Democratization, Energy Poverty, and the Pursuit of Symmetry

At a time when political sensitivities and economic realities acknowledge the eradication of energy poverty to be both a moral and material imperative, and in an era where citizens’ demands for an expansion and deepening of inclusionary economic and political institutions punctuate the globe, it remains curious that policy makers have not robustly connected the two areas explicitly. For the laws of political ecology are not wholly unlike the laws of natural ecology in the interconnected nature of their object’s components and the very potent symbiotic relationships contained therein. The argument advanced in this brief essay maintains that the pursuit of energy service provision runs through the public domains of open deliberation, shared infrastructure and inclusionary governance structures, and that a more defined and symmetrical programmatic treatment of the two would facilitate a more expeditious and effective realization of both.