Chapter 5: Regimes and values in the Global South
5.3. Discussion
5.3.1. Differentiating regimes in the Global South
119 by socio-technical reconfigurations. These trends are thus caused by and will be further exacerbated by urban energy transitions.
Figure 5.14: Electricity surplus for categories of South African municipalities
Source: Raw data sourced from local government MTREF budgets (2006-2014)
The case of large-scale renewable electricity provides a strong example of tensions between urban transitions and autonomy and national development aspirations. These structural tensions, that cut across levels of government, are manifested by conflicting visions, values and understandings amongst social groupings. This highlights the complex relationships between scale, contestation and justice in relation to reconfigurations of urban infrastructure networks that are (inter)- connected with national grids. Notably, it brings to the fore opposing securities of urban ecological security the one hand, and national developmental transitions on the other. In brief, it illustrates that wealthy munipclaities ‘going it alone’ in urban transitions may conflict with national development ambitions or transitions.
120 South infrastructure regimes. These are beset by inequities, infrastructure poverty, formal and informal infrastructure dichotomies (Filion and Keil, 2017) and differentiation (Monstadt, 2009), multiple infrastructure, fuel and livelihood strategies and infrastructure marginalisation. Notably, this chapter identified the presence of hybridity in socio-technical regimes in relation to the formal and informal and the interactions and blurring between these dichotomies. Socio-technical regimes in the Global South are thus plagued by dual or differentiated (Jaglin, 2008) systems of infrastructure provision. The prominence of inequality and differentiated service provision in regimes in the Global South bring a multitude of questions to the fore of relevance to the MLP.
These include a transition for whom? Which socio-technical system is being transitioned, the formal or informal infrastructure system? Who are the beneficiaries of transition processes? Who pays for and who suffers (Schlosberg, 2012a; Schlosberg, 2012b; Myers, 2011) from particular processes of socio-technical reconfigurations and how is risk and benefit allocated in decision-making related to infrastructure reconfigurations? These questions, central to PE and environmental justice, become patent when exploring socio-technical regimes in the Global South. This reasserts the theoretical value of tempering the MLP with a political ecology lens (Lawhon and Murphy, 2011; Murphy, 2015) when exploring regimes in the Global South. Further, the degree of infrastructure poverty in cities in the Global South makes comparisons with socio-technical regimes in the Global North difficult.
Related, the relationship between access to and beneficiaries of socio-technical infrastructure and socio-economic development is central to understanding regimes and reconfigurations in the Global South.
Second, South Africa’s electricity-related institutional landscape and by extension electricity- related institutional landscapes in South African cities, differs substantially from typical electricity regimes in the Global North. These include utilities that are regulated monopolies; an absence of an independent market operator; lack of competition in energy supply; and bundled transmission, distribution and generation. Alongside and partly as a result of the above, niche innovations and niche firms are less prolific in the Global South. These features provide important insights for transition theories. Primarily, as infrastructure regimes in the Global South are more centralised and less competitive, the capacity for private ‘niche’ disruption is limited. Thus, transition processes, including the stimulation of niche innovations and ‘mainstreaming’ them into network infrastructure, is more dependent on state intervention. Accordingly, it becomes necessary to conceptually distinguish between private and public-led transitions, depending on the prominence of niche firms or the state. Importantly, the dominance of the private sector versus the state in facilitating transitions is tied into Global South-North geographies, with the state playing a larger role in regulated monopolies or even ‘hybrid’ (Eberhard, 2010) infrastructure markets. There are
121 further distinguishing features between the strengths of public-versus-private-led transitions. In brief, public driven transitions may be better able to maintain public goods65 but without stimulating the efficiency and competition that facilitate emergent complex adaptive systems.
Inversely, private sector-driven transitions (disruptions) are underpinned by quasi-evolutionary properties (competition) yet result in transformed regimes that are not able to fully maintain public goods embedded in regimes.
Third, exploring an infrastructure regime in a city in the Global South brings up a range of spatial and scalar dynamics that provide insight into the relationship between cities and the niche-regime- landscape hierarchy. It is evident that national socio-technical infrastructure regimes are highly entangled, not only with municipal infrastructure regimes, but also municipal functions (service delivery and planning) and the structure of cities in general. Thus, it is possible to argue that the functional systems of cities identified by Pieterse (2008), namely operating, infrastructural, economic and spatial systems, are extensions of and reinforcing instruments of national socio- technical regimes. In this way, urban regimes (as lower agglomerations) both mirror and reinforce underlying modes of thought, logics and functions of national socio-technical regimes. Various sub- systems of urban regimes are thus enmeshed with and co-evolve alongside both national, centralised infrastructure regimes and wider municipal functions. Finally, it is worth noting that historical spatial patterns of socio-technical networks result in spatial externalities, whereby the negative impacts of regimes66 are located far from the areas of consumption. These may be termed
‘regime externalities’.
5.3.2. (Re)framing regimes as value systems and social contracts
Socio-technical systems literature focuses on a range of elements that are solidified and entrenched within the structure of regimes including technology, regulation, markets and infrastructure (Geels, 2004). However, sustainable transition theory overlooks values as an element that both stabilises and is stabilised within socio-technical regimes. Conversely, this chapter highlights that values both drive and are deeply entrenched in socio-technical regimes.
