Electricity provides a range of desirable services such as electric light and the use of mobile phones and is regarded as a conditional factor for economic growth. Gender equality and women's empowerment are also promoted as a key to development on the international agenda. However, relatively little is known about how the advent of electricity in new contexts affects gender relations.The present analysis of electricity's impact on gender relations engages with the concepts of care work and empowerment. Based on two ethnographic case studies in rural communities in Uttar Pradesh, India, and Bamiyan, Afghanistan, we examine how and to what extent the introduction of electricity affected women's care work practices and empowerment -and potentially transformed gender relations. We also draw on our own empirical material from other parts of India (West Bengal and Jharkhand). We find that electricity affected everyday life in terms of providing important resources and enhancing women's opportunities to perform their expected role as care workers more efficiently and in a qualitatively better way. The women appreciated this positive effect of electricity in their everyday lives. However, we argue that in India, electricity at the same time reinforced structures of gender inequality such as patriarchy and dowry practices, and we trace this tendency to the conceptualisation of women as care workers in combination with conventional, gender 'neutral' electricity interventions. In contrast, there are signs that women's status increased in the Afghanistan case, which we link to the unusual inclusion of women engineers in the electricity supply.
This article reviews the empirical literature on women's empowerment through electricity access and the methodologies that have been used. Statistical studies have looked at areas with access to the grid and measured the impact on welfare indicators and employment. Qualitatively oriented studies have looked at various types of supply and studied how electricity access in a given context has influenced women and men in everyday life, sometimes focusing on the role of the design of the systems of supply and the process of electrification. The overall results show that electricity access benefits the welfare of women as well as men, but that the impact on gender relations remains largely unclear. With the ambition to better understand the gendered natureand impactsof various types of electricity access, we develop a framework for analysing women's empowerment through electricity and subsequently illustrate its applications by drawing on the reviewed empirical literature.
Decades of techno-economic energy policymaking and research have meant evidence from the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH)—including critical reflections on what changing a society’s relation to energy (efficiency) even means—have been underutilised. In particular, (i) the SSH have too often been sidelined and/or narrowly pigeonholed by policymakers, funders, and other decision-makers when driving research agendas, and (ii) the setting of SSH-focused research agendas has not historically embedded inclusive and deliberative processes. The aim of this paper is to address these gaps through the production of a research agenda outlining future SSH research priorities for energy efficiency. A Horizon Scanning exercise was run, which sought to identify 100 priority SSH questions for energy efficiency research. This exercise included 152 researchers with prior SSH expertise on energy efficiency, who together spanned 62 (sub-)disciplines of SSH, 23 countries, and a full range of career stages. The resultant questions were inductively clustered into seven themes as follows: (1) Citizenship, engagement and knowledge exchange in relation to energy efficiency; (2) Energy efficiency in relation to equity, justice, poverty and vulnerability; (3) Energy efficiency in relation to everyday life and practices of energy consumption and production; (4) Framing, defining and measuring energy efficiency; (5) Governance, policy and political issues around energy efficiency; (6) Roles of economic systems, supply chains and financial mechanisms in improving energy efficiency; and (7) The interactions, unintended consequences and rebound effects of energy efficiency interventions. Given the consistent centrality of energy efficiency in policy programmes, this paper highlights that well-developed SSH approaches are ready to be mobilised to contribute to the development, and/or to understand the implications, of energy efficiency measures and governance solutions. Implicitly, it also emphasises the heterogeneity of SSH policy evidence that can be produced. The agenda will be of use for both (1) those new to the energy-SSH field (including policyworkers), for learnings on the capabilities and capacities of energy-SSH, and (2) established energy-SSH researchers, for insights on the collectively held futures of energy-SSH research.
Policy makers and scholars often assume gender to be irrelevant in energy politics. However, an increasing body of scholarship and development policies has focused on how gender discrimination has negative effects on women’s access to energy resources and equal contributions to decision-making processes that influence energy issues. This article evaluates four overarching and salient policy and research discourses that frame women’s and men’s positions in benefiting from and participating in decision-making about energy. First, energy has mainly been perceived as gender neutral, ignoring gendered outcomes of energy policies. Second, women have been presented as victims of energy poverty in the global South to instigate donors and action. Third, women’s empowerment in the global South has been presented as instrumental to increasing productivity and economic growth through access to modern sources and uses of energy. These discourses have produced narratives that provide limited imaginaries of women’s agency and relevance to the politics of energy in their lives. The fourth and less familiar discourse has presented women as rights holders of basic services, including access to modern and sustainable energy. This last discourse has provided a tool for examining the deeper unequal structures, as well as holding stakeholders in supply accountable for reproducing gender equality, needed to understand and produce relevant and socially just knowledge.
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