Keywords

4.1 Introduction

This chapter engages with gender equality and social inclusion as central aspects of community energy. Chapter 1 presented community energy as a tool to accelerate a just transition to sustainable energy. Two characteristics make this possible. First, community energy can act as a mechanism for social change, bringing together communities to gain control and autonomy over their energy supply. Second, community energy can identify differential vulnerabilities and capacities, helping deliver inclusive outcomes in energy access and improved resilience. However, community energy is not a neutral tool, and it does not advance social inclusion objectives on its own. Implementing community energy projects in a just way requires careful consideration of how existing structures of oppression, discrimination, and exclusion may be reproduced through new projects and dreams of community futures.

A just transition creates opportunities for everyone, distributes impacts fairly, and follows a negotiated approach to decision-making at all levels. Transitions, however, start from the point of entrenched social inequalities. They often fail to challenge existing inequities, and in the worst cases, they may reinforce them. For example, all countries face a gender gap in the energy sector that directly impacts the workforce and decision-making for energy-related decisions that impact everyone (Clancy & Feenstra, 2019). This gender gap hinders the transition to sustainable energy regarding who can be included in the process and how transition outcomes impact different populations. Other signifiers of inequality, such as nation, race, class, or sexuality, may also shape the outcomes of transitions, but to date, they have received limited attention in the literature (Newell, 2021).

This chapter proposes a feminist perspective on community energy to tackle the challenges of gender equality head-on. First, the chapter examines how gender inequalities manifest in the energy transition as a point of entry to examine the question of difference. Second, the chapter argues for expanding the concern with gender to an intersectional perspective that tackles multiple forms of inequality, engaging with the theoretical implications of such a move. Third, the chapter explores what it means to develop an intersectional perspective on community energy. Finally, the chapter ends with a reflection on the strategies used within the CESET project to facilitate research practices that put an intersectional perspective on community energy at its core.

4.2 Feminist Perspectives on Energy Transitions

Debates on energy policy have emphasised a notion of energy access as transformative, not only providing economic benefits but also redefining social structures and gender relations. As interests have moved towards a transition to ensure universal access to renewable energy, the emphasis on gender has become more prominent, emphasising the active role that women can play in activating positive change in the energy sector. For example, the Gender and Energy Compact, developed by a coalition of public, private, and civil society actors under the auspices of the United Nations, aims “to catalyse action towards gender equality and women’s empowerment to accelerate a just, inclusive and sustainable energy transition.”Footnote 1 The Compact highlights measures to facilitate women’s empowerment, to lead and participate in the transition, and to gain control (not just access) over sustainable energy (Table 4.1). According to the Compact, this requires more projects putting women at their centre, changes in strategies and policies, access to finance and business services, career development measures, and higher-quality knowledge, for example, by collecting gender-disaggregated data.

Table 4.1 Summary of the multi-stakeholder Gender and Energy Compact launched in 2022
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The Compact is innovative in its treatment of the energy transition through a gender lens. It resonates with the concern that the energy transition cannot be assumed to deliver universal benefits and that its benefits and impacts are differentiated by, among other factors, gender (Rewald, 2017; Tjørring, 2016). Initiatives like the Compact also recast women away from the notion of hapless victims (Buckingham & Le Masson, 2017). Instead, women’s empowerment, especially in terms of access and control over resources, has become the main strategy to address gender issues in energy policy and practice (Winther et al., 2017). For example, understanding how women entrepreneurs benefit from electricity (because women tend to lead smaller and more frugal enterprises) may inform strategies to maximise those benefits (Pueyo & Maestre, 2019). Women are also considered active participants, playing specific roles leading the transition (Allen et al., 2019), and facilitating innovation (Anditi et al., 2022; Baruah, 2015). A gender lens is presented as a condition for successful renewable energy projects (Gray et al., 2019). Gender inequality also hinders delivering energy justice (Feenstra & Özerol, 2021). The transition is presented as a dynamic process which requires women to play an active role. However, as the feminist literature has emphasised, portraying women in this way also shifts the burden to women in terms of reclaiming their space in the energy sector.

