Insights from an assemblage perspective for a (better) understanding of energy transitions

Abstract

The energy sector in Lebanon faces many challenges: an ailing infrastructure dependent on fuel oil, a weakened electricity network damaged by violent conflicts over the years and an increasing demand for its services due to population growth, immigration and rising living standards. To fill the gap between this demand and the inadequate supply of electricity services, an informal system of provision based on polluting diesel generators has emerged. The resulting situation exacerbates the economic burden on households in Lebanon and leads to environmental and energy injustices, whilst holding back prosperity for the country. By examining the myriad assemblages of electricity access, the case of Lebanon illustrates how the concept of assemblage, as a theoretical lens, can help advance thinking on energy and sustainability transitions for cities of the global South by paying close attention to the informal system of energy provision that has emerged over the years. This contribution argues that for an energy transition to be realisable in the current climate urgency, an inclusive approach that seeks collaboration among multiple actors is necessary. The rootedness and localised nature of many informal providers can be an asset to a decentralised energy system that can integrate green and renewable energy sources.

Full text

2 Insights from an assemblage
perspective for a (better)
understanding of energy transitions
Facing the challenge of sustainability in
Lebanon’s energy crisis
Dana Abi Ghanem
Introduction
This chapter takes the case of the electricity infrastructure in Lebanon to dem-
onstrate how assemblage as a theoretical perspective can be useful in advancing
thinking on energy and sustainability transitions in cities of the global South. It
builds on qualitative research conducted in Lebanon on the power outages that
blight the everyday life of the country’s denizens, delving into their history in
the context of the civil war and the subsequent post-war developments that have
shaped electricity services since. Whilst the example of Lebanon is not neces-
sarily representative of the various challenges and priorities facing cities with
regards to energy access and sustainability, the purpose here is to contribute an
analytical lens that can advance our thinking and policy making on energy transi-
tions in the global South.
In Lebanon, electricity services face a major crisis. The electricity generated
is insucient to meet demand (Bouri and El-Assad, 2016), resulting in unreliable
services and scheduled power outages. This has become an endemic problem for
the country’s residents that began during the Lebanese civil war (1975–1990) and
continues to this day (Abi Ghanem, 2018; Moore and Collins, 2020). Post-war
reconstruction eorts since the early 1990s (World Bank, 1996) have led to a
rise in living standards and consequently a rise in demand for electricity services.
However, the energy sector is still hampered by corruption and mismanagement,
whereby subsequent investment in the network infrastructure fails to ll the sup-
ply gap (Abdelnour, 2003). The corrupt practices also involve the national util-
ity company – Électricité du Liban (EDL) – which has not been able to recoup
monthly billing nor control illegal connections to the grid (Moore and Collins,
2020) and is in decit (UN-ESCWA, 2017). With Lebanon relying heavily on
imported fuel oil (OECF/IEA, 2014), the energy sector is responsible for a large
part of the country’s external debt (World Bank, 2019) and has become a nancial
burden on the country’s economy.
Furthermore, recent developments in the region, namely the Syrian war that
began in 2011 and is still ongoing, compounded the problem, with the usual
DOI: 10.4324/9780367486457
2

Insights from an assemblage perspective 19
electricity imports from Syria disrupted (Bouri and El-Assad, 2016) and the inux
of thousands of Syrian refugees escaping the violence, which increased electricity
demand. All these factors contribute to perennial power outages and load shed-
ding that have impacted many communities in Lebanon since the early 1990s
(Bouri and El-Assad, 2016), and have worsened since 2011. The power outages
have become normalised and their eects integrated into the rhythm of everyday
life in Lebanon (Abi Ghanem, 2018). However, the power outages do not aect
everyone in the same way: communities in metropolitan Beirut (the capital) have
lived with a schedule of between three and four hours of outage per day, whilst
those in the suburbs and the rest of the country endure around six to eight hours of
outage daily. In order to meet their electricity needs, the vast majority of people
came to rely on an informal network of electricity provision, which gradually
grew as a result of this shortage (Abi Ghanem, 2018; Bouri and El-Assad, 2016).
The informal system provides electricity to households to cover most outages. At
a considerable cost, they not only exacerbate the economic burden and the energy
poverty of many households, but also worsen urban air pollution since they are
based on diesel generators and located within urban areas (Shihadeh et al., 2013).
As mentioned before, the electricity situation in Lebanon is presented here
to make a case for engaging with assemblage theory when exploring energy for
development. In the last decade, pathways and plans have been developed for
the energy sector in the country, emphasising the need for a reliable infrastruc-
ture in order to drive much-needed growth and development (Abosedra et al.,
2009). The 2010 Energy Programme (Bassil, 2010) promised administrative and
legal reforms, including mechanisms for privatising supply and liberalising the
energy market, establishing a regulatory body and investing in renewable energy
technologies (RETs). From the plan, a National Renewable Action Plan has been
developed and two phases for a National Energy Eciency Action Plan have been
implemented (Jouni et al., 2016). However, the overall reforms and projects out-
lined in the 2010 Energy Programme are yet to be implemented, owing to political
and nancial impediments in the country (UN-ESCWA, 2017).
In principle, scrutiny of these plans reveals the extent of the investment and
nancing needed, and the considerable legal and institutional reform required to
bring about the desired change (Machnouk et al., 2019). What can be gleaned
from overviewing these documents are the debates on the viability of dierent
approaches and their extent, such as the liberalisation of the energy market to
allow new entrants to generate and sell electricity. The expansive list of techno-
logical options belies socio-economic and local structures that can inhibit uptake
and deepen the energy divide. From a sociological lens, one insight that can be
elicited is the notion of energy services centred on the “modern infrastructure
ideal” (Graham and Marvin, 2001), and one can trace this project in Lebanon
as beginning with the large-scale investments in water and hydroelectric energy
from the 1960s (Abd El-Al, 2018). Building on the legacy of the Litani River
project (consisting of a large irrigation system and several hydroelectric power
plants), the new Energy Programme for Lebanon continues to be dominated by a
centralised market-led and state-regulated energy system based on investment in

