Home-cooked energy transitions: Women empowerment and biogas-based cooking technology in Pakistan

Nazia Yasmin and Philipp Grundmann

Energy Policy, 2020, vol. 137, issue C

Abstract: Male-dominated societies often tend to neglect having a consideration for women in the choice of appropriate cooking fuel technology. Traditional cooking technologies have adverse effects particularly on women. These technologies require the use of solid biomass such as wood or biogenic residues, and this practice leads to harmful consequences for individual's health and involves drudgery and hardships especially for women. Even though women can gain immense benefits in switching to a cleaner fuel, their influence over the relevant household energy choice decision is still not well understood. In this study, we use individual-level household survey data from Pakistan to investigate the influence of women empowerment on the decision to adopt and continue using biogas-based cooking technology. To do this, our study analyses the resource and agency profile of women by applying a multivariate analysis using both direct and proxy indicators of women's status. The results show that older, educated, financially empowered women with greater agency and control over resource have a strong influence on the decision to adopt biogas technology. The paper concludes by recommending policies to enhance women's status that could help in fostering the process of transitioning toward clean cooking fuel technology.

Keywords: Women agency; Cooking fuels; Decision making; Technology transition (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (20)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421519306615
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:enepol:v:137:y:2020:i:c:s0301421519306615

DOI: 10.1016/j.enpol.2019.111074

Access Statistics for this article

Energy Policy is currently edited by N. France

More articles in Energy Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().