Women in rural areas of India play an important role in household energy management. Programmes designed to help them administer these needs more effectively by providing alternative, sustainable energy solutions, however, have met with limited success. Women's roles and energy needs are rarely a main focus of rural energy programmes and there are few mechanisms for creating a more meaningful role for them throughout the programme lifecycle. This paper presents the results of a joint Tata Energy Research Institute (TERI), India and University of Waterloo (UW), Canada project, which aimed to develop a participatory rural energy planning methodology that defines and creates a space for women in the rural energy development process. The paper begins with a brief background on the rural energy scenario in India, the official responses and programme performances. We discuss the role of women in household energy management with respect to gender variations in roles and decision-making and the failure to recognise these differences in policy formulation. Within this context, we present a participatory process for designing household energy programmes with rural women. A case study drawn from work in rural Haryana, India illustrates the method. This methodology fills an existing need for tools and approaches within the rural energy sector to provide concrete ways to include women as full partners in the development process. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.