20 Dana Abi Ghanem
large water and energy projects including dams, additional thermal power plants
and large-scale PV farms (LCEC, 2016). Further assessment of these plans is
beyond the scope of this chapter; suce to say that insofar as national-level strat-
egy is concerned, an idealised large-scale infrastructure for electricity provision
remains the overriding vision.
In practice, the aforementioned RET plans have succeeded in developing a
small part of Lebanon’s energy sector towards renewable sources (c.f. Moore
and Collins, 2020). The extensive uptake of comprehensive reforms, however,
is impeded by the political system (Obeid, 2020) and therefore a considerable
sustainable energy transition driven by large-scale investment is unlikely given
the political instability in the country and the decit-ridden EDL (UN-ESCWA,
2017). However, given the worsening socio-economic conditions in Lebanon
(World Bank, 2019), urgency is required, which cannot wait for political reforms
or the legal and regulatory framework (AUB-IFI, 2019), both necessary for large-
scale sustainable investments in the energy sector (Machnouk et al., 2019). This
is evident in that where success is observed, it has been limited to small-scale
projects (Moore and Collins, 2020). From this perspective, it can be argued that
these plans obfuscate the myriad complexities that have arisen over the years
(during and since the civil war), including the socio-political inertia and the reality
of informal services and self-generation. In particular, they ignore the notion of
hybrid congurations of electricity provision (Verdeil, 2019; Castan Broto et al.,
2018) that needs to assimilate the informal network of electricity providers into
future energy planning. This is especially the case for Lebanon, given the vested
interests that established informal electricity providers have (Rose, 2018; Rosen,
2018) and their entrenched power in the country’s political system (Moore and
Collins, 2020).
This research recognises that the everyday experience of energy access across
the dierent urban areas of Lebanon – their noisy and polluting generators, the
dierent household appliances and equipment, the intermingling wires, as well as
the complicated routines and everyday strategies adopted by people to accommo-
date power outages – all together make up the infrastructure that serves the elec-
tricity needs of the country’s inhabitants. It is in delineating these networks and
associations that we begin to truly understand the energy challenge: how these
energy services come to be and come to shape towns and cities, which nowadays
are ever more under pressure to drive forward sustainable energy transitions. By
doing so, we acknowledge the services’ power and inuence over any propensity
to transition to a more sustainable energy system and the role they could play in
the future of energy provision for Lebanon.
Perspectives from geography and science and technology studies (STS) have,
over the years, argued for better-informed and context-based approaches to
understanding energy and infrastructure (Furlong, 2011; Graham and McFarlane,
2015; Rutherford and Coutard, 2014). In this chapter, these approaches are used
to develop an account of infrastructure with a focus on how electricity services
in Lebanon are experienced, explaining how the dierent logics of access have
emerged. Thinking through assemblage (McFarlane and Anderson, 2011), these

Insights from an assemblage perspective 21
disruptions are used as a point through which to trace the entanglements of the
electricity infrastructure. These entanglements cut across political pivot points,
economic imaginaries and the socio-technical. Following the wires of Lebanon’s
networked infrastructure elicits not only the heterogeneity of the system that it is
characterised by today, but also sheds light on some elements of its history and,
importantly, the emergence of the informal system of provision, which has come
to signicantly inuence people’s everyday experience of energy and public ser-
vices (Abi Ghanem, 2018).
Employing an assemblage lens can enrich not only our understanding of the
present situation, but open up various possibilities – potentials – for future energy
transitions, where such potentials are not often explicit in development practice.
Furthermore, an assemblage perspective highlights the agency of networks and
pushes our thinking in relation to infrastructure beyond technological systems that
can be acted upon and inuenced through policy, and instead recognise how these
networks can emerge and grow in unexpected directions. In the case of Lebanon,
such divergence is a call to appreciate the complexity of the informal electricity
provision and how it shapes everyday life. In doing so, we can begin to question
notions of lawful state provision set against the informal generator “maas”, as
they are often referred to in the media and by the lawmakers themselves (Mohsen,
2012; Rose, 2018). This chapter argues for the potential of the “coming together”
of existing and future actors and networks to realise an inclusive approach, in
order to sustainably tackle the energy crisis in the country. For energy transitions,
the hope is that this study can point towards fresh theoretical tools that can articu-
late more inclusive and just energy transitions viable in the near future.
Background
In parallel to the state-owned electricity infrastructure in Lebanon, self-gener-
ation has emerged to supplement the much-needed electricity services for resi-
dents and businesses in the country. As mentioned earlier, Lebanon’s national
electricity supplier, EDL, has failed to provide continuous electricity services,
and self-generation emerged as a result, supplying approximately 40% of elec-
tricity consumption in Lebanon (Bouri and El-Assad, 2016). In parallel to the
infrastructure development plans that have been put in place in the post-war years
to augment electricity generation and ll the supply gap (World Bank, 2008),
self-generation in the shape of an informal system of provision expanded duing
Lebanon’s civil war and since the early 1990s, mainly based on privately owned
diesel generators.
Throughout the war years, people with the nancial means were able to
procure small diesel-powered generators for their homes and small businesses
(Awada, 1988) in order to supply a few hours of electricity during the extended
power cuts brought about by the ghting. After Lebanon’s civil war ended, the
informal system of provision evolved and consolidated into privately owned gen-
erator services dominated by two forms: (1) local entrepreneurs (Verdeil, 2009)
who provide subscription services at the neighbourhood level; and (2) co-owned