Women’s access to green jobs in the energy transition is a concern, as women tend to be restricted to administrative jobs with little decision-making power (Winther et al., 2017). There is a gender performance gap whereby fewer women than men benefit from employment in the transition. The causes for this gap entail a mix of external and internal constraints, from the difficulties for women technicians to access the renewable energy sector to the cultural prejudices that may lead young women to study energy engineering (Pueyo & Maestre, 2019). Systematic reviews have shown that transitions to renewable energy have both positive and negative impacts on gender equality and that they tend to shift, rather than eliminate, inequalities, for example, reproducing the prejudices that prevent women from accessing the field of energy engineering (Johnson et al., 2020).

While the gender gaps are an empirical reality of the energy transition, the emphasis on women obscures the complex working of gender relations in the energy sector. Such debates mirror previous debates on gender and development that proposed moving beyond empowering women to challenge gender-based power relations that generate difference (Moser, 2017). The extractive and market processes involved in the energy sector have profound impacts on gender relations (Cielo & Sarzosa, 2018). A narrow focus on gender differences distracts attention from the forms of discrimination already inscribed in the category of gender. In India, for example, male operators of renewable energy face discrimination because their existence does not fit toxic notions of masculinity and gender binary logic (Pergetti, 2023). Their work is hidden and undervalued, downplaying the importance of this work and the skills required to deliver it (Pergetti, 2023). Discourses of ‘petro-masculinity’ that link misogynistic gender models to racist projects of nationhood and fossil fuel exploitation are inspiring new authoritarian social movements that hinder and slow down the just transition (Daggett, 2018). Inequities are embedded in the constitution of social roles in ways that manifest structurally but also through everyday interactions, assumptions of normality, and learnt behaviours.

Research and policy often present women as disadvantaged actors and uncritically emphasise the benefits of energy access without considering the broader social and political conditions in which such access happens (Rewald, 2017). Commonly held beliefs about gender in energy policy, such as ideas that link modernisation and productivity to improvements in quality of life and the focus on single technologies that would ‘save’ women, are, in fact, myths because they find no justification in practice. Such gender and energy myths shape policies and strategies as they are used to legitimate and instrumentalise specific technologies or projects, sometimes at the expense of gender equality outcomes (Listo, 2018). They also may help to justify the continued use of fossil fuels (Wilson, 2018).

The transition, however, calls for feminist perspectives that challenge structures of patriarchy and capitalism at the heart of fossil fuel cultures, which goes beyond a focus on gender differences (Bell et al., 2020). Feminist thinkers have tried to develop alternative perspectives by reframing problems, focusing on implementation and governance, and offering long-term visions and ideals (Cannon & Chu, 2021). Community energy may provide opportunities to activate such a transformative feminist perspective in practice. Still, it is also open to forms of appropriation that may reproduce the very gender relations it aims to challenge. The strategy here is to think of community energy through an intersectional perspective, which can capture the interconnected nature of multiple forms of discrimination and exclusion. At the same time, an intersectional perspective challenges the categories themselves that enable such discrimination. For example, gender and energy critiques focused on binary conceptions of gender and sex reinforce, rather than challenge, the conceptual structures that reproduce gender-related inequities (Fathallah & Pyakurel, 2020). The following section explains some of the insights from such an intersectional perspective, before exploring its implications for the energy transition and community energy.

4.3 Intersectionality: Potential and Challenges

Intersectionality provides a way of looking at the world by recognising the varied impacts that structures of power and control have on different subjectivities. Individuals connect with society and others through the signifiers of identity that shape who they are, but these same signifiers condition experiences and behaviours. Intersectionality calls to interrogate the combined impact of different forms of identification as they translate into situated, unique experiences. This means challenging the very categories used to name those experiences, their homogeneous application (e.g. there are many ways of being a woman) and the political affiliations they generate. To understand how the transition to sustainable energy reduces or exacerbates existing social inequalities, intersectionality is both a tool to reveal the dynamic and interconnected nature of inequalities and a means to foster radical social change:

