WENDY WEI, JOURNALIST

Community-Owned Microgrids in Egypt: Tools of Empowerment or Unwanted Burden?

5/12/2016

The principle of community building and community participation in development projects is nothing new. Development goals over the past decade have been shaped by an emphasis on community building, which “means empowering locals to take ownership of processes that allow them to make their own changes.” (Amer, pers.comm., 2015). To this end, community participation is seen as an intrinsic tool of sustainable development, as “[e]nviornmental issues are best handled with the participation of all concerned citizens” (UNEP, 2002, online resource).

Simultaneously over the past decade, microgrids for electrifying rural areas have received considerable attention and investment from international aid organizations. Total microgrid capacity worldwide has quadrupled in the last four years[1], and many off-grid communities now enjoy electrification from a sustainable, renewable source. Thus, a greater priority for Egypt’s development plans is increasing energy access in remote areas, at least for international NGOs and researchers, along with increasing participatory decision-approaches, such as teaching local governance, that empower a community to effect social change.

Indeed, at the First International Conference on Solar Energy Solutions for Electricity and Water Supply held at the American University in Cairo in November 2015, almost all microgrid projects presented relied on the labor of community members for the actual construction and to espouse community empowerment. Community building in the context of the physical construction of a microgrid, or any other public service or building, owned and run by the community itself gives the term a quite literal meaning, and also certain challenges. While microgrids, or any innovation, have many proven technical strengths, the distance between the development practitioner’s vision for and the target community’s acceptance of a new grid can be an insurmountable gulf.

Fundamentally, often practitioners assume that ownership and responsibility is desirable for all communities when in reality, it can be seen as an unwanted burden. In Egypt, the government tends to view decision-making for a community as an exclusive political power and there are regimes that do not want to see empowerment on the local level. Presently, the government is wary of any project, especially conducted by a foreigner, that encourages community building, especially around electricity access. Among the masses, electricity access in Cairo has historically been a social barometer for the performance of national leadership. It is not uncommon to hear people link their support of a political party to how many power or water outages occurred during the party’s time in office. Thus, implementing projects dependent upon community empowerment in menacing political climates necessitate particular sensitivity on the part of practitioners, and sheds light on the fact that the very idea of community empowerment may be a strange concept in some areas of the world.

Nonetheless, participatory approaches to development projects such as microgrids are necessary. After all, once established, the infrastructure will be owned, operated, maintained and financed by the local community, and its sustainability depends on the local community. However, there needs to be thorough understanding of the ways in which these projects can be clearly translated into practices that community members are willing and ready to incorporate into their lives. If communities do not accept the rationale behind a project, and especially if community members are expected to contribute the labor to construction and maintenance, these projects will be abandoned quickly.

In Egypt, there have been cases where locals would severely question green practitioners’ recommendations of site location or construction material, and would end up ultimately unsatisfied with the given reason. For example, in the Western Desert of Egypt, the manufacture of white bricks for housing construction is notorious for its detrimental impacts on laborer’s health and the environment. However, residents continue to use white bricks in their housing for reasons of affordability, speedy delivery, and the elevated social status of living in a more “Western” house. In sustainable development practice, practitioners often assume that minimizing greenhouse gas emissions or preserving natural and cultural landscapes are goals shared by local residents, when often these ideals do not make the roster of prioritized values. If community members see that they have to pay more for a resource they do not feel is necessary, they will not take up the responsibility of ownership.

The issues that arose in Egypt’s communities in response to community building initiatives and sustainable practices are applicable to the proliferation of microgrids in remote areas and the broader development field, that prioritizes “empowering locals.” As past projects in desert communities in Egypt demonstrate, only with local acceptance, and flexibility on the part of the researchers, can sustainable concepts be translated into successful practice.

[1] http://www.utilitydive.com/news/how-remote-microgrid-systems-are-driving-capacity-growth-for-the-sector/410072/

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Alternative Islams

4/28/2016

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A running theme throughout my studies and time in Egypt has been the notion of multiple “Islams” and the great diversity among Muslim communities. While diversity is a fact, it’s easier to understand diversity on the surface level as geographic location, language, or dress, than to grasp that diversity of Islam is also in the different experiences, meanings, and understandings of Muslim identity as expressed through their ritual practices.

As Geertz posits, ritual is a symbolic language and each symbol points to something beyond itself, into many levels of interpretation. For example, while some Muslim groups worship separately from the opposite sex as an expression of religious piety, at least one community (the Alevi) conducts worship without separation because they believe that God does not see physical bodies, only souls during worship. Different worship practices reflect different understandings of what is appropriate and
sometimes even seemingly universal Islamic rites, like the hajj, have many interpretations.