22 Dana Abi Ghanem
medium to large generators that serve residents of apartment blocks, where a
building’s residents manage their own diesel generator to service all apartments.
Since then, recently built real estate developments have come to include large die-
sel-based generators to serve the apartments even before they are sold. It remains
that the most prevalent source of augmented supply for the majority of residents,
particularly medium and lower-income neighbourhoods, are the services provided
by the local entrepreneurs, where participating homes have to pay a connection
charge as well as the monthly subscription fee in return for ve or ten amperes1
of electricity supply. These service providers have become increasingly prolic in
the last 30 years and prevail in both urban and rural settings (Abi Ghanem, 2018),
as fewer households opt to manage their own small diesel generators given the
additional eort and costs associated with it. A recent survey reports that 66% of
Lebanon’s households rely in some way on diesel generators to ll the power out-
age gap (UNDP, 2018). The widespread presence of these services – particularly
those dotted around urban areas – is a signicant contributor to local air pollution
(Baayoun et al., 2019), resulting in serious environmental health risks for the
urban residents (Shihadeh et al., 2013).
Currently, the privately owned generator-based electricity providers function
within an ambiguous legal structure. Over the years, exploitative practices have
emerged in light of the increasing demand for subscriptions, such as steep prices
per ampere and the monopolising behaviour of several providers in dierent parts
of the country, where it could be that a single private generator service controls
all neighbourhood connections. In response, in 2010, the government sought to
control the cost of informal providers by decree from the Ministry of Energy
and Water2 through imposing a monthly subscription tari enforced by local
municipalities on private providers in their jurisdictions (Gabillet, 2010). Despite
that, the services remain costly for the average household in Lebanon, which is
eectively burdened by two electricity bills: one for the national provider, EDL,
at approximately 9.5 US cents per kWh and another for the private providers,
which is on average 45 cents per kWh (Bouri and El-Assad, 2016; Hamdan et
al., 2012). This double bill equates to many households (46%) paying up 8.4% of
their income on electricity services (UNDP, 2018). The services are normalised in
the citizen’s everyday life and embedded in the cities and towns, where new hous-
ing blocks are built with space for a generator and sometimes include pre-agreed
deals with neighbourhood generator services (Verdeil, 2016; Abi Ghanem, 2018).
This means many homeowners and tenants do not have a choice when it comes to
informal electricity supply. Moreover, as lower-income households living outside
Beirut suer longer power outages, they pay more for their subscriptions. Lower-
income households are also less likely to live in developments that oer access to
co-owned or internally owned generator services, whereas those who do (middle
or high-income households) pay relatively less to augment their electricity supply
(Verdeil, 2016).
As such, the energy crisis in Lebanon and its negative socio-environmental
impacts make the need for a sustainable energy transition ever more urgent. On
the policy level, the Energy Programme proposed by the Ministry of Energy and

Insights from an assemblage perspective 23
Water (Bassil, 2010) included provision for the development and growth of the
renewable energy sector, though this is yet to be fully ratied (UN-ESCWA,
2017). More recently, the procurement of electricity from the two Turkish power
ships3 (Bouri and El-Assad, 2016) have further increased the country’s electric-
ity costs and are indicative of the energy impasse the country faces; its inability
to meet local electricity demand beyond augmenting power generation (Bouri
and El-Assad, 2016). In parallel to the successive governments’ eort to secure
energy, Lebanon has succeeded in fullling its targets in terms of energy e-
ciency and renewable energy (El-Khoury, 2016), mostly by pushing for solar
thermal heaters. Though limited in scale, recently, licences have been granted for
three solar PV farms and one wind farm, which should provide cheaper energy to
EDL in the future. Thinking along the multiple scales of electricity in Lebanon,
from the increasing nancial and environmental burden to policy, informality
and the technological impasse, can be daunting. However, by closely examining
the failing and disrupted services, we are presented with an opportunity to better
understand infrastructures in the context of energy transitions. As networks that
do not function seamlessly, they reveal their components and highlight the oppor-
tunities for change and improvement that are needed.
To consider further opportunities towards greener and more sustainable sys-
tems that constitute not only socio-technical trajectories but a more in-depth
examination of the implications for justice and wellbeing, a more nuanced
approach is needed and often argued for in the socio-economic literature. For
example, Moore and Collins (2020) argue for a place-based and people-centred
approach, and call for a strategy that goes beyond the traditional top-down struc-
tural reforms and investments often promoted by development agencies. They
recommend a decentralised energy system that benets from “citizen insights”
(Moore and Collins, 2020: highlights). These examples can be context-specic
and are the product of the spatial arrangements they occupy. One such initiative
is the Beirut Solar Map project (Berjawi et al., 2017), which, whilst providing a
techno-economic assessment of the potential for rooftop solar PV solutions on
the densely urbanised capital, has to grapple with the reality of diesel-based gen-
erators (their cost, the level of consumption they provide) and contrast that with
the benets of PV technology. Similarly, a recent assessment of the potential for
distributed power generation for Lebanon builds on the current informal diesel-
based generator market (ESMAP, 2020). This signals that to truly engage with
bottom-up, decentralised and hybrid options for a sustainable energy transition,
we need to develop a clearer understanding of the “messy” and dispersed nature
of the energy infrastructure.
An assemblage approach for thinking
through energy transitions
Assemblage thinking has beneted energy research in recent years (Kumar et al.,
2019), highlighting the heterogeneity and diversity of energy services (Lawhon
et al., 2018). Building on concepts of assemblage and networks, the notion of

