Keywords

1.1 Introduction

In a recent essay on the need to recognise the ‘slowness’ of climate action in delivering results, writer Rebecca Solnit (2024) recalls Greta Thunberg’s speech to British MPs, in which she embodied the frustration of many climate activists:

Avoiding climate breakdown will require cathedral thinking. We must lay the foundation while we may not know exactly how to build the ceiling. (Thunberg, 2019)

The transition to sustainable energy may as well be a cathedral as it requires both a commitment to work over many decades and a firm belief in the transcendence of the effort. However, as Solnit explains, the cathedral of our common future will not be built only in grand plans but also in day-to-day actions that redefine whole cultures and societies because “a change of regime isn’t a change of culture and consciousness” (Solnit, 2024: n.p.). Creating long, deep, lasting change requires a myriad of actions, from the mundane to the extraordinary.

For many scholars and activists participating in this book, building a cathedral is an apt metaphor for the task at hand. We have been brought together by a shared belief that putting communities at the centre of action is the most effective and fair means of delivering a transition to sustainable energy. At the same time, we realise that community energy is not yet fully recognised as a transition option outside very specific contexts, such as remote rural areas without grid coverage where no other workable alternative is available. The transition is our cathedral. Community energy helps to build part of its foundations. Committing to community energy requires a leap of faith and the capacity to imagine a very different energy future.

Such a leap of faith has brought together a group of interdisciplinary scholars to investigate the possibilities, advancement, and challenges for community energy. The project Community Energy and the Sustainable Energy Transition in Ethiopia, Malawi, and Mozambique (CESET) is a collaborative multi-institutional research partnership funded by the UK’s Global Challenges Research Fund that explores the potential of community energy systems to accelerate inclusive, just, and clean energy transitions in Ethiopia, Malawi, and Mozambique. Putting the research focus on these three countries enables examining community energy contributions to the combined challenges of providing universal energy access, enabling the decarbonization of energy systems, and increasing communities’ resilience in the face of increasingly tangible climate impacts.

A recent report from a panel of African experts on the Just Transition argues that “new energy systems need to be powered by a large diversity of actors, not least common good oriented and non-profit maximising entities such as households, farmers, cooperatives, community associations, schools, universities, hospitals and other public service entities” also embracing diverse-sized renewable projects and mechanisms to democratise energy systems (Sokona et al., 2023: p. 50). This will require rethinking infrastructure models of energy development away from the model of the grid but also piloting multiple institutional arrangements for governance and ownership, such as cooperatives and partnerships, alongside the participation of the government and the business sector.

The experiences of the CESET countries have much to contribute to this debate. Ethiopia has pioneered community energy experiences, but the community energy model is still seen as a secondary strategy for energy access. Malawi has embraced community energy as a workable alternative to deal with the country’s enormous gap in access to electricity, but limited resources, the pressures of foreign exchange rates, and fragmented supply chains have stalled the development of projects. Mozambique adopted a new off-grid regulation in 2021 that could favour the entry of community energy, but the dominance of the public sector on infrastructure development and the emphasis on capital investments constrain the imaginations of what community energy can achieve in that country. Learning from these experiences, a key research question is: what is the potential for community energy to catalyse not just a technological but also a social, institutional, cultural, and economic transition to sustainable energy?

Community energy forces a revision of standard thinking about transition and whether transitions can be just. Zero-carbon climate-resilient futures must be addressed alongside social development programmes that address differential vulnerabilities that shape communities’ sensitivity to climate impacts and their capacity to respond (Lee et al., 2023). One response has been to call for transitions that incorporate justice as a core component of the actions to change energy sectors. Unfortunately, debates on the just transition have been dominated by an aspiration to develop conceptual clarity (e.g., Heffron & Heffron, 2021; Wang & Lo, 2021) at the expense of delivering practical responses tackling the drivers of oppression of people and the world—the drivers that lead to climate breakdown in the first place.

