Publication Type

Journal Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

9-2021

Abstract

The inadequate supply of electricity in Pakistan disrupts everyday life and hampers industry and business; in this it is an emblematic indicator of the poor quality of urban governance pervasive in much of the Global South. We focus on the governance of Karachi’s electricity distribution system, and its spatial unevenness across this sprawling metropolis of 15 million residents which encompasses huge informal settlements alongside upscale housing and commercial plazas. Using a dataset with granular, neighborhood-level electricity data, we apply spatial and statistical modeling techniques to understand how transmission and distribution losses, i.e., the utility’s ability to bill for the electricity it supplies, vary across the city. These electricity losses provide a useful lens on the unevenness of urban governance in the city, especially where other sources of detailed socio-economic data are scarce. Our models link losses to higher proportions of residential consumers rather than commercial or industrial. Moreover, based on an analysis of model residuals, we can start to specify the degree to which urban governance is driven by the underlying characteristics of the neighborhood and bring some precision to understanding the spatial distribution of urban governance. Our findings reinforce the importance for governance reforms to be locally situated and informed, while also opening up new possibilities for visualizing electricity governance at a very local level and thus promoting democratic transparency.

Keywords

Electricity, Urban governance, Pakistan

Discipline

Asian Studies | Urban Studies | Urban Studies and Planning

Research Areas

Sociology

Publication

Energy Research and Social Science

Volume

79

First Page

1

Last Page

10

ISSN

2214-6296

Identifier

10.1016/j.erss.2021.102166

Publisher

Elsevier

Copyright Owner and License

Authors

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2021.102166

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