It has long been assumed that delivering UN SDG 7 (access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all) will also help deliver UN SDG 5 (gender equality and empowerment). But empirical evidence on the gendered impacts of electricity access is mixed: in some cases transformative, in some cases reinforcing, or worsening, existing unequal gendered power hierarchies. This paper responds to calls for the emerging literature on gender and electricity access to integrate insights from the Gender Studies literature and to better explain why, not just how, electricity access impacts gender in different ways in different contexts. It achieves this by developing a novel, performative theoretical framework, which combines and extends insights from Gender Studies on the performative, intersectional and power-laden nature of gender, and insights from Social Practice Theory on how electricity access becomes meaningful through its intersection with the performance of everyday practices. This theoretical framework is refined through an in-depth empirical analysis of the gendered impacts of electricity access in patriarchal societies in rural Guatemala and matrilineal societies in rural Colombia. The paper also develops a novel methodology, including an 8-step approach for applying the theoretical framework in practice. It concludes by articulating how these contributions can facilitate more targeted policy interventions with greater potential for positive impacts on gender equality in specific contexts.

As SDG7-related interventions seek to transform access to clean energy, this paper presents an analysis of both a previous transformative intervention (Lighting Africa) and a theoretical approach to understanding how such transformations can be achieved in the Global South (socio-technical innovation system, STIS, building). The paper makes four contributions. First, it tests the extent to which the STIS-building concept is useful in understanding and conceptualising how Lighting Africa transformed the market for solar lanterns in Kenya from an estimated market size of 29,000 lamps in 2009 to one where 680,000 Lighting Africa certified lamps were sold in Kenya by the end of the Programme in 2013. Second, it presents the most in-depth analysis of Lighting Africa that we are aware of to date. Third, it presents a conceptual framework that illustrates the Lighting Africa approach, providing a framework for future policy interventions aiming to transform access to clean energy technologies in the Global South. Fourth, it reflects on weaknesses in the STIS approach. In particular, these include a need to better attend to: the gendered implications of interventions (and social justice more broadly); implications of different scales of technologies; value accumulation and the extent to which interventions benefit indigenous actors and local economies; and the political and economic implications of any intervention and its distribution of benefits.

Climate change research is at an impasse. The transformation of economies and everyday practices is more urgent, and yet appears ever more daunting as attempts at behaviour change, regulations, and global agreements confront material and social-political infrastructures that support the status quo. Effective action requires new ways of conceptualizing society, climate and environment and yet current research struggles to break free of established categories. In response, this contribution revisits important insights from the social sciences and humanities on the co-production of political economies, cultures, societies and biophysical relations and shows the possibilities for ontological pluralism to open up for new imaginations. Its intention is to help generate a different framing of socionatural change that goes beyond the current science-policy-behavioural change pathway. It puts forward several moments of inadvertent concealment in contemporary debates that stem directly from the way issues are framed and imagined in contemporary discourses. By placing values, normative commitments, and experiential and plural ways of knowing from around the world at the centre of climate knowledge, we confront climate change with contested politics and the everyday foundations of action rather than just data.

The Economic History ReviewVolume 73, Issue 2 p. 618-619 BOOK REVIEW Christopher D. Gore, Electricity in Africa: the politics of transformation in Uganda ( Woodbridge: James Currey, 2017. Pp. xiv+186. 7 figs. 1 tab. ISBN 9781847011695 Hbk. £60) David Ockwell, David Ockwell University of SussexSearch for more papers by this author David Ockwell, David Ockwell University of SussexSearch for more papers by this author First published: 14 April 2020 https://doi.org/10.1111/ehr.12990Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume73, Issue2May 2020Pages 618-619 RelatedInformation

Realising the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) will require transformative changes at micro, meso and macro levels and across diverse geographies. Collaborative, transdisciplinary research has a role to play in documenting, understanding and contributing to such transformations. Previous work has investigated the role of this research in Europe and North America, however the dynamics of transdisciplinary research on ‘transformations to sustainability’ in other parts of the world are less well-understood. This paper reports on an international project that involved transdisciplinary research in six different hubs across the globe and was strategically designed to enable mutual learning and exchange. It draws on surveys, reports and research outputs to analyse the processes of transdisciplinary collaboration for sustainability that took place between 2015–2019. The paper illustrates how the project was structured in order to enable learning across disciplines, cultures and contexts and describes how it also provided for the negotiation of epistemological frameworks and different normative commitments between members across the network. To this end, it discusses lessons regarding the use of theoretical and methodological anchors, multi-loop learning and evaluating emergent change (including the difficulties encountered). It offers insights for the design and implementation of future international transdisciplinary collaborations that address locally-specific sustainability challenges within the universal framework of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

UK AID has recently invested in a new £39.8 million programme that aims to transform access to modern energy cooking services, or MECS, in Africa and Asia. In this working paper we demonstrate how reframing our understanding of how transformations happen in access to clean energy technologies, foregrounding the social and the political, together with more sophisticated, systemic understandings of how sustained technological change and innovation occurs, can increase the chances of transformative change that is environmentally sustainable and socially just. This moves beyond the largely unsuccessful track record of past interventions that tended to focus only on technology hardware and finance. The working paper analyses the case of Lighting Africa, which successfully transformed access to solar lighting in Kenya and, as far as we are aware, conceptualises and illustrates for the first time Lighting Africa’s approach. This builds on past STEPS research that focusses on building sociotechnical innovation systems. The paper then compares the existing and planned activities of the MECS Programme in order to facilitate learning looking forward. This analysis is assisted by consideration of the important ways in which cooking as an energy service, and its related social practices, differs from lighting. It is also assisted by analysis of some critical social justice and political dimensions that were not explicitly addressed by Lighting Africa. As well as making substantive recommendations for the future operation of this £39.8 million programme of research and delivery, the working paper provides a useful illustration of how the STEPS Pathways Approach can contribute to applied analyses of policy and practice.

