Advancing an energy justice perspective of fuel poverty: Household vulnerability and domestic retrofit policy in the United Kingdom

By R. Gillard, C. Snell, Mark Bevan. 2017

216 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The concept of energy justice has brought philosophies of ethics and principles of social justice to bear on a range of contemporary energy issues. More inter-disciplinary and applied endeavours are now needed to take this field forward. One such application is to the issue of fuel poverty and the challenge of retrofitting inefficient housing stock. An energy justice perspective sees fuel poverty as a fundamentally socio-political injustice, not just one of uneven distribution. Starting from this premise, we highlight the multiple injustices faced by two groups who are regarded by policymakers as being particularly vulnerable to fuel poverty: disabled people and low-income families. In the UK, these groups are nominally prioritised within fuel poverty policy, but their complex situations are not always fully appreciated. Building on the theoretical foundations of energy justice, we present an inter-disciplinary dialogue that connects this approach with wider vulnerability research and domestic energy efficiency policy. Specifically, we discuss ‘within group’ heterogeneity (recognition justice), stakeholder engagement in policy and governance (procedural justice) and the overlap of multiple structural inequalities (distributional justice). In each section we illustrate the added value of combining justice and vulnerability conceptualisations by linking them to domestic energy efficiency schemes.

Subfields: Pollution, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/461841124bd0c3743c9ac6d96975659dbd3ce1ee

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In Pollution

In Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

Citations in the corpus

Energy justice in the transition to low carbon energy systems: Exploring key themes in interdisciplinary research (2019, background): “environment [52, 53], energy [54, 55] and climate justice [56, 57] has become more qualitative and theoretical.”
Energy poverty vulnerability index: A multidimensional tool to identify hotspots for local action (2019, unknown): “…several authors have been exploring various dimensions of EP, focusing on the social and health di-mension of the problem (e.g. Day et al., 2016; Gillard et al., 2017; Thomsonetal.,2017a,b),economicandexpenditureside(e.g. Hills, 2012; E-Control, 2013; ONPE, 2014), geography (e.g. Anusi and…”
Confronting Energy Poverty in Europe: A Research and Policy Agenda (2021, background): “What is more, national policy frameworks display a relative lack of innovative participatory mechanisms to engage vulnerable citizens in the design and implementation of relevant measures and programmes—especially in terms of the “hard to reach” [10,46], who face a complex array of institutionally a”
Objective vs. subjective fuel poverty and self-assessed health (2020, background): “However, it is also important to note that not every household in areas prone to fuel poverty is effectively in a fuel poverty situation and hence some wealthier households can benefit in detriment of poorer ones (Gillard et al., 2017).”
Temporality, vulnerability, and energy justice in household low carbon innovations (2019, background): “We already see certain groups underrepresented in discussions and policymaking, such as those in fuel poverty (Gillard et al., 2017), implying that a low carbon system will not necessarily improve access to affordable energy.”