Powerless: Equity in Resource Distribution in Times of Scarcity

Patrick Shaw, Brown University

In August 2022, South Africa began implementing mass power cuts across the country to address a growing energy shortage. These cuts have lasted for more than two years and are likely to continue for the foreseeable future. While the South African government’s uniform approach to allocating power through nationwide loadshedding is putatively equitable, this logic fails to consider how a uniform distribution of risk and consequences interacts with existing geographic and demographic inequities, including variation in the means of individuals and communities to respond or adapt, to affect health and wellbeing. It is possible, indeed likely, that uniform ‘fair’ policies will harm those already most vulnerable to shocks and resource scarcity. I use an original dataset linking geocoded data reflecting the timing and duration of loadshedding to measure outage intensity and match this with census data to examine how loadshedding has been distributed across geography and population nationally and measure the extent to which the distribution of risk has in fact been equitable. The findings from this will have broader relevance globally as countries and communities face growing energy poverty and resource shortages due to climate change as well as growing exposure to environmental shocks coupled with large demographic shifts.

Keywords: Population and Development, Population Policies, Population, Shocks and Pandemics, Linked data sets

See extended abstract.