GENDERED ENERGY CULTURES AND CLEAN COOKING IN KIGALI: STATUS, TASTE, AND FUEL STACKING
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18623/rvd.v22.n4.3717Keywords:
Clean Cooking, Gender, Energy Cultures, Fuel Stacking, Social NormsAbstract
Clean cooking is often framed as a diffusion or pricing problem, yet households adopt and use stoves within gendered energy cultures that organise labour, risk, taste, and status. Drawing on ten focus-group discussions, 100 observed cooking sessions, and 20 semi-structured interviews with urban residents of Kigali, Rwanda, we combine anthropological narrative inquiry with the Energy Cultures framework to examine how material arrangements, shared meanings, and everyday practices co-produce household fuel portfolios. We identify three mechanisms. First, status-mediated switching: households rotate among LPG, electricity, charcoal, and episodic firewood to perform urban modernity while safeguarding dish-specific flavour, with women’s culinary authority and men’s liquidity control shaping sequences of use. Second, a double bind of transition: price volatility and supply reliability intersect with safety talk and taste standards to stabilise stacking as a low-regret strategy under uncertainty. Third, policy choreography, sequenced community-level interventions, culinary stewardship (taste-equivalence protocols), safety dramaturgy (neighbour-led demonstrations), and budget-fit infrastructure align technologies with culturally legible routines. We report transparent qualitative procedures (reflexive memoing, shared codebook, and intercoder checks) and propose portfolio-quality metrics, exposure reduction, time efficiency, and sensory satisfaction as outcomes that better capture progress than primary-fuel displacement alone. Designing with gendered culture, rather than around it, offers a more durable and just pathway to clean-cooking transitions in rapidly urbanising African cities.
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