Differences in firewood users’ and LPG users’ perceived relationships between cooking fuels and women’s multidimensional well-being in rural India

Abstract

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Energy Justice and the Capability Approach—Introduction to the Special Issue

“…Malakar, Greig, and van der Fliert (2018), studying villages in rural India, find that the use of solid fuels demonstrably acts as direct limitation on capabilities, but that this usage is nevertheless entrenched through social practices. Nevertheless, in a development of this work, Malakar and Day (2020) find that both firewood usage and liquid petroleum gas usage were felt by the women using them to make positive contributions to capabilities, albeit in different ways. This work illustrates how the usage of the Capability Approach helps illuminate complex relationships between fuel usage practices and wellbeing, with useful insights for the design and implementation of future interventions.…”

A Capabilities-Led Approach to Assessing Technological Solutions for a Rural Community

“…(Older men's group) Both female and male participants at the focus groups showed interest in using an alternative fuel source and stoves for cooking, such as electric and gas stoves. Unlike in other studies, e.g., Reference [8], participants in Tlamacazapa were not concerned about any potential change of the taste of food from different cooking methods. The male participants commented that when they travel away from the village to sell handicrafts, they eat food cooked in other ways, and are used to the taste.…”

“…The first stage in our project was to understand the nature of energy poverty and energy needs in Tlamacazapa to form the baseline for selecting suitable energy projects, and to do this we took a capabilities-led approach [7,8,18]. Using the concepts of capabilities and functioning from the work of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum [19][20][21], this approach links energy demand with the pursuit of capabilities, which are defined as the opportunity to engage in valued 'beings and doings' [19] (p. 40) (and where functionings are the active engagement in these beings and doings).…”

“…Energy poverty in this approach is understood as an inability to realize essential capabilities as a direct or indirect result of a lack of access to safe, affordable and reliable energy services [7]. We chose this approach over alternatives such as focusing on the affordability of energy, access to clean energy, or the achievement of basic energy services, all of which are alternative approaches to assessing energy poverty, because of the capability approach's better focus on the diverse wellbeing and development outcomes that energy and energy services are needed for [8,10,13].…”

“…We approached the assessment of energy poverty and energy needs through a capabilities framework [7], an approach growing in popularity that connects the demand for energy to multi-dimensional wellbeing and human development, taking into account the specific social and economic context. The capabilities approach has recently been applied to assess the impact of energy projects at different scales in low and middle income countries [8][9][10][11][12][13], for instance, Velasco-Herrejon and Bauwens [9] used it to assess community acceptance of utility scale wind energy in Mexico, and Fernández-Baldor et al [10] used the approach to assess renewable energy-based electrification projects in Cajamarca, Peru. These studies have shown that using the capabilities approach as the assessment framework reveals a wider set of impacts and outcomes than conventional approaches, can reveal unequal impacts, and that it is valuable in understanding the perspective of individuals and communities themselves [8,10].…”