Beyond technology and finance: pay-as-you-go sustainable energy access and theories of social change
By Paula Rolffs, D. Ockwell, Robert Byrne. 2015
152 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Two-thirds of people in sub-Saharan Africa lack access to electricity, a precursor of poverty reduction and development. The international community has ambitious commitments in this regard, e.g. the UN's Sustainable Energy for All by 2030. But scholarship has not kept up with policy ambitions. This paper operationalises a sociotechnical transitions perspective to analyse for the first time the potential of new, mobileenabled, pay-as-you-go approaches to financing sustainable energy access, focussing on a case study of pay-as-you-go approaches to financing solar home systems in Kenya. The analysis calls into question the adequacy of the dominant, two-dimensional treatment of sustainable energy access in the literature as a purely financial/technology, economics/ engineering problem (which ignores sociocultural and political considerations) and demonstrates the value of a new research agenda that explicitly attends to theories of social change – even when, as in this paper, the focus is purely on finance. The paper demonstrates that sociocultural considerations cut across the literature's traditional two-dimensional analytic categories (technology and finance) and are material to the likely success of any technological or financial intervention. It also demonstrates that the alignment of new payas- you-go finance approaches with existing sociocultural practices of paying for energy can explain their early success and likely longevity relative to traditional finance approaches.
Subfields: Business and International Management, Global and Planetary Change, Pollution
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5b619db0f49b9792866fac239a34fe4be0ba8b27
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Citations in the corpus
- Ordering theories: Typologies and conceptual frameworks for sociotechnical change (2017, unknown): “Expectations can also play a role in articulating a future in which particular socio technical configurations are featured (Rolffs et al., 2015).”
- Sustainability transitions in developing countries: Major insights and their implications for research and policy (2017, background): “On the other hand, it is observed that many centralised state programmes are target-oriented and subsidy-driven, and thus provide little incentive for learning, monitoring and evaluating innovations (Rolffs et al., 2015; Rehman et al., 2010) or energy efficiency financing (Streitferdt et al.”