Abstract
Energy justice is now an established research topic in the field of energy policy. Despite the growing popularity of energy justice research, however, conceptual and analytical frameworks used in the field have remained limited. This paper reviews the prevailing three-tenet framework of energy justice which has shaped the current discourse based on the three dimensions – distributional, procedural, and recognition justice. As an effort to contribute to expanding the research agenda of energy justice problems, we propose a new understanding of the production of energy injustice by characterizing three institutionalized tendencies of dominant modern energy systems: 1) preference for large-scale technical systems and distancing of system designs from local decision-making processes; 2) centralization of energy production and concomitant distancing of supply from users; and 3) widespread ‘risk-taking’ tendencies portrayed by designers and proponents of current energy supply systems as a necessary ‘price to pay’ for technological innovation and social progress. We then connect these three tendencies to political, economic, and technical ideologies of modernism that often provide justifications for energy inequity: 1) top-down political and economic decision-making systems, 2) technical interpretation of sustainability, 3) specialist understanding of fairness, and 4) path dependency. Finally, we present an illustration of how this new conception of energy justice can be applied in practice using the case of South Korea’s nuclear power system and Seoul’s One Less Nuclear Power Plant Initiative.
Highlights
The fast growth of energy markets throughout the twentieth century has been widely interpreted as an essential ingredient of economic development
To illustrate how the new approach can apply in practice, we present an analysis of South Korea’s nuclear power system and differential risks it creates across socioeconomic groups and geographies
Byrne et al (2006) share this viewpoint that “building an inquiry into energy as a social project will require the recovery of a critical voice that can interrogate, rather than concede, the discourse’s current moorings in technological politics and capitalist political economy,” and that “a fertile direction in this regard is to investigate an energy-society order in which energy systems evolve in response to social values and goals, and not according to the dictates of technique, prices, or capital (p. 23).”
Summary
The fast growth of energy markets throughout the twentieth century has been widely interpreted as an essential ingredient of economic development (see, for example, the “energy-civilization” equation mapped by Basalla, 1980). We welcome the contemplated improvements but would offer that additional research on structural and ideological components of energy injustice is needed In this vein, the paper offers a systemic framework for understanding injustices associated with energy production.. While the three-tenet framework provides a conceptual backbone for identifying and analyzing problems with regard to common energy (including fuel poverty), it does not directly address complex political and economic forces that routinely produce energy injustice. The framework tends to shed more light on ‘tailpipe’ problems and fixes like improved accessibility and affordability while leaving the structural and ideological pillars of the problem under-examined.3 For this reason, energy poverty is usually the analytical boundary for discussions of energy justice (Bouzarovski and Simcock, 2017). We argue that energy justice frameworks should recognize external driving forces of injustice beyond the three justice dimensions of the prevailing framework
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