Energy Poverty and Policy Coherence in India

Energy poverty is frequently mobilized as a normative argument in international negotiations. Explicitly or implicitly, the argument stands behind India’s request that industrialized countries should support, or at least not impede India’s and other developing and emerging countries’ quest for economic growth and their strive for energy security. Yet, from a development perspective, engaging in an international dialogue about energy poverty only makes sense if achievements at the international level can be expected to actually lead to improvements at the national level, i.e. eventually for the Indian poor. The concrete linkages between the propositions at the international level and national policies remain ill-defined, and thus invite different stakeholders to make use of terms like 'energy poverty' for their own purposes; 'energy poverty' remains a contested concept that lends itself to social norm construction. The chapter argues that the use of normative positions regarding energy poverty in India reveals the Janus-faced process of strategic social construction. On the one hand, salient norms may genuinely inform interests, with norms themselves as political ends of rationally calculating actors. On the other hand, however, political actors effectively utilize norms as means and subsume them to their economic and political considerations. To that extent, norms are first and foremost means to different political ends, which in turn may or may not reflect normative propositions. We illustrate our argument empirically by comparing Indian statements at the international level with the domestic discourse, actual subsidy policies, and access to clean energy.