Cooking Citizenship: Clean-Cooking Transitions and the Politics of State Identity in Kigali, Rwanda

Urban clean-cooking transitions are often evaluated in terms of technology uptake, affordability, or infrastructure readiness. Yet in many cities, such transitions are also political projects through which states seek to cultivate particular forms of citizenship, while citizens interpret and reshape the state through everyday encounters with governance. This article employs the concept of cooking citizenship as an analytical lens to examine the performance and contestation of state identity within cooking-energy policy and practice. Drawing on a six-month qualitative study in Kigali, Rwanda, involving fifty purposively selected households across Gasabo, Kicukiro, and Nyarugenge districts, the research combines in-depth interviews, cooking observations, group discussions, neighbourhood walks, and analysis of policy and market documents. The findings demonstrate that clean-cooking governance extends beyond the promotion of modern fuels. It (1) frames cleanliness, safety, and modernity as civic virtues reinforced through everyday pedagogies; (2) produces differentiated entitlements through enrolment, verification, and the moral classification of households as recognised or suspect; and (3) generates routine insecurities that households navigate through compliance, improvisation, and fuel stacking, thereby shaping state identity from below. By linking everyday fuel practices to questions of authority, belonging, and food rights, the article positions clean cooking as a site where legitimacy is continuously negotiated through interactions with meters, markets, vendors, and local officials. It concludes by proposing practice-sensitive design principles aimed at reducing temporal, financial, and dignity costs while strengthening co-produced trust in Rwanda’s energy transition.