In the search for a new eco-social contract, we must not ignore the state of current global efforts to achieve a just energy transition. Proposing new forms of social contracts requires looking at the state of our current ones to identify obstacles, challenges and conflicts to come. This brief informs and expands the ongoing debate about what a more comprehensive view of a just energy transition should look like and how to achieve it—one that considers principles of justice, human rights and democracy.
In the search for a new eco-social contract, we must not ignore the state of current global efforts in the energy transition. This transition is currently defined as the transformation of the energy sector from operating mainly with fossil fuel based sources toward a zero-carbon sector using renewable energy, for example, solar, eolic and hydraulic energy (IRENA 2022). The justification for an energy transition is a necessary response to the climate crisis, and the energy sector has already experienced significant, albeit insufficient, progress with the supply of electricity generated by solar power increasing by 23 percent and eolic power by 12 percent in 2020 alone (IEA 2021). However, a just energy transition can achieve so much more. This brief informs and expands the ongoing debate about what a more comprehensive view of an energy transition should look like and how to achieve it—one that considers principles of justice, human rights and democracy.
What is a just energy transition?
As a concept, energy justice has a short history. This is unsurprising given that the ever-present influence of energy in our lives is also fairly recent. Today, we need energy for lighting, heating and cooling our homes; to study, work, cook and clean; and a plethora of other uses. The growing need for energy globally also makes the shortcomings of how the energy system currently operates more palpable. Concerns regarding justice and energy first appeared in practice among civil society organizations in the late 1990s in the United States and the United Kingdom. However, it is not until 2013, with its integration in academic study, when the three main tenets of energy justice that are now commonly used were established: distributional, procedural and recognitional justice (Heffron and McCauley 2017).
Distributional justice is the fair distribution of costs and benefits, along with their associated responsibilities, in the generation, distribution and transmission of energy.
Procedural justice integrates and engages all stakeholders in decision making while ensuring that their participation has equal weight on final outcomes.
Recognitional justice acknowledges processes that devalue select people and identities when compared to others and aims to guarantee all individuals fair representation with complete annd equal rights (McCauley et al. 2013).
More recently, the addition of a fourth principle has been considered: restorative justice. Restorative justice considers the harm that has already taken place and suggests what the response should be toward the victims, focusing on repairing and correcting historical damage in addition to punitive justice toward the offender (Heffron and McCauley 2017).
The right to energy: The question of definition
One fundamental way to foster justice-oriented actions in the way we develop the energy transition would be to establish energy as a right, shifting away from our current conception of energy as a commodity to be bought and sold. The commodification of energy fosters a logic of privatization and control that reproduces the harms associated with accumulation, dispossession and perpetual growth (Burke 2021).
However, using the language of rights is not without its pitfalls given that the proliferation of this kind of discourse can lead to its overuse and misuse (not every desired good, outcome, service, activity or principle should be a right). From this perspective, there is a need for specificity in what a right to something means, and how and where it is applied. The most common argument in defence of the need for an energy right is its consideration as a derived right, meaning that we do not see access to and use of energy as an end in and of itself but as a means to achieving a certain living standard. The question: what do we need energy for? becomes significant and points to the relevance of local contexts in the definition of energy as a right, in turn making a universalistic or global approach to its definition and implementation difficult. Equally important to consider is how energy services can satisfy energy needs and whether some (or all) should be subject to rights claims. For example, there is a long-standing campaign in the United Kingdom concerning the right to warmth (Walker 2015; Löfquist 2019).
“The commodification of energy fosters a logic of privatization and control that reproduces the harms associated with accumulation, dispossession and perpetual growth.” — Burke 2021
Furthermore, there is a need to define what energy is. Energy is not a natural category but rather a socially constructed one materializing in multiple forms and deriving from various sources making a clear definition necessary. These distinctions and energy’s definition will depend on the priorities we are aiming for in the establishment of energy as a right. For example, if it is agreed that energy must be affordable, clean or sustainable, this immediately discards some categories of forms and sources of energy and brings others to the forefront.
A second and equally critical consideration is how broadly we should envision the right to energy to be. Limiting the definition to a right to access implies a right to a connection where people can always have a steady and reliable supply of energy. However, this does not mean that there will be guarantees against exogenous constraints such as low income that may hamper the ability of individuals to use this energy supply. The right to energy at the very least must include access and use rights. Consequently, this expands considerations beyond infrastructure improvements to power grids, power plants and pipelines, to also consider pricing and billing as well as the terms of disconnection and energy efficiency (Walker 2015).
Currently, the right to energy is not explicitly recognized by any national legislation or international agreement although some regions like the European Union have stopped one step short of doing so. In recent years there have been several actions to offer wider protections to energy-poor households and the new Clean Energy for All Package requires member states to define, assess and report the energy-poor households within their territory and to communicate the measures that are being undertaken on the matter (Hesselman et al. 2019).
Box 1. Energy access and Indigenous resistance in Mexico
The civil resistance organization Luz y Fuerza del Pueblo in Chiapas, Mexico, is one example of the need for local contextualization in the way a framework for the right to energy is consolidated. According to the National Council for the Evaluation of Social Development Policies (CONEVAL), the organization was founded at the beginning of the twenty-first century in the poorest state of the country as a direct response to unaffordability due to rising energy prices and the constant rollback of subsidies and redistribution policies since the 1980s.
