Beyond Utilitarian Economics: A Capability Approach to Energy Poverty and Social Suffering

This article uses energy poverty and social suffering phenomena to show the inadequacy of utilitarian policy-making that puts primary focus on resource generation and availability as a means of socio-economic development. This approach fails to acknowledge that energy generation can go-hand-in-hand with energy poverty and social suffering. Drawing on empirical qualitative research in Zimbabwe, the article shows how a lack of social and political-economic capabilities contributes to energy poverty, which consequently leads to social suffering. The article draws on Amartya Sen’s capability approach, and then extends the argument through a Foucauldian analysis of power. It concludes that the local people of the region studied are more capability poor than energy poor. The article proposes a sense of capability, or the evaluation of the subjective and enduring experience of capability deprivation resulting from one’s social position, as an important consideration in energy policy. Policy makers should consider wellbeing as a basis for energy policy and the generated data could feed into a wider multidimensional measure of energy poverty that includes not only objective criteria, but associated perceptions as well.