Promoting energy inclusiveness: Is rural energy poverty a political failure?

We examine the impact of democracy and governance on rural electrification and rural access to clean fuels and technologies for cooking using comprehensive panel data of 34 countries from Latin America and the Caribbean between 2000 and 2020. Evidence from heteroskedasticity-based instrumental variable regression revealed that governance improves rural electrification and rural access to clean cooking fuels and technologies, while democracy of different forms limits rural electrification and rural access to clean cooking fuels and technologies. We suggest that better governance ensures justice in providing and allocating essential public services such as electricity and clean cooking solutions, not democracy.