Energy poverty as capacity deprivation: A study of social housing using the partially ordered set

Abstract

The energy crisis generated by the Russia-Ukraine war has further highlighted the urgency of addressing energy poverty. A comprehensive understanding of its incidence, severity, and drivers is crucial to contrast its increasing diffusion effectively. This need is even more evident in the Italian social housing sector, characterized by the deep obsolescence of the building stock and the economic precariousness of its users, but still, little examined due to the scarce availability of data. According to the Capability approach, this paper aims to estimate the incidence and severity of multidimensional energy poverty in the social housing building stocks by presenting a pilot survey by administering a questionnaire to 431 households living in public housing stock in the Province of Viterbo (Italy). Although the dual cut-off identification procedure is considered the traditional approach to multidimensional poverty, it is significantly influenced by researchers' choices on weights and trade-offs between dimensions. Conversely, the partially ordered set (poset) does not require any compensation between energy dimensions. To overcome the limits of the counting approach, this paper adopts the poset to estimate the multidimensional headcount ratio and poverty gap indices. The results show a high diffusion of the phenomenon among the interviewed households: 71,23% experienced severe forms of energy deprivation, on which the inability to cool the dwelling in the summer adequately exerts a significant influence. The survey suggests the ineffectiveness of the eligibility criteria of social measures in reducing the incidence of energy poverty in this specific sector, which requires long-term structural solutions such as energy requalification programs.