Scaling-Up Sustainable Pro-poor Energy Solutions: Addressing Stumbling Blocks

Abstract

Affordable, reliable, and modern pro-poor energy solutions play a key role in achieving sustainable development in emerging economies. While such solutions have been successfully tested in numerous protected niches and “proto-markets,” their diffusion beyond these niches has remained very limited. There are a number of factors explaining the widespread failure to change prevailing energy supply regimes. An actor-oriented perspective (Wiesmann et al. in Research for sustainable development: foundations, experiences, and perspectives: Perspectives of the Swiss National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) North-South. University of Bern, Bern, pp. 231–256, 2011) helps demonstrating that these factors are primarily linked (1) to action itself, viewed as the interplay between actors’ existing practices, their means, and assets, and the meaning actors attribute to action; and (2) to external dynamic social, economic, political, and ecological conditions of action influencing actors’ perceptions. The four contributions of Part III (Chaps. 8–11) identify the stumbling blocks hindering the successful scaling-up of pro-poor energy solutions. The solutions proposed by the authors focus on the dynamic conditions of action (Kung et al., Chap. 8; Zalengera et al., Chap. 9), on local actors’ perceptions, means, and activities (Mirza, Chap. 10), and on the utilization of a comprehensive planning and decision-making framework to improve the sustainability of pro-poor energy solutions (Jain and Kattuman, Chap. 11).