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- All Subjects: India
- All Subjects: Energy Justice
- Creators: Callahan, Sharon
- Member of: ASU Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Description
As universities, nonprofits, community foundations, and governmental organizations proliferate the language of leadership development and social transformation, it is with an inadequate understanding of what agency is being provoked. With an emphasis on ‘career-focused’ tools and techniques in community development literature and pedagogy, there is too little understanding of the knowledge being drawn upon and created by community workers (CWs). Furthermore, this knowledge is often tacit, bodily, spiritual, and collective, making it even more alien to the empiricism-focused world of social science. Situated meaning-making must be recapitulated in the study of community development in order to better address the complexity and ambiguity of specific practices and the associated construction of identities.
This study suggests an alternative way to understand and analyze community development work. Building on fieldwork in the Kumaoni Himalaya of India, it is argued that community workers make sense of the world in large part through the co-construction of dialectic identity metaphors (DIMs). These DIMs help explain to the workers the way the world works, the way it does not work, and what to do about it. More than formal community development theory, I suggest community workers look to dominant DIMs to structure organizational vision and program creation. Furthermore, ideological fragments within local DIMs contribute to the reproduction of dominant ways of knowing and the creation of best practices. For this reason, in situ examination of DIM creation and maintenance is useful for understanding how and why CWs collectively construct their identities and the co-constitutive work.
This study suggests an alternative way to understand and analyze community development work. Building on fieldwork in the Kumaoni Himalaya of India, it is argued that community workers make sense of the world in large part through the co-construction of dialectic identity metaphors (DIMs). These DIMs help explain to the workers the way the world works, the way it does not work, and what to do about it. More than formal community development theory, I suggest community workers look to dominant DIMs to structure organizational vision and program creation. Furthermore, ideological fragments within local DIMs contribute to the reproduction of dominant ways of knowing and the creation of best practices. For this reason, in situ examination of DIM creation and maintenance is useful for understanding how and why CWs collectively construct their identities and the co-constitutive work.
ContributorsPeterson, Charles Bjørn (Author) / Knopf, Richard C. (Thesis advisor) / Callahan, Sharon (Committee member) / Buzinde, Christine (Committee member) / Rodriguez, Ariel (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
As India expanded its grid infrastructure, decentralized renewable energy technologies, such as off-grid solar, also emerged in parallel as an electrification solution. This dissertation critically examines the role of off-grid solar in facilitating rural electrification efforts in India. Specifically, it applies the frameworks of the multi-level perspective, capabilities approach, and energy justice to achieve three objectives: (1) trace the evolution of off-grid solar in India; (2) understand the role of solar micro-grids in improving household capabilities and well-being; (1) examine whether and how community-scale solar micro-grids can operate as just means of electrification. This research relies on qualitative case-study methods. The historical research in Paper 1 is based on published policy documents and interviews with energy experts in India. It finds that landscape-regime-niche actor relations and politics were crucial in shaping off-grid solar transition outcomes. There is also a narrative component, as the key narratives of energy security, environmental degradation, climate change and energy for development converged to create spaces for state and non-state interactions that could nurture the development of off-grid solar. The community-level research in Papers 2 and 3 analyze a local energy initiative of community operated solar micro-grid using semi-structured interviews and participant observations from three villages in Maharashtra. Solar micro-grids play an important part in expanding people’s choices and opportunities. The benefits are not uniform across all people, however. Increases in energy-related capabilities vary by economic class and gender, and to some extent this means certain biases can get reinforced. In addition, the inability of solar micro-grids to keep up with the changing electrification landscape and daily practices means that the challenges of affordability, reliability and community engagement emerged as important concerns over-time. Empirically, this dissertation finds that off-grid energy initiatives must be carefully designed to be in alignment with local values and realities. Theoretically, it adds to debates on justice in energy transitions by showcasing the regime-led innovations, and temporality elements of energy justice local energy initiatives.
ContributorsRajagopalan, Sushil (Author) / Breetz, Hanna (Thesis advisor) / Klinsky, Sonja (Thesis advisor) / Singh, Kartikeya (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021