Energy for empowerment: the role of energy in women’s organising and empowerment in urban and peri-urban South Africa

Abstract

In feminist scholarship empowerment has been extensively theorised and critiqued, yet it has only recent emerged as a critical concept in energy and gender thinking. An emerging body of studies have begun to more critically theorise empowerment and the links with energy access, yet these studies give less emphasis to key aspects of empowerment as it is conceived by feminist scholars, including collectivity or community, process and social practice. In this thesis, I bring such elements into the conversation of energy, gender and empowerment, and so contribute to an ongoing tradition of feminist energy scholarship.The central aim is to explore the practices and experiences of women who are collectively organising to improve their energy systems, and the role of energy in the process of their empowerment. I do so in the context of urban and peri-urban contexts in South Africa, a country with its own tradition of gender-specialist and feminist researchers and advocates with a focus on energy. Specifically, I address:1) How, and through what practices, are women collectively organising for better energy systems?2) In what ways does organising for energy facilitate women’s empowerment?3) What role does energy play in transforming gendered identities and empowerment?My orientation is explicitly feminist and I am guided by a theoretical framework of feminist concepts, namely gender, empowerment and power. I hold the notion of empowerment with complexity, embracing the significant debates which underpin its theorisation. I investigate three case studies in urban and peri-urban South Africa, of organised groups of self-identifying women, such as people’s movements, or women’s committees, which are active at a local community level and supported by external NGOs. I have taken a feminist methodological approach, with the intention of transformative research practice and attention to both academic and political rigour. This included qualitative data collection methods, adapting a combination of narrative methods such as Oral History Interviews, and Collective Narrative Practice methods with both women and the NGOs to draw out stories and experiences of women as individuals and as collectives.I found that energy, rather than being a causal factor, is intertwined with broader societal institutions and norms which drive the conditions gendered disempowerment and inequality. Equally, energy is intertwined with femininities, conceived as shared expressions gender. In analysing the role of NGO interventions in shaping women’s experiences of collective empowerment, I unearthed the significant influence of community practice in enabling empowerment. Finally, I examined women’s experiences of empowerment, and the factors they identified as crucial to increasing their power. I found that while the materiality of energy played a role in this process, equally significant were intangible resources such as relationships, learning and theory, and skills, and in these contexts energy’s immaterial nature was also significant. In examining this notion further, I found energy to be important as a shared vision or sociotechnical imaginary in collective gendered empowerment. As such, I call for a retheorisation of energy in relation to gendered empowerment, as both a material (embedded in social practices), and as theory or imaginary, (as a set of meanings and visions in and of itself). These expanded theorisations of empowerment and energy have implications for the work of researchers, policymakers and practitioners. I offer an alternative approach to facilitating gendered empowerment with energy interventions, which I name ‘transformative energy literacy’. ​​​​​​​