Unpacking (Un)reliability and Access in the Electrical World

Keywords: unreliability, resource access, resource governance, electricity
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

Scholarship on access is popular in the context of resource governance. Yet there hasn’t been a lot of engagement between access literature and resource geography that deals with spatial and temporal processes. In this article, I offer up a way to extend and provide nuance on resource access by including the temporalities and spatialities that shape value. Specifically, I use my grounded empirical work on electricity access to theorize the concept of “(un)reliability” in order to account for the psychosocial dimensions of access in everyday life that go beyond simply deriving benefits. This theoretical turn grapples with the tension between an idealized benchmark for access – the ever-present connection – and the kind that might in fact be feasible as access scales up in the context of environmentalism and humanitarianism in our growing electrical world. (Un)reliability reflects not only unequal access but also unequal expectations, which may inadvertently cause unequal access to persist. It is these multiple cycles of expectations and low investment, normalizations and valuations, and goals and grounded realities that a theory of (un)reliabilty sets out to untangle.