With the rise in cooling demand and the permeation of decentralised renewable energy resources in electricity networks, electricity demand-side management (DSM) has become a major tool for electricity planning and decarbonisation in the Global South. In India, the commercial application of DSM is not new, yet utility-driven residential-scale demand response (DR) remains an unexplored area. This paper contributes on two fronts – to explicate householders and practitioner's perceptions of DR: disjunctions between these perceptions and its implications for the acceptance of residential DR. Using a co-production approach, this paper draws insights from two sets of stakeholders in India - 25 DR policy and utility experts and 24 household consumers. Our results show that technological saviourism pervasively underscores practitioners understanding of DR and householder agency, a crucial factor in the adoption of DR at the residential scale remains a missing piece. The paper concludes that without considering householder agency, delivering a decarbonised future based on demand response will be challenging and consumers may remain locked into-existing socio-cultural practices that negate the adoption of DR.

随着制冷需求的增加以及分散的可再生能源在电力网络中的渗透，电力需求侧管理（DSM）已成为全球南方电力规划和脱碳的主要工具。在印度，DSM的商业应用并不是新事物，但是由公用事业驱动的住宅规模需求响应（DR）仍然是一个尚未开发的领域。本文在两个方面做出了贡献-阐明了住户和从业者对灾难恢复的看法：这些看法与它对住宅灾难恢复的接受之间的脱节。本文采用联合生产的方式，从印度的两组利益相关者那里获得了见解-25位灾难恢复政策和公用事业专家以及24位家庭消费者。我们的结果表明，技术上的普遍使用强调了从业人员对灾难恢复和家庭代理的理解，而在住宅规模采用灾难恢复的关键因素仍然是一个缺失的部分。该论文得出的结论是，不考虑住户代理，基于需求响应来实现脱碳的未来将是具有挑战性的，并且消费者可能仍然陷入现有的社会文化习俗中，从而否决了DR的采用。