Presumptions and Precarity: Probing Electricity Infrastructure

The international community has for decades tasked itself with worldwide “Development,” broadly understood as a project to improve the human condition. Among development projects, electricity infrastructure has received an outsized amount of money and support. Despite this concerted effort, electricity development goals have been largely unrealized and huge disparities in electricity production and reliability persist worldwide. Infrastructure scholarship leans on an old global dichotomy: infrastructure in the Global South is marked by failures while in the North it is successful and taken-for-granted. Centralized grid systems of the Global North are characterized by cheap, constant, plentiful access, or “abundant” systems, while Global South services are characterized by expensive, erratic, absent access, or “constrained” systems. In the prevailing narrative, electricity providers, workers, and the users themselves, particularly those in sub-Saharan Africa, are to blame for failing electrical systems. By both scholars and policy-makers, users are often cast as “corrupt,” “thieves,” and “non-payers,” whose behavior culminates in non-technical losses. This link between bad users and bad systems informs policy measures and technical interventions, but it has not been sufficiently justified. In this dissertation, I leverage the global energy dichotomy in order to move past oversimplified, prescriptive narratives./nThe challenges of electricity development and inequality are compounded by an astounding array of disciplines required to understand them. This project uniquely synthesizes power system engineering, critical theory, and social science. I argue that social and material relations underpin electricity infrastructure, and use a Marxian understanding of these relations to explore the material conditions of “the grid” (i.e. voltage fluctuations, power outages, and intermittency) alongside the actors and actions they mediate and through which they are mediated. Ultimately, this work has implications for the interdisciplinary study of electricity, establishing important groundwork for understanding how vulnerabilities and opportunities are spread, by whom and for whom, along “the grid.”/nSituated in electricity services in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) and within “modern energy for all”—the international commitment to support electricity access in poor communities worldwide — this dissertation uses Unguja, Tanzania as a main site to investigate how contemporary assumptions about the value of electricity development impact inequalities. Specifically, it probes three key assumptions in contemporary electricity development – those of goodness, equity, and abundance – and explores related aspects: the evolution and fragmentation of authority and responsibility in the governance of electricity provision; the production of everyday life in constrained electricity systems (characterized by expensive, erratic, absent, and hyper-visible access); and the implications of using abundant grid systems as benchmarks for grid development today. Guided by a historical comparative lens, I use interviews, surveys, and two years of voltage monitoring to develop an ethnographically-grounded study of the social and material relations produced, and the responsibilities contained within, the Unguja grid./nIn chapter one, I offer an introduction to the political economy of grid development and provide a theoretical framework that guides the rest of the dissertation. In chapter two, I explore equity as it relates to “modern energy for all,” and/nspecifically the rise of prepaid meters as the technical solutions to theft and mismanagement. I find that the rise in the prepaid meter represents a shift away from a provider- and user-centered relationship to a more overtly techno-human one, with new roles for Unguja residents. For the state-owned utility, a less visible, seemingly distant relationship with its customers emerged. Importantly, I find that although governmental and non-governmental institutions are, on average, more indebted to electric utilities, utilities and foreign donors (such as the World Bank and IMF) push prepaid meters more aggressively on residential users. Thus the responsibility for “unsuccessful” grids is discursively and actively falling on residential users, but so too are the vulnerabilities these constrained/nsystems induce./nChapters three and four probe the assumption of goodness in an electricity connection. Broadly, I ask: what life do constrained grids produce? In light of constrained grids, how do we interpret the quest of “modern energy for all?” By all accounts, the Unguja electric grid is a constrained system. Grid services in Unguja are considered highly unreliable, thus creating daily challenges for their relatively poor Zanzibari users. Nevertheless, technical experts in the area claim that “households can cope.” Chapter three explores what residents are forced to cope with. I combine extensive empirical mapping of electricity quality with household surveys, showing that extreme voltage fluctuations result in dim lights at best and power outages and broken appliances at worst, denying many residents the expected benefits of access to electricity. Finally, in chapter four I explore residents' experiences with, and expectations of, their electricity services, and deliberately highlight their stories as they more broadly relate to a global development discourse on electricity infrastructure. I argue that perhaps expectations are being met because expectations are so low. This is a type of national politics that allows global development politics to ignore the precarious vulnerabilities of unreliable services, in turn reinforcing the logic that “a little goes a long way.”/nThis dissertation shows how assumptions in electricity development have served to misplace blame on, and helped spread new burdens and vulnerabilities in, SSA communities. It is guided by what I believe is the future of “modern energy for all”—constrained electric grids. Ultimately, I hope this project will spark a reckoning over the possible limits of contemporary electricity development and inform future policy decisions.

Advisor: Ray, Isha