24 Dana Abi Ghanem
heterogenous infrastructure congurations has been put forward as a tool for
examining and understanding service provision in a way that moves beyond rigid
institutional categorisations (state, private, community), as well as the division
of infrastructure as formal and informal. It calls for “comparative thinking about
the conditions of possibility for incremental change” (Lawhon et al., 2018, 722).
In doing so, it emphasises the need to move away from the technology-focused
approach still dominant in explorations of energy transitions, and to instead
engage critically with energy in a manner that emphasises the processual and
emergent nature of infrastructure (Farias, 2011).
The concept of assemblage (DeLanda, 2016; Deleuze and Parnet, 2007) or
assemblage thinking (Farias and Bender, 2011; McFarlane, 2011; McFarlane
and Anderson, 2011) is, thus, used here to understand the complex relations
between myriad elements of the Lebanese electricity problems, which can be
social and material, historical and current. An assemblage is best described as
“a multiplicity constituted by heterogeneous terms … which establishes liai-
sons, relations between them” (Deleuze and Parnet, 2007, 52). Questions in
relation to energy and energy services have beneted from assemblage thinking
in recent years, where it has shed light on their heterogeneity and diversity, as
well as normative concerns including matters of justice and access (Walker and
Day, 2013). The multiplicity of scales and the varying geographies of energy
(Bouzarovski and Petrova, 2015, 34) alongside its inconspicuous nature (Shove,
2003) and its entanglements in dispersed practices of consumption and produc-
tion (van Vliet et al., 2005) that are in constant ux, require thinking about
energy holistically.
McFarlane (2011) distinguishes between assemblage as a descriptive term and
assemblage as an analytical approach, an orientation. As a tool, this helps in
bringing into the analysis the dierent components of the system of electricity
provision in Lebanon. It simply aids in generating tools for understanding the
challenges and needs from energy infrastructure and to think of them beyond
their technological elements. Crucially, assemblage as an approach when stud-
ying infrastructures invites us to view the energy system as an “open whole”
(Bennet, 2005, 461) that is continuously emerging in space and time. In this
way, we see the dierent components that an assemblage is composed of change,
assemble and reassemble, but nonetheless, altogether the dierent components
give the whole its agency. It is the notion of the agency of the assemblage that is
important here, and that helps in moving beyond the analysis of the physical and
social-cultural constituents of an infrastructure as a socio-technical system that
is simply acted upon.
Luque-Ayala et al. (2016) draw attention to the fact that assemblage thinking
explains how power works. When considering the case of Lebanon, where formal
and informal providers co-exist and where the burden of that is carried by the
people, being attentive to how power relations are embedded, and where and how
this power can be challenged, is important. This power is not only held by the dif-
ferent members of the assemblage. In the case of Lebanon, we can begin to trace
the power of the informal sector through their embeddedness in the urban built

Insights from an assemblage perspective 25
environment, and through the socio-economic fabric of the dierent communities
they serve. Their strength and inuence can be conceived through those socio-
material relations (Silver, 2015). As Kumar et al. (2019) argue, paying attention
to power makes it possible to explore “how power operates through the push of
multiple stakeholders, in multiple sites and through a range of diverse practices”
(p. 167).
Examining the electricity infrastructure in the case of Lebanon, we nd that
an assemblage perspective is not only helpful in establishing the grounding for
context-based approaches by tracing the spatiality of the infrastructure, but also
eliciting the temporality of energy by helping to unpack the ows that constitute
the everyday dynamics of electricity service provision. We do so by explor-
ing the heterogeneity of electricity provision in Lebanon, i.e. the growth of an
informal electricity network that holds signicant inuence and power today,
as well as an exploration of the historical moments that led to the rise of non-
state actors’ and their interventions in the management and delivery of energy
services during the war. As such, this chapter reects on eldwork conducted
over several research visits to Beirut. The research began with a one-month visit
in October 2015 and was followed up with further research trips in November
2016, April 2017 and August 2017. These visits focused on conducting a wide
range of interviews with ministry ocials, academics and experts, energy con-
sultants, operators of generator services and households. The households inter-
viewed included residents in metropolitan Beirut, the suburbs and peri-urban
areas surrounding the capital.
Another visit in April 2018 was dedicated to conducting historical research on
electricity infrastructure during the civil war. This relied on newspaper archives:
the Lebanese daily newspaper Annahar and the now-defunct daily newspaper
Assar,4 as well as historic accounts and biographies of prominent political g-
ures and their contemporaries of the civil war years, declassied reports of the
civil war period from government sources and grey literature consisting of policy
papers and decrees of the Ministry of Energy and Water. These sources were used
to document the dierent incidents that involved the electricity infrastructure, its
services and the use of generators. In addition to the archives, historical research
involved interviews with several war veterans, local authority gures active dur-
ing the civil war years and former EDL engineers involved in electricity service
provision during the civil war. As such, combining research into the historical
rise of informality in Lebanon as well as how it currently functions can enrich not
only our understanding of the present situation, the actual (McFarlane, 2011), but
open up the possibility for future energy transitions that are not often laid out in
development discourses, in other words, the potential. This thinking raises ques-
tions of what a more sustainable (and just) future for cities of the global South
can look like (Lawhon et al., 2018). In this way, it should stimulate an “alter-
native way of thinking, being and organising” for infrastructures (Knox, 2017)
that builds on plural forms of energy transitioning involving a wider network of
existing and future actors (both formal and informal) to realise fairer and greener
energy futures.

