Sustainability is not a thing: It's hard work! Recognizing the middlemen of operations and maintenance for feminist energy systems in India's Sundarbans

Abstract

The work it takes to operate and maintain energy systems is essential yet often missing from public and scholarly discourses on energy transitions. Such discourses often reduce sustainability to a property of energy sources and/or technologies, thereby discounting the hard work it takes to sustain energy systems in the long term. Building on insights from feminist theory, the paper conceptualizes this work as care work – key to the reproduction of energy systems past the original moments of design and production – and considers the question of who cares for energy systems as having both social justice and sustainability implications. Informed by primary data collected during 15 months of fieldwork on an island of India's Sundarbans, the paper connects two separate conversations in ERSS: the first aims at exploring the gender-energy nexus; the second calls attention to those figures who mediate between energy technologies and users – the “missing middlemen” of energy studies. In India's Sundarbans, it is men who care for energy systems, yet their care work is devalued. Showing how the devaluation of middlemen's work cannot be abstracted from their identities at the intersection of gender and other markers of difference, the paper provides an illustration of what feminism can offer to energy studies. Animated by a political commitment to enact a vision of feminist energy systems, the paper seeks not only to advance scholarly conversations but to help imagine a different type of society – where the work of energy system reproduction counts towards achieving sustainable energy objectives.