title: Powering improvisation: unstable electrification in rural northern Uganda
Creators: name: Nielsen, Kirsten Milo
Publisher: name: The University of Edinburgh
Year: 2025
Subjects: subject: Anthropology
subject: FOS: Sociology
subject: Africa
subject: infrastructure
subject: Energy
subject: Development
subject: Material Culture
subject: Citizenship

description: Electrification is a key focus in the development strategies of countries in Sub Saharan Africa, where large parts of the population still live beyond the reach of the central grid. Most people without access to electricity live in rural areas. In national and international development policies, rural electrification is anticipated to contribute to poverty reduction and to the general improvement of people’s lives. However, power sectors in Sub-Saharan Africa struggle to supply their growing customer base with stable electricity in the aftermath of neoliberal restructuring policies. In the newly electrified village in northern Uganda where I conducted ethnographic fieldwork for eleven months in 2019, power cuts happened often and could last up to several weeks, creating rhythms of progress and setback. Electricity’s instability affected how people perceived the power provider, and by extension the state. It also led to a plethora of improvisational practices as people attempted to secure access to electricity and stable income through electrified work, relying on their own knowledge and skills, and the market of distributed electricity sources. Following the approaches of previous anthropological scholarship on energy, electricity, and infrastructures, this dissertation asks: how does unstable electrification restructure social relations at different scales? I focus on two categories of relations – those between people and the state, and the local, personal relations between kin, friends, and neighbors. I show how grid instability and irregularities in the payment system led to mistrust in the power cooperative and by extension the state, complicating and at times even negating the sense of citizenship understood as a relation of trust and reciprocity. People’s references to customer service furthermore exemplifies how grid connection in Lalogi has contributed to producing a kind of neoliberal subjectivity where the state is no longer seen as providing social services to its citizens but rather commodities that can be accessed through market-like relations. At a local scale, I show how improvisational approaches to securing access to electricity that rely on technical knowledge, embodied skills, and calculative capabilities create new lines of social differentiation, but at the same time map onto and enhance existing inequalities, since they are closely tied to people’s material resources. Counteracting the increased inequalities resulting from unstable electrification, I show how the moral obligation to share resources with kin, friends, and neighbors that underscores social life in the region contributes to a more equal distribution of electricity. Through the study of unstable electrification in northern Uganda, this dissertation generates new insights into the effects of electrification and connectivity in the global south. More specifically, it contributes new insights into how infrastructures restructure social relations in a context where grid electricity is unstable and people thus combine it with other power sources. While infrastructural instability has been actively theorized in anthropological scholarship about urban infrastructures, this is less evident in the scholarship on rural infrastructures and infrastructural development. This dissertation also makes a contribution to the regional literature on northern Uganda by providing new perspectives on history and contemporary life beyond the war.