conditionalities of decision-making.

Paper short abstract:

This review focusses on the socio-cultural factors driving household decisions to adopt solar home systems and compares them to the adoption drivers for LPG. Households facing energy poverty across Sub-Saharan Africa will be examined.

Paper long abstract:

The emergence of solar home systems (SHS) as a viable technology for households lacking electricity access has led to their wide-scale adoption across Sub-Saharan Africa, which dominate the total global sales of SHSs, with a share of 70% (GOGLA, 2019). EFID in collaboration with BBOXX have reviewed consumer behaviour for solar home systems and clean cooking in Rwanda through three ongoing doctoral projects, which form the basis of this paper. BBOXX currently have over 200,000 SHS consumers and 100 pilot clean cook consumers in SSA.

The paper will conduct a literature review on what socio-cultural factors, beyond purely income levels, impact a household's decision to sign up for a SHS in Sub-Saharan Africa. These adoption determinants for electricity through SHSs will then be compared to the determinants of liquid petroleum gas (LPG) for cooking. In addition, case studies of BBOXX SHS and LPG customers will be examined.

Papers have uncovered a common set of determinants between households, showcasing the motivations behind people's purchasing decisions, such as households' awareness and knowledge of SHS and LPG. The aim is to use the outputs of this review to provide policy recommendations to the public sector to provide an enabling environment for the private sector to scale up. The similarities and differences between drivers behind both clean cooking and clean electricity adoption will provide key information for companies' investment strategies, product design, consumer support and marketing strategies and could thereby improve and accelerate energy access in light of the 2030 deadline of achieving universal access.

Paper short abstract:

We propose a paper that investigates if and how class and status can be used as an organising principle to capture domestic cooking practices in different socio-spatial settings.

Paper long abstract:

The recognition that biomass-fuelled stoves have negative impacts on health and environment is the driving force behind schemes to distribute improved and clean cookstoves in developing countries. However, despite considerable promotion over many decades, adoption remains limited. Some attribute this to the fact that the project architects overlooked the socio-cultural practices associated with cooking and the differentiated interests of the cooks (Crewe, 1993). Although somewhat a mundane activity, the preparation and consumption of food is said to have symbolic significance in conveying distinction and class relations in a given social system. Food is one way status is organised, i.e. what one eats and how one eats signify one's class (Goody, 1982; Bourdieu, 1984). In recent times, programmes like MECS have shown the interest to delve in the socio-cultural significance of the way people cook to understand what drives and hinders households' transition to clean cooking energy. We propose a paper that looks at how and to what extent class and status can be used as an organising principle to capture domestic cooking practices in different socio-spatial settings. If the intended result of programmes like MECS is to induce substantive behavioural changes that will themselves impact cooking-as-culture, how can an understanding of class - among the other complexities of 'mere cooking' - be used to enhance the targeting and effectiveness of programmes like MECS?

Bourdieu, P. (1984) Distinction, London

Crewe, Emma (1997) The Silent Traditions of Developing Cooks. London: Berg.

Goody, Jack (1982) Cooking, Cuisine and Class: Cambridge University Press

Paper short abstract:

This paper redeploys the domestic domain for research into renewable energy transition, in particular cooking energy materialities, advocating a holistic contextualisation of the relation between cooking fuel practices and energy processes integrally connected to domestic reproduction of livelihoods

Paper long abstract:

There is a fertile fringe in the knowledge interface between Anthropology and Geography that shares common concerns in methodologies for understanding rudimentary human processes in the generation of social life. 'The domestic domain' has been the locus of numerous analytical and interpretive paradigms. These have ranged from the exogamous imperative of the incest taboo as a bio-genetic strategy for social alliance (structuralism), and the training of capacity for reading class formation into the reproduction of inequality in differential holdings of human and non-human assets (political economy), through to the comparative recognition of humans' relations with creatures and ecologies as not 'Nature', but sentient actors (ontological turn). (Gender problematisation runs through all these paradigms exposing patriarchal misrecognition in each). This paper redeploys the domestic domain for new purposes of conducting research into renewable energy transition, using a framework of energy livelihoods, and attempts to maintain genealogical sight of previous paradigms. To highlight the problem, it is very rarely the case that any study of transition in cooking energy technologies presents a holistic contextualisation of the relation between cooking fuel practices and energy processes integrally connected to domestic reproduction of livelihoods. It is in the flows and ruptures experienced in bio-social materialities of human labour, interaction with domestic livestock, in meaningfully cultivated places on troubled soils, and in shared activity through gendered divisions of practice and power that the sense of accommodating new energy technologies and their affective life of communicative personhood will become visible as anthropological 'figure' to geographical 'ground'.