Women and the Energy Revolution in Asia

Reihana Mohideen

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9789811502293
• eBook ISBN: 9789811502309
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book examines the low-carbon energy transition taking place in developing Asia, in the context of persisting social and gender inequalities, the threat of climate change which has necessitated the decarbonisation of industry, and examines how developing Asia can 'leap-frog' the carbon-emitting stages that more developed economies have passed through, while simultaneously 'leap-frogging' social and gender equity gaps. The book uses the concept of 'disruptive technologies', an area of study that assesses the potential of certain technologies to disrupt the status quo and the concept of socio-technical frameworks, where social considerations are factored in to engineering systems and models. Using case studies and methodologies drawn from interdisciplinary approaches to engineering, and from development studies, science and technology studies and feminist approaches, it assesses how the low-carbon energy transition potentially provides poor women in developing Asia the opportunity toget on board at the early phase of these changes and influence and even transform their societies and lives.

© The Author(s) 2020

R. MohideenWomen and the Energy Revolution in Asiahttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-0230-9_1

Begin Abstract

1. Asia’s Energy Transition: “Leapfrogging” Stages

Reihana Mohideen¹  

(1)

Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia

 

 

Reihana Mohideen

Email: [email protected]

Abstract

Modern energy access is an important indicator of poverty and social development. Asia is rapidly increasing its access to energy. This expansion is taking place at a time when the threat of climate change has necessitated the decarbonization of industry, replacing fossil-fuel energy with renewables. While there is no technological fix to the social and gender equity challenges that confront society, the transition taking place in the energy sector in developing Asia, driven by technology innovation, can enable countries to “leapfrog” stages by using fewer capital-intensive, centralized systems and technology. This would have important improvements in the quality of life of communities, providing women the opportunity to get on board at the early phase of these changes and influence and even transform their societies and lives.

Keywords

Energy transitionGender equityAsiaClimate changeRenewable energyLeapfroggingChinaCapitalism

End Abstract

Why did technologies take the form that they did? What assumptions do engineers, politicians and business people make about the role that people or machines might play in the brave new worlds they sought after? How can we find multidisciplinary ways of looking at social and technical relations, even-handedly? While the book does not attempt to tackle all these questions, several of the issues raised impinge on these questions.

While Asia has made remarkable progress in providing electricity access to hundreds of millions of people in the last two decades, there is still a long way to go, to reach compatibility with OECD countries. Modern energy access (or the lack of it), therefore, is an important indicator of poverty and social development, such as equitable access to health, education and basic services, as well as women’s welfare and even status in society. South Asia is also a region of the world where extreme gender disparities persist, with low labour force participation rates for women, disproportionate levels of poverty amongst women and some of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world (UNDP 2013).

There is no technological fix to the social and gender equity challenges that confront society. However, the transition taking place in the energy and power sector in developing Asia, driven by technology innovation, can enable countries to “leapfrog” stages by using fewer capital-intensive, centralized systems and technology. This would have important welfare benefits and improvements in the quality of life of women and men. Modern energy services can improve women’s welfare and enable women to fulfil their traditional roles, but don’t structurally change gender relations. However, energy services that contribute to women’s economic empowerment can be a key factor in catalysing the transformation of gender roles.

The Energy Transition

Asia’s energy transition is being driven by energy demand and the commitment by developing Asia’s economies to cut back emissions to reduce the average rise in global mean surface temperature. A substantial global effort is required to meet the 2 °C warming limit under the Paris Agreement, within which Asia has a critical role to play.

The energy transition implies that the way we produce and consume energy has to change. While the power grid is undoubtedly an astonishing scientific and engineering achievement that transformed living standards in the last century—female and male life expectancy, maternal mortality, education and more—it now has to change. The world’s power grids are becoming old, too big, unreliable, harder to control, and expensive to maintain, experiencing peak-to-average problems. They are increasingly contributing to global warming and are not suited to incorporation of distributed energy, experiencing contingency restoration problems and increasing use of constant power loads and inverters.

