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Beyond technology and finance: pay-as-you-go sustainable energy access and theories of social change

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journal contribution
posted on 2023-06-09, 00:19 authored by Paula Rolffs, David OckwellDavid Ockwell, Robert ByrneRobert Byrne
Two-thirds of people in sub-Saharan Africa lack access to electricity, a precursor of poverty reduction and development. The international community has ambitious commitments in this regard, e.g. the UN's Sustainable Energy for All by 2030. But scholarship has not kept up with policy ambitions. This paper operationalises a sociotechnical transitions perspective to analyse for the first time the potential of new, mobileenabled, pay-as-you-go approaches to financing sustainable energy access, focussing on a case study of pay-as-you-go approaches to financing solar home systems in Kenya. The analysis calls into question the adequacy of the dominant, two-dimensional treatment of sustainable energy access in the literature as a purely financial/technology, economics/ engineering problem (which ignores sociocultural and political considerations) and demonstrates the value of a new research agenda that explicitly attends to theories of social change – even when, as in this paper, the focus is purely on finance. The paper demonstrates that sociocultural considerations cut across the literature's traditional two-dimensional analytic categories (technology and finance) and are material to the likely success of any technological or financial intervention. It also demonstrates that the alignment of new payas- you-go finance approaches with existing sociocultural practices of paying for energy can explain their early success and likely longevity relative to traditional finance approaches.

Funding

STEPS centre; ESRC; ES/I021620/1

History

Publication status

  • Published

File Version

  • Published version

Journal

Environment and Planning A

ISSN

0308-518X

Publisher

SAGE Publications

Issue

12

Volume

47

Page range

2609-2627

Department affiliated with

  • Geography Publications

Full text available

  • Yes

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Legacy Posted Date

2016-02-17

First Open Access (FOA) Date

2016-02-17

First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date

2016-02-17

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