Tanja Winther

Empowerment Through Energy? Impact of Electricity on Care Work Practices and Gender Relations

Electricity provides a range of desirable services such as the electric light and the use of mobile phones and is regarded as a conditional factor for economic growth. Gender equality and womens empowerment are also promoted as a key to development on the international agenda. However, relatively little is known about how the advent of electricity in new contexts affects gender relations. The present analysis of electricitys impact on gender relations engages with the concepts of care work and empowerment. Based on two ethnographic case studies in rural communities in Uttar Pradesh, India, and Bamiyan, Afghanistan, we examine how and to what extent the introduction of electricity affected womens care work practices and empowerment – and potentially transformed gender relations. We also draw on our own empirical material from other parts of India (West Bengal and Jharkhand). We find that electricity affected everyday life in terms of providing important resources and enhancing womens opportunities to perform their expected role as care workers more efficiently and in a qualitatively better way. The women appreciated this positive effect of electricity in their everyday lives. However, we argue that in India, electricity at the same time reinforced structures of gender inequality such as patriarchy and dowry practices, and we trace this tendency to the conceptualisation of women as care workers in combination with conventional, gender ‘neutral’ electricity interventions. In contrast, there are signs that womens status increased in the Afghanistan case, which we link to the unusual inclusion of women engineers in the electricity supply.

Women’s empowerment through electricity access: scoping study and proposal for a framework of analysis

ABSTRACT This article reviews the empirical literature on women’s empowerment through electricity access and the methodologies that have been used. Statistical studies have looked at areas with access to the grid and measured the impact on welfare indicators and employment. Qualitatively oriented studies have looked at various types of supply and studied how electricity access in a given context has influenced women and men in everyday life, sometimes focusing on the role of the design of the systems of supply and the process of electrification. The overall results show that electricity access benefits the welfare of women as well as men, but that the impact on gender relations remains largely unclear. With the ambition to better understand the gendered nature – and impacts – of various types of electricity access, we develop a framework for analysing women’s empowerment through electricity and subsequently illustrate its applications by drawing on the reviewed empirical literature.

Impact evaluation of rural electrification programmes: what parts of the story may be missed?

Impact evaluations of electricity interventions have the methodological advantage that central parts of the intended outcomes are directly observable. However, in terms of measuring the social impact of interventions, electricity poses a particularly challenging field for evaluation due to the multifaceted and indirect ways electricity conditions various services in daily life. Another problem with regard to attribution is that electricity systems including their end use among private consumers take a long time to evolve. The paper draws on the author’s ethnographic work on the impact of electricity in various places and examines the methodology used in a selected evaluation of electricity’s impact in Mozambique. The intervention was funded by Norway and evaluated by Norplan AS on behalf of Norad. The analysis shows that the task at hand, to evaluate the impact on people’s living conditions, was narrowed down and mainly implied focusing on the number of connections and examining people’s consumables and a segment of their finances. Some of the sources for this reduction are traced to the Terms of Reference, which limited the scope of the study, for example, by avoiding asking the evaluator to assess the effects of electrification on various groups. Methodological choices, such as using the household as a unit of analysis, implied that potentially important data on the significance of the wider social networks and gender aspects were disregarded in the analysis. The paper concludes that the use of quantitative methods in impact evaluations of electrification would bring more valuable knowledge if they were preceded by a thorough, qualitative examination of the sociocultural and material context and gave more attention to the process of electrification. The author also discusses some ethical considerations connected to conducting large-scale surveys.

Electricity Consumption: Should There Be a Limit? Implications of People's Attitudes for the Forming of Sustainable Energy Policies

Authors’ note Our interest in socially and environmentally sustainable development derives from a deep concern for the current global state of affairs. The effects of climate change are felt dramatically in many parts of the world (one of us has done fieldwork in West Bengal where the number of floods and cyclones is increasing and in Kenya where droughts are threatening people’s livelihoods). In countries like Norway, however, the pressing global concerns seem distant, and consumption levels remain high. In light of this, we are concerned with Western policies and the apparent lack of willingness to introduce efficient tools for change, which seems to be a task that policy has largely left up to the individual consumer. As an economist interested in the multifaceted aspects of behaviour and an anthropologist trying to understand and convey people’s own perspectives and realities, we aim to show how interdisciplinary approaches, together with people-centred empirical material, could contribute to the forming of policy for sustainable development.

Revisiting household energy rebound: Perspectives from a multidisciplinary study

In this paper, an interdisciplinary team of economists and anthropologists study the perplexing case of Norwegian households’ heat pump ownership. The heat pump is a technology that has the potential to reduce electricity consumption by up to 25% compared to conventional electric heating, but, as we demonstrate in this study, when taken into use it results in little or no change in electricity consumption. To explain this large rebound effect, we use a quantitative economic analysis combined with qualitative interviews attuned towards examining the effect of heat pumps on people’s everyday practices. We find that, on average, households with and without a heat pump use approximately the same amount of electricity. The main sources of rebound identified was higher indoor temperature and heated living space, less firewood and fuel oil use and less use of night-set-backs or reduced temperature while away from the home.