CLAIMS to Energy Citizenship is an exciting research project, funded by the Danish International Development Agency (DANIDA) under the theme of “Development under conditions of climate change”. The project runs from April 2024- March 2028 under the leadership of Associate Professor Karen Waltorp (Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen) and Senior Researcher Liza Rose Cirolia (African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town).
In the context of Cape Town, South Africa, CLAIMS unpacks how energy – in particular electricity – is a key site of negotiating contemporary citizenship and urban statecraft. The project positions itself at a series of crossroads. On the one hand, there is a rapid rescaling of energy governance in South Africa, with concomitant technological and fiscal implications. Related to this, pressure to decarbonise is mounting, presenting both opportunities and risks. On the other hand, and 30 years after the end of Apartheid, persistent and stressful inequities in infrastructural provision animate the urban experience, shaping everyday life, strategies for survival, notions of belonging, and modes of activism.
Against the backdrop of calls for a just urban transition and spiraling electricity costs, there are high stakes for citizens and city authorities alike. While there are many voices in these debates, CLAIMS hopes to add a careful and creative contribution, straddling scholarly critique and generative propositions. Accordingly, the CLAIMS research team is interdisciplinary and includes anthropology, geography, urban studies, historical and religious studies. Gathering a range of backgrounds and experiences, the project brings together senior researchers, post-doctoral fellows, PhD and master students, and community-based researchers.
The CLAIMS project will recruit two master students, registered in the ACC’s MPhil in Urban Studies – Southern Urbanism, and organize a Citizen Science Academy. The master students will be registered from Jan 2025 to Dec 2026 and will align their research themes to the project. The Citizen Science Academy will provide training to community-based researchers in ethnographic and arts-based methods. Some of these participants will be hired by the project to document the afterlives of electricity experiments.
The project is structured around three work packages:
Work Package 1 is led by Karen Waltorp and Tammy Wilks, and focuses on historical and present day claims to energy citizenship. The researchers in this WP will deploy archival, arts-based, and ethnographic approaches to explore everyday claim-making and challenges related to electricity access on the Cape Flats. They will explore the afterlives of electricity experiments, the labor of accessing services and the state, and the make-do tactics used to survive in times of energy scarcity.
Work Package 2 is led by Anna Selmeczi and Razaz Hassan Basheir, and focuses on “just transition”, with an emphasis on the emerging role of city authorities in questions of energy delivery and decarbonisation. The researchers in this WP will explore the material, fiscal, regulatory, and political dimensions of urban statecraft from the perspective of electricity rescaling. The WP will explore the ways that electricity forms a critical site of urban statecraft; whether claims to energy sovereignty echo colonial or apartheid patterns of differentiated inclusion; and what speculative imaginaries drive technological reconfigurations at the urban scale.
Work Package 3, led by the full team, will draw together insights from WP1 and WP2, aiming to integrate these multi-scalar and interdisciplinary insights into a coherent theorisation of energy citizenship. The overall objective is to juxtapose government and city policies and provision practices to the concerns and actions of marginalised electricity users, in order to examine the frictions and possible reciprocity between them. WP 3 will also work to translate insights from WP1 and WP2 into meaningful outputs for public audiences, working with the City of Cape Town’s Environmental Strategy Implementation Unit (Saul Roux) and Energy and Climate Change Directorate (Thandeka Tshabalala).
