Energy poverty in the European Union: landscapes of vulnerability

By Stefan Bouzarovski. 2014

415 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Energy poverty can be seen as situation in which a household lacks a socially and materially necessitated level of energy services in the home. In the context of the European Union (EU), its causes and consequences largely coincide with those of the more narrowly defined notion of ‘fuel poverty’, which has attracted a significant amount of public attention, scientific research, and state policy in Ireland and the UK. Outside of these two countries, however, EU energy poverty scholarship, debates, and policies are embryonic. From the limited amount of research that has been published to date, it is possible to conclude that the condition is predicated upon high energy prices, low household incomes, inefficient buildings and appliances, and specific households energy needs. It is particularly widespread in Eastern, Central, and Southern Europe, where it tends to affect groups who are already vulnerable to income poverty. Recent years have seen a conceptual shift in the mainstream theorization of domestic energy deprivation, onto more complex and nuanced issues of household needs, built environment flexibility, and social resilience.

Subfields: Energy Engineering and Power Technology, Pollution, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a3cf17bade8f6b89afa865b8f0def0d4843466c5

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Citations in the corpus

Energy poverty in Portugal: Combining vulnerability mapping with household interviews (2019, background): “By emphasizing the spatial dimension of energy poverty, different scales emerge [9, 11, 13] .”
‘Getting the measure of fuel poverty’: The geography of fuel poverty indicators in England (2017, neutral): “Interest in the spatial distribution of fuel poverty ranges from a recognition that the condition is ‘locally contingent’ upon different national contexts ([77]: 282), to acknowledgment of the ‘local realities’ of fuel poverty within different neighbourhoods and households ([9]: 9).”
Geographies of injustice: the socio-spatial determinants of energy poverty in Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary (2017, background): “…(Hegedüs, 2011; Lampietti & Meyer, 2002). at the same time, EU- and ECE-level studies have explored the general sociodemographic extent of the condition within the context of broader regional trends (Bouzarovski, 2014; Bouzarovski & Tirado Herrero, 2015; Healy, 2004; Thomson & Snell, 2012).”
DIRECTORATE GENERAL FOR INTERNAL POLICIES POLICY DEPARTMENT A: ECONOMIC AND SCIENTIFIC POLICY (2012, background): “339 19 dealing with the elimination of its symptoms, but not its root causes (Bouzarovski, 2014; IEA, 2014).”
Advancing an energy justice perspective of fuel poverty: Household vulnerability and domestic retrofit policy in the United Kingdom (2017, background): “Recent metareviews of this emerging field of research call for even greater synthesis across nations, and a whole systems approach [6,7], whilst others focus on household and community level issues [8–10].”
Spatializing energy justice (2017, background): “…assemblage of material elements can be described via the more generic notion of ‘landscape’, so as to highlight the ‘heterogeneity of socio-energetic relations and their dynamics’ (Castán Broto et al., 2014, p. 194; also see Bouzarovski, 2014, for a theorization of “landscapes of vulnerability”).”
Energy poverty indicators: A critical review of methods (2017, methodology): “A fundamental element in this family of methods is the ‘energy burden’ or share of energy expenditure within total household expenditure or household income.(40) The most prominent examples of practical implementation of this method are the UK official fuel poverty statistics – Boardman’s 10% requir”
A global perspective on domestic energy deprivation: Overcoming the energy poverty-fuel poverty binary (2015, background): “This approach helps draw a distinction between energy or fuel poverty as a descriptor of a state within a certain temporal frame, on the one hand, and vulnerability as a set of conditions leading to such circumstances, on the other [158,159].”