Spatializing energy justice

By Stefan Bouzarovski, N. Simcock. 2017

459 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper introduces the concept of spatial justice and inequality to understandings of energy poverty and vulnerability. By applying an explicitly spatial lens to conceptualize energy poverty as a form of injustice, it contributes to debates in the domain of ‘energy justice’, where previous examinations of energy deprivation through a justice framing have focused on inequalities between social groups and often marginalized questions of spatial difference. We start from the premise that geographic disparities in the risk and incidence of domestic energy deprivation are a key component of energy justice. An extensive literature review has allowed us to highlight the spatial and temporal variation of cross-sectoral and entire-energy-chain injustices that lead to elevated energy poverty risks. These processes contribute to the rise of energy injustices via four mechanisms – which we term landscapes of material deprivation, geographic underpinnings of energy affordability, vicious cycles of vulnerability, and spaces of misrecognition – operating at a multiplicity of scales. While lending some support to area-based approaches towards energy poverty alleviation, our findings also suggest that such policies alone may marginalize the underlying structural dynamics that (re)produce spatial inequalities. Therefore, achieving energy justice necessitates broader interventions in the fundamental driving forces of spatial inequality.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f1f621cb4065342e99bacbc57b82d7759d62b61b

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In Energy Engineering and Power Technology

In Pollution

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

Energy poverty policies and measures in 5 EU countries: A comparative study (2019, unknown): “What is more significant is that individuals living in energy poor conditions may not be homeowners and may therefore seem to be even more reluctant to invest in energy eﬃciency measures [48] .”
Confronting Energy Poverty in Europe: A Research and Policy Agenda (2021, background): “The second group of criteria encompasses “provision of resources” [39,40] in the distributional and spatial domain.”
‘Getting the measure of fuel poverty’: The geography of fuel poverty indicators in England (2017, unknown): “Instead, in the few geographic contexts in which the incidence of fuel poverty is measured, expenditure-based indicators are relied upon to provide a national estimate of households, with little attention given to the localised geographies of fuel poverty they succeed in creating [11,9].”
The methodologies, geographies, and technologies of energy justice: a systematic and comprehensive review (2021, background): “But numerous other interpretations have been developed utilizing other concepts and approaches, including prohibitive and affirmative principles (Sovacool et al 2013), notions of restorative justice (Heffron and McCauley 2017), spatial justice (Bouzarovski and Simcock 2017), and even calls to combin”
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] .”