Ethnicity as a social determinant of energy poverty: the case of Mexican indigenous population

Abstract

ABSTRACT Despite an extensive literature on energy poverty, the prevalence of this problem in the indigenous populations is an underexplored area. Additionally, in Mexico and Latin America energy poverty is just an emerging research field. This paper contributes to mobilising the debate on energy poverty in indigenous populations, being the first to focus on ethnicity as a social determinant of energy poverty, and by providing elements to support progressive public policies targeting the most vulnerable populations. With a quantitative approach, an exploratory scope, and incorporating the ethnic approach as a multidisciplinary tool to diagnose and measure social inequalities, this paper analyses energy poverty in the Mexican indigenous population and measures the social inequities in energy experienced by these ethnic groups with respect to non-indigenous Mexican populations. Finding that the main efforts of the federal government have focused on electrification. However, the federative entities with the largest national proportion of the indigenous population, particularly Chiapas, Oaxaca, and Guerrero present a systematic pattern of social inequalities in all energy poverty dimensions, linked to the concentration of extreme multidimensional poverty. This is reflected in the high Energy Effort Rate, low availability of energy consumption goods and services, the exacerbated use of firewood or coal for cooking as a strategy of self-restraint to coping energy poverty, as well as a high housing precariousness, despite the high housing tenure rate. Concluding that in Mexico, due to historical Sate discrimination, ethnicity is a social determinant of energy poverty, and this could be accentuated in subgroups of the indigenous population.