Negotiating urban energy transitions in Greater Maputo: Street-level politics and infrastructural heterogeneity

Research on urban energy transitions in sub-Saharan Africa has focused either on formal governance or on micropolitics in low-income neighborhoods, providing limited insight into how transition policies addressing access, cost recovery, reliability, and greening are contested across heterogeneous urban infrastructural settings. We address this shortcoming by examining the politics of policy implementation in Greater Maputo, Mozambique, through a street-level bureaucracy lens. Drawing on qualitative data, we show how the electricity utility and its staff exercise discretion in an access-first energy transition setting, amid competing accountabilities and uneven material conditions. Across three ideal-typical settings—peri-urban grid-expansion zones, low-income neighborhoods constrained by affordability, and areas demanding premium reliability—we identify policy divergence patterns: illusory implementation, selective enforcement, and informal service differentiation. These patterns help actors to reconcile conflicting demands but also adversely affect service reliability, undermine greening objectives, and increase socio-spatial inequalities across the city. By showing how material conditions mediate implementation choices, we explain how street-level politics reconfigure heterogeneous urban infrastructures.