Stefan Bouzarovski and Neil Simcock have recently published a new EVALUATE paper, ‘Spatializing energy justice’. The paper appears in a Special Issue of the journal Energy Policy, ‘Exploring the Energy Justice Nexus’.
The paper introduces an explicit spatial vocabulary to understandings of energy justice. It highlights the geographic disparities in the risk and incidence of energy poverty, arguing that this is a key component of energy (in)justice. Such geographic disparities are reproduced through four mechanisms – termed landscapes of material deprivation, geographic underpinnings of energy affordability, vicious cycles of vulnerability, and spaces of misrecognition – that operate from the local to the global scale.
The paper’s findings add further weight to the belief that energy poverty is a distinct and severe form of (energy) injustice, acting as a reminder that its alleviation is a fundamental political duty rather than an optional act of benevolence. Furthermore, while lending some support to local and area-based energy poverty alleviation policies, the findings also indicate the need to intervene in the deeper, wider-scale processes and mechanisms through which spatial inequality and energy poverty (re)produced.
The paper is open access and is available to freely read and download. We can recommend the rest of the Special Issue, which contains an impressive set of conceptual and empirical papers.
People and Energy Collective 