A mundane infrastructure of energy poverty: The informal trading of second-hand car batteries in Madagascar

Abstract

This article examines the complex interconnected chains of large- and small-scale trade that sustain the supply of second-hand car batteries as a widespread traditional solution to energy poverty. It traces the routes of goods that support the circulation of batteries from international routes upstream and downstream to urban and rural areas in Madagascar. It addresses the notion of a mundane infrastructure based on economic circuits that support the regular supply of rebuilt batteries as their repair, maintenance and recharge in the course of their second life. The analysis focuses on central nodes along this supply chain where intermediaries organize transactions over heterogeneous regimes of value and discontinuous economic spaces. It highlights the way these entrepreneurs provide solutions for disjunctions via translation and requalification processes. While the trade of second-hand car batteries is more and more subject to control to prevent lead trafficking rings, these secondary circuits of makeshift energy products raise the interweaving moral and material tensions between the contemporary global environmental politics and the survival of the mundane infrastructure of energy poverty.