Energy Justice in Dhaka's Slums

Energy Justice in Dhaka’s Slums PhD Thesis Submitted to University College London by Mark Leonard Gregory Jones The Bartlett Development Planning Unit 31 December 2020 Dedicated to Derek L G Jones LFRAIA 31 December 2020 Mark Jones: Bartlett DPU ii Acknowledgements My primary thanks for this PhD are extended to Dr Alexandre Apsan Frediani, my supervisor, for his unwavering support though this whole journey. Alex’s guidance on academic process, research rigour, and on the evolution of my topic have been invaluable and highly influential. I have enjoyed dozens of stimulating and enriching sessions with Alex over three years in discussing the details and direction of my research, certainly a highlight of my PhD process. Thank you also to Dr Julio Dávila and Dr Colin Marx of the DPU for early guidance on the way of a doctorate, and to Colin for ongoing support throughout the PhD. Other supportive and helpful DPU staff have included Dr Pascale Hoffman and Michael Casey-Gillam. Special thanks too are extended to my secondary supervisor, Dr Xavier Lemaire, for his valuable input, especially a thorough review of my first draft thesis. For encouraging my original PhD application to the DPU, I am grateful to Dr Nigel Mehdi of the University of Oxford, and to Dr Vanesa Castán Broto of the University of Sheffield. My thanks to Nigel and Vanesa for sending me on this rewarding path. I received an extraordinary boost to my PhD when in 2018, Professor Nurul Islam Nazem of the University of Dhaka agreed to act as my honorary tertiary supervisor. Professor Nazem provided advice on case-study selection, methodology and fieldwork procedures, coordinated preparation of a site map for use in my study, provided general background information on relevant political events and conditions, suggested useful contacts in Dhaka, supported my appointment as a visiting academic at UD, and organised research assistants from within the student body. This has been an immense and extremely generous contribution, which really has facilitated the whole study. I shall remain forever grateful to Professor Nazem. The School of Architecture at my home university, the University of Queensland, hosted me for many months during the period of my PhD. This provided me with a productive workspace and access to many academics with relevant expertise, with whom I could discuss my work. Additionally, the School invited me to present my work in various formats. For this experience, thank you to Head of School, Dr Cameron 31 December 2020 Mark Jones: Bartlett DPU iii Bruhn, and particularly to my friend, Dr Chris Landorf, who invited me into this stimulating world, and provided a great deal of encouragement and advice in my PhD work. A genuinely happy outcome of this PhD is the set of friendships that I have established at UQ Architecture. For my fieldwork, I was remarkably fortunate to have my close friend, Wendy Truer, accompany me to Dhaka for several weeks. Wendy and I shared a special experience in Dhaka and in Kalyanpur Pora Bostee, the case study slum. Having Wendy lead the female interactions was extraordinarily beneficial, and her moral support in a difficult environment helped me enormously. S M Younus, my translator and cultural guide, has been a wonderful support through these years, and he has become a friend. Also, to my research team lead by Monojit Saha, I am more than thankful. Other team members were Sauda, Sakura, Royon and Mamun. We all really enjoyed our work as a team in the slum. Next, I wish to mention two Bangladeshi academics who supported and influenced my work: Salma Shafi of the Centre for Urban Studies and Assoc Professor Anwar Hossain of the University of Dhaka. Thank you both for your positive input. Additional thanks are due to Dr Alexander Mebius, formerly of the University of Oxford, for detailed reviews of some key chapters and particularly for helping me with academic language. I must also mention the supportive and affable staff at the Weston Library of the Bodleian in Oxford, with whom I calculate I spent at least 750 days. Special thanks to librarian, Nik O’Toole and her colleagues Sam and Oliver. This has been a wonderfully productive and happy workspace for both my Masters and my PhD years. As would apply to most PhDs, I have been well-supported by my family in the PhD endeavour. Encouragement from my parents, siblings, and from my sons has kept me motivated through the PhD years. Above all, special thanks to my wife Claire, who encouraged me through the lows, the highs, and the long, hard grind of the PhD journey, from the initial application through to completion. I shall always be deeply grateful for her steadfast belief and support over these years. 31 December 2020 Mark Jones: Bartlett DPU iv Certainly, my greatest appreciation goes to the people of Kalyanpur Pora Bostee. My colleague Wendy and I were warmly embraced by the people of the bostee. The interactions and friendships with the bostee people have been the greatest joy of my PhD. We shared many enjoyable conversations, laughter, and tears with these remarkably resilient people. For men, women and children to live under such deprivation and injustice, and yet to remain positive about life, is inspirational. I was really privileged to have this life-affirming experience with the people of Kalyanpur Pora Bostee. Wendy Truer and friends Declaration I, Mark Leonard Gregory Jones confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been indicated in the thesis. 31 December 2020 Mark Jones: Bartlett DPU v Abstract Access to energy is widely acknowledged to be a fundamental determinant of human wellbeing and a key element of poverty alleviation. The UN Sustainable Development Goal SDG7, target 1 demands that by 2030, we are to ‘ensure universal access to affordable, reliable, and modern energy services.’ This is an exceptionally ambitious aspiration, given that around one billion people live without electricity and about three billion, most of whom reside in the global South, depend on cooking with solid fuels. Research on the challenges of universal energy access for the urban poor has potential to contribute to substantial quality-of-life improvements for a vast population. This study contributes to a deeper understanding of the complex and inequitable socio-technical infrastructures underlying access to energy for households in particularly challenging environments, the slums of Dhaka, Bangladesh. The nascent energy justice debate is far from comprehensive at this stage of its development, with a deficiency in studies in the global South and for household scale analyses. Scholarship to date is largely situated in the North and presents global or national scale principles. An understanding of the concepts around particularities of cities of the global South developed in the Southern urban critique provides an informative entry point for energy justice deliberations relating to informal settlements in poor cities. Through engaging with the capability approach, this thesis develops a detailed appreciation of the effects of energy injustices on households and individuals in a case study slum, Kalyanpur Pora Bostee in Dhaka. In these terms, this thesis opens a new dialogue between energy justice, the capability approach, and the Southern urban critique to develop a new framework for energy justice – a framework designed specifically for urban poverty conditions in the global South. The framework presents key principles for energy justice in this environment, and maps relationships and dependencies between those principles. 31 December 2020 Mark Jones: Bartlett DPU vi Impact Statement The research presented in this thesis is expected to be of value to academics working in the field of energy justice. My contention is that it brings a new perspective to the energy justice debate through a detailed examination of energy justice in an urban poverty setting in the global South. As such, this contribution opens up opportunity for comparative global South studies in an academic domain that has largely focussed on global conditions and universal principles to date. The energy experience in this type of community is vastly different from that experienced in the North or even from that experienced by the middle-class in the global South. My engagement at an individual and household scale, using the capability approach, has provided me with a detailed understanding of the manifestations of energy injustice in this setting, while a ‘top-down’ analysis of socio-political influences has illuminated the broad context of energy justice in Bangladesh. These learnings are likely to have applicability in other settings of urban poverty in the global South, though with nuances. In practical terms, the impact of this research would be maximised through government and NGO engagement with the new energy justice framework that it develops. Delivering energy services to informal settlements through reference to this framework would enhance the potential success of energy policy and energy projects. Traditionally, energy policy and energy projects have been considered almost exclusively in terms of quantum of energy supplied, essentially a focus on economics and technology. The new framework engages with a wide range of important success factors including capability outcomes, energy service attributes and critical underlying mechanisms, notably the political context. In these terms, the framework provides a realistic

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