From promise to pitfall? How interventions by non-governmental organizations can exacerbate energy vulnerability in Colombian off-grid communities

Abstract

Ensuring a just transition away from energy poverty is a critical issue in Colombia. Approximately half of its territory is not connected to the national grid, more than 1.2 million households lack access to electricity, and millions more live with the uncertainties of insufficient, unreliable, or costly energy services. While public and market actors strive to address this challenge, their efforts often fall short, creating opportunities for third-sector actors like non-governmental organizations (NGOs). However, these organizations operate in convoluted energy landscapes, and thus their interventions may not align with policy goals or local perspectives. This paper investigates how NGO-led socio-technical transitions in off-grid communities can unintentionally produce new energy vulnerabilities as a result of delivering inadequate solutions shaped by improvised and opportunistic approaches to the issue. We present an exploratory case study of an NGO operating in six off-grid communities in Montes de María and La Guajira, on the Colombian Caribbean region. Our analysis focuses on the interactions between beneficiaries, the NGO, and energy systems, examining how these dynamics influence and are influenced by local imaginaries surrounding electricity and public services. We demonstrate that inadequate planning and opportunistic behaviors led to continual reinventions of intervention models, resulting in a slow marketization process that overlooks energy imaginaries, reinforces structural injustices, and creates new material and temporal vulnerabilities. Ultimately, the implications of our findings underscore the need for external actors to adopt grounded understandings of these complex transitions—one that respects and centers local agency on this matter.