Gender Justice and Decentralised Energy Resources: Perspectives from the United Kingdom and Nigeria
Akinsemolu, A.
Akinsemolu, A.
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2025
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Abstract
This chapter analyses the legal dimensions of the challenges and prospects of decentralised energy generation, through a feminist lens. First, decentralization has implications for the ownership structures of the energy systems, establishing new hierarchies in operation, ownership, and distribution structures. The establishment of these hierarchies necessitates the development of a fair, effective, and functional decentralised governance system, presenting the legal challenge of establishing a governance system that upholds gender and energy justice while maintaining efficiency in energy production and consumption. Second, one of the objectives of energy decentralisation is to promote universal access to energy by making it available to places and households that were previously excluded from the grid under the centralised system. This presents the legal issue of the establishment of a balance between the democratisation of energy access and the commercial viability of energy decentralisation by addressing the factors that previously prevented universal connection to the centralized grid within existing legal frameworks. Finally, the production, storage, and consumption of decentralized energy requires adaptation to emerging technologies to maintain environmental sustainability. This capital-intensive practice presents the legal issue of the establishment of a balance between environmental sustainability and universal connectivity to decentralized energy. These three legal issues require direct focus in energy laws and governance systems, to ensure that women and other marginalized groups can access decentralized energy resources (DERs) to address energy poverty and other environmental and equity concerns that are exacerbated by the prevailing centralized energy systems. Against this backdrop, the chapter examines the effectiveness of the energy laws and policies in Nigeria and the United Kingdom in integrating a gender justice lens in DERs design and implementation. Recommendations are made for legal reforms to address the critical challenges of gender equity in the deployment of sustainable DERs in Nigeria and the United Kingdom.
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Obani P and Akinsemolu A (2025) Gender Justice and Decentralised Energy Resources: Perspectives from the United Kingdom and Nigeria. In: del Guayo I, Olawuyi DS, De Fontenelle L et al (Eds) Sustainable Distributed Energy Resources. Oxford University Press.
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