Energy Security as Justice: Law, Governance and Postcolonial Sovereignty in Bangladesh

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🔬研究者:Provides a normative framework for reconceptualizing energy security as justice, useful for scholars in energy justice, postcolonial governance, and climate policy.

🏢実務担当者:Offers insights for development agencies and NGOs working on energy access in the Global South, highlighting the need for community-centered approaches.

🏛政策担当者:Highlights how structural dependencies limit policy autonomy in climate-vulnerable countries, relevant for designing equitable international climate finance mechanisms.

This thesis examines energy governance in Bangladesh through a postcolonial lens centred on justice and sovereignty. It challenges orthodox understandings of energy security as a matter of supply adequacy, reliability, or affordability, arguing instead that energy governance is a contested legal and political arena in which justice, human rights, and ecological duties are negotiated along lines structured by colonial legacies. Set within a climate-vulnerable Global South context, the thesis shows how external financing, technological dependence, and institutional constraints shape energy decision‑making, limit policy autonomy, and compromise sovereignty. The central research question asks how structural dependency, governance practices, and developmentalist ideologies shape Bangladesh’s energy choices, reproduce postcolonial dependency, and affect sovereignty, justice, and long-term energy security. Methodologically, the thesis adopts a doctrinal, qualitative approach, analysing domestic legislation and regulations, executive instruments, judicial decisions, international instruments, policy documents, empirical reports, and secondary literature. Grounded in postcolonial political economy, alternative development theory, and energy and climate justice scholarship, it examines the regulatory architecture to show how legal frameworks, expansive executive powers, and limited participation mediate policy choices and their distributive consequences. The thesis argues for the recognition of an enforceable right to energy and reconceptualises energy security as a normative question of justice. It advances a bottom-up framework centred on communities, human and ecological rights, intergenerational equity, and differentiated international responsibility to address persistent historical inequalities. This framework offers a transferable lens for assessing energy systems across comparable Global South jurisdictions and contributes to debates on equitable, sustainable, and accountable energy governance amid the climate crisis and the energy transition.

• openalex https://doi.org/10.25501/soas.01029555first seen 2026-06-12 04:45:02 · last seen 2026-06-16 04:40:54