Description
There are multiple ways of defining and understanding energy transitions, but many scholars now argue that systemic changes in energy systems require deep transformations in social and ecological dimensions that support social life, especially in urban areas. These systems and associated infrastructures have been shaped by distinct historical and political-economic processes, which in African contexts involve colonial histories of settlement, planning, and market formation. Accordingly, understanding energy transitions requires accounting for historical path dependencies that are embedded in energy systems, yet these have received little attention to date.
In this paper, drawing on a collaborative project about electricity grid access in urban Mozambique, we examine the ways that colonial legacies shape the contours of the country’s current energy system, and efforts by planners and policymakers to promote more just and sustainable energy futures. First, we focus on electricity provision to examine the effects of locations of power generation sources in relation to distribution and consumption centres, and the lack of redundancy in the network, meaning that no system of electricity dispatch exists in cases of excess or deficit of electricity. We explore the government’s plans to construct new power generation sources to supply external markets while building grid interconnections with southern African neighbours, and its parallels with colonial-era hydroelectric planning, in which whole regions were sacrificed to support national development objectives. We then turn to resource extraction, and the prospects for lucrative energy investments in natural gas or large hydropower, which have led to the deprioritizing of distributed renewables, to the detriment of local energy needs.
