Max-Neef and sustainability: theoretical, methodological and empirical contributions

The work of Manfred Max-Neef has been hugely influential in many areas of academia. One of those areas has been sustainability studies in general, through to energy studies from a social science perspective more specifically. In this paper, we explore how Max-Neef’s work has been used to describe energy, more specifically energy services, as need satisfiers. Moreover, we also describe how the study of energy services as need satisfiers has been undertaken in practice, with urban and rural communities in Colombia, Zambia and Nepal. Our empirical work is based on Max-Neef’s workshops, albeit with some adaptations. We have named the adapted approach human scale energy services (HuSES). The HuSES approach has allowed us to understand which energy services are more synergetic for the communities we have worked with, and therefore we consider it to be a useful tool for prioritising energy interventions.