Towards a framework of ‘off-gridding’: Conceptualising the practices and processes of urban energy transitions in South Africa

• Develops framework of off-gridding and analyses South Africa’s energy landscape. • Demonstrates how off-grid practices and processes shape infrastructure networks. • Identifies forms of off-gridding: secession, marginalisation, and supplementation. • Argues uneven state support for off-grid practices entrenches urban inequality. • Advances a framework to analyse just energy transitions in South Africa and beyond. This paper develops the concept of off-gridding as a continuum of interactive, relational practices and processes with material, organisational, and social dimensions. It contributes to wider scholarship on the nature of energy infrastructures and their implications for diverse urban citizenships. Off-gridding is developed and demonstrated in the context of urban South Africa to understand how the practices of end-users (from below) and the processes of the state and other emergent actors (from above) involved in urban energy infrastructure transitions rearticulate the state-citizen relationship, and the implications for a just transition. These infrastructure transitions occur through: (1) grid secession by higher-income consumers insulating themselves from a failing electricity grid, (2) marginalisation of lower-income consumers from the grid, and most frequently, (3) grid supplementation with alternative energy sources across income groups. This continuum of practices occurs within the context of enduring spatial inequalities in the wake of apartheid urban development, South Africa’s electricity crisis, and contradictory state mandates and actual practices around provision. The paper draws on interview data across three sample groups of stakeholders in South Africa’s energy sector, including local government, private sector generators and distributors, and civil society. It also draws on field observations in high-, middle-, and low-income neighbourhoods in Cape Town and Johannesburg. Beyond South Africa, off-gridding provides an analytical framework for understanding how heterogeneous infrastructure provision and access intersect with liberalising energy markets and global agendas for just transitions.