has been published in nal form at http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/sea2.12050. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance With Wiley Terms and Conditions for self-archiving. Use policyThe full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-pro t purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. Although they are important, the facts and figures concerning global energy poverty and the health effects of burning biomass are not our focus. Our analysis questions the functionalist constructions of "community" and "household," which are being depicted as ideal scales at which energy project initiatives should be directed. There is a tendency to assume a number of things: that communities (and households) have clearly delineated boundaries, that they provide a nurturing or cohesive focus for energy provision, that they are spatially and locationally specific, and that they operate according to predictable norms of energy consumption constructed to flesh out the ideal of a linear, evolutionary "energy ladder" up which communities and households progress. We suggest, instead, that because households and communities have Campbell et al. 3become spatially and relationally more fluid, more flexible, and indistinct with globalization, this sharp delineation, if it were ever true, has become far more blurred. Communities need conceptual reenergizing.In respect of the new energy era, households and communities are being rewritten as "apparatuses of knowledge" (Foucault 1977:106). These are technocratic apparatuses that give preeminence to the territorial, rather than the relational, dimensions of such designations (Gusfield 1975) to suit the potential of available technologies. In some low-income contexts (e.g., Bangladesh), the household has been depicted as the critical arena for intervention through the emblematic functionality of the Solar Home System. In other contexts, community energy is promoted, with the form or scale of community often being dictated by the mini-, micro-, and nanogrids that, in claiming to fit a particular scale of community, end up defining it. Walker and Devine-Wright (2008) have already pointed out the sociological emptiness of simple locality and labeling of projects as "community energy," when processes of community engagement can actually be quite minimal. Networking communities for researchResponding to growing curiosity about low-carbon energy technologies globally, the work of the Low Carbon Energy for Development Network (LCEDN; supported by the U.K. The scale at which the rollout of these game-changing technologies is set is mostly determined by technolo...

The decentralization of governance is increasingly considered crucial for delivering development and is being widely adopted in sub-Saharan countries. At the same time, distributed (decentralized) energy systems are increasingly recognized for their role in achieving universal access to energy and are being promoted in sub-Saharan countries. However, little attention has been paid by governments and energy practitioners to the dynamic interrelationships between national and local government and the role of governance decentralization in transitioning to distributed energy systems. This paper traces the complex relationships between accelerated delivery of distributed energy and decentralized local governance systems. The argument is grounded in an exploration of two different approaches to decentralized energy systems governance in Kenya and Malawi. For Kenya, analysis focuses on the energy sector since the adoption of the new decentralized constitution in 2010. In Malawi, it focuses on the involvement of the authors in piloting Local Authority Energy Officers in districts under the decentralization of Malawian energy policy. Our analysis shows that accelerating the speed and scale of implementation for distributed energy systems and enhancing their sustainability and socio-economic impacts is directly linked to the quality of local and national governance structures and their interrelationships. The paper extends existing work in energy and evidence literacy for policy actors by developing an analytical framework, to enable more effective local governance within energy access initiatives in the Global South.

This paper sets out to trace some major points of convergence between an emerging literature on the political geographies of corruption-super-1 and current attempts to develop a renewed research agenda in the geographies of global finance-in this case in a specifically European context. In particular, we offer some preliminary observations on the need to elaborate an alternative geography of Europe's financial architecture that could incorporate the role of flows of illegal and informal finance as major driving forces behind the way in which that architecture currently constitutes itself. This is an inherently complex task due to the intrinsically hidden nature of these flows and the difficulties involved in their accurate measurement; nevertheless, they are too important to be ignored, as is too frequently the case at present. In the paper we offer some necessarily preliminary, and deliberately provocative, reflections on how to take forward such a re-conceptualisation. Ultimately, our analysis revolves around the identification of an uneasy tension between the demand for deregulated financial markets and the increasing integration of those markets, and the international momentum towards finding ways of dealing with the (apparently) ever-increasing problems of corruption, money laundering, and the financing of terrorism through new forms of financial regulation and control. Copyright 2007 Blackwell Publishing.

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Through a brief review of the literature in which the concept of food security has developed since the first use of the term in 1974, this paper suggests that the 'food security' appearing extensively in governmental, official and academic analysis is a social construct that acts to conceal the reality of corporate food production mechanisms dominating global food systems. Since the date of the first World Food Summit in Rome in 1996, representations of both food security and insecurity have increasingly become a meme, a vehicle for conveying and performing a set of socio-cultural beliefs relating to a neoliberal view of global food production that excludes the biopolitics of corporate, systemic global food production. The analysis focuses particularly on a range of forms of waste produced by global food systems, to suggest that in a world over-producing food of which over a third is wasted and in which waste has become a mechanism for profit, no presentation of food security that fails to take into account this systemic reality can produce valid or effective policy. The food security meme that has evolved over nearly 40 years portrays at best a partial analysis, which as a consequence continues to proffer a range of market-based solutions, ignoring issues of dominance and control. In considering the memetic representation of food security, the paper also examines briefly the biopolitics presented by corporate systems of dominance and control in global food production, as well as the systems of waste (vastogenic systems) that they produce. In conclusion, the development of what are effectively empires of waste has fuelled an urgent need for a radical re-think of food security issues, based on proposals for food regime and food systems analysis that have begun to emerge in the literature.