For this reason, the mulids in Egypt can be seen as a basic analogy for the diversity of understandings and expression of Islam in Muslim communities:

“A mulid is a festival characterized by a profound ambivalence of experience and ambiguity of meaning: a time and a space for countless different celebrations, some of which overlap and others that never meet. Each visitor makes his or her own mulid, depending on where he or she goes and what he or she does.” (Schielke, 539).

Similarly, Islamic rites and the Muslim identity among communities grow out of and are maintained by different cultural traditions. However, though understanding the cultural experience of each community is important, it is also important to look at Islam from above and remember that politics (the state, economic elites, etc.) and religion are intertwined.

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James Dawes’ “Evil Men” – Representation of Human Cruelty

3/15/2016

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Yesterday I attended James Dawes’ lecture on his book, Evil Men. The event was sponsored by the University of Chicago’s Human Rights Department and attending the talk has broadened my perspective on human rights issues, particularly to consider input from fields outside of political science. In fact, Dawes is an English professor and his book is summarized below:

“Presented with accounts of genocide, we ask how people could bring themselves to commit such horrendous acts. Drawing on the firsthand interviews with convicted war criminals from the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) that inform his recent book Evil Men (Harvard, 2013), Dawes will explore what motivates atrocity and how it can be stopped.”

My initial reaction to the idea of Truth Commissions was puzzlement. How can something I perceive to be a deeply personal experience (coming to terms with trauma) be experienced through a political, public mechanism such as truth commissions? How does talking about their crimes turn perpetrators repentant? How does talking about their trauma relieve victims of their heavy burdens? Mendez notes that there is an obligation to document war crimes, but what if there exists an un-fillable gap between a survivor’s truth and public knowledge?

Dawes expresses his concern for exposing the private space of trauma through public representation of atrocities. He gave the example of photojournalists who document conflict zones and massacres, and asserts that the “image of horror can have an allure” that calls on the human attraction to horror. Consider a car accident on the side of the road. How many drivers slow down to drive past, perhaps hoping to catch a peek of some macabre scene? How can representations of evil avoid making a “pornography of evil?”

Though Dawes brings up many paradoxes in representing evil, the one often overlooked paradox that builds the foundation of arguments for or against Truth Commissions is the paradox of trauma. On one hand we must represent atrocities, but on the other, we must not represent atrocities. Dawes does not cite reasons of political calculus or pragmatic barriers of funding, but instead focuses on the philosophical nature of traumatic events. He argues that it is impossible to transform a traumatic experience into words since trauma itself is something so beyond ordinary human perception that one does not even truly experience it. Supposedly, the traumatic event is too traumatic to be made conscious or intelligible; it is in-cognitive. Dawes cites the sentiments of Holocaust survivors, many of whom remark that their experience of the Holocaust is like a gap in their being, something that cannot be understood. Dawes takes this as evidence for trauma being an assault on meaning and this is something that cannot be transcended. In a way, representing trauma through words or art or speech is a betrayal because it suggests that one can restore what is in-comprehensible with art. But on the other hand, one must still attempt to represent trauma as it is worse to be silent.

Another important paradox Dawes cites that directly relates to Truth Commissions is the paradox of confession. Dawes makes a point about the nature of confession and its compatibility with local traditions. During his research with Japanese war criminals, a colleague urged him to re-evaluate his use of the word ‘confession’. ‘Confession’, the term, implies psychoanalysis, Western thought, forgiveness. When the Japanese war criminals use the term, are they even talking about the same thing? Are they thinking of Confucian ideals? The same could be asked of all non-Western contexts in which confession is used as a means to achieve reconciliation.

Additionally, the act of confession is a power relation. The listener is not just the locator, but a person who has the power to decide how to transcribe perpetrator's confession and what to do with the confession. This reminded me of truth commissions that use a mixture of international and local commissioners. What is the effect of the presence of the “Western, educated, rich commissioner” on the confession of perpetrators? Confessions, especially at truth commissions, are performances with actors, stages, and scripts that offers perpetrators an opportunity to trade in a sinful past for a forgiving present. Thus, we should be suspicious of remorse given these factors. In a way, truth commissions could indirectly pressure and insist that tramautized victims forgive for the sake of the “greater good” of national reconciliation.

Dawes’ insight from an English and Philosophy background can inform the broader understanding of the merits and pitfalls of Truth Commissions. It’s important to remember that in the midst of all these pragmatic problems, such as funding, policy, and physical enforcement, truth commissions and responses to human rights violations deal with the core of what it means to be human. Being aware of these paradoxes (there are many more than I mentioned) can better inform policy makers on their actions.

A more detailed review of Dawes' book is available here.

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Community-Owned Microgrids in Egypt: Tools of Empowerment or Unwanted Burden?

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