The Politics of Energy and Sustainable Development in Sub-Saharan Africa Page 1 of 26 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 15 March 2019 Subject: Political Science, Regional Studies Online Publication Date: Mar 2019 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190861360.013.29 The Politics of Energy and Sustainable Development in Sub-Saharan Africa Laurence L. Delina The Oxford Handbook of Energy Politics Edited by Kathleen Hancock and Juliann Allison Oxford Handbooks Online Abstract and Keywords The global sustainable development agenda, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), places energy systems—technologies to improve energy access, increase renewable energy generation, and tap energy efficiency—at its core to deliver what the United Nations General Assembly envisaged to be sustainable development for “people, prosperity and planet.” But a fourth “p”—for politics—needs to be enmeshed in this framework. This chapter maps the extant literature on the connections between the politics of energy systems and sustainable development in sub-Saharan Africa, a region where most of the world’s energy poor live. A focus on the politics of energy and sustainable development for people, prosperity, and planet remains a rich, yet understudied, frontier for future research. This chapter suggests an inclusive, interdisciplinary, and influential research agenda. Keywords: sustainable development, Sustainable Development Goals, energy access, energy transition, sub- Saharan Africa The United Nations General Assembly (2015), in its meeting on September 5, 2015, adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, a collection of seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) with 169 targets that place “people, prosperity and planet” front and center in development. Energy—which came to be recognized as a key driver for social and economic development but was conspicuously absent in the Millennium Development Goals, the precursor to the SDGs—has been duly included in this global agenda as goal 7 (SDG7). It calls for universal energy access and increases in the deployment of renewable energy and energy efficiency technologies. But SDG7 does not operate in a vacuum. Delivering the targets of SDG7 by 2030 is a process rife with contentious and messy exercises, in which technical materiality interacts with power, discourse, and behavioral, social, and institutional forces. In short, it is difficult to divorce the politics of energy from the rhetoric of sustainable development for all (Meadowcroft 2009; Newell and Phillips 2016; Stirling 2014; Schillebeeckx et al. 2012; Chaurey et al.