Ockwell and Bryne describe the success story of the Kenyan solar photo-voltaic (SPV) sector in creating electric energy from sunlight, perhaps the largest such national system in the world in terms of families supplied with some electricity. They observe that electricity is the prerequisite for most kinds of family, agricultural, educational and commercial activities. In Sub-Saharan countries of Africa this is an acute need. But what are the causes, and what factors have been the basis or necessary elements in this story?

The first three chapters review ideas and development/innovation theories of what it takes to successfully get an innovation like SPV electricity established, extended and maintained consistently in a country without developed economy infrastructure and resources. Coming from engineering backgrounds Ockwell and Byrne describe two major clusters of thought about how innovations like these, and by implication other efforts, can intentionally be planned and built to support economic viability and sustainable societies. They are polite but critical of the claims and effectiveness of hardware financing and private sector entrepreneurship. These areas and accompanying buzzwords occupy corporate businesses and government attention, and lots of resources, but have not proved to be the successes such rhetoric would suggest.

An interesting comment Ockwell and Byrne make in first assessing the innovation studies literature and then the socio-technical transition literatures, is that governments often prefer corporate and commercial models, and businesses for their part like working in big units of funding and contracts from governments. Ockwell and Byrne do not go into detail, but the book implies that the operation of Western nation ideologies fails to ‘read’ from the evidence on the ground, instead imposing their views based on quite different national histories, often missing the point and even being counter-productive. One deeper argument well made, for instance, is that copying high-carbon strategies from elsewhere in the world does not graft well onto, or support getting towards, low-carbon energy practices in countries like Kenya. This is summarised in pp. 14–20 and explained in Chapters 2 and 3.

Ockwell and Byrne prefer ‘innovation in the context of social practices and socio-technical regimes’ (p. 44). Sociologists would agree. Money, hardware, and corporate business practices by themselves are isolated from the cultural interconnections that make them effective and useful. Ockwell and Bryne suggest focusing on strategic niche management as a way forward. This recognises that any country, including those not economically advanced, has a set of existing socio-cultural and socio-economic arrangements that constrain, shape, or enable certain sustainable practices to emerge in local ways. Ockwell and Bryne explore this strategy in terms of technology, financing and other practices, but usefully resist the seduction of ‘big’ solutions and ‘big’ proposals and answers.

In fact, the second half of the book, in Chapters 4–6, in effect gives a history and analysis of several decades of trial and error in the Kenyan case of non-reticulated SPV power. Different readers may prefer the earlier general discussion of innovation and sustainability, while others will find interest in the vicissitudes of funding, changes in government attitudes and policy, individual efforts, and contestation between groups, individuals and regions, as reasons for uptake by some groups and not others. The role of schools and principals as creating interested buyers after effectively showcasing working off-grid solar PV systems is one such element in this overall national narrative.

Ockwell and Byrne are not opposed to cross-national application of innovation practices, merely the over-universalising of them. Learning from others with appropriate adaptation is instead core to their understanding. They equally reject being pushed into the opposite position of valuing only what is developed at home. The middle position they adopt is harder to assert within the noise of simpler — read that as ultimately simplistic — affirmations of Western-type entrepreneurship and the undermining effects of high-carbon economic thinking. Being able to respond to the importance of ‘context-specificities’ (p. 181) is the harder but eventually more realistic route to economic development of the low-carbon and sustainable power options they advocate.

Environmental educators will see much to reflect on here from the detailed discussion of this real-world, long-term, national-scale case study. Perhaps like a lot of education it is a matter not altogether about learning new things, but unlearning old certainties, so that interstitial insights that emerge in the trial and error of cultural and technological change can indeed be recognised and allowed to come to fruition over time in other places. Sure, the book deals with only one specific energy type, but that focus is better read as its strength, given that even in that space the complexity of policy, participants and economic influences takes time to absorb.

Ockwell and Byrne’s book emphasises energy sustainability interactions and contestation within a poorer developing economy. Agriculturalists and ecologists will rightly want to talk about implications in Kenya — and more generally — for soils, sustainable farming practices, and existing ecological pressures that new energy forms, even SPV, bring to bear on this region. But that is to criticise good effort and thinking for the complexity facing not just one country but global human society. More positively, learning some important lessons here and applying these to re-educate ourselves and leaders and followers around us, would add other necessary elements to efforts for the pro-poor sustainable world that is work for us all.

We know that technologies to capture solar power, as the most abundant of all renewable energy sources, have been steadily reducing in cost. Arguments today that these are passing conventional fossil forms in cost-effectiveness suggest this decades-long story of Kenya may in time be seen as the early stages of a very different modernisation sequence for African countries. My sense is that any generalisations made have the built-in limitation that we are in a digital-global revolution as significant as the first industrial revolution. The consequences of this change might be assisted, but they are beyond the explanatory reach of individual models. Technology, entrepreneurship, innovation, strategies of whatever hue, interact with socio-cultural and socio-economic drivers beyond national and regional confines.