The dynamics of building committees can capture how people adapt everyday routines to the constrained electricity supply, which they negotiate with their neighbours to ensure that the provision matches their needs. They can be sites for seeking out collective micro-solutions and we also found life-enhancing and resistance strategies that challenge an unjust energy reality, as residents attempt to achieve solidarity, collaboration, and collective action – if only temporarily.
We recounted on-the-ground experiences of the energy crisis arriving at people’s doorsteps, requiring them to find collective technical solutions with the distributional and procedural aspects of justice implicit in their decision-making, but also while they succumb to the global, state and systemic energy injustices.
We showed that even with good intentions, the added responsibilities in relation to providing electricity proved too complex for individual building committees and increased the burden imposed on them by the failing state. From an energy justice perspective, this is far from the expectations of democratisation in access to energy and community empowerment that we might imagine from policy and activist discourse.
Consider the example of Um-Rami, a 78-year-old grandmother who has been in charge of the committee and bookkeeping in her building for two decades. She writes everything in two little notebooks in which the building expenses and income from residents’ contributions over the last 10 years are recorded chronologically. There is also a small metal box containing any remaining cash, bills and receipts.
At the end of each year, she calculates the totals and carries them over to the next page. Um-Rami complains of still being responsible for this task, of how she is tired and making mistakes in the calculations. Maya recalls trying to support her over the years by keeping an Excel file with two sheets for each year, one for expenses and the other for income, in order to produce a yearly report for the residents. She too is tired, struggling to find the time between work, housework and raising her children.
Shifting the weight of a solution for the energy shortage – a decades-long national-level problem in addition to a global climate crisis – onto the shoulders of city dwellers like Um-Rami is not a democratisation process nor is it empowering. Indeed, even among younger or more technically skilled committee members, managing such a system is taxing. These committees are struggling to maintain the services necessary for their residents’ everyday life while grappling with a dynamic political crisis, currency devaluation, and fuel shortages.
Given the scale of the energy crisis and the corruption in Lebanon, the empowering response is not the stopgap measures that Beirut’s dwellers have been forced to adopt, nor is it the deployment of small-scale expensive and environmentally questionable technical solutions, nor indeed thinking that the answer lies in community energy. The energy crisis is political – and demands a political response.
To clarify, energy justice scholars and activists call for decentralised and community-directed energy systems24 and returning ‘the mic to marginalized communities whose voices have been systematically silenced for far too long’.25 But without parallel political action to dismantle rent-seeking political systems in the global South and the neo-colonial regimes that sustain them and that reap the benefits of unjust and extractivist energy systems, calls for decentralisation and community energy risk reinforcing the injustice.
Communities, as we have seen in Lebanon and elsewhere in the global South,26 are then expected to bear the burden of meeting their energy needs on the debris of failing energy systems, but without the power and resources to do so.27
Grassroots efforts are thus arguably better devoted not to deploying technology-focused solutions to the energy crisis, but to helping collectively organise against the politics that caused it. Although the corrupt state elites have succeeded in quelling opposition through a tightly knit clientelist and sectarian-based populist politics, mobilisation has helped move the discussion on services and infrastructure.
For instance, previous mobilisations, such as the #YouStink campaign,28 despite its limited success, rightly pointed to the political corruption that led to the waste crisis, rather than focusing on technical solutions for solid waste management.
Furthermore, for individual households, the building committee as a unit is still of great relevance, certainly as a starting point for defining and voicing community-level needs and priorities. These committees operate within an urban ecosystem; one that encompasses neighbouring buildings in similar circumstances, informal service providers including generator owners and local electricians and, where they are active, local municipal authorities.
We saw some examples of this cooperation, such as one building committee that attempted to procure a generator together with a neighbouring one, or sometimes negotiated subscription rates jointly with neighbourhood private providers, while another building committee takes note of a fire at a neighbouring generator to improve safety measures in their own building.
The role of the generator providers, often demonised as a mafia given their monopoly of neighbourhood services and their price fixing, could be managed in a different way.29 We question this simplistic labelling, given people’s mixed feelings that emerged from our study. We argue that there is room to engage them in ways that go beyond transactional service provision.
They are supplying services at a relatively large scale that the state is failing to provide and that people are struggling to manage at the level of buildings. The ideal is by no means a continued reliance on neighbourhood-level generator services, given the lack of accountability and the environmental health consequences. Despite being private entities, they are – much like the neighbourhood grocery store – also part of their communities and enmeshed in its network of relations and patronage systems.
Support should be provided so that resident collectives can push for improvements in conditions of service, not least the reduction of noise and emissions. A third necessary partner who can support residents are the municipal local authorities. The one building where the municipality took on an active role in regulating the private generator providers, residents benefited from having a less stressful management of their everyday energy needs.
Building committees continue to be crucial spaces for collective organising in Beirut’s complicated urban context. However, in efforts to achieve energy justice, the social capital and skills of organisers at the building level, like Um-Rami, might be better invested in strengthening bridges between neighbouring residents, mobilising for effective political change and pressuring service providers and local authorities for more just energy solutions.
Years of corruption and the unchecked power of the ruling elite in the country make any effort to support the transition to greener energy or to address energy poverty particularly challenging. Lebanon’s energy crisis is not a technical problem that local community-led energy projects could simply alleviate.
These insights make us ever more convinced this is a political crisis – from years of brazen power grabs by corrupt politicians who gained influence over its energy infrastructure – and a political solution is imperative.