Sustainable Access For All: Building Sustainability into Universal Energy Access

This paper investigates whether the goal of universal energy access in the post-MDGs dialogue sufficiently addresses the challenges faced by the Southern countries. It argues that though the notion of energy access in the dialogue may be fairly comprehensive in tracking the current level of access, it does not provide sufficient insight into the ability of the energy system to sustain that level of access. In addition, an approach based on literature on risk assessment is proposed to incorporate ‘sustainability of access’ into the current energy goal.

Authors: Sahil Ali, Nihit Goyal and Shweta Srinivasan