While transitions are often thought of as transforming the status quo, incumbent institutions—those who hold power—often adapt to changing conditions, shifting narratives to claim new forms of legitimacy (Novalia et al., 2021). Sometimes, innovative technologies become the instruments for elites to build such legitimacy (Swyngedouw, 1997). Often, lofty discourses of justice overlook the complex trade-offs that shape the political economy of energy and any transition occurring within it (Newell & Mulvaney, 2013). For example, transitions have different impacts at a distance, including the reconfiguration of supply chains for energy projects, which may lead to the creation of new ‘green sacrifice zones’ to satisfy new needs of mining and resource exploitation within the renewable energy industry (Zografos, 2022). There is, thus, great pessimism about the extent to which a transition will be able to shift the status quo and challenge the structural drivers of exclusion and exploitation within the energy system (Swilling et al., 2016). Even when just transition discourses are actively mobilised by political elites, they seem to have a limited impact on the well-being and lives of those who are most disadvantaged (Johnston et al., 2023).

Environmental justice scholars have long linked decision-making power to the deployment of knowledge and the construction of specific forms of rationality (Patel, 2009). Postcolonial studies of transition show that pervasive forms of coloniality are reproduced in dominant narratives of economic development that underpin the injustices and inequalities that a just transition is deemed to address (Johnston et al., 2023). Coloniality is also reproduced in well-intentioned discourses of justice and well-being through the imposition of certain models of thinking, such as aspirations to rational or clean modernities (Tamale, 2020). Postcolonial scholars have called for action that acknowledges how imperial legacies influence today’s unfair energy landscapes and thus shape the transition to sustainable energy (Swilling & Annecke, 2012).

In this context, community energy experiences in countries like Ethiopia, Malawi, and Mozambique reveal what future transitions are possible and how to deliver them. The CESET’s team has adopted a broad definition of community energy, encompassing communities with a shared energy-related interest and deploying collective actions which democratise the energy sector and enrol citizens in the management and governance of energy systems (Rincón-Rubio & Cedano-Villavicencio, 2023). Central to this definition is the possibility of generating plural perspectives on energy and bottom-up-led actions that can challenge existing forms of coloniality embedded in current systems of energy provision (Routledge et al., 2018; Sovacool et al., 2023). Community energy is also a means to redefine the systems of knowledge that underpin transition thinking and policy prescriptions. In doing so the CESET experience extends well beyond these countries providing specific insights for the slow transition that will eventually build the cathedral of a sustainable future. Thus, the question is not only about the role of community energy in a transition to sustainable energy, but specifically, in which ways community energy can act as an engine for social change, and how does community energy counters existing inequities in energy provision and use, including the recognition of the forms of oppression and discrimination that shape the process and outcomes of transitions.

The innovation of this book is that it attempts to answer these questions from the perspective of the experience of existing community energy projects on the ground, attending to the different factors that shape their feasibility and their impacts on communities and on the politics of energy. This requires examining community energy from an interdisciplinary perspective. Community energy projects are diverse: they require diverse knowledge in terms of the multiple technologies, resources, governance arrangements, and sizes that shape community energy projects. They are also diverse in terms of their integrations of heterogeneous communities that come together working for a common interest, sometimes with variable results. These topics require interdisciplinary—sometimes uneasy—dialogue across engineering, economics, and critical social science, the kind of dialogue that CESET seeks to foster. The result is a book of equally diverse contributions, full of lessons learned and experiences, but also full of warnings about unduly optimism about the potential for community energy. The book calls for moving away from ready-made recipes for community energy in favour of co-designing projects from the bottom up, led by the concerns and skills within the communities deemed to benefit from these projects. The book is grounded on a propositional attitude to infrastructure development focused on future possibilities within specific contexts rather than a particularistic critique of the structural constraints that prevent fairer infrastructural futures (Baptista & Cirolia, 2022). Such a propositional attitude goes hand in hand with a recognition of the importance of provisional responses to imagine infrastructural alternatives.

In summary, this book presents an interdisciplinary, grounded, but forward-looking—cathedral-building—perspective on the transition to sustainable energy, using community energy as the main proposition to examine the process and consequences of such transition. The rest of the introduction discusses community energy as a pragmatic response to activate a bottom-up transition to sustainable energy first, then discusses how community energy relates to current debates on just transitions and energy justice. The final part of the introduction provides an overview of the book's contributions.

