Giving Compass' Take:

• A recent Sustainable Energy Transitions Initiative review identifies a knowledge gap that exists among low- and middle-income countries that may hinder more energy access and, thus, advancement of the SDGs.

• Funding research to close that gap could be the best thing aid organizations can do, focusing on local institutions. What will we find about the way energy relates to welfare around the world?

• Here's one startup bringing renewable energy to Haitian businesses.

Is energy the “golden thread” that connects economic growth, social equity, and environmental sustainability? To answer this question, the Sustainable Energy Transitions Initiative (SETI) set up a systematic review and searched through nearly 77,500 papers over three years.

What has SETI found and why should you care? While we know how energy access impacts many of the SDGs, we don’t have enough scientific evidence about what is being done by practitioners and policymakers in low- and middle-income countries. This “know-do gap” — what we know through research and what is implemented — will keep the world from achieving a critical cluster of SDGs.

In general, this review points to a troubling pattern: A big gap between what is being evaluated by scholars and the types of programs, projects, and policies being implemented. These know-do gaps take different forms — the interventions implemented are often not the ones studied, the intended impacts are not the impacts studied, and the geographical areas studied do not fully represent the areas of implementation.

Know-do gaps emerge largely because impact evaluations are public goods; that is, because it rarely makes sense for an organization to conduct an expensive impact evaluation that will not directly benefit the project. Besides, there are large differences between evidentiary standards and the research needs of policymakers and researchers. And inevitably, there isn’t enough local capacity to conduct serious evaluations.

If we don’t make scientific evidence much more practice based by encouraging (rigorous-enough) impact evaluations of real-life projects, programs, and policies, we will continue to be in the dark.

Read the full article about achieving universal energy access by Subhrendu K. Pattanayak, Hannah Girardeau and Faraz Usmaniat Brookings.