Empowered by electricity? The political economy of gender and energy in rural Naryn

Abstract

This article examines if and how access to electricity has contributed to women’s empowerment in the broader context of the political economy of gender and energy in rural Naryn, Kyrgyzstan. Earlier literature has pointed to how electricity provided through development interventions has facilitated a range of desirable services, conditional for children’s education, communication technologies and economic growth. Access to electricity has been linked to gender equality and women’s empowerment via providing women new opportunities for agency and income. The context of this article is rural Kyrgyzstan where electricity has been available since the 1970s as a service delivered by the centralized Soviet state. This study provides important insights into how this has affected local development and gender relations in a post-socialist country. It reveals the complexity of energy access and challenges the assumptions that access to modern energy such as electricity will lead to fulfillment of SDG#7 on affordable and clean energy, or increased economic activity and abandonment of traditional energy use. The findings demonstrate that electricity provides an important resource for communication, income generation and household chores. However, the lack of reliability and affordability of electricity in rural areas in the larger context of post-Soviet transitional challenges and changing gender norms, has undermined women’s potential empowerment and has worked to maintain gender inequalities.

Keywords:

• Gender
• electricity
• energy
• women's empowerment
• Kyrgyzstan

Acknowledgments

The authors express their appreciation to Asel Myrzabekova, Gulnora Iskandarova and Zharkyn Omurbekova for their assistance in data collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This study is financed through DIKU – Norwegian Agency for International Cooperation in Education and Quality Enhancement in Higher Education's Eurasia Program under grant number CPEA-2015/10013.

Notes on contributors

Elena Kim

Elena Kim is an associate professor and a Head of the Division of Social Sciences at the American University of Central Asia, Bishkek Kyrgyzstan. She has taught graduate and undergraduate courses on gender and international development, gender and violence and supervised graduate students’ research. Elena earned her PhD degree at the Center for Development Research in the University of Bonn in Germany. In her dissertation entitled ‘International Development and Research in Central Asia: Exploring the Knowledge-based Social Organization of Gender, she looked at everyday practices of gender equality work in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan using institutional ethnography for her analysis. Within the last few years, she has managed various development research projects funded by the United Nations Development Program, United Nations Environmental Program, Norwegian Government, World Bank, etc. Her last publications include those in Rural Society, Central Asian Survey, Women and Therapy.

Karina Standal

Karina Standal is a researcher at CICERO – Center for Climate Research in Oslo, Norway. Her research interests include gender, energy and development in the Global South. Email: [email protected]