Large dams, energy justice and the divergence between international, national and local developmental needs and priorities in the global South

Giuseppina Siciliano,Frauke Urban,May Tan-Mullins,Giles Mohan

doi:10.1016/j.erss.2018.03.029

Giuseppina Siciliano, Frauke Urban + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2018.03.029

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Abstract

This paper investigates from a socio-technical and energy justice perspective the lack of coordination of international, national and local developmental priorities and inclusion of local needs in the decision making process of large dam construction in the global South. The paper argues that the analysis of energy infrastructures as socio-technical systems requires an energy justice approach to capture the true environmental and social nature of energy production and consumption. In doing so, this paper proposes a conceptual framework called “The Energy Justice Framework for Dam Decision-Making” as a tool to inform energy decisions on infrastructure development based on energy justice principles and social impact assessment. The proposed framework is used in this paper to analyse distributional, procedural, restorative justice, and power relations throughout the entire dams’ energy system in the case of four large dams located in Africa and Asia, namely Kamchay dam in Cambodia, Bakun dam in Malaysia, Bui dam in Ghana and the planned Zamfara dam in Nigeria.

Highlights

One of the main goal of the Sustainable Energy for All initiative promoted by the United Nations is to ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy by 2030 from renewable sources, such as wind, water, solar, biomass and geothermal (United Nations, 2015)
We present an energy justice decision making framework that can be used as a tool to inform energy decisions on infrastructure development based on energy justice principles (Sovacool et al, 2016; 2017) and social impacts’ evaluation (Kirchherr and Charles, 2016)
This paper has showed that large energy infrastructures should be analyzed as socio-technical systems and from an energy justice perspective and in economic and technical terms but as a highly political decision, involving the satisfaction of competing preferences and needs in society

Summary

Introduction

One of the main goal of the Sustainable Energy for All initiative promoted by the United Nations is to ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy by 2030 from renewable sources, such as wind, water (i.e. hydropower), solar, biomass and geothermal (United Nations, 2015). Energy accounts for approximately 60% of global greenhouse gas emissions, reducing the carbon intensity of energy production by increasing the share of renewable energy in the global energy mix is seen as a key objective in long term climate policies’ strategies (United Nations, 2015). Sub-Saharan Africa and developing Asia account collectively for 97% of the total population without access to electricity (IEA, 2017). Building hydropower dams has become an attractive policy solution to mitigate the climate and fuel development, especially in energy poor countries (IEA, 2016; World Bank, 2017). Many new large dam projects are planned in Sub-Saharan Africa with a projected increase in the share of electricity supply from 22% in 2014 to 26% in 2040 (IEA, 2014). Southeast Asian countries plan to construct 61 gigawatts (GW) of new hydroelectric generating capacity by 2020 (Mayes, 2015)

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