Intersectionality investigates how intersecting power relations influence social relations across diverse societies as well as individual experiences in everyday life. As an analytic tool, intersectionality views categories of race, class, gender, sexuality, class, nation, ethnicity and age – among others – as interrelated and mutually shaping one another. Intersectionality is a way of understanding and explaining complexity in the world, in people, and in human experiences. (Collins & Bilge, 2020: p. 29)

As a tool for revealing inequalities, intersectionality not only recognises particularity but also warns that the assumed universality of identity categories (women, black) can become a means of oppression. In her classic work on intersectionality, Crenshaw examined how the categorical separation of gender and race in antidiscrimination law failed groups at the margins, such as black women (Crenshaw, 1989). The term intersectionality has encapsulated a long-held demand from black feminism while expanding to embrace multiple social justice projects across academia (Collins, 2019). In energy studies, intersectionality is approached as a principle to understand identity as an intersection of multiple categories of difference that challenges entrenched categorisations—such as the homogeneous vulnerable woman, which dominates energy policy (Pergetti, 2023).

There is a risk that such an approach is translated into an additive formula of spatially or temporally rooted inequalities. First, by ‘intersection’ the emphasis is on how different identification categories interact with overlapping or conflicting effects (Cho et al., 2013). Second, intersectionality rejects categories that hold connotations of unity and stability and that, in doing so, simplify the experiences of inequality and reproduce an essentialist logic (Carastathis, 2013; Walby et al., 2012). Intersectionality is itself a critique of uncritical forms of categorisation. Third, intersectionality insists that the attention should be redirected towards the structures of power that create discrimination rather than mapping difference (Cho et al., 2013; Crenshaw, 1991). Categories of difference also matter insofar as they are able to articulate alliances and political coalitions to counter such projects of domination (Carastathis, 2013; Matsuda, 1990). In summary, intersectionality calls for a situated analysis of power structures as they translate into social categorisation, which in turn determines how individuals and groups relate to energy systems and their impacts (Kaijser & Kronsell, 2014).

This is why intersectionality emerges as much more than an analytical tool. A history of engagement with the lived political realities of marginalised people has made intersectionality a practical tool to achieve social change (Collins, 2019). In the context of the transition to sustainable energy, intersectionality highlights the interconnections between the structures of exploitation and the oppression and discrimination of groups of people on the basis of identity (Newell, 2021; Wilson, 2018). These intersecting forms of oppression call for flexible solidarities alongside forms of epistemic resistance (Collins, 2019). In the case of the transition to sustainable energy, this involves articulating collective claims to energy sovereignty, claiming the exploitation of resources, the technological systems that support them, and the forms of infrastructural violence they create (Castán Broto, 2017). Intersectionality raises ‘who’ questions: who acts, who receives, and how that leads to particular operations of political power in energy transitions (Ryder, 2018). The ultimate objective is not to navigate but to dismantle existing forms of discrimination.

4.4 An Intersectional Perspective on Community Energy

Intersectionality has become popular in many fields, but often, this has been by adapting concepts and methods to the new concerns raised by intersectionality rather than accepting intersectionality’s fundamental challenge to existing conceptualisations of social life (Cho et al., 2013). This chapter aims to show how intersectionality helps rethink the transition to sustainable energy and the role of community energy, first, by positioning community energy as a strategy that puts social equality at the heart of the energy transition and, second, by exploring what an intersectionality perspective may mean for the deployment of community energy projects.

4.4.1 Intersectional Transitions and Community Energy

Identifying the structures of privilege that shape the transition to sustainable energy becomes the first analytical task for the intersectionality scholar (Garcia & Tschakert, 2022). In this case, the reproduction of a networked ideal camouflages patriarchal and colonial power under the pretence of universal service provision (Coutard, 2008; Graham & Marvin, 2002). Post-networked ideals are paradoxical because they advance a political critique of universalism while accepting the retreat of the state and the liberalisation of services (Coutard & Rutherford, 2015). Their rise corresponds to a parallel rise in the popularity of resilience ideals as situated and grounded, explicitly addressing power's workings (see Chapter 2). While off-grid systems offer hope, they effectively shift the burden of work to the disadvantaged populations which will putatively benefit from them (Castán Broto, 2022).

