Energy justice in the transition to low carbon energy systems: Exploring key themes in interdisciplinary research

By D. McCauley, Vasna Ramasar, R. Heffron, Benjamin Sovacool, Desta Mebratu, L. Mundaca. Applied Energy, 2019

410 citations recorded by the source corpus.

With the dual challenges of reducing emissions from fossil fuels and providing access to clean and affordable energy, there is an imperative for a transition to a low carbon energy system. The transition must take into consideration questions of energy justice to ensure that policies, plans and programmes guarantee fair and equitable access to resources and technologies. An energy justice framework is outlined to account for distributional, procedural and recognition inequalities, as well as emerging themes such as cosmopolitan and non-Western understandings of justice, in decision-making relating to energy systems. The spectrum of research offers critical perspectives on the energy transition as well as tools for decision-making and policy processes. Quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods all contribute to our understanding of the problems and the success of responses. The studies presented in this special issue illustrate that the field of energy justice is a rapidly growing arena. There is constant innovation taking place in enabling the transition with new structures, processes and metrics being introduced to guide decision-making and a more holistic view of the community emerging where acceptance, mobilisation and empowerment are opening possibilities for a just transition to a low carbon energy system. The importance of introducing the interdisciplinary approach between social sciences and natural sciences as well engineering implementation supported by scientific data and experiments shall be emphasized in future studies.

Subfields: Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Pollution, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/095eaf512bcf3ffb1ef528fd4c7e3cc8e8e5f846

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Citations in the corpus

Flexibility capital and flexibility justice in smart energy systems (2019, background): “While there has been a significant amount of research attention on energy justice considerations related to low-carbon transitions (McCauley et al., 2019), work explicitly considering the justice implications of flexibility specifically has still been somewhat limited given the scale of expectations”
Volatile Photovoltaics: Green Industrialization, Sacrifice Zones, and the Political Ecology of Solar Energy in Germany (2021, background): “These themes buttress a line of emerging work revealing that lowcarbon transitions are locally disruptive processes (D€utschke and Wesche 2018; Dunlap 2019; McCauley et al. 2019).”
Confronting Energy Poverty in Europe: A Research and Policy Agenda (2021, background): “We also discuss changes between the draft and final versions of the NECPs as a broad-level indicator of the strength, capacity and determination of individual national governments to combat energy injustices in relation to the energy–climate interface [25,26].”
Decarbonization and its discontents: a critical energy justice perspective on four low-carbon transitions (2019, methodology): “Issues of public participation, due process, and representative justice are central to procedural justice (McCauley et al. 2019; Sovacool et al. 2019).”