26 Dana Abi Ghanem
Glimpses into the social history of
Lebanon’s infrastructure failures
In this section, the current hybrid nature of energy supply in Lebanon is explained
from a situated historical perspective by presenting some integral moments during
the civil war when an energy assemblage was visible. As Awada (1988) shows,
the civil war brought about resilience measures that secured residents’ basic needs
during periods of ghting. In doing this research, the belief that, prior to the war,
electricity provision was universal and uninterrupted was pervasive amongst
those interviewed. However, electrication, which began in the late 1920s ini-
tially as a colonially established private company that was nationalised in 1964,
was not universal and not always available across the dierent regions (Abu-Rish,
2015; Kassir, 2003), neither was the level of electricity access sucient to meet
the aspirations of the emerging middle class in the early years of the Lebanese
Republic (Abu-Rish, 2014). The subsequent hacks as a form of resilience by
the “creative” Lebanese (Moore and Collins, 2020) are not simply a war-time
response to electricity shortages, rather a challenge by the marginalised poor to
the rooted inequality in access to state services. Infrastructure development in
Lebanon has always favoured commercial regions and the capital Beirut (Nagel,
2002), and this is also the case in Lebanon’s electricity sector since its inception
(Abu-Rish, 2015). Therefore, whilst uneven access to electricity services predates
the civil war, the purpose of focusing on these moments (leading up to and during
the civil war) is to trace the current entrenchment of informal electricity service
provision in the country. In doing so, we avoid the pitfall of simply linking the
overall electricity crisis in Lebanon to the civil war alone.
Regarding the civil war, its early stages from 1976 to 1982 involved predomi-
nantly Christian right-wing political parties with their associated militias, opposed
by several leftist parties allied with the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO),
who took refuge in Lebanon in 1973 after being expelled from Jordan. One of the
right-wing parties, the Kataeb, developed – alongside their political and para-
military organisation – civil committees whose remit was to lobby government
for reform and community development (Frieha, 2017). These committees were
later mobilised to provide basic services in lieu of the national infrastructure ser-
vices for the neighbourhoods they controlled in East Beirut, particularly when the
latter were disrupted during battles. These included health, public works, social
services, nancial services, information, and education. In their work, they inter-
sected with the provision of water and electricity and early on initiated the dis-
tribution of kerosene lighting appliances, candles and oil heaters during winter.
Their stated objective of doing so was to preserve the dignity of the Lebanese
society during the violent impasse and strengthen the resilience of the residents
in these areas.
On the left, the PLO, led by Yasser Arafat, were also strong advocates of
“steadfastness”, and also provided infrastructure and social services by establish-
ing NGOs and cooperative associations. When, during the war, their supply of
electricity (coming from the part of Beirut under the control of the right-wing

Insights from an assemblage perspective 27
militia) was disconnected, they embarked on a new cable connection to access
electricity from Jiyyeh station, a thermal power plant south of Beirut. The work
on this cable was barely complete when the rst phase of the war ended in autumn
1976. In 1978, the work resumed, connecting Beirut to Jiyyeh station and allow-
ing the PLO to continue from their main headquarters in West Beirut (Awada,
1988). The PLO’s electricity hack that year sought not only to respond to the
hostility of the Christian right-wing militias, but also to congeal the moral and
nancial support of the national and international allies of the PLO and to show-
case the steadfastness and strength of its followers. This moment portrays how
electricity access assembled into a crucial development of the civil war: opening
up the system of the “informal” and the illegitimate to take shape and become
enmeshed into what it means to survive in the city during these precarious times.
Informal patterns of electricity services were also assembled to reveal a neolib-
eral imaginary for Lebanon’s post-war reconstruction in 1983. Believing the war
to be close to conclusion, the Lebanese entrepreneur Rac Hariri (who would later
become the country’s prime minister) demonstrated a possible rebirth of the then
destroyed Beirut downtown by lighting Ma’arad [Exhibition] Street (Bkassini,
2015). Through his company Libano-Oger (Farshakh, 2006), he was sub-con-
tracted by the Municipality of Beirut to maintain and rehabilitate roads and city
infrastructure. Given the destruction brought about by the civil war, most of the
work consisted of removal of debris and rubble, and the reopening of roads and
streets.5 One of the projects that Hariri felt strongly about was the relighting of
metropolitan Beirut (Shalak, personal communication, 28 March 2018). Although
he began in the central neighbourhoods that were inhabited during the war, the
lighting of Ma’arad Street remains salient given its location in downtown Beirut,
which was a deserted no-man’s land at the time (Nagel, 2002). Temporary con-
nections and transformers were used to light up the street, whilst shops and busi-
ness were invited to reopen for the day to celebrate the revival. Once again, this
moment in the history of the temporary, informal and improvised provision of
electricity services shows how this assemblage – although eeting – materialises
that yearning for more peaceful times but, crucially, lays down the contours of
a neoliberal future for the city of Beirut, dened by a reconstructed commercial
centre and supported by functioning infrastructure.
These three examples illustrate how informal electricity services were
assembled as sites for reclaiming state power and identity, enabling resistance
to perceived threat, and revitalising development and reconstruction driven by
neoliberal market forces. Seen this way, the social history of the conict and
of informality in infrastructure services are intertwined. Even though universal
access to electricity was never achieved prior to the start of the civil war in 1976,
the intersection of salient moments of informality with pivotal moments of the
civil war have produced many of the current dominant meanings of electricity
provision, whether focused on the capability and role of the legitimate state in
services provisioning or the perceived threat of non-state actors on infrastructure
control that fester ethnic divisions. These assemblages have determined the extent
of informality in upending formal infrastructures of the state, as well as the depth