1.2 Community Energy as a Pragmatic Response to the Transition to Sustainable Energy

Community energy, sometimes also referred to as energy communities, generally refers to specific situations in which the provision and use of energy are governed locally. There is no single definition of community energy: a systematic review of community energy definitions showed that precise definitions tend to be developed in relation to policy problems or specific contexts of study (Brummer, 2018). At the same time, this review identified that, while not universal, community energy projects tend to:

  • involve the deployment of renewable energy technology;

  • rely on decentralised infrastructure networks;

  • be developed at small, local scales;

  • serving a local area where production and consumption of energy take place in close proximity;

  • depend on diverse forms of participatory decision-making and community ownership.

Some scholars emphasise the notion of ‘integration’ (e.g., integrated community energy systems) in community energy because community energy projects generally involve a variety of local heat and electricity generation, flexible demand, and storage (Koirala et al., 2016). The development of online-based platforms has further enabled new models of peer-to-peer energy trading that have further diversified ideas about community energy and whether it is territorially located (Sousa et al., 2019; Zhang et al., 2017). Definitions are built on stories, and stories are built on examples. There is perhaps no example of community energy most famous than the Samsø Renewable Island Project in Denmark, which achieved 100% renewable energy supply in the short span of a decade through collective and cooperative-based action (Sperling, 2017). Projects such as this have inspired community action in other locations around the world. However, the emphasis on regional, technologically savvy projects distracts attention away from the fact that the majority of community energy projects are initiated in contexts with scarce resources in which communities work together to access markets and technologies. While technological advancements enable innovation in community energy (e.g., Huang et al., 2015), there is a risk that complicated technologies and larger-scale infrastructures will exclude the communities that should be at the centre of the action.

A major challenge in understanding community energy is precisely explaining what ‘community’ is. The idea of community is often taken for granted, but the literature shows that communities are neither bound to place nor delimited social networks (Creamer et al., 2018). Instead, community refers to a dynamic social group which is actively constructed through the process of building a common project. This is explored in depth in Chapter 3.

The question of understanding ‘community’ relates to one of the main features of community energy, having community ownership. Community ownership is not simply a pragmatic arrangement to manage a project. Rather, community ownership is one of the central features whereby community energy may enable the democratisation of the energy system, facilitating users’ participation in decision-making concerning energy services (Burke & Stephens, 2018). The challenge here is identifying who is the subject making decisions and how decisions are made. Communities are not homogeneous units with a single rationality (Rigon & Castán Broto, 2021). Moreover, this raises questions about whether there is a separation between the knowledge held by communities and the knowledge provided by energy experts, often from outside the community.

What is the contribution of community energy to transitions to sustainable energy? Community energy provides multiple benefits. Table 1.1 adapts the results of a systematic review, which examined the benefits of community energy documented in the US, Germany, and the UK (Brummer, 2018). The analysis is shaped by policy assumptions made in North American and European contexts, which may not be entirely relevant in Eastern and Southeastern African countries. Nevertheless, Table 1.1 shows the range of economic and social benefits associated with community energy, including building knowledge for future changes and developing endogenous innovation. At the same time, Table 1.1 demonstrates that the contribution of community energy to the transition is most often framed in terms of contributing additional generation capacity or in terms of raising awareness for changing lifestyles and improved attitudes towards renewables (e.g., Bauwens & Devine-Wright, 2018). Community energy is framed as an add-on to existing infrastructure configurations rather than a mechanism to change the fundamental technological regimes that shape them.

Table 1.1 Community energy benefits
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More recent work, however, has explored how community energy reconfigures infrastructure systems, in particular, through facilitating the decentralisation of energy generation. For example, a comparative study of 13 case studies of community energy in the Netherlands (including solar PV, biomass, and increased efficiency projects) investigated their contribution to the decentralisation of the energy network and the subsequent adoption of renewables (The Netherlands lags behind other European countries in the share of renewables within their energy mix) but were unable to reach a conclusion because the relatively young character of all the initiatives investigated (van der Schoor & Scholtens, 2015). Even in countries with a strong community energy policy, the spread of community energy remains aspirational.

