Developing and Testing a Best Practice Framework for Energy Access Interventions

This article presents an attempt to operationalize the concept of ’best practice’, as applied to project-based interventions to expand energy access in developing countries. To this end a methodology has been developed to quantify project performance across five dimensions, each informed by three key indicators, and aggregate these into a composite indicator, using weights obtained from a survey of experts. The experience demonstrates the inherent limitations in developing a ‘one-size-fits-all’ methodology, revealing the implicit tension between the political desire to refer to objective, absolute, measures of best practice and highly contextual realities where baselines are often lacking. However, the methodology does offer a comparative means to highlight the relative strengths and weaknesses of any given project, enabling both ex-post assessments and project learning. The study features an analysis of cases selected from the Energy Access Knowledge Base, published by the Global Network on Energy for Sustainable Development (GNESD). Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment