title: Energy Transitions, Local Traditions: health, gender, and household energy practices in Kenya
Creators: name: Saligari, Serena
Publisher: name: University of Liverpool Repository
Year: 2024

description: The procurement and use of firewood, charcoal, sawdust, and kerosene to cook, light, and heat living spaces in the Majority World represent a critical global public health, environmental, and social concern. When burned, these fuels release health-damaging substances that lead to a wide range of non-communicable diseases. The collection of firewood and the production of charcoal are associated with deforestation and land degradation. Furthermore, tending to domestic energy needs is a gendered task that disproportionally impacts women’s physical and mental health, educational and working opportunities, and financial and gender empowerment. Energy transitions to clean fuels have become a priority under the Sustainable Development Agenda of 2015, which identifies “clean energy for all” as an imperative to achieve by 2030 (Sustainable Development Goal 7). Gas bottles that run on a clean fuel like Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) are considered major assets to achieve clean cooking. Sturdy and compact, they are easy to move and refill. LPG gas bottles also have an intuitive design and require minimal equipment to be operated, technical features that make them easily scalable. Many governments across the Majority World have prioritised their adoption, supporting it through improved infrastructures and subsidies. While several Kenyan households have integrated LPG gas bottles into their cooking practices, these new technologies continue to be used in combination with pre-existing fuels and devices, a practice known as “stacking”. Evidence that LPG is not used exclusively has, thereby, prompted questions about how straightforward clean energy transitions can be.
This social anthropological study investigates local experiences of accessing domestic energy in the Kenyan community of Langas, a peri-urban informal settlement on the outskirts of Eldoret town, and the values residents attribute to household energy access. The approach I take depends on generating ethnographic descriptions of cooking practices and exploring the social and material arrangements through which household energy becomes available to end-users. The thesis starts by examining the different fuels and devices people employ to cook and their social and cultural significance. It then contextualises the use of fuels and cookstoves in relation to people’s residential arrangements, exploring the limits and possibilities houses pose to energy choices and behaviours. Finally, it traces the social relationships sustaining access to household energy, focusing on the role fuel vendors play in mediating people’s encounters with the infrastructure and logistics of energy. The study generates a fine-grained and situated picture of the role domestic energy occupies in people’s everyday lives and shows how it is bound up with local understandings of health, pollution, and gender which may differ from the ones of actors involved in promoting energy transitions. Investigating how LPG gas bottles are integrated into existing cooking practices reveals that these objects continue to be used alongside pre-existing devices because they are not completely appropriate to meet contingent energy needs. While clean energy stakeholders see stacking as a limitation, the ethnographic accounts I provide show it to be a historical response to situated cooking contingencies. In a context like Langas, the flexibility afforded through stacking takes precedence over making healthy, socially, and environmentally responsible energy choices. This study therefore advocates for those promoting clean energy transitions to recognise access to domestic energy as a contextual issue, consider the wider social and material concerns it is entangled with, and define the appropriateness of the interventions they propose in relation to the situated needs of energy users.