Entrenched provisionality Struggling for public electricity in postapartheid Johannesburg

Abstract

This article explores practices of community-based energy justice activists in Johannesburg. Against the background of municipal corporatization of electricity delivery in the wake of the postapartheid state’s neoliberal policy turn, residents of the urban periphery organize to ward off cost-recovery measures and illegally (re)connect to the grid. Informed by theories of critical urban studies on the South, this article situates activists’ practices historically and discusses the limits of their strategic claims with a view to their inextricable relation to the state.