With increasingly improved cooking stoves (ICS) that aim to reduce fuelwood consumption by forest-dependent households, more evidence of what drives households to adopt ICS is needed. Using data from a representative sample (N=271) of households in a rural part of eastern Tanzania, we estimated a mixed logit model to take into account the limitations of the standard multinomial logit model and relaxed the restrictive assumption of the conditional logit model.

The recent Collective Forest Tenure Reform in China has started the process of devolving forest management rights from village collectives to households since 2003. In this paper, we study the impact of the reform on rural energy consumption. Devolving forest tenure improves farmers' access to forest products on their newly acquired forestland, and is therefore expected to increase farmers' fuelwood consumption. The reform also allows farmers to adopt some revenue-enhancing forest technologies which may lead to energy switching in farmer households.

Electrification, especially rural electrification (RE), is a core component of the Sustainable Development Goals and a major focal point of the global development community. Despite this focus, more than one billion people worldwide do not have access to electricity, and electrification growth rates are not keeping pace with population growth. In this paper, we posit that lack of progress is partly driven by a misalignment between academic research and energy planners’ and policy makers’ needs.

This study investigates local residents’ attitudes toward shale gas exploitation in China through interviews of 730 residents of Sichuan Province and explores determinants of their support or opposition. It is the first study in China to explore local residents’ attitudes on this subject and we identify underlying factors contributing to such attitudes, including energy poverty, environmental awareness, and risk and benefit perceptions. The results show that the respondents are generally supportive of shale gas development. Fewer than 20% of them report opposing such development.

The Economics and Environment for Development Program (EEfD) carry out a review of policy relevant documents and countries initiatives on environment and development topics in Central America. The policy review addresses the issue of sustainable energy from two different perspectives. One approach considers energy in its broad spectrum and as a national sector of relevance, while the other one focuses on the relevance of implementing sustainable energies under a climate change context (EEfD 2016)1.

The investment requirements to achieve the United Nations’ universal electricity access goal by 2030 are estimated at 640 billion USD. The assumption underlying this goal is that electrification contributes to poverty alleviation in many regards. In recent years, a body of literature has emerged that widely confirms this positive poverty impact assumption. Most of these studies, however, are based on data from Asia and Latin America. This paper challenges the transferability of impact findings in the literature to the African context.

More than 3 billion people use wood fuels for their daily cooking needs, with detrimental health implications related to smoke emissions. Best practice global initiatives emphasize the dissemination of clean cooking stoves, but these are often expensive and suffer from interrupted supply chains that do not reach rural areas. This emphasis neglects that many households in the developing world cook outdoors. Our calculations suggest that for such households, the use of less expensive biomass cooking stoves can substantially reduce smoke exposure.

Free technology distribution can be an effective development policy instrument if adoption is socially inefficient and hampered by affordability constraints. Yet, policy makers often oppose free distribution, arguing that reference dependence spoils the willingness to pay and thus market potentials in the long run. For improved cookstoves, this paper studies the willingness to pay six years after a randomized one-time free distribution.

Measuring inequality can be challenging due to the limitations of using household income or expenditure data. Because actual energy consumption can be measured more easily and accurately and is relatively more stable, it may be a better measure of inequality. Here we use data on energy consumption for specific devices from a large nation-wide household survey (n = 3,404 rural households from 12 provinces) to assess inequality in rural China.

This paper examines the relationship between information feedback and residential electricity consumption, based on a household survey dataset collected in 2012 that covered 26 provinces in China. The results show that information feedback is strongly associated with residential electricity consumption. Electricity consumption is statistically lower in households who obtain consumption information through interactions with meter readers, receive ex ante feedback (use a prepaid metering system), and receive explicit feedback by directly paying meter readers.