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dc.contributor.authorRolffs, Paula
dc.contributor.authorOckwell, David
dc.contributor.authorByrne, Rob
dc.date.accessioned2016-11-02T14:20:16Z
dc.date.available2016-11-02T14:20:16Z
dc.date.issued2015-12
dc.identifier.citationRolffs, P., Ockwell, D. and Byrne, R. (2015) Beyond technology and finance: pay-as-you-go sustainable energy access and theories of social change, Environment and Planning A, vol. 47 no. 12en
dc.identifier.urihttps://opendocs.ids.ac.uk/opendocs/handle/20.500.12413/12639
dc.description.abstractTwo-thirds of people in sub-Saharan Africa lack access to electricity, a precursor of poverty reduction and development. The international community has ambitious commitments in this regard, e.g. the UN’s Sustainable Energy for All by 2030. But scholarship has not kept up with policy ambitions. This paper operationalises a socio-technical transitions perspective to analyse for the first time the potential of new, mobile-enabled, pay-as-you-go approaches to financing sustainable energy access, focussing on a case study of pay-as-you-go approaches to financing solar home systems in Kenya. The analysis calls into question the adequacy of the dominant, two-dimensional treatment of sustainable energy access in the literature as a purely financial/technology, economics/engineering problem (which ignores sociocultural and political considerations) and demonstrates the value of a new research agenda that explicitly attends to theories of social change – even when, as in this paper, the focus is purely on finance. The paper demonstrates that sociocultural considerations cut across the literature’s traditional two-dimensional analytic categories (technology and finance) and are material to the likely success of any technological or financial intervention. It also demonstrates that the alignment of new pay-as-you-go finance approaches with existing sociocultural practices of paying for energy can explain their early success and likely longevity relative to traditional finance approaches.en
dc.language.isoenen
dc.publisherEnvironment and Planning Aen
dc.rightsThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).en
dc.rights.urihttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/en
dc.subjectClimate Changeen
dc.subjectTechnologyen
dc.titleBeyond technology and finance: pay-as-you-go sustainable energy access and theories of social changeen
dc.typeArticleen
dc.identifier.externalurihttp://epn.sagepub.com/content/47/12/2609.abstracten
dc.identifier.externalurihttps://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X15615368
dc.identifier.doi10.1177/0308518X15615368
dcterms.dateAccepted2015-03
rioxxterms.funderDefault funderen
rioxxterms.identifier.projectDefault projecten
rioxxterms.versionVoRen
rioxxterms.versionofrecordhttps://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X15615368en
rioxxterms.funder.projectc941507f-fd0b-4fc3-9822-4b2132f61a1den


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This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
Except where otherwise noted, this item's license is described as This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).