State and capital in Pakistan’s rooftop solar transition

This paper argues against unqualified celebration of Pakistan’s recent market-mediated turn to solar rooftop technology. Prompted by high electricity prices, richer households and businesses are rapidly installing solar rooftop systems and reducing their reliance on the grid, further privatising electricity production and access. The paper argues that high prices stem primarily from the excessive de-risking of largescale private investments in generation beginning in the 1990s, and that both this de-risking and recent state attempts to counteract it are indicative of class relations inscribed in the Pakistani state. These relations are now shaping (and being shaped by) the infrastructural reorganisation driven by solar rooftop expansion. More than half of installed solar capacity is behind-the-meter and thus largely invisible to the state, creating major challenges for planning and regulation. At the same time, growing grid defection is also increasing prices for those who remain dependent on the grid. This dynamic will likely intensify the debt-ridden rentier state’s fiscal crisis, which is experienced most harshly by the working classes. While re-embedding low carbon electricity production in households and small social units is an environmental necessity and offers democratic possibilities, it must be supported by steps towards unconditional universal access. State-capital relations and the state itself as a terrain of class conflict are thus key sites of the struggle for a just transition.