The charcoal web: Material and social relations in Uganda’s woodfuel energy infrastructure

Charcoal is the predominant household energy source in many African cities and has been a major industry throughout the continent for decades. Despite charcoal’s critical importance to urban energy provision and social order, however, production and trade have often been subject to neglect, arbitrary repression, and rent extraction by African states that officially aspire to ‘modern’ energy and blame charcoal for environmental harm. This presents a puzzle, as charcoal’s vast scale, effectiveness, and resilience as an unregulated, informal, even criminalized, industry challenge the assumption that major energy systems require formal regulation and legal certainty. Charcoal also challenges the assumption that states would be incentivized to engage more proactively, consistently, or even constructively with an industry and infrastructure so central to social order. We seek to explain this puzzle by showing how the materiality of charcoal provides a plurality, flexibility, and adaptability to the relations comprising its infrastructure, which, in turn, enables it to ‘work’ not despite, but together with, state neglect and repression. Through a study of charcoal in Uganda, we trace the material and social relations that constitute what we call the ‘charcoal web’ to explain its sustained role in energy provision. There, charcoal’s material qualities enable decentralized, autonomous, small-scale ‘anarchic’ production systems outside the gaze of the state to exist alongside more coordinated ‘oligarchic’ systems involving large-scale industrial operations and state involvement, and together these enable charcoal’s sustained efficacy – but often at a significant social and ecological cost.