ABSTRACT
Globally, the energy sector carries the biggest responsibility for man-made climate change. The most vulnerable communities to climate impacts are often those with the lowest rate of energy access. This is thus a pressing ethical issue. In Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), women in rural areas are found to be even more vulnerable and in more crucial need of energy services. They are the focus of this chapter, which adopts a normative framework based on the concept of energy justice and using the capability approach lens. Quantitative and qualitative evidence from an extensive survey of 2,290 households in a three-year project is used to propose a diagnostic from energy justice principles and to identify local interventions to operationalize these principles in the region. Based on empirical evidence and our theoretical framework, the main conclusions are that a capability approach to energy justice requires and is more efficient with a bottom-up approach for both policy and monitoring (e.g., eliminating the least efficient cookstoves). Also, without specific improvements in social justice for women in rural areas, increasing electricity offers (energy access) in rural areas is unlikely to translate into more energy services for women and thus more energy justice. Our empirical as well as conceptual work thereby offers a valuable contribution to the nascent literature on energy justice, providing insights on ways to better operationalization of the energy justice framework in rural SSA and in other developing world contexts.
