Domestic biogas in Nepal and Bangladesh: transformations around the heat of the hearth

Domestic biogas in Nepal and Bangladesh: transformations around the heat of the hearth Title  

13 January 2022, 1-2pm 

Dr Ben Campbell, DEI Fellow & Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology

As the Pandemic took hold, the project ‘Positioning Biogas for Modern Energy Cooking Services’ was gearing up for initiating fieldwork case studies to explore the social embedding of domestic anaerobic digesters in four countries where biogas programmes had made considerable headway. To date there had been extremely little social science knowledge of how these systems, which have been built mostly since the 1980s/90s have articulated with livelihood systems-practices, and with socio-cultural norms of domestic divisions of labour and gender. All of a sudden the field visits had to become virtual and the countries to conduct the work reduced to two. The talk will discuss some important first findings from the research.

While concreted into domestic properties, the facilitating contexts for adopting biogas depend very much on fluid extra-domestic networks and support.

Attention to social practices around the cook stove reveals a rapid set of transformations at work for each generation and what cooking signifies to them.

The potential for domestic biogas to enable sustainable livelihoods for climate adaptation and energy sovereignty will not be realised by relying on the resilience of domestic autarky but on collective governance capacities.

Ben is an environmental/energy anthropologist concerned with research and teaching on the social dimensions of energy systems, developing an understanding of the potential for energy innovation by engaging community based local knowledge and skilled practice. Ben is co-chair of the Low Carbon Energy for Development Network working with DFID-ESRC-EPSRC projects.

To book a place at this event please visit our EvenBrite page.