From a feminist perspective, distributed and decentralised fuel power challenges existing power structures (Bell et al., 2020). Decentralisation is a crucial pillar of a feminist perspective on the transition to sustainable energy together with a plural policy landscape, an impulse to center care for humans and the Earth, the rejection of any form of exploitation, and the scepticism towards technosolutionism (Table 4.2). The challenge is that empirical evidence does not follow directly from feminist theory. As explained above, research on inequalities in energy access has tended to use universal categories, fixating, for example, on the benefits of electrification or any other energy innovation to the lives of women, and they have hardly considered the impacts of different systems on different populations. Claims on the benefits of low-carbon or off-grid developments on the lives of disadvantaged groups (with an abstract category of women often standing for those) rarely present tangible evidence of local and immediate impacts (Rewald, 2017).

Table 4.2 Dimensions of a feminist research agenda on the transition to sustainable energy
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Table 4.2 shows how community energy projects respond to feminist ideals of the transition to sustainable energy. Community energy works when the community concerned mobilises to claim sovereignty over its energy resources. The community needs to activate a coalition-building process to mobilise flexible solidarities, in which the priority is not to leave anyone behind. Notions of plurality and dialogue are coupled with the realities of technology access for communities to claim autonomy over their present and future energy (Castán Broto, 2017). Such a unique process can be transformative, but it also poses complex questions of inclusion within every community energy project as it unfolds.

4.4.2 Making Community Energy Work for Everyone

In practice, intersectionality requires situating any categorisations of identity in their historical and geographical contexts and not  treating any single category in isolation. Gender, or any other form of identity, should also not be treated as synonymous with marginalisation. Any gender projects should recognise instead the locations of privilege and the dynamics of discrimination. For community energy projects, this means engaging actively with the process whereby a community comes together in the form of a coalition and how they advance particular projects of self-improvement, in this case in the energy sector, remembering that no project is intrinsically positive for everyone (Ojong, 2021). This does not mean, however, overlooking the constraints faced by social groups facing discrimination. Women, for example, face bundled constraints in accessing labour markets in renewable energy, which directly impact their participation as active agents in community energy projects (Table 4.3). A community energy project may start by reviewing how these bundled constraints impact women, but it cannot do so without asking ‘the other question’ (Carastathis, 2013; Matsuda, 1990), for example, who are the people who face barriers to access skills and education and why?

Table 4.3 Addressing the bundled constraints faced by women through community energy systems
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A community energy project will require co-production to bring together different actors, challenge their assumptions, and develop collective goals. Castán Broto and Neves Alves (2018) developed an analytical tool to think of intersectionality in relation to the co-production outcomes that community energy projects may aspire to (Table 4.4). The outcomes of co-production vary, ranging from the production of a design, the facilitation of institutional innovation, the development of new inclusive decision-making processes, and the creation of new systems of signification. For example, a community energy project will produce a context-specific design, new institutions to manage and maintain the project that include the community, a decision-making process that puts the community at its centre, and new ideas about energy access and the kinds of dependencies that reproduce inequalities in energy access. These are all overlapping stages in which the community will have a say. For the communities to have such a say, they need to be recognised as legitimate interlocutors of the project. That, however, is not always easy (see Chapter 3). First, there is a question of what the community is and who belongs to it. Second, there is a question about how the community is perceived from the outside. Third, there is a question about the extent to which the community is recognized as a legitimate interlocutor by various actors. Fourth, there is a question of the inherent deficit of credibility that some people face by virtue of their position in society (this deficit of credibility is called epistemic injustice). Each of these elements poses a specific recognition challenge, to which intersectionality approaches provide a range of insights.

Table 4.4 Intersectionality dimensions of service co-production
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In summary, the operationalisation of intersectionality will vary across implementation contexts, but three principles may help start the analysis:

  • To recognize people at the receiving end of diverse forms of institutional, structural, and cultural discrimination that prevent their flourishing and

  • To recognize people as active agents in charge of their own futures rather than as passive receivers of the benefits of a given community energy intervention.