28 Dana Abi Ghanem
of socio-political and ideological drivers in the country’s social milieu today. In
these moments, the hybridity of service provision and notions of their legitimacy
versus the role of the state become visible.
Heterogenous provision in post-war Lebanon
As mentioned before, Lebanon’s electricity provision is characterised by continu-
ous load shedding and power outages, which vary between dierent areas. Often,
coastal cities and towns receive relatively more electricity than more peripheral
regions such as peri-urban or rural areas. Indeed, the spatial disparity in manag-
ing and augmenting power supply encounters an intricate topography constituted
by who supplies the electricity, by what means and in what contractual capacity
(Verdeil, 2016). Another dierentiation is the type of diesel generator provision
a household has access to. Tracing the origins of diesel generator supply, Awada
(1988) reported its widespread use along with kerosene rations for electricity,
heating and lighting to the households at the beginning of the civil war. These
practices widened and, by the late 80s and early 90s, there was a proliferation of
individual diesel generators, to the extent that the reliance of homes and business
on them was perceived as a form of resilience and considered a viable tempo-
rary measure for post-war recovery as outlined by the CIA report from that year
(US Directorate of Intelligence, 1983). Today, whilst individual small to medium
generators still exist, these are mainly in rural parts of the country where they are
mostly used by business owners.
Across the country, the informal network of private electricity providers, driven
by local entrepreneurs, pervades. Informal electricity supply is based around large
diesel generators with wires pouring out of main inverter boxes to neighbouring
residents and businesses. These connections run alongside district level low-volt-
age distribution networks, where the cables and fuse boxes sit alongside the utility
connectors and dangle o the electricity poles on the streets. The informal pro-
vider’s electricity supply “station” in the neighbourhood houses the switches to
each building; congregated there are the owners and their electricians. Across the
street, you might nd a generator, another in a silencer encasing, wires stretched
across walls, weaving their way into homes through doorways and windows.
Despite their improvised appearance, these informal networks congeal not only
through their physical state and ubiquity across the built environment, but through
their function, which is dispersed through aective and socio-material moments.
One example is Sahar, who bought a newly built apartment in a block outside the
capital. When purchasing on the plan, she was informed of “the private provider.
His cables and connections were already in place and for every at in the build-
ing there was a placeholder for the ampere meter and the switch”. She explains,
“it was up to us whether we wanted to activate that connection, but he’s the only
provider for his neighbourhood. He won’t let anyone else do business on his turf”.
This example shows how the informal system, integrated coherently in the built
environment and emerging as a “maa” structure (Mohsen, 2012; Rose, 2018), is
assembled. In this example, the pre-installation of the informal wiring provides

Insights from an assemblage perspective 29
Figure 2.1 Diesel generator wires visible in the foyer of an apartment building in Beirut.
an added level of invisibility, in line with the many dimensions of infrastructure
(Leigh-Star, 1999).
As mentioned before, another form of supply is co-ownership, and typi-
cally involves residents of an apartment block or building sharing ownership
of a relatively larger supply asset that is managed and maintained by the apart-
ment blocks’ residents. Costs are shared and the day-to-day service of supply is
handled by the building concierge or caretaker. A more recent form of supply
follows the contours of the current private providers, but the ownership of the
generator and transmission facilities is either community-based organisations or
local authorities, and these are often supported nancially by political parties.
Finally, an oft-cited and less understood (on the practical everyday level) mode
of provision is “hacking” or theft of electricity from low-voltage power lines
using circuit breakers, with such modes of provision common in poorer and more
informal urban settlements, including refugee camps. The purpose of outlining
the dierent informal electricity provision structures is to highlight the intricate
relationships that ensue from these supply modes, as well as the dierentiated
aective and practical outcomes from these arrangements on those who experi-
ence and participate in the making of them. For example, dierent social rela-
tions emerge between neighbours in a building who co-own a generator, where
economic or nancial exchange shapes interactions between them. In a similar
way, an informal subscription to a private provider is not purely an economic
exchange, as our ndings suggest; many subscribers are friends and family whilst
the generator owner is also a neighbour and an acquaintance. These contracts are

