Building Energy Institutions in a Conflict Zone

How do international development organisations develop institutional capacity in conflict zones? Here we take a descriptive, topological perspective on the question, using the case of Afghanistan. For twenty years prior to the capture of Afghanistan by the Taliban in August 2021 the international community directed substantial resources to Afghanistan, seeking to build a democratic state. Here we examine selected, energy-related aspects of those institution-building processes, taking the country as a case study of institutional development for energy and other transitions that is explicitly driven by particular values. We find that this institutional development can be categorized in terms of three main themes: development of a regulatory framework for the energy sector; privatisation of energy systems; and women's empowerment in terms of knowledge, skills and engagement in energy sector provisioning.