This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/BY/4.0/Rural community energy projects in the Global South have too frequently been framed within a top-down technologically-driven framework that limits their ability to provide sustainable solutions to energy poverty and improving livelihoods. This framing is linked to how energy interventions are being imagined and constructed by key actors in the sector, via particular sociotechnical imaginaries through which a set of increasingly universalised energy futures for rural communities are prescribed. Projects are too frequently reverse-engineered through the lens of particular combinations of technologies, financial models and delivery mechanisms, rather than by attending to the particular energy needs/aspirations of individual communities. Assumptions over the association between energy access and livelihood enhancement have also reinforced a technocratic determination of appropriate system scale and a search for universalised ‘scaleable’ delivery models. There is, however, no necessary causation between scaleability and outcomes - appropriate implementation scales are not purely determined by technical or financial considerations, rather it is the social scale via which optimum forms of local participation and ownership can be achieved. To operationalise this concern for social space we propose a Social Energy Systems (SES) approach that is advanced via exploration of the interactions between three distinct but mutually edifying variants of energy literacy – energy systems literacy, project community literacy and political literacy

Energy and Society is the first major text to provide an extensive critical treatment of energy issues informed by recent research on energy in the social sciences. Written in an engaging and accessible style it draws new thinking on uneven development, consumption, vulnerability and transition together to illustrate the social significance of energy systems in the global North and South. The book features case studies, examples, discussion questions, activities, recommended reading and more, to facilitate its use in teaching. Energy and Society deploys contemporary geographical concepts and approaches but is not narrowly disciplinary. Its critical perspective highlights connections between energy and significant socio-economic and political processes, such as globalisation, urban isation, international development and social justice, and connects important issues that are often treated in isolation, such as resource availability, energy security, energy access and low-carbon transition. Co-authored by leading researchers and based on current research and thinking in the social sciences, Energy and Society presents a distinctive geographical approach to contemporary energy issues. It is an essential resource for upperlevel undergraduates and Master’s students in geography, environmental studies, urban studies, energy studies and related fields.

For the past 40 years, the dominant ‘policy’ on cooking energy in the Global South has been to improve the combustion efficiency of biomass fuels. This was said to alleviate the burdens of biomass cooking for three billion people by mitigating emissions, reducing deforestation, alleviating expenditure and collection times on fuels and increasing health outcomes. By 2015, international agencies were openly saying it was a failing policy. The dispersal of improved cookstoves was not keeping up with population growth, increasing urbanisation was leading to denser emissions and evidence suggested health effects of improved stoves were not as expected. A call was made for a new strategy, something other than ‘business as usual’. Conventional wisdom suggests that access to electricity is poor in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), that it is too expensive and that weak grids prevent even connected households from cooking. Could a new strategy be built around access to electricity (and gas)? Could bringing modern energy for cooking to the forefront kill two birds with one stone? In 2019, UK Aid announced a multi-million-pound programme on ‘Modern Energy Cooking Services’ (MECS), specifically designed to explore alternative approaches to address cooking energy concerns in the Global South. This paper outlines the rationale behind such a move, and how it will work with existing economies and policies to catalyse a global transition.