30 Dana Abi Ghanem
held together by not only the wires, but by notions of community, neighbourli-
ness and trust.
After all, the private generator entrepreneurs in many parts of the country are
themselves members of these communities. Amongst dierent providers is com-
petition and cooperation, where factors such as the limits of the network, costs
and practical measures precede the securing of a new client. Joseph, a generator
owner interviewed in this study, tells me he has turned down subscription requests
and recommended a competitor when a customer has a request that he could not
full. He added, “he [the competition] doesn’t take away my clients, but I don’t
mind if he does sometimes”. The amiable relations are extended in some cases to
subscribers, such as Emile, who prefers to do business with Joseph because “he
knows him”. His wife explains,
we’ve been with this provider for as long as he’s been here, as soon as he
got a generator. We’ve never changed. I don’t like to change. Some people
here have changed to an “outsider”, I mean why? If a person born and bred
in your neighbourhood is providing this service, why would we switch to an
outsider? I don’t like it. I am very principled.
In some way, notions of community and identity are realised through these rela-
tionships, and it raises the question of whether active forms of discrimination take
place through these informal electricity connections. In other neighbourhoods, the
merits of one provider over another are highlighted in how polite the fee collec-
tors are or in the provision of modern automatic switches so that “I don’t have to
run downstairs to switch the supply over”, as Sahar explains. In this instance, the
automatic switches ensure the seamlessness of the informal supply arrangement
where daily disruptions are avoided or minimised. These, it should be noted, fur-
ther enhance the invisibility of the informal infrastructure, noted earlier, and its
concealment not only within the physical built structures, but also in the routines
and rhythms of everyday life.
These heterogenous congurations are also aective. Much like the desired
politeness of subscription fee collectors, the power outages and the resulting reli-
ance on informal services bring to the fore reactions and emotions. One notable
observation is feelings of abandonment by the state that has “forgotten about its
citizens”, as Hala tells me; a feeling that overwhelms her as she walks back home
through darkened streets lit dimly by the lights from the windows of households
“who can aord it”. In these daily experiences, the social and political reality of
Lebanon are expressed clearly in the darkness and heightened feelings in relation
to the role of the state. Theft on the network by using a circuit breaker is less
talked about, but Amin – who works as a taxi driver by day – provides his family
with electricity by “hacking”. He assures me it is safe, adding, “if my parents need
light, I will sort it out. Not my brother though, he’s not man enough”. With Amin,
although his theft is out of necessity, the act engenders his role as the good son
and underscores his masculinity and power. Though Amin’s theft is not unique
and parallels historical precedents, it is also a response to pressing needs that he
feels can only be provided in this way.

Insights from an assemblage perspective 31
The examples above show how the informal assemblage wields power, but
households can – in some instances – untangle themselves to prevent the burdens
and negative impacts of the power outages. Layla will not talk to me about her expe-
rience with the private provider in her neighbourhood, “it upsets me”, she explains.
Instead, she lavished us with more cakes and coee until her son Salim arrived to
show us the UPS system he installed in her attic, as “he knows how it works. He got
the idea from working with this IT business. They had the same thing in place”, she
explains. In her attic, a large UPS system with three lead-acid batteries are carefully
mounted onto a steel cradle to automatically rock in place, ensuring the longest bat-
tery life (Figure 2.2). This system provides enough electricity to power her fridge-
freezer and TV, as well as charging a mobile phone. These are carefully assembled
into the network of curtailed household energy consumption, in the timing of wash-
ing and ironing, a reconsideration of domestic priorities, and most of all the distress
and anxiety that Layla avoids. For her, living outside the capital, her power outages
were longer and her bills higher, and by the end of every month, she dreaded “the
sight of the private generator’s fee collector” walking through her front yard.
By conceptualising the provision of electricity, both formal and informal,
as balanced assemblages that are constantly in the making, we avoid unhelpful
dichotomies of “state” vs “non-state”, “maa” vs “community”. Notions of cor-
ruption and theft can be understood in how they are made possible across dif-
ferent scales. The aim of this research was to explore the everyday practices of
provisioning electricity services in ways that go beyond these binary labels. On
an everyday level, this is necessary if a bottom-up approach to sustainable energy
transitions is desired. Accounting for electricity services as material, social and
Figure 2.2 Lead-acid batteries mounted on a cradle in the attic of Layla’s house.

32 Dana Abi Ghanem
political ows, constituent of human and nonhuman elements (Latour, 2005) and
emerging as assemblages, opens up the possibility to outline a broader and more
inclusive stakeholder engagement at the community level in ways that can be
conducive to a greener energy system of provision. By understanding how an
individual household can actuate their agency amidst the web of cables, switches
and meters, we can then truly build towards a bottom-up approach for a transition
to a more equitable and sustainable energy supply. Importantly, this is a call for
a pragmatic approach that seeks to engage with all elements of informal supply,
rather than the measures that the government has attempted in order to curb the
power of the private providers, a recent one being by imposing the installation of
metering for the clients of the informal providers (c.f. Rose, 2018).
Conclusion
In this chapter, the case of Lebanon’s ongoing electricity failures was explored
through an assemblage perspective. The analysis brought together the lived expe-
rience of the informal electricity services and a consideration of the historical
moments during the civil war where dierent formations of informality took shape.
The historical contextualisation is not intended as an explanation for the origins
of informality. Although it highlights signicant moments of its emergence, the
assemblage perspective provided a lens through which a study of the experiences
of the civil war can be made. Like Braudel (1982, cited in DeLanda, 2016), the
aim is to retell these moments by bringing to the fore the agency of diverse enti-
ties: the ows of electricity, improvised electrical connections, the city and the
streets as well as the people – who are not heroic gures. In this way, the informal
electricity assemblages are broadened and their agency is traced both spatially and
temporally. Kumar et al. (2019) recommend an assemblage perspective in order to
attend to the “socio-technical congurations … that are continually being assem-
bled, disassembled and reassembled in time and space” (p. 174). Understanding
how these processes constituted these assemblages will empower researchers and
policy makers of energy in the context of just and urgent transitions to design
interventions that are attuned to the existing “ways of doing” electricity and in a
way that achieves legitimacy and durability. In so doing, we can begin to chal-
lenge the received wisdom of large decentralised infrastructure projects.
In this chapter, a similar view is taken. By employing an assemblage lens, a
rich account of the workings of the informal systems of electricity provision was
possible, tracing moments in history and accounting for the current realities of
energy infrastructure. In the three historical moments, the agency of energy pro-
vision highlighted the technology’s politics. The historical exploration showed
how the assemblage of electricity services took shape through political attempts
at resilience, steadfastness and recovery. These moments opened up possibilities
of self-provisioning not only as an inevitable consequence to the destruction of
infrastructure due to violent inghting, but as a necessity for survival and continu-
ity rooted in national and communitarian beliefs. These connections can be seen
in the present day; in the relationships between the providers and the households,

