Neoliberal energy transitions in the South: Kenyan experiences
By P. Newell, Jon Phillips. 2016
176 citations recorded by the source corpus.
What is the relationship between the direction and form of an energy transition and the political economy within which it is embedded? This paper explores how the nature of (low carbon) energy transitions is strongly influenced by the process of neoliberalisation that shape energy policy in the South. We seek to understand emergent energy transitions and to advance their theorisation through an account of the political economy of energy transition in Kenya. In contrast to the often techno-managerial orientation of literatures on socio-technical transitions, we explore the political terrain upon which competing visions of energy futures and material interests collide and seek to accommodate one another. We develop a political economy account that emphasises the structural and disciplinary power of capital and global institutions to set the terms of transition. This expresses itself in both delimiting the autonomy of state actors and by reconfiguring domestic institutional and social power in ways that shape the distributional politics of transitions.
Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Pollution, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/feecc42751b38ff9864ade4bb02f706396be10a0
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Citations in the corpus
- Trasformismo or transformation? The global political economy of energy transitions (2018, background): “…may shed some light on is the extent to which and the ways in which countries’ freedom of manoeuvre to select energy pathways may be restricted by the disciplinary power of donors or international institutions, as in the case of Kenya’s ‘market-led’ energy transition (Newell & Phillips, 2016).”
- Imagining renewable energy: Towards a Social Energy Systems approach to community renewable energy projects in the Global South (2017, background): “Exploring the nexus between the direction and form of an energy transition and the political economy within which it is embedded, Newell and Phillips’s [84] study of neoliberal energy transitions in Kenya also presents a nuanced analysis to show how issues of power and political economy can play a k”