This paper examines the rapidly emerging and rapidly changing phenomenon of pay-as-you-go (PAYG), digitally enabled business models, which have had significant early success in providing poor people with access to technologies relevant to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (e.g., for electricity access, water and sanitation, and agricultural irrigation). Data are analysed based on literature review, two stakeholder workshops (or transformation labs), and stakeholder interviews (engaging 41 stakeholders in total). This demonstrates the existing literature on PAYG is patchy at best, with no comprehensive or longitudinal, and very little theoretically grounded, research to date. The paper contributes to existing research on PAYG, and sustainability transformations more broadly, in two key ways. Firstly, it articulates a range of questions that remain to be answered in order to understand and deliver against the current and potential contribution of PAYG in affecting sustainability transformations (the latter we define as achieving environmental sustainability and social justice). These questions focus at three levels: national contexts for fostering innovation and technology uptake, the daily lives of poor and marginalised women and men, and global political economies and value accumulation. Secondly, the paper articulates three areas of theory (based on emerging critical social science research on sustainable energy access) that have potential to support future research that might answer these questions, namely: socio-technical innovation system-building, social practice, and global political economy and value chain analysis. Whilst recognising existing tensions between these three areas of theory, we argue that rapid sustainability transformations demand a level of epistemic pragmatism. Such pragmatism, we argue, can be achieved by situating research using any of the above areas of theory within the broader context of Leach et al.'s (2010) Pathways Approach. This allows for exactly the kind of interdisciplinary approach, based on a commitment to pluralism and the co-production of knowledge, and firmly rooted commitment to environmental sustainability and social justice that the SDGs demand.

International agreements on energy access and climate change, formulated according to neoliberal orthodoxy, will drive significant finance to developing countries for clean technology investments. But critics call for more active state intervention - a developmental approach - arguing that free markets alone will not deliver what is required. This creates the potential for confrontation between contradictory ideologies in national policymaking and implementation: neoliberalism in global agreements versus developmentalism in national policy. The Kenyan photovoltaics (PV) market has long-experienced neoliberal-developmental policy interactions, reflecting on which can illuminate how such encounters might unfold in the future. We construct a new 'niche political economy' theoretical framework to analyse these past interactions, constituting one of three contributions we offer. The second is empirical, showing how PV practitioners, national policymakers and global development actors have negotiated their policymaking encounters over time. Our third contribution offers reflections on the issues explored, discussing what this might mean for future neoliberal-developmental encounters. We find that action on the ground will emerge from messy negotiated interactions between competing ideologies rather than be determined by powerful neoliberal actors. As such, realising global energy and climate ambitions becomes even more uncertain unless long-term active niche-building resources are secured in international agreements.

This special issue focusses on the now rapidly growing solar photovoltaics markets across various geographies and scales in Africa. Herein we summarise the contributions of the component papers and position them within the context of the sustainable energy access literature. We argue that there is an urgent need for greater attention to the neglected socio-cultural and political dimensions of sustainable energy access, dimensions that are vital to understand if ambitious global commitments to sustainable energy for all by 2030 are to be achieved. Included in this special issue are papers on the systemic and socio-technical nature of energy access transitions; their politics and political economy; gendered dimensions; critiques of their technologically determinist framing and the implications for marginalising local actors; and, perhaps for the first time in the energy access literature, application of social practice perspectives to the energy access challenge. The result is a diverse range of empirically-grounded, theoretically and methodologically novel approaches, providing new insights into and understandings of the neglected socio-cultural and political dimensions of sustainable energy access.

•Participatory arts might hold key to climate compatible behaviour change.•Arts based interventions must be combined with interpretive social science.•Value demonstrated by application to small sample in Outer Hebrides, Scotland.•Provides basis for new research & policy agenda across arts and social sciences.

This book demonstrates the weaknesses of existing academic literature on energy access and the dominant contemporary policy framings of the problem. The book advocates a new theoretical perspective, based on Socio-Technical Innovation System Building, and goes beyond a purely academic critique in detailing how this approach might be operationalized in practice. The book facilitates both a detailed plan for future comparative research as well as a clear agenda for policy and practice. This book will be of great interest to researchers, policy makers and practitioners in the field of sustainable energy access and low carbon development more broadly.

Rural mini-grids are viewed as a key technology for providing access to electricity to the billion or more people that lack it by 2030 (in line with the UN’s Sustainable Energy for All commitment). But at present no model for the sustainable management of rural mini-grids exists, which contributes to high failure rates. This paper makes a number of contributions. First, it explores how electricity in mini-grids might be understood as a Common Pool Resource (CPR), opening up potential to learn from the extensive literature on institutional characteristics of sustainable CPR management in the natural resource management literature. Second, it refines Agrawal’s (2001) overarching framework of enabling conditions for sustainable CPR management institutions to develop a framework applicable to rural mini-grid management in developing countries. Thirdly, the utility of this refined framework is demonstrated by applying it to analyse data from 27 semi-structured interviews with actors with expertise in mini-grid development and management in Kenya and 2 field visits to rural mini-grids there. This contributes a nuanced basis for future application of CPR theory to mini-grids and a systematic analysis of institutional challenges and possible solutions, which have hitherto received limited attention in the energy and development literature.