Insights from an assemblage perspective 33
in the prevalent theft on the network and in the general acceptance of political
parties’ involvement in generator-based informal provisioning. Accordingly, the
challenge of electricity provision is introduced not as a physical network with
power plants and pylons that can be acted upon, or xed. Rather, the multiple
ways that the meanings and everyday dynamics of electricity provision drove
and have been driven in the past and to this day attest to its continuity, processual
nature (Farias, 2011) and agency. In this way, the hybridity of electricity provi-
sion through state and non-state actors cannot be ignored.
To address Lebanon’s energy crisis, recent governments have sought to price
out informal electricity providers (Rose, 2018), but much-needed RET invest-
ment plans are yet to be comprehensively realised (LCEC, 2016) and the neces-
sary reforms for the energy sector have not yet been implemented (Obeid, 2020).
Government plans such as the Energy Programme (Bassil, 2010) have failed to
realise the much-needed system changes and to meet the levels of electricity gen-
eration needed. These plans, although ambitious, seek to depoliticise the electric-
ity crisis in the country and neglect the realities of informal electricity services
and their rootedness in Lebanon’s cities, built environment and everyday life.
With the ubiquity of informal provision in mind, an alternative is an approach that
is inclusive of the multiplicity of stakeholders that seeks to nd commonalities
through the various elements of the informal assemblage. By building on local
and community-level connections, a plan that incorporates the informal networks
of provision and that includes its physical, human and cultural capital, can be an
eective strategy to implement distributed renewable energy sources for electric-
ity supply. This approach is arguably more achievable in the context of urgency
and can be conducive to prosperity (Moore and Collings, 2020). For example, the
connections of private electricity providers can open up the space for implement-
ing microgeneration solutions such as rooftop solar PV. The propensity of house-
holders to shift between dierent sources of light and electricity enables us to
envision energy access that is more diverse, where the heterogeneity and “messi-
ness” can be seen by policy and decision makers as an advantage. By opening up,
the challenge is to collaborate with a wider network of actors and change agents
where diesel generator owners are invited to participate in cleaner energy oppor-
tunities. What should be emphasised is their embeddedness in their communities
rather than the oft-cited “maa” descriptors they are labelled with (Rosen, 2018).
As aective infrastructures (Knox, 2017), notions of historical and current
government failures can instead be mobilised into empowering processes of
cooperation and collaboration. In better understanding the relational dynamics of
energy assemblages as they emerged in the past and as they continue to unfold,
we might begin to see an “alternative way of thinking, being and organizing”
infrastructures (p. 380). Seen this way, the sites of failure, when explored through
the lens of assemblage, are socio-material entanglements that have the potential
to produce new energy landscapes that are decentralised, greener and potentially
more prosperous (Moore and Collins, 2020). Community-level self-generation
is then not an abandonment by the state but an empowering direction towards a
sustainable energy policy for the country.

34 Dana Abi Ghanem
Lebanon still faces a considerable challenge when it comes to driving a vision
of a greener and more sustainable energy future for its citizens. The ailing physi-
cal infrastructure, the mismanagement of natural and nancial resources, coupled
with a maligned informal system of provision, can seem insurmountable. To the
onlooker, they can even suggest that to bring in low-carbon targets is prema-
ture. However, the green energy options that the country can exploit should be
an integral part of the solution. The decentralisation model is itself not void of
questionable political circuits of power, as observed by Verdeil (2019) in the case
of local authority-led electricity provision. However, to respond positively to the
demands of the people who are suering energy injustices, a socially and cultur-
ally informed approach that engages positively with a multiplicity of actors is
argued here as the alternative but necessary orientation to overcome the ecologi-
cal and political impasse in the country.
Notes
1 The ve and ten amperes are the most common options and indicated in the Lebanese
authorities’ description of the generator service. The choice depends on the size and
income of the household.
2 Decree was issued by the Ministry of Energy and Water (14/10/2010); pursuant to the
decision of Council of Ministers No. 2 dated 14/12/2011) to control generator services
taris through the publishing of monthly permitted taris for ve amperes and ten
amperes respectively.
3 The Turkish power ships, owned by Karadeniz Holding, have since 2013 supplied 25%
of the total electricity demand in Lebanon at a cost of USD 130 million per year for the
Lebanese treasury. However, the USD 140 million in unpaid dues suggests that solu-
tions based purely on supply augmentation are unsustainable given the much-needed
reforms in the electricity sector that are yet to be implemented.
4 The Annahar newspaper archive was accessed at their headquarters: An-Nahar Bldg.,
Martyrs’ Sq., Marfa’ Sector, Beirut, 2014 5401. The archive of Assar was accessed
at the media archives of the American University of Beirut Jafet Library, P.O. Box
11-0236, Riad El-Solh/Beirut 1107 2020, Lebanon.
5 The re-opening of roads and city streets was a common practice after militias closed
them o as part of their retaliatory tactics during some of the urban street ghting that
was a common occurrence throughout the civil war.
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