Pluralizing energy justice: Incorporating feminist, anti-racist, Indigenous, and postcolonial perspectives

Abstract

Justice represents not only a moral obligation but can enhance the legitimacy and acceptance of a rapid push toward global decarbonization. Innovations in technology, even those geared toward sustainability, can both reinforce and introduce new inequalities and disparities across populations, while also perpetuating environmental degradation. The concept of energy justice has emerged as a conceptual, methodological, and empirical tool to both highlight and remediate many of these concerns, with an emphasis on what is morally just or right. But much of this body of scholarship fails to adequately account for gender, Indigeneity, race, and other intersecting inequalities. Feminist, Indigenous, anti-racist and postcolonial approaches to justice offer an important remedy to theories of justice with underlying colonial, liberalist, majoritarian, utilitarian, or masculinist assumptions. Our Perspective is grounded in these four core, but often misperceived or even radical, approaches to justice. We first provide an overview of each of these approaches and then synthesize them into a set of themes, principles, and questions, which can guide future energy justice research and practice.