Despite a flurry of interest from the international development community, political science has so far remained largely silent on energy poverty. Why do 1.1 billion people live without electricity and 2.8 billion without clean cooking fuels, while some governments have made rapid progress in providing virtually universal energy access? In this lucid and ambitious study, Michaël Aklin, Patrick Bayer, S. P. Harish, and Johannes Urpelainen aim to fill the gap and provide “a systematic, empirically falsifiable theory of energy poverty” (p. 59). In so doing, they open up a major new area of research in comparative political economy and energy policy.

Escaping the Energy Poverty Trap considers two dimensions of energy poverty that have particularly substantial effects on the well-being of energy-poor (largely rural) households: access to electricity and to modern cooking fuels. Chapter 2 provides a flexible working definition of energy poverty and surveys the wide variation in countries’ success in enabling energy access. Existing explanations of this divergence have tended toward economic or geographical determinism, seeing policy success as a function of country size, wealth, or resource endowments. Such theories, however, struggle to explain why China and Vietnam electrified precociously early or why resource-rich Nigeria and Indonesia have lagged behind.

Although it does not deny the significance of such factors, Escaping the Energy Poverty Trap persuasively argues that the ultimate determinants of this variation are political. Most crucial is government interest. Given the vast infrastructural investments required, the authors assume that the national government is the primary actor in alleviating energy poverty. As chapter 3 outlines, the government’s level of interest depends on whether it has sufficient political and economic incentives to help rural households meet their basic energy needs. Where governments believe their political survival depends on the rural energy-poor, they will invest in improving energy provision, a thesis that echoes The Logic of Political Survival (2003) by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Alastair Smith, Randolph M. Siverson, and James D. Morrow. Because rural voters in democratic regimes can exercise influence through the ballot box, democracies are more likely to eradicate energy poverty. Nonetheless, authoritarian regimes may also rely on rural constituencies or expect similar economic benefits from improved agricultural productivity through electrification. If the national government determines that net costs of eliminating energy poverty outweigh the benefits to itself, however, such eradication is unlikely (p. 74).

Yet government interest is necessary but not sufficient; the degree of policy effectiveness is conditioned by institutional capacity and local accountability. If all three factors are present, the result is fast and sustained progress (as in the case of rural electrification in China). If interest is strong but institutional capacity or local accountability is weak, improvements will be slower and more uneven (as in Ghana and Bangladesh). A fourth factor, technological change, can open up new opportunities through decentralized energy provision, but cannot overcome a lack of government interest.

Given the paucity of existing comparative research on energy poverty, these bold conclusions are based on a careful research design that examines most-similar and most-different case studies in turn. Chapter 4 presents a longitudinal analysis of energy access in India since 1947, using subnational comparisons across five Indian states to build its hypotheses. This argument is then tested through 11 shorter case studies across Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America. Chapter 5 explores energy access success stories—China, Vietnam, South Africa, Ghana, Brazil, and Chile—leveraging regime change to examine the effects of democratization. Chapter 6 analyzes cases where universal energy access remains elusive—Bangladesh, Indonesia, Kenya, and Nigeria—as well as the deviant case of Senegal. Together these chapters present a sweeping synthesis of recent research on energy access policies across the Global South.

The cases compellingly demonstrate the importance of government interest in minimizing energy poverty. As Indonesia and South Africa show, democratization often ushers in greater government interest in energy access for the rural energy-poor. Authoritarian regimes that consider rural electrification a matter of national economic and strategic concern, such as Maoist China and postwar Vietnam, may also invest heavily. Where governments are more interested in prioritizing urban and industrial constituencies or in outright graft, as in Nigeria and Kenya before the late 1990s, the outcomes are generally dismal. Policy-minded readers may find the practical implications persuasive but dismaying: energy access advocates and researchers are instructed to give up on governments uninterested in eradicating energy poverty (p. 251). Others may wonder precisely why there is such wide variation across regime type, especially in the degree of commitment to universal access for the most marginalized, something that deserves further elucidation. More optimistic is the exciting finding that local accountability has been foundational for energy access successes, from China’s decentralized rural electrification to Ghana’s demand-led programs. Future research might explore what kinds of local accountability mechanisms are most effective not only in sanctioning underperformance but also in shaping the concrete details of national policy implementation.

Across virtually all of the case studies, rural electrification has progressed more rapidly than access to clean cooking fuels. This aligns with the book’s predictions. Governments have greater incentives to promote rural electrification than access to modern cooking fuels, because of the former’s tighter link with economic productivity and pivotal constituencies like wealthy farmers (what the authors call “public service delivery by coincidence”). The apparent exception, Senegal, fits the deeper pattern: the threat of deforestation and desertification drove strong government interest in providing modern cooking fuels, unusually outpacing rural electrification. These nuanced findings prompt a valuable note of caution against the tendency of political scientists to discuss public goods and services in the abstract, rather than paying attention to the quiddity of particular goods. Institutional capacity is also domain specific, the authors argue—not something that can be measured at the aggregate level. The concluding chapter calls for political scientists to analyze concrete realities from the bottom up, rather than imposing preexisting analytical categories.

The book’s own analytical categories are left somewhat underspecified, however. It is not clear how to measure government interest or why it varies over time. Institutional capacity is variously treated as synonymous with bureaucratic competence, technical expertise, interagency coordination, or even utility profitability. Local accountability is similarly used as a catchall term to refer to everything from community ownership to market signals and consumer voice in regulatory forums. These discussions also tend to sidestep the most popular explanation for poor utility performance in the Global South—political capture—and indeed political competition finds surprisingly little place in the analysis. Although the book concludes that clientelism is a side issue (p. 248), this downplays the problem that short-run benefits may undermine long-term sustainability; responsiveness to rural demands can lock energy sectors into financially and environmentally ruinous subsidies. As the authors themselves acknowledge, each of these categories deserves systematic measurement and further study.

These concerns notwithstanding, Escaping the Energy Poverty Trap provides a thrilling opening salvo in a nascent field of study. Political scientists, energy scholars, and development practitioners alike will find the book stimulating and provocative, as well as a rich repository of material on successes and failures across three continents. It deserves to kickstart a new wave of comparative politics research on sustainable energy access for all.