Electric activism: Analysis, alliances, and interventions

Electricity has been the unspoken bedrock of modern life. Decisions about how power is produced, transmitted, and delivered have been entrusted to technical experts and have been relatively unquestioned. In turn, the electricity sector has historically been an opaque one, impervious to public scrutiny. Yet liberalization of the sector, global and local environmental impacts, and new energy technologies are spurring a growing clamor to peel back the layers of technocracy and to prise open a space for new voices and actors. This article explores the ways in which the governance of the electricity sector is changing and being changed by a new politics of energy production and consumption. The article focuses on long‐term electricity planning to understand how critical independent experts and nonexperts have formed alliances that challenge entrenched decision‐making processes and assumptions. It presents case studies from South Africa and Thailand that document the struggle between reluctant departments of energy and nongovernmental initiatives demanding access to the processes underpinning the production of knowledge about electricity sector needs. The analysis places these cases within the shifts under way in energy sectors around the world, away from centralized command‐and‐control systems to those that are decentralized with multiple points of energy generation. It explores the implications for how governance is conceived, with special attention to the implications for both policy and activist agendas. What forms of interaction between experts and citizens can we conceive, and how can they be supported?