  • To direct action towards dismantling structural barriers to emancipation and making it possible for people to use their capacities to improve their autonomy and flourishing and recognise the location of privilege.

4.5 Implementing an Intersectional Perspective in a Research Project on Community Energy

How to put equality and intersectionality at the core of CESET? Challenging inequality must become an ongoing process in which structural and cultural barriers are challenged through a centripetal intersectional practice (Cho et al., 2013): one that decentres the assumptions and philosophy of the project. This means mobilising a concern with inequality in every structural decision about the project, but also in day-to-day behaviours and attitudes. For CESET, intersectionality is a diagnostic tool to analyse the drivers of inequity, support civil struggles, and prevent unnecessary harm. Paraphrasing the Combahee River Collective Statement (1977), a key objective of the project is ‘not to mess with people’ in the name of externally imposed project goals. While these aspirations are laudable, there are many challenges to delivering them in practice. Perhaps the most salient is that CESET researchers are not members of the communities where energy projects are being developed, although over time some of those members have been brought into dialogue with the team (see, as an example, Chapters 10 and 11).

CESET aims to recognize the drivers of inequality (using the project to challenge them) and mobilise existing capacities and possibilities that support emancipatory directions. The off-grid energy lab (CESET’s Work Package 4) will be implemented by the Universidade Eduardo Mondlane together with CESET’s delivery partner, SCENE and the University of Sheffield. The objective is to create a laboratory to build local capacities for understanding and delivering renewable energy. We are also investigating how the project could provide energy services to a local community (e.g., energy for a community hub, street lighting, or directly to households). CESET’s plan is to develop an off-grid, flexible system that could grow organically through the support and collaboration of residents. Early on, it was deemed that women's needs were underrepresented in Mozambique's energy policy, and thus, the project developed policy recommendations that brought the team into a dialogue with the Ministry of Mineral Resources and Energy (MIREME), dring their development of a gender strategy (Table 4.5). In doing so, the project has fostered a cross-institutional dialogue on gender and energy: a starting point for further policy development.

Table 4.5 Recommendations to advance gender equality objectives in CESET
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However, these suggestions alone are not sufficient to deliver the coalitions that will deliver just energy through community energy projects. The category of ‘women’ (or even ‘women and other’) presents its own challenges. The lab will be implemented in the neighbourhood of Chamanculo, in Maputo. Multiple factors, from origin to political affiliation, shape the power structures of the neighbourhood alongside more conventional class and gender lines. The project needs to engage with such power structures while also building bridges to mobilise the flexible solidarities that support emancipatory coalitions.

For this reason, CESET’s approach cannot rely solely on a set of policy recommendations or prescriptions. The point is to move from aspirational utopias and engage with practical actions on the ground, with the kind of care already anticipated in black feminist thought. Three challenges that conflict with the delivery of community energy are:

  • The centrality of ideas of care and mutual support to enable the participation of all kinds of people while also understanding how certain groups carry a disproportionate burden of care work.

  • The need to demystify technologies and make them accessible to everyone.

  • The importance of breaking with epistemic injustice and giving credibility to people’s experiences.

A feasible approach is one accepting of the dynamic and incomplete process of making an alliance, in which the most important challenge is to keep checking in. A starting point could be to reflect on the development of the project. For that task, Castán Broto and Neves Alves (2018) provide a set of questions that enables a continuous and generous engagement with the minutiae of building political and technological power at the community level (Table 4.4). Table 4.6 reimagines those questions in the case of community energy. These questions have been discussed across the project team and with community leaders, to facilitate local leadership in the implementation of CESET’s energy lab. As the project is being delivered in the spring of 2024, the team is looking forward to see what transformations will it foster.

Table 4.6 Questions for the continuous evaluation of intersectionality concerns in the CESET lab
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So, this chapter concludes as an open process of rethinking and reimagination: Without strong prescriptions for action. Instead, the chapter provides an invitation to embrace complexity as a constitutive factor of everyday life in which justice is always an objective in the horizon capable of inspiring shared commitments across perspectives and understandings.