Household access to resources in urban areas is increasingly contested as a political arena under
the rubric of globalization. These debates focus on the coming together of urban population
growth, increasing inequality, and economic restructuring - processes that cut through arenas of
households, communities, national policies, and international regimes. Sector reforms including
privatizations of urban resource services and infrastructures such as water, transportation, and
energy all figure prominently in these debates and have important stakes for household and
community access. This paper is part of a broader dissertation research project focused on
unraveling the historical, resource, and discursive processes producing conditions of urban
energy in Dar es Salaam. It presents a preliminary set of arguments suggesting that reforms may
be contributing to dynamics that may increase and sustain urban charcoal use, and consequently
increase pressure on forestry resources. The relationship between formal and informal resource
economies, community-level resource strategies, and differentiated intra-household dynamics
around labor, gender, and power all play central roles in this discussion. This paper arrives at its
main argument through three parts. First, it introduces the specific policies connected with
reforms and their historical origins in a paradigm shift from treating energy as a public service to
a commodity good. Second, it lays out a framework for conceptualizing dynamics of household
energy access, where reform policies may rework access conditions in important ways. Third, it
elaborates the main hypothesis of this paper by showing how charcoal is now the cheapest
cooking fuel as a result of changing fuel pricing policies and elaborates a set of dynamics around
consumer goods that may serve to further differentiate types of energy priorities and direct
resources away from spaces of kitchens. The paper concludes with a short discussion of the
policy implications and next steps in the broader research project.