A few factors may change the context of the development of community energy. First, as projects get slowly consolidated, there is growing evidence that community energy is a feasible response to providing energy access, particularly in contexts where there are no alternatives. The drive to attain Sustainable Development Goal 7—of providing universal energy access to clean energy by 2030—has revealed that current strategies for infrastructure development will not serve to bridge the enormous gaps in energy access, even more now that evidence increasingly shows that energy poverty is frequently reproduced under the grid (González-Eguino, 2015). Decentralised, modular, flexible systems are also considered more adaptable to changing conditions of infrastructure provision as rapid urbanisation and climate change deepen current infrastructure gaps. The benefits of community energy are thus not only related to economic benefits and the decarbonisation of the energy system but also to future visions that emphasise resilience as the main value shaping the design of infrastructure systems (see Chapter 2).

Community energy challenges the model of infrastructure provision that still dominates transition thinking. It proposes models for imagining infrastructure reconfiguration alongside the possibilities of more flexible technologies and away from networked models of urbanism and infrastructure planning (Coutard & Rutherford, 2015). Post-networked narratives may help assemble a different perspective away from the emphasis on infrastructure inadequacy and failure that pervade accounts of infrastructure development—particularly in Africa—and that seems to miss the embeddedness of infrastructures in systems of social and political integration (Silver, 2023). A post-networked model appears more attuned to the realities of infrastructure development in those locations where networked models of infrastructure never delivered on their promise of universal reach, but it is also associated with new patterns of inequality and displacement (Essex & de Groot, 2019). Because of its refusal to accept the traditional public and private-led models of energy provision, community energy poses a direct challenge to the institutional organisation and the actors of transitions, creating de facto new energy governance models of which the cooperative is but one example (Avelino & Wittmayer, 2016). For those who conceive the transition as a political struggle, the potential for community energy to change the fundamental structures of decision-making structures is their major asset (Burke & Stephens, 2018). Community energy operates both as an add-on that provides a Band-Aid solution to an inadequate energy system that perpetuates energy injustices and as a tool to potentially challenge the existing infrastructural politics of energy. Hence, it is imperative to consider community energy not just as a means for transitions but as a means for moving towards a just transition ideal.

1.3 Community Energy as an Instrument to Advance Justice in Transitions

CESET's foundational hypothesis is that community energy can contribute to making transitions to sustainable energy more just. A growing body of literature on energy justice informs this hypothesis. A certain consensus has emerged about defining energy justice in relation to the three pillars that have evolved with the literature on environmental justice: fair distribution of benefits and impacts, recognition of multiple subject positions and interests, and plural and active participation in decisions concerning energy provision and use (for some recent examples see: Jenkins et al., 2016, 2021). Within the transition, community energy can be seen to directly contribute to  reduce the enormous inequalities in access to energy while also providing opportunities to foreground marginalised perspectives on energy, move beyond technocratic prescriptions for energy development, prioritising social, human-centred development, and enabling people to actively participate in the development of renewable technologies. These outcomes, however, are heavily dependent on the manner of implementation, and community energy initiatives are not inherently just. Moreover, putting justice at the centre of the transition does not actually translate into resolving the broad drivers of discrimination that result in an unequal energy system: justice perspectives raise dilemmas that may be overlooked in the context of urgency—such as, for example, the need to mobilise a community around a common purpose to deliver the project’s benefits in a timely and efficient manner (Kumar et al., 2021).

Community energy projects are sometimes assessed in terms of their contribution to energy justice in ways that overlook the contradictions and dilemmas that emerge at the core of energy projects. However, the perspective on community energy projects changes when they are situated in broader contexts of energy production and consumption within the energy sector. Healy et al. (2019) have proposed to consider embodied energy injustices, that is, the interlinked chain of injustices that occur during the extraction, processing, transportation, and disposal of energy. This means that assessing how community energy addresses energy injustices cannot be limited to the specific moment of project conception and delivery. Inspired by this notion, van Bommel and Höffken (2021) have argued that community energy justice can be analysed at three different levels: actions within the initiatives themselves, in between the relations of those initiatives with a broader set of actors, and beyond the initiatives. This framework allows for a multidimensional understanding of justice within community energy, which reveals its interaction with the larger processes of social change that shape the transition to sustainable energy (Table 1.2).

