Contested energy-development-climate pathways: the politics of sustainable energy policy processes in Ghana

Evolving international discourses and governance arrangements on energy access and climate change provide new directions for energy system change towards social justice and equity in Sub-Saharan Africa. Shifts to national decision-making in implementing the Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement provide opportunities to open up policy processes and centre-stage local energy needs and knowledge in efforts to align climate and development goals. Growing enthusiasm in the academic and policy spheres in governing low carbon transitions too often ignore the politics of plural and competing sustainable energy pathways in Sub-Saharan Africa. Besides fragmented landscapes for the provision of access to electricity and cooking services and differences in resource endowments, plural energy futures are conditioned by prior country-specific technological and political trajectories, involving a broad range of actors with different interests and operating at different scales.

Taking the goal of widening energy access for socio-economic development and poverty reduction as a contextually-relevant perspective on energy transitions, this research aims to understand the politics of sustainable energy policy processes in Ghana. Analyses of 40 semi-structured interviews, conducted during a four-month fieldwork in the country, and policy-related documents, provide an empirically- grounded account of policy processes underpinning two nationally-formulated documents: the Sustainable Energy for All Country Action Plan (CAP) and the National Climate Change Policy (NCCP). A focus on multi-scale and multi-actor dynamics driving changes in the national grid system and the promotion of decentralised solar systems for rural electrification help contextualise and historicise plural pathways to sustainable electricity foregrounded in the two nationally-formulated policy documents.

The research confirms the deeply political nature of seeking to align evolving global discourses with national objectives. Deeper attention to the politics of policy processes during, and prior to, the formulation of the SE4ALL CAP and the NCCP reveal plural framings of interlinked energy-development-climate challenges and pathways of response promoted by Ghanaian actors and international donors. Nationally-led processes have resulted in a reframing of coexisting supply challenges in the dominant grid electricity pathway and demand-focused alternative trajectories foregrounding interlinkages between access to energy services for socio-economic development and poverty reduction. The relational perspective in this thesis outlines dynamic processes where co-evolving discourses and governance arrangements for plural sustainable energy pathways are incrementally negotiated and re-negotiated not only in formal policy spaces for decision-making but also in implementation.