Journal of Innovations

Vol. 4, Issue 5

Negotiating Sustainable Energy Transition: Social Innovation, Power Dynamics, and Clean-Cooking Practices

AUTHOR(S)

Jeremiah Thoronka

ABSTRACT

Energy transition scholarship often privileges technology, infrastructure, and policy targets while giving insufficient attention to how power is negotiated in everyday household practice. This article addresses that gap through an ethnographic analysis of clean-cooking transitions in Kigali, Rwanda. It argues that urban energy transition is not simply a shift from biomass and charcoal to liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) or electricity, but a negotiated reorganisation of cooking practices shaped by gendered labour, household authority, infrastructural constraints, moral economies of taste, and trust in markets and institutions. Bringing together social practice theory, energy justice, political ecology, and a relational understanding of power as power to, power with, and power over, the article analyses household cooking routines, adoption and non-adoption narratives, and the institutional conditions that structure everyday energy use. The findings show that access does not equal appropriation; households rely on sequenced and hybrid cooking arrangements rather than linear fuel switching; gatekeeping artefacts and trust infrastructures shape who may use modern energy, when, and under what conditions; and social innovation emerges through reconfigured permissions, routines, competences, and relations of trust. The article concludes that durable and just clean-cooking transitions require interventions that move beyond ownership counts to assess sustained everyday use, decision-making control, affordability, safety, and the practical ability of primary cooks to make cleaner energy part of routine meal preparation.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.62470/1e261309

CITE THIS ARTICLE 

Thoronka, J. (2026). Negotiating Sustainable Energy Transition: Social Innovation, Power Dynamics, and Clean-Cooking Practices. Journal of Innovations, 4(5), 1-14. https://doi.org/10.62470/1e261309