Table 1.2 An expanding perspective of the role of community energy in advancing just transitions
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Table 1.2 contains multiple lessons. The first one is that advancing justice requires multiple actions at many levels, from the practical, localised action that takes place within independent community energy projects to the forms of narrative and institutional change that take place in the interactions within the networks of stakeholders that shape them, and within the broader political system. It is this third dimension that becomes more fundamental for understanding transitions.  Here, community energy reveals injustices and, through cumulative experiences, helps build alternative visions of sustainable futures. However, it would be an error to focus exclusively on these aspects of community energy development. For that reason, the focus of this book is not on discussing justice within projects but on understanding how community projects unfold within specific political contexts, activating changes across different levels of interaction.

1.4 Structure of the Book

This book focuses on bringing in perspectives from the countries of Ethiopia, Malawi, and Mozambique. These are all countries where there is a dynamic discussion on community energy and what it means for the development of the energy sector in each country. The discussions in these countries resonate with ongoing efforts to conceptualise the energy transition in the African context (Sokona et al., 2023). In addition, the discussions of the contribution of community energy to just transitions in those countries contain powerful lessons about the theory and practice of community energy that can be valuable elsewhere as community energy becomes a demanded alternative for sustainable energy. This contribution is even more critical in the current research context, dominated by anglophone perspectives on community energy that present as universal very provincial debates. For example, a recent bibliographic review analysed 263 articles on community energy from 1997 to 2018 and found that only 2% of the articles had a geographical location outside Europe and North America (van der Schoor & Scholtens, 2019). In contrast, 36% of the cases were in the UK and 10% in the US. Thus, empirical research from the UK and the US has driven interest in a body of research focused on how community energy impacts the acceptance of renewables—an issue that relates to the dynamics of the setting of renewable energy facilities in those countries, but that would be framed differently in other locations. Even the discussion provided in this chapter, based on a phronetic appraisal of the literature, rather than on a systematic review, demonstrates the dominance of the UK experience in current thinking on community energy. In this context, the empirical experiences of other countries where community energy is developing rapidly or changing transition discourses and the theoretical insights from those processes may be particularly important to challenge context-based assumptions that dominate current models and recommendations for community energy.

The CESET team is committed to developing a theoretical perspective on community energy from elsewhere. The contributions to this book are not only characterised by coming from situated locations (in relation to critical analyses of energy systems in Ethiopia, Malawi, and Mozambique), but also from multiple disciplinary outlooks—because the CESET team is a recognition that energy transitions require an interdisciplinary effort to understand technological change alongside the massive changes in society and politics that would make such technological changes appropriate and sustainable. The book is roughly divided into two sections: the first section focuses on developing a conceptual toolbox that can bridge disciplinary perspectives in thinking policy and action for community energy. They are led by scholars actively engaged in the practice of community energy. The book's second part focuses on distilling practical lessons from engaged efforts on the ground led by engineers and practitioners of community energy.

The book's first half engages with five key concepts that challenge current assumptions about community energy. These are resilience, community, gender, finance, and regulation. Chapter 2 analyses the relationship between community energy and community resilience. The chapter challenges current approaches to the benefits of community energy. In diverse fields such as ecology and engineering, resilience refers to the capacity of a system to withstand shocks. This term has travelled to community development policy to highlight the sustainability of communities, but by emphasising permanence, the term has often been prescriptive of conservative action directed towards keeping communities stable or operating within a given system. This chapter challenges such notions by reframing resilience as a means to transform communities to emphasise social development and community well-being—building the different forms of capital that enable a thriving community. Vallecha and To offer a persuasive account of the multiple ways in which community energy enables multi-level transformations that ultimately may lead to the activation of resilient communities within a fundamental unjust energy system.

Chapter 3 complicates the narrative of community energy by examining the notion of community closely, particularly seeking to put aside myths such as the purported homogeneity of communities and the idea that communities can be found ready to act in specific locations. Instead, the chapter portraits communities as dynamic and purposeful social arrangements that come together to claim collective spaces within an area of intervention. The chapter develops a notion of community that, without claiming community utopias, can deliver pragmatic means to challenge injustice from the local (e.g., through the development of appropriate conflict management plans) to the global (e.g., by collectively generating assessments of embedded energy injustices).