They are also socially inequitable—they are not available to everyone and have been unable to solve the challenges of energy access in developing countries. The energy transition is a response to this and is already underway, and it is also driven by technology innovation. It is a transformation from the old grid to a new one, although the features of this new grid haven’t yet been clearly defined or understood.

The transformation of the energy and power sector is especially marked in Asia. In India and China, more than 50% of existing power capacity was built in the last decade, and in ASEAN more than 40% was. This also demonstrates that Asia is relatively unhindered by legacy issues related to old systems in the power sector. This rapidly growing new and smarter grid is driven by, and continues to foster, technology innovation.

Technology, Society, and Environment

The case study of the Alternative Energy Promotion Centre (AEPC) in Nepal clearly shows that access to electricity can create significant progress in gender equity and social inclusion, and that renewable energy, distributed through decentralized mini-grids that use smart technology, is the most effective way of increasing access, particularly in rural areas.

But the data from the AEPC also shows that uptake of alternative energy is increased by measures to address existing inequalities, such as targeted subsidies benefiting women-headed households, the poor and those marginalized due to ethnicity, religion, caste or geography.

The impact of technology on society is not independent of politics and economics.

The research presented here demonstrates the potential for decentralized renewable energy, and other disruptive emerging technologies, to enable much of Asia (and other parts of the developing world) to leapfrog over the phase of fossil fuel–burning, centralized capital-intensive energy and industry, and create sustainable development in a way that increases human potential and reduces inequality.

However, the degree to which this potential is realized will not be determined by the technology itself but by decisions made by institutions, governments, communities and individuals.

Scientists—and the increasing frequency of extreme weather events all over the world—are warning that the 2 °C limit set by the Paris Agreement may not be sufficient to prevent catastrophe, while current trends in energy production worldwide suggest it is unlikely that the Paris targets will be met.

Continued increases in carbon emissions from energy generation and transport, despite the known very real possibility of this leading to the extinction of humanity, is evidence that there is an irrationality in the way decisions are made.

Commoner (1972) in The Closing Circle wrote: “We are in an environmental crisis because the means by which we use the ecosphere to produce wealth are destructive of the ecosphere itself. The present system of production is self-destructive; the present course of human civilization is suicidal.”

John Bellamy Foster’s Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (2000) explains this irrationality through capitalism, being based on the alienation of humanity from nature, and the alienation of production from humanity.

Bellamy Foster argues that carbon emissions will continue to increase while decision-making is monopolized by capitalists and governments and institutions that serve them. The history of capitalism is intertwined with the history of fossil fuel–based industry. The power of capitalists derives from owning carbon emitting means of production. Their material interest is for the transition to renewable energy technologies to be incremental, allowing them to maintain control of the means of production through the transition.

However, preventing catastrophic climate change requires a much more rapid decarbonization of production: one which would make a significant proportion of the means of production worthless as capital. In the global transition to renewables, questions of social economy and political power will have to be confronted.

Likewise, Commoner (2011), in a 1973 lecture, said: “When any environmental issue is pursued to its origins, it reveals an inescapable truth—that the root cause of the crisis is not to be found in how men interact with nature, but in how they interact with each other—that, to solve the environmental crisis we must solve the problems of poverty, racial injustice and war.”

Can Developing Asia Leapfrog Stages to a Sustainable and Gender Equitable Future?

In developing world communities that lack access to electricity, systems of energy generation and distribution, using renewable energy and decentralized smart-grid technology and mini-grids, can be developed from the outset.

The concept that technological innovation can enable developing countries to “leapfrog” stages—jumping over capital-intensive, centralized systems and technology—is the sibling of the concept of disruptive technologies.

While in the already highly industrialized parts of the world, new technologies are disruptive because they present a challenge to very well-established systems and technologies, in developing countries they can bring important welfare benefits and improvements in the quality of life for women and men more cheaply and sustainably than the older technology.

