Publications
Explore journal articles and reports developed from our research activities.
Journal Articles
Electricity access remains out of reach for about half of the population in Sub-Saharan Africa, and in rural areas, the electricity access gap reaches almost 70%. Overcoming the electricity access gap is also spurring innovative models of distributed electrification. The considerable debate about how households will advance from offgrid solar technologies to larger appliances and grid connections has mainly focused on the economic and technological aspects of these decisions.
Intermediaries include actors playing multiple and often different roles in the innovation process, but comparatively little scholarship has characterized intermediation for technology diffusion in remote or hard-to-reach contexts.
Dam development improves water, food, and energy security but often with negative impacts on human health. The transmission of dam-related diseases persists in many dammed catchments despite treatment campaigns. On the Senegal River Basin, the transmission of Schistosoma spp. parasites has been elevated since the construction of dams in the late 1980’s.
Kenya’s national electrification plan now promotes the use of off-grid solar home systems as a long-term energy access solution in rural regions of the country, suggesting that these technologies may no longer be viewed as stop-gap solutions for households awaiting the centralized grid.
We provide a conceptual review of mutual aid to operationalize a more just notion of resilience at individual, community, and group levels. We link scholarship across disciplines to examine how mutual aid contributes to adaptive capacity to support climate resilience. Mutual aid has the potential to support responses to climate change that do not return to the status quo, but instead address systemic burdens and vulnerabilities to support existing community strengths and assets.
Many rural households in India lack access to reliable energy services but off-grid solar technologies are able to meet basic lighting and electricity needs. The availability and perception of different technologies, appliances, and services influences how households will transition to renewable energy.
This paper argues that government leadership both at the federal and local levels remains central to implementing green infrastructure for stormwater management. We conducted interviews with more than forty city, federal, and regional staff on how and why they work to implement green infrastructure, and interpreted the material using literature from environmental governance and water management.
Reports
A focus on exploring the idea of an “energy navigator” and how that might work in practice emerged during the “Energy and Equity in the Twin Cities” 2021 workshop hosted by the University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment (IonE) and Robert J. Jones Urban Research and Outreach-Engagement Center (UROC).
This research was funded by the Minnesota Department of Commerce to support the 2021 Weatherization Assistance Program Working Group. Authors of this report were not members of the Working Group but attended select meetings to ensure alignment of research design with the Working Group objectives and identified research needs.
The CHIPS and Science Act presents a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to center sustainability in ongoing R&D and investment and mitigate the myriad environmental impacts of chips before they become even more ubiquitous.