From Energy Racism to People's Power

Review of African Political Economy, 2023

Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 2021

Analysis of precarity has offered a critique of labour market experiences and politically induced conditions of work, housing, migration, or essential services. This paper develops an infrastructural politics of precarity by analysing energy as a critical sphere of social and ecological reproduction. We employ precarity to understand how gendered and racialised vulnerability to energy deprivation is induced through political processes. In turn, analysis of energy illustrates socio-material processes of precarity, produced and contested through infrastructure. Our argument is developed through scalar analysis of energy precarity in urban South Africa, a country that complicates a North-South framing of debates on both precarity and energy. We demonstrate how energy precarity can be reproduced or destabilised through: social and material relations of housing, tenure, labour and infrastructure; the formation of gendered and racialized energy subjects; and resistance and everyday practices. We conclude that analysis of infrastructure provides insights on how precarity is contested as a shared condition and on the prospect of systemic change through struggles over distribution and production.

Human Rights and the Environment under African Union Law, 2020

Legal critique of renewable energy projects, such as mega dam construction and biofuel production for energy provisions in Southern Africa, highlights a crooked balancing act between the modern neoliberal desires for maximum power generation for industry and private enterprises juxtaposed with a deliberate lack of effective legal and policy frameworks for the protection of the human rights, developmental and environmental justice aspirations of rural and less powerful sectors of the community. The chapter argues that a critical assessment of historical and contemporary energy planning in Zimbabwe, Mozambique and other regions of the Global South exposes violations of human and developmental rights as well as environmental injustice. Lessons from the impact of neoliberalism and pro-business energy projects will be vital for the Global South. The chapter utilises critical theoretical approaches to law and employs an interdisciplinary analysis of primary information, academic and practitioner commentary. This analysis is beefed up by an environmental justice and human rights-based framing.

This study explores the discursive dynamics behind the controversy to build the US$17.8 billion 4800 MW Medupi coal-fired power plant in South Africa, the seventh largest in the world. It begins by viewing climate change and energy security not as objective fact driven concepts, but constantly negotiated discourses. Based on a sampling of project documents, reports, testimony, and popular articles, the study then maps the discursive justifications behind the project as well as those against it. More specifically, it isolates themes of economic development, environmental sustainability, and energy security that converge into a discursive ensemble of inevitability supporting complete electrification for all of South Africa. The study also documents themes at the heart of the campaign against Medupi: maldevelopment and secrecy, local and global environmental degradation, and energy poverty which coalesce into a grand narrative of democracy. Tracing the intricacies of the Medupi controversy provides rich insight into energy policy and planning in South Africa. It also emphasizes how struggles to expand access to energy services can exacerbate degradation of the environment, and shows how climate and environmental discourses can become institutionalized.

2022

This book reconnects energy research with the radical, reflexive, and transformative approaches of Environmental Justice. Global patterns of energy production and use are disrupting the ecosystems that sustain all life, disproportionately affecting marginalized groups. Addressing such injustices, this book examines how energy relates to structural issues of exploitation, racism, colonialism, extractivism, the commodification of work, and the systemic devaluing of diverse ‘others.’ The result is a new agenda for critical energy research that builds on a growing global movement of environmental justice activism and scholarship. Throughout the book the author reframes ‘transitions’ as collective projects of justice that demand societal shifts to more equitable and reciprocal ways of living. This book will be an invaluable resource for students, scholars, and practitioners interested in transforming energy systems and working collaboratively to build just planetary futures.

Politikon, 2020

Energy Research & Social Science, 2021

Development Southern Africa, 2019

IDS Working Paper, 2018

Energy Democracies for Sustainable Futures, 2023