Communities of energy

Abstract

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...

Ethnographies of electricity scarcity: Mobile phone charging spaces and the recrafting of energy poverty in Africa

“…Finally, the links between technology, infrastructure, social practices and economies are quite striking between the two case studies (see Table 1). Technologies (e.g., smartphones, photovoltaic power) are mediated by the contexts into which they are thrust (Campbell et al, 2016), new technologies in particular have multiple and often unexpected uses that are intimately entangled with socio-cultural practices and processes involving questions of gender, politics, knowledge, meaning, value and ethics (Sovacool and Drupady, 2012). For example, unlike Sierra Leone, the informal mobile phone charging sector in The Gambian case did not benefit greatly from the introduction of smartphones that need more frequent charging as it roughly coincided with the arrival of grid electricity.…”

Diffusion on the ground: Rethinking the logic of scale and access in off-grid solar in Sri Lanka

“…As recently argued in a special issue in this journal entitled 'Exploring the Anthropology of Energy: Ethnography, energy and ethics', ethnographic approaches are particularly suited to illustrate the diversity in how different people engage with and make judgements about energy in order to open up and reflect on taken-for-granted assumptions (Smith & High, 2017), and to grapple with the socio-cultural aspects entangled with energy use (Chatti, Archer, Lennon, & Dove, 2017). In the case of solar diffusion in Sri Lanka, it enabled the research to challenge the notion of homogeneity at local scales, by including multiple communities of interest, which had different experiences of the process of SHS diffusion (Campbell et al, 2016).…”

“…Arguing that "scalability spreads -and yet is constantly abandoned, leaving behind ruins" (Tsing, 2012), she calls for more critical enquiries of "scalability in action". Investigating scalability in action or more precisely in this paper "diffusion in action", widens the analysis and evaluation of diffusion beyond the logic of cumulative sales and end-users, towards a more empirically situated interrogation of how different communities of interest are involved (Campbell, Cloke, & Brown, 2016) at different times and places. Diffusion in action, as opposed to diffusion, asks about the processes and practices that make diffusion happen and how its effects are constructed, made real and countered.…”

Sustainability of Off-Grid Photovoltaic Systems for Rural Electrification in Developing Countries: A Review

“…The Renewable Energy Policy Network for the 21st Century (REN21) [195] confirm that the lack of the commitment of a community leads to a detachment of actual local requirements and the deception of rural users. As argued by Campbell et al [196], levels and types of participation need to be mapped to all interest groups of the community that are characterized as "complex, self-organizing, self-imagining, and conceptually productive" actors.…”