Changing the landscape: The role of aid agencies in Afghanistan’s energy transitions

The Multilevel Perspective on Sociotechnical Transitions (MLP) has become one of the dominant frameworks to study sustainability transitions. This framework argues that socio-technical transitions occur as a result of interactions between three conceptual levels: niche, socio-technical regime, and socio-technical landscape. It maintains that the landscape level is comprised of slow-changing factors that remain beyond the influence of the actors. While much effort has been dedicated to understanding the niche and the sociotechnical regime, the landscape level has received much lesser attention. Indeed the (under)conceptualization of the landscape level in the MLP has attracted some criticism (Hansen et al., 2018; Kanger & Schot, 2019; Martínez Arranz, 2017; Sutherland, Peter, & Zagata, 2015; Wieczorek, 2018), raising questions of quite how the landscape level may be influenced by niche or regime actors. Here we investigate some of the ways in which regime-level actors may influence aspects of cultural life that the MLP posits at the landscape level, drawing on the recently proposed conceptual framework Regional Transition Paths to Sustainability (RTPS) and the transition topology methodological approach (Pflitsch & Radinger-Peer, 2018; Strambach & Pflitsch, 2018, 2020). The empirical case is the activity of aid agencies in Afghanistan, which are not only active in shaping the development of the country’s energy sector, both technically and financially, but which are also active in seeking to institutionalise new gender and political norms. Using the above methodological approach, we make visible the organizational and institutional changes that have been induced by the aid agencies over time. In this study, we focus on the agency of aid agencies with regards to changing structures (and thus institutions).