Photons vs. firewood: female (dis)empowerment by solar power in India

Abstract

Renewable energy transitions are accelerating in the Global South. Yet many large-scale renewable energy infrastructures are developed on public lands with unknown impacts on commons access and usage. A prime example of this is the Gujarat Solar Park (GSP) in India, which is one of the world’s largest solar photovoltaic facilities. The GSP is situated on 2,669 acres of previously common property, which has historically been used by female pastoralists for firewood collection. In this paper, we examine the following research questions: How do gender and caste power shape natural resource access in this region?; Does the Gujarat Solar Park exacerbate already gendered social-economic-political asymmetries? Our study utilizes a feminist political ecology framework to analyze the social dimensions of the GSP, drawing on recent work in this vein that uses a postcolonial and intersectional approach to examine the production of social difference through the spatial processes and political economy of solar energy generation. We find that the enclosure of public ‘wastelands’ to develop the Gujarat Solar Park has dispossessed resource-dependent women of access to firewood and grazing lands. This spatial dislocation is reinforcing asymmetrical social power relations at the village scale. Intersectional subject-positions are (re)produced vis-à-vis the exclusion of access to firewood in the land enclosed for the solar park. Affected women embody this dispossession through inter- and intra-village emotional geographies that cut across caste, class and gender boundaries.

Keywords:

• Feminist political ecology
• intersectionality
• postcolonial
• solar development
• emotional geography
• firewood

Acknowledgements

We extend our heartfelt gratitude to friends, colleagues and respondents in Gujarat. We are indebted to the support of Amit Garg, IIM-A and the Fulbright Commission. Special thanks to Pradipsinh Parmar for fieldwork support. We dedicate this article to Raysha.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad fellowship under grant P022A170064

Notes on contributors

Ryan Stock

Ryan Stock is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Earth, Environmental and Geographical Sciences at Northern Michigan University. He is a political ecologist and development geographer whose work examines development interventions, the political economy of environmental change, agrarian transformation, social power and intersectional social difference.

Trevor Birkenholtz

Trevor Birkenholtz is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at Pennsylvania State University. He is a political ecologist and critical development scholar who specializes in understanding agrarian change in South Asia.