Defining ‘access’ as the nexus of ‘energy access for all’ in the global South
Session Convenor: Ankit Kumar (Eindhoven University of Technology), Britta Turner (Durham University) and Raihana Ferdous (Durham University)
Globally some 1.2 billion people are known to lack access to electricity and a further 2.7 billion people continue to rely on biomass as their sole energy source for cooking. Achieving universal access to affordable, reliable and
modern energy services by 2030 has been a focus of the UN’s sustainable energy (SE4ALL) campaign and is now one of the agreed sustainable development goals (SDGs) yet there remains remarkably little consensus on what constitutes energy access, how best to
achieve these targets or to track their progress. Often viewed as simply a technical and logistical process of boosting the number of connections and ‘plugging’ consumers into a grid infrastructure there remains a pressing need to problematize energy ‘access’
and to trace some of the local social, cultural, political and economic dynamics that are critical in defining what energy access means and how it is experienced in the global South.
We invite submissions of both theoretical and empirically-focused papers concerned with the configuration of the energy access agenda in the global South. Areas of potential interest for contributions to this session might include
but are not limited to:
What constitutes energy access and how much energy is enough?
What forms does energy access take and who decides what counts?
Kinds of connections and disconnections
Formal and informal routes to energy access
How is access endured and experienced?
Thanks
Ankit
Ankit Kumar
Postdoctoral Researcher
School of Innovation Sciences
Eindhoven University of Technology
