From crisis to context: Reviewing the future of sustainable charcoal in Africa

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dc.contributor.authorBranchaJok, Adam
dc.contributor.authorKwaku, A. Frank
dc.contributor.authorGai ,Anaic
dc.contributor.authorLaloyo ,A. Stella
dc.contributor.authorBartlett , Ann
dc.contributor.authorBrownell, Emily
dc.contributor.authorCaravani, Matteo
dc.contributor.authorCavanagh, Joseph Connor
dc.contributor.authorFennell, Shailada
dc.contributor.authorLangole, Stephen
dc.contributor.authorMabele, Bukhi Mathew
dc.contributor.authorMwampamba , Heita Tuyeni
dc.contributor.authorNjenga, Mary
dc.contributor.authorOwor, Arthur
dc.contributor.authorPhillips, Jon
dc.contributor.authorTiltimamer, Nhial
dc.date.accessioned2026-04-23T08:28:03Z
dc.date.available2026-04-23T08:28:03Z
dc.date.issued2021-12-08
dc.description.abstractABSTRACT Is charcoal a sustainable energy source in Africa? This is a crucial question, given charcoal's key importance to urban energy. In today's dominant policy narrative – the charcoal-crisis narrative – charcoal is deemed incom patible with sustainable and modern energy, blamed for looming ecological catastrophe, and demanding replacement. However, an emerging sustainability-through-formalization narrative posits that charcoal can be made sustainable – specifically, through formalization of production, trade, markets, and consumption technologies. This represents an important opportunity to go beyond the crisis narrative and to engage productively with charcoal. However, this ascendent narrative also risks misrepresenting the reality of charcoal on the continent and leading to inappropriate policies. The narrative's designation of the African charcoal sector as unsustainable at present obscures charcoal production's diverse and uncertain impacts across the continent; moreover, the association of informality with unsustainability obscures a similarly complex and diverse social reality as well as the ways that social processes and relations of power and inequality determine charcoal's sustainability. We argue that charcoal needs to be considered within its historical, social, and environmental contexts to better understand its present and the emergent pathways to sustainable energy futures. We draw upon research that is raising questions about both the charcoal-crisis and the sustainability-through-formalization narratives to argue for a new narrative of charcoal in context. This approaches charcoal as a politically, ecologically, and historically embedded resource, entailing significant socio-ecological complexity across diverse historical and geographical conjunctures, and calling for new agendas of interdisciplinary research with an orientation towards sustainability and justice.
dc.description.sponsorshipThe British Academy for funding provided by the Heritage, Dignity, and Violence Programme (HDV190205) is supported under the UK Government’s Global Challenges Research Fund. We would also like to thank the Philomathia Foundation and Trinity Hall, Cambridge, for funding the 2019 conference, where the presentations were originally made, and Gulu University for hosting the conference. We appreciate support from the CGIAR Research Programme on Water, Land and Ecosystems (WLE). Finally, we would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their very helpful suggestions for revisions.
dc.identifier.citationBranch, A., Agyei, F. K., Anai, J. G., Apecu, S. L., Bartlett, A., Brownell, E., ... & Tiitmamer, N. (2022). From crisis to context: Reviewing the future of sustainable charcoal in Africa. Energy Research & Social Science, 87, 102457.
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14270/795
dc.language.isoen
dc.publisherEnergy Research & Social Science , ElsevierLtd.
dc.relation.ispartofseries87; 102457
dc.subjectCharcoal
dc.subjectSustainability
dc.subjectAfrica
dc.subjectDeforestation and degradation
dc.subjectInformality
dc.subjectWood fuels
dc.titleFrom crisis to context: Reviewing the future of sustainable charcoal in Africa
dc.typeArticle

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