From potential to practice: rethinking Africa’s biogas revolution

Abstract

The purpose of this comment is to call for more critical engagement with the potential and practice for biogas investment on the African continent. Over the past two decades, immense amounts of money have been spent by African governments, private individuals, and most conspicuously, international aid agencies and donors, on countless biogas projects in every country on the continent. Yet, despite the investments, biogas in African countries has not taken off, and the continent is strewn with the ruins of hundreds of failed and abandoned biogas projects. Moreover, scholarly literature contains little feedback about what actually happens on the ground. Drawing on this critical reading of the literature, including its blindspots on project outcomes and failures, and drawing on the authors’ own extensive experience with small-scale biogas projects in Malawi and South Africa, this comment article calls for more scholarly critical reflection on why a biogas revolution, that has been perennially over the horizon, has yet to arrive while centring the role of social scientists to engage with biogas owners and operators to bridge the socio-technical divide from potential to practice.