The Impact of Land on the 'Right to Energy' in Namibia

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Reß, Theresa:
The Impact of Land on the 'Right to Energy' in Namibia.
Bayreuth , 2022 . - 97, XXIII S.
(Masterarbeit, 2020 , Universität Bayreuth, Fakultät für Biologie, Chemie und Geowissenschaften)

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Abstract

Energy plays nowadays an essential role for a countries’ development and economic growth. Particularly interesting is thereby the case of Namibia. As a young, previously colonized nation, the country is currently working towards economic development. This includes pushing forward its energy sector and increasing the energy distribution. However, despite the efforts, progress is only slow. At the same time, ‘land’ is a highly critical topic, as the nation is trying to overcome the remnants of its colonial past. With land and energy playing such a big role, chances are high that both might impact each other, thereby affecting the respective progress. This thesis therefore analyses the ‘land – energy’ situation in Namibia, as well as potential linkages in terms of the ‘right to energy’ and energy justice. While the connection of land and energy certainly affects the nations’ current development, this is clearly only partly the reason for all the issues. Against that, the more crucial factor hindering the progress is the persistence of Namibia’s colonial past. Thus, hysteresis effects and path dependencies strongly impact citizens on a local level, but also the institutional and political decisions. It causes infrastructures like the centralized energy system to remain in force, and colonial ideas and beliefs to still be a large part of peoples’ everyday life. In this way, they create a strong inequality in terms of energy, that still go along racial, apartheid lines, ultimately also affecting the ‘right to energy’. Accordingly, in Namibia this ‘right to energy’ is denied due to these dependencies on historic systems and beliefs. It leads to energy injustice, whereby the people discriminated are the same citizens that were already suppressed during Namibia’s past. Thus, rather than benefiting from new innovations or the governments’ attempts of restructuring the energy system, many Namibians keep relying on their adopted habits, preventing themselves from progress and the development of a fair energy system. It is thereby the combination of a challenging geographic and demographic context, unsuitable infrastructures, and institutions and beliefs based on past ideas that prevent the energy system from progressing. In this way, the natural land – energy – nexus is aggravated by the persistence of history, blocking both, the countries land reform and energy sector development.