Paul George Munro

In this chapter, we draw on recent empirical insights from surveys, interviews, and secondary data, to discuss the repair and waste implications of Vanuatu’s rapid adoption of off-grid solar products, emphasising this book’s theme on the ecologies of waste . The chapter starts by mapping the emergence and impressive growth of off-grid solar adoption in Vanuatu through international development interventions such as Lighting Vanuatu and the Vanuatu Rural Electrification Program I (VREP-I), before turning to the associated repair and waste challenges. These challenges in Vanuatu are situated both within the broader global context of the commodification of off-grid solar—yielding a dynamic that incentivises product replacement over repair—as well as the distinct challenges posed by the nation’s archipelago geography. The chapter illustrates the acute economic and logistical challenges associated with providing repair services and waste management infrastructure across Vanuatu’s over 60 inhabited islands, emphasising how underlying cycles of product obsolescence compel vulnerable communities to grapple with the dual challenges of maintaining energy access and managing harmful streams of waste.

The chapter presents the reform of the electricity sector proposed in Mexico by former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, in office between 2018 and 2024, who broke with the neoliberal institutional legacy inherited after almost four decades of structural adjustment programmes. This reform met with strenuous opposition from environmental organisations, energy companies and private investors, a large part of the national business sector, right-wing parties and the US government, being ultimately rejected in 2023. The analysis of this case aims to show the political and geopolitical complexity at stake when a country in the global South deals with the interdependent challenges of energy poverty alleviation, greenhouse gas emissions reduction and energy sovereignty, by resorting to state capitalism.

This chapter synthesises the findings from the book, highlighting key themes linking electricity capital and energy transitions within the global South. This includes unpacking how global development agenda has fostered profit-driven strategies as means for expanding electricity, raising critical concerns about distribution, sustainability, and long-term effects on marginalised populations. The chapter also develops a critical focus on the role of the state in shaping energy transitions through infrastructure development and regulatory reforms, concluding across the case studies that a sometimes ambivalent and sometimes facilitator picture of the state emerges in terms of its engagements with electricity capital. The chapter also engages with how digitalisation has transformed electricity provision and how it can reinforced power asymmetries and data exploitation; and then finishes with an examination of capitalism’s intrinsic connection to waste, where commodity market structures prioritise resale over repair. Overall, the findings of the chapter emphasise the complex interplay between neoliberalism, state intervention, and the financialisation of development in reshaping electricity governance, reinforcing the need for a nuanced, context-specific approach to energy poverty.

While datafication—the growing presence, use and impact of data in social processes—plays a significant role in new technologies for energy access and the alleviation of energy poverty, little has been said about how these technologies, such as digital electricity meters, affect certain Ubuntu relational values between the state, the citizenry and service providers. It is easy for engineers and energy policy planners to show the efficiency of datafication; it is harder to show how the use of these technologies can undermine valuable relationships such as identifying with others and exhibiting mutual care. The implication for policy is that energy technologies must be of benefit to society, but the deployment of these technologies should be conditioned on good relationality, involving the user in their design and implementation.

This chapter draws on insights from in-depth stakeholder interviews and secondary data to critically examine the political economy of off-grid solar in Uganda, emphasising the theme of the financialisation of development . We begin with an overview of the boom in off-grid solar adoption since 2009, highlighting how reduced production costs, advancements in financial technology and large flows of capital from the global North have positioned private solar companies at the forefront of addressing energy poverty in the global South—particularly sub-Saharan Africa. Through the prism of the “Wall Street Consensus”, we illustrate how a range of market support programmes are escorting capital from the global North to facilitate investment in the sector, largely to the benefit of global North-linked multinational companies operating in Uganda. It goes on to critically discuss the growing financialisation of the off-grid solar sector in Uganda, highlighting the blurring boundaries between solar companies, financial institutions and telecoms, as well as the growing use of the pay-as-you-go fintech model to sell a diverse range of consumer goods and services beyond solar home systems. The chapter concludes by attending to the justice implications of this increasingly financialised approach to disseminating solar products, highlighting contradictions from its articulated intent to address energy poverty, and its tendency to reproduce uneven patterns of development.

This chapter focuses on developing core themes around electricity capital, providing a conceptual basis for the book. The first theme, the “financialisation of development”, explores the evolving nexus between development finance, private investment and energy poverty eradication in the global South. The second theme, “the recalibration of the state”, interrogates the changing role of the state in electricity systems and its implications for development trajectories. The third term “the datafication of the energy poor” highlights how digital technologies and smart devices are used by market and state actors to govern energy use, instil consumerist behaviours and manage energy poverty. The final theme, “ecologies of repair and waste” engages with the afterlives of renewable energy solutions, focusing on the socio-material impacts of electricity capital on the maintenance, repair and disposal of solar infrastructure. Together, these themes provide a critical lens on the political economy of energy poverty and the shifting landscape of development in the global South, which are unpacked in the selected case studies.

Using a geographical political economy lens, this chapter examines the uneven and relational characters of developmental state capitalism and energy transition in Indonesia, and how such dynamics impact the way that energy poverty is spatially reproduced in the country. Drawing on interviews, participant observation and secondary data analysis, the chapter first reveals the tendencies for the persistence of large-scale generation and Java-Bali centrism underpinning Indonesia’s electricity development, and how such dynamics are indicative of state-driven accumulation strategies. The findings also illustrate the centralised logic behind government’s off-grid electrification initiatives that largely precludes genuine community participation, leading to unsustainable outcomes. Focusing on a case study from Eastern Indonesia, we then demonstrate how the marketisation of energy access project has come into conflict with the state developmentalist agenda, and the adverse implications that such a contestation creates for rural communities. We argue that attending to these contradictions, and how energy poverty is potentially (re)made through its own solutions, is necessary for our pursuit of energy for all.