Chapter 4 engages with a feminist analysis of energy justice as a means to put justice and inequality at the centre of the community energy debate, in line with the concerns about just transitions explained above. Such a feminist lens cannot be advanced without paying tribute to a long-standing tradition of gender scholars working in energy studies, whose contributions were often ignored in a highly masculinist context of research. However, some of the debates on gender and energy have sometimes tended to simplify the nature of gender relations and essentialise gender roles, leading to simplistic assumptions that generate inadequate policy. For example, improved cookstove programmes directed at women may have overlooked the complex relations around cooking while also preventing the development of alternatives such as electric cooking. The challenge is that we hardly understand how gender relations impact energy access and resilience within specific communities because much of the empirical work in this area falls back on essentialist stereotypes and lacks disaggregated data. The chapter proposes an intersectional perspective moving beyond those contexts of energy development.

Finance is the main subject of Chapter 5. From the outset, CESET aimed to advance new ideas on alternative forms of finance for community energy, and agitated debates took place within the project team. Aran Eales kindly took these debates forward by examining the team's lofty aspirations in relation to the actual constraints in drawing the capital and facilitating the management of community energy projects. Two key insights emerge from Chapter 5. First, while ideals of self-financing of community energy are persistent, in reality, most community energy projects rely on external grants for survival. In Malawi, for example, ODA-related financing plays a significant role in making community energy possible, but ODA funding is not always available. The possibility of developing forms of alternative finance is related to the increasing availability of cheap technologies for community energy. Second, capital is not sufficient to make community energy available: key bottlenecks appear once projects are up and running during its maintenance and management, but these costs are routinely underestimated. Communities have the tools to reduce and manage these costs, particularly when they are given support to develop appropriate skills.

Chapter 6 engages with the other sacred cow of community energy: regulation. This multi-institutional collaboration emerges from a collective dialogue on the common assumption that more regulation facilitates transitions to sustainable energy and energy access and, even more, the proliferation of community energy. An empirical analysis of statistical data in the three countries demonstrates that this relationship is uneven and that the relationship between the development of regulations and energy access strongly depends on contextual factors about the needs of the country and the ways in which regulations are implemented. Nevertheless, the chapter provides a compelling case for increasing attention to regulation to foster a transition to sustainability with universal reach.

Chapters 7–11 seek to mobilise some of these concepts in different regulation, education, and practice contexts in Ethiopia, Malawi, and Mozambique. Chapters 7 and 8 explore the context of Ethiopia, a country that has pioneered government-led efforts to deliver decentralised energy but whose ambitious energy plans were curtailed by the civil war in Tigray (2020–2022). The chapters are led by leading scholars in the country who, during the duration of CESET, have  been involved in maintaining precarious energy infrastructures during the conflict. While Chapter 7 delivers a systematic analysis of the barriers to community energy within existing institutions and regulations in the country, Chapter 8 explores future potential through the development of education and skills needed for the energy transition. Chapter 8, in particular, incorporates some of the concerns about interdisciplinarity and gender developed in previous chapters to challenge the relatively homogeneous and technology-oriented landscape of energy education in the country. Chapters 9 and 10 focus on Malawi, a country with strong policies for community energy development fostered under the umbrella of international development programmes such as those led by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Chapter 9, led by a research group at the University of Mzuzu, a leading international research centre on people-centred energy studies. The chapter analyses the uneasy history of community development in Malawi, from the initial localised projects that were developed with grant funding in the 2000s to the more coordinated programmes that are taking place today. The comparative experience of multiple projects provides practical insights about what matters for community energy development. Two case studies presented in Chapter 10 examine these lessons. In Chapter 10 two community energy practitioners explain  their experiences seeking to inspire other practitioners working in the area. Chapter 11 brings together a group of experts on the political economy of energy systems in Mozambique to explain their perspectives on a changing regulatory context where top-down policies drive off-grid network development. The chapter shows the interrelated set of concerns that emerge during the implementation of regulatory frameworks as multiple actors and technologies interact in a changing landscape.

The final chapter comes back to the two main questions raised by the book about the role of community energy in fostering transitions and the extent to which community energy advances justice within changing contexts of energy provision and use. The chapter concludes that community energy holds significant promise but that this promise is invariably linked to its diversity: the diversity of technologies that characterise community energy and the diversity of people and social relations that characterise the communities that make it possible. Such diversity requires flexible approaches to developing community energy projects, seeking to take maximum advantage of the contextual opportunities offered by different political economy contexts but realising the inherent contradictions that community energy projects, always projects-in-the-making, may rise.