The article examines the dynamics of access to electricity in two West African cities: Cotonou (Benin) and Ibadan (Nigeria). Due to poor supply from the grid, households are developing varied ways of accessing electricity, based on different socio-technical dispositifs. In this paper we first demonstrate that access to electricity is based on co-production processes that must be approached from a multi-scale perspective (from the household to the urban scale). We then argue that particular attention to the socio-technical and spatial dimension of co-production arrangements makes it possible to interpret urban electrical configurations and their evolution. We thus show that co-production processes, relying on many actors and technologies to meet a growing and diversified demand for electricity in cities, support an ongoing movement of extension-hybridisation of electricity configurations on an urban scale, thus offering an interesting perspective on power changes in sub-Saharan Africa.

Durante muchos años, las políticas públicas de manejo de los residuos desarrollaban acciones de represión hacia los actores del reciclaje informal. En Perú, desde la Ley del Reciclador del 2009, las políticas públicas se posicionan en favor de un reciclaje inclusivo, mediante la integración de los recicladores. Movilizando los conceptos de innovación socio-institucional y apropiación deresiduos reciclables, el objetivo de este artículo es sustentar que las modalidades de implementación de la Ley conducen a la creación de modelos de gestión de residuos reciclables innovadores que permiten mitigar el conflicto del acceso a estos residuos entre recicladores formales, pero al mismo tiempo, este conflicto se desplaza desde el conjunto de los recicladores hacia generar una rivalidad entre formales e informales. Se destaca que, gracias a las innovaciones socio-institucionales, el nuevo interés institucional para el recojo selectivo no conduce a la creación de un conflicto de apropiación entre el servicio público de gestión y la lógica mercantil de reciclaje, como pudo haber sido.

Waste management models in Colombia and Peru are at a turning point in favor of the integration of informal waste pickers. The Capital District of Bogota and Lima's fifty municipalities are putting in place formalization processes that are more than just a formality. It involves recognizing, regulating and integrating wastepickers. The study of the processes at work in these two cities reveals distinct models of formalization with contrasting impacts on the informality and the marginality of a practice and the population dedicated to it.

Electricity access has become a crucial issue in global South cities. While demand is growing, conventional grids are failing or insufficient, especially in Africa. Urban dwellers therefore have to develop a wide range of (in)formal infrastructures to meet their daily electricity needs. Building on recent studies on urban electricity in the global South, this paper aims to contribute to the debates on hybrid forms of electricity provision by analysing the diffusion of solar panels and generators in two cities, Ibadan in Nigeria and Cotonou in Benin. Although neighbouring and relatively similar, these two cities illustrate distinct daily electrical lives. In Nigeria, an electricity-exporting country, people face daily power outages. In Benin, a country that depends on Nigeria for its supply, there is electricity but it is difficult to connect to the grid because of connection costs. Based on an empirical study, the article shows that Ibadan’s inhabitants use generators as a complement to a conventional grid that is almost universal but unreliable. In Cotonou, solar energy is an alternative until they can connect to the grid. Generators and solar panels have become the material markers of urban Africa, providing information on inequalities in access to electricity.