Energy justice from the bottom up: developing a framework to guide energy poverty policy

The energy system is undergoing a fundamental transformation, involving technological change as well as changes to ways of using and consuming energy, to regulations, and to the roles of actors. The concept of energy justice should be incorporated into this transformation to ensure a just transition and can provide a lens for assessing energy policies taking place in sociotechnical systems. Energy poverty, while a policy priority, is an ongoing energy justice issue in EU, despite policy efforts, affecting around 50 million people. Current understandings of drivers of energy poverty are criticised for being too narrow. Hence, policy efforts in this direction might exacerbate existing injustices rather than alleviate them. Both individual and social factors of the socio-technical system, which influence energy behaviours, need to be better understood and incorporated in policy assessment and design to ensure justice concerns are properly addressed. Current frameworks for assessing energy justice are criticised for being too top down, lacking transparency or being difficult to operationalise. We aim to address some of these shortcomings by applying a participatory bottom-up approach to framework development. We carry out a participatory qualitative analysis that explores the sociotechnical context of energy poverty and the conceptualisation of energy justice according to key energy actors and households. We derive guideline energy justice criteria, in the context of energy poverty. Our findings may provide useful guidance for policy-makers when assessing energy poverty alleviation policies, as well as provide a foundation for the development of future context-sensitive assessment tools. This brief shares the findings from our recent report.