This chapter demonstrated that the City’s electricity regime is structured to facilitate a range of values such as redistribution, social security, universal access to services in support of socio- economic development and affordable electricity for the poor. More than merely being embedded in the regime structure it is evident that values are central to the way in which the City’s incumbent electricity regime is in fact configured. Moreover, it is evident that values both co-evolve alongside
65 See Section 5.3.2
66 Such as air pollution, associated health impacts and environmental degradation
122 and exert a strong structuring force on other regime elements. Notably, values play a large role in shaping the physical infrastructure of socio-technical regimes. For example, electrification (underpinned by a value of universal access) creates new infrastructure in the form of transmission lines for new connections. This highlights that socio-technical regimes are both shaped by and underpinned by values. These may be referred to as ‘regime values’. Through this lens socio- technical systems may be (re)conceptualised as systems that integrate and house different values (and belief systems) and sets of coupled values.
Second, sustainable transition cases that focus on electricity systems are commonly underpinned by notions that State-owned electricity systems are archaic and inefficient models for service delivery and sustainable transitions are thus underlain and achieved through forms of privatisation, fostering private sector technology development and encouraging individualised and decentralised innovations (Rifkin, 2011; Rutter and Keirstead, 2012). This chapter demonstrated that privatisation and ‘disrupting’ centralised grids, commonly identified as a precondition for achieving sustainable transitions in electricity networks, create systemic tensions overlooked in theory. This challenges the neo-liberal tendencies present in sustainable energy transition research and practice, that focuses on the power of decentralised, liberalised and distributed energy systems to facilitate sustainable change and elevates the role of market-driven competition and private sector innovation (Jamasb and Pollitt, 2008; IEA, 2014). Conversely, this chapter highlights the function of network infrastructure as systems to administer social and public goods, in theory and policy; and the disjuncture between service provision and sustainability innovation. This emphasis pays greater attention to the ‘equity deficit’ (Satterthwaite, 2007) and differentiated infrastructure (Savage and Ward, 2003) that may accompany reconfigurations of socio-technical regimes. Notably, it provides a more relevant foci for examining transitions in contexts such as development states and geographies with immense inequality in terms of access to infrastructure.
Third, research on sustainable energy transitions has not traditionally focused on the role of social contracts in the formation and reconfiguration of socio-technical regimes. Cases exploring regime change in large technical systems commonly view the stabilisation of socio-technical regimes as driven by quasi-evolutionary, competitive dynamics that are detached from consensus-building and cooperation amongst social groupings. In contrast, this chapter highlighted the presence of a fragile but effective social compact between diverse social groupings in relation to the City’s electricity regime. This enables a (re)framing of network infrastructure as systems constituted from underlying social contracts between different social groupings. In the City, many stakeholders argue that in the configuration and operation of networks, stakeholders forfeit a degree of control and benefit, highlighted through the example of net-metering, from network infrastructure in favour of wider
123
‘public goods’. Through such a lens, reconfigurations (or transitions) of infrastructure regimes are seen as a process of re-negotiating the social contract between different social groupings in response to landscape pressures that are forcing change.
5.3.3. (Re)framing socio-technical reconfigurations as value tensions
The City’s electricity regime is currently structured around a set of values that may broadly be defined as developmental values. However, as highlighted, these values and the public goods entrenched in network infrastructure may be disrupted by green niche innovations in particular and regime reconfigurations based on environmental values. Thus, in the City’s case, environmental values compete with developmental values embedded and integrated within the regime structure.
These tensions are both systemic in nature and contested in reconfiguration policy agendas.
Systemic value tensions relate to the deep structure of a socio-technical regime. In the City of CT’s case, for instance, it was highlighted that reconfigurations based on environmental values can cause fissures in the regime related to reproduction of development values such as collapsing a business model that services the poor or disrupt redistribution, affordability and pro-poor service delivery through facilitating a system based on energy autonomy and privatisation (inverse values).
Value tensions in ‘reconfiguration policy agendas’ (or policy value tensions) are manifest in several ways. First, reconfigurations based on environmental values (hereinafter referred to as environmental reconfigurations) may compete with and usurp budget and resources that would otherwise be spent on development objectives. Second, environmental reconfigurations may increase the cost of infrastructure or development services to the poor. Third, environmental reconfigurations disrupt or hinder service delivery to the poor. Four, environmental reconfigurations may facilitate the provision of differentiated services to different user categories and thus increase inequality and splintered urbanism (Jaglin, 2008; Monstadt, 2009; Sattherwaite, 2007). Five, regulation and taxes aimed at facilitating environmental reconfigurations may be regressive in that they disproportionately affect the poor.
In brief, this chapter illustrates that different regime values may be oppositional and create tensions during regime reconfiguration processes. Notably, entrenched regime values may be threatened with the introduction of new regime values. These tensions are both systemic in nature and are manifested in reconfiguration policy agendas. Whereas the former relates to tensions that occur as a result of the way in which regimes are structured, the latter occurs due to competing policy agendas. This provides a fresh conceptualisation of regimes as a set of contested values that compete with each other during configuration and reconfiguration processes. This to some extent blends the MLP with a Hegelian-Gramscian (1932) perspective on transitions by conceptualising
124 socio-technical regimes as systems produced and reproduced through contested ‘hegemony and ideology’.