ABSTRACT
Community Renewable Energy (CRE) projects can play a pivotal role in providing universal energy access and rural sustainable development for off-grid communities in developing countries (DCs). To date, CRE initiatives have not been universally successful, and no accepted metrics for monitoring and evaluation of impacts and project outcomes are available. Hence, a review was conducted exploring the discourses around CRE initiatives in DCs and examining options for assessing project impacts and results. Assessment alternatives found were categorised into general and specific approaches. Interestingly: a) measurements related to specific challenges and success factors within CRE projects are frequently overlooked within available assessment frameworks; b) evaluation options tend to focus either on sustainability assessments or technical-economic analyses, but not on an integration of both; and c) it seems there is a preference by authors for using indicator-based evaluations, but without community feedback. Consequently, a new capability-based framework is also presented to improve monitoring and evaluation of these initiatives and therefore assist decision and policymaking to support future deployment of CRE in DCs.