Smart phones are a commonly cited example, with mobile phone and Internet access becoming the norm in places that never had a landline-based phone network.

In the world’s most industrialized countries, there is debate over whether disruptive technology will bring a leisure-defined utopia or an unemployment-defined dystopia—a networked future combining individual choice and autonomy with enhanced ways to communicate and collaborate with other people, or a technological totalitarianism with enhanced manipulation and surveillance.

Rundle (2014) says that how these questions are answered will be determined politically—by which sections of society are included or excluded from making the relevant decisions.

The same is true with “leapfrogging” stages in developing countries. The power of multinational capital in steering development is visible in much of the excitement over the leapfrogging potential of smart phones being focused on quixotic attempts to turn the world’s poorest people into consumers of financial services.

The evidence from the AEPC case study is part of a growing body of evidence that renewable energy technologies and other new technologies allow living standards and quality of life to improve without the carbon emissions that accompanied such improvements in the West. Furthermore, the evidence shows that such development can bring improvements in gender equity.

However, whether gender relations can “leapfrog” stages driven by technology innovation and advancement is an entirely different matter.

Energy services can improve women’s welfare and enable women to fulfil their traditional roles, but don’t structurally change gender relations. However, energy services that contribute to women’s economic empowerment can be a key factor in catalysing the transformation of gender roles.

While there is no technological fix to the social and gender equity challenges that confront society, the transition taking place in the energy and power sector driven by technology innovation does provide women the opportunity to get on board at the early phase of these changes and influence and even transform their societies and lives.

“Leapfrogging” technologies are particularly important when nature disrupts human society, and technology and infrastructure are suddenly wiped out. While seismic and climatic disasters have always had the ability to disrupt society, the disruption of the climate by carbon emissions is making natural disasters a lot more common.

The AEPC case study suggests that when empowered to make decisions—even to a relatively small degree, such as through the targeted subsidies—women, the poor and communities marginalized due to ethnicity, caste, religion or geography make decisions that are in their material interests and embrace the potential that renewables and related technologies offer.

On the one hand, this disruptive technology has the potential to empower women and increase inclusion and equality. On the other hand, the struggles for inclusion and equality by women, the poor and marginalized have the potential to disrupt decision-making, which is necessary for the technology to fulfil its potential. The threat posed by anthropogenic climate change makes this an existential question for humanity.

The system of energy production and distribution that has existed for over a century was also gender biased. It was (and still is, to a large extent) an industry designed and dominated by men. Therefore, the transformation of the energy and power sector in Asia should be of tremendous interest to gender equity advocates, as it has potentially important implications for gender equity and women’s empowerment. It’s in the context of these changes that the book is situated.

Bibliography

1. Bellamy Foster, John. 2000. Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature. New York: Monthly Review Press.
2. Commoner, Barry. 1972. The Closing Circle: Confronting the Environmental Crisis. London: Cape.
3. ———. 2011. Barry Commoner: Ecology and Social Action. https://​climateandcapita​lism.​com/​2011/​12/​20/​barry-commoner-ecology-and-social-action/​.
4. Rundle, Guy. 2014. A Revolution in the Making: 3D Printing, Robots and the Future. Melbourne: Affirm Press.
5. UNDP. 2013. Human Development Report 2013. The Rise of the South: Human Progress in a Diverse World. New York: United Nations Development Program.

© The Author(s) 2020

R. MohideenWomen and the Energy Revolution in Asiahttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-0230-9_2

Begin Abstract

2. Gender-Powered Approaches

Reihana Mohideen¹

(1)

Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Mel...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Asia’s Energy Transition: “Leapfrogging” Stages
• 2. Gender-Powered Approaches
• 3. Technologies “Disrupting” Gender Relations?
• 4. Gender-Inclusive Energy: The Nepal Case
• 5. Some Concluding Comments
• Back Matter