Luz y Fuerza del Pueblo’s response was to stop paying for electricity, disconnect their meters and connect themselves manually to the power grid. They organized themselves out of a need to guarantee security and a long-standing tradition of organized activism that persists in the region. The paradigm in which they saw the access and use of energy had three main driving forces (Cao and Frigo 2021):
A primordial, supernatural gift of Judeo-Christian origin mediated by Liberation Theology: electricity comes from natural resources that the divinity gifted humanity to live from and to care for.
A relational ontology dependent on Mayan cosmovisions: being part of the “living whole”, natural resources are communal. No one can ever be denied access to them for subsistence. Furthermore, humanity has to protect the cosmos with a role of custodian.
A non-commodified view of nature, whose origins are twofold: the Mayan worldviews on one side, and anti-capitalist ideology on the other. More specifically, activists oppose the exploitation of natural resources when it is aimed at the accumulation of capital, and not for the purpose of subsistence.
The energy transition: Change the system, not just its inputs
It is impossible to talk about current efforts toward an energy transition without mentioning the 2015 Paris Agreement, the moment when the need for collective action at the global level to stop the climate crisis was formally consolidated. The Paris Agreement is a legally binding international treaty on climate change and includes articles on keeping earth’s temperature from rising 1.5 Cº , increasing resilience to the adverse effects of climate change and developing low and/or zero-emissions systems to achieve carbon neutrality, among others.
The Paris Agreement is broader than previous attempts at global international treaties on climate change and, because of this, implies the need for multiple other transformations in economies and societies. Additionally, the Agreement is not mainly driven by market forces but by long-term policy efforts which give an opportunity for citizens and stakeholders to be more involved. This drive based on policy also enables a more planned transition (Vandenbussche 2021). However, for this same reason, it also requires a greater level of coordination and agreement.
Nevertheless, actions have been taken toward a just energy transition. The global installed capacity of renewable energy is set to increase 60 percent between 2020 and 2026, accounting for over 95 percent of the increase in power capacity. China and Europe are on track to overshoot their targets and move on to more ambitious goals in their transition plans. However, 80 percent of this expansion in renewables is concentrated in these two markets along with the United States and India (IEA 2021).
In addition, the NDC Synthesis Report, published in 2021 by UN Climate Change, shows the difficulty in translating ambitious targets into consequential actions. Despite most of the countries considered in the study having stronger goals in their search for emissions reduction, their current Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) show that the impact in total emissions would be a reduction of just 1 percent in 2030 compared to 2010. This stands in stark contrast with the 45 percent reduction needed to keep the 1.5 Cº goal of the Paris Agreement within reach.
The largest factor at play that explains the current deficiencies of the energy transition is seldom talked about: the resilience of existing power structures. Not only do current power structures dampen the changes that must happen, but they also affect the way these changes take place. At the root of the power structures that permeate the energy sector are extractivist and colonialist frameworks. These frameworks establish dynamics of dispossession and subordination at almost every level (individual, local, national and international) and their very existence have as a goal the unfair distribution of costs and benefits (Hamouchene 2019).
As it stands, the winners and losers of the energy transition are bound to resemble the ones existing under the current energy sector, both as generators and users of energy. Women, for example, are still vastly underrepresented in leadership positions and in the workforce in the fossil fuel and renewable energy sectors. Patterns of disenfranchisement in decision making that repeat themselves at the community and household levels also continue to exist for many women despite the fact that their assigned roles in the care economy makes them more knowledgeable and more impacted by the decisions taken at these levels (TGI 2020).
Indigenous peoples around the world have had to coexist with an energy sector that operates within political and economic structures that can be incompatible, if not directly hostile, with their existence. Many of the efforts Indigenous peoples have led in defence of their rights and territory for their subsistence and survival as part of their cosmovisions, as well as for the recognition and autonomy of their livelihoods and social structures, has resulted in repression, violence and displacement (PFII 2022).
The oil, gas and carbon sectors represent a history of wage theft, deriving partially from the constant cycle of layoffs and new hires according to price fluctuations, and experiences high mortality rates when compared to other industries (Dickson et al. 2020). An energy transition that does not consider the need for reskilling and upskilling workers to adjust to the new jobs that will be created and does not establish proper procedures to promote workers’ participation in defining working conditions (Vandenbussche 2021) can and will duplicate the inequalities of the fossil fuel industry.
“At the root of the power structures that permeate the energy sector are extractivist and colonialist frameworks.”
Finally, the shift toward renewable energy has been long sustained by innovation and the fast-paced development of new and better technologies. However, innovation—specifically technological innovation—has presented several instances of bias resulting from using predominantly white male subjects as the universal model. The New York Times and Vox have both reported that the last few years have been plagued with cases of gender and racial bias in artificial intelligence and the reticence of the actors who created the biases in the first place and those hired to fix them. Google’s firing of Timnit Gebru is one of the most blatant examples (Metz 2021). In the specific case of climate change, initiatives like Stanford University’s Gendered Innovations Programme has insisted on the need for an intersectional framework where questioning assumptions and biases that may be driving analyses is built in by design.
What does systemic change in a just energy transition look like?
There is a need to integrate technological change with socioeconomic and political change as a means to achieve a more democratic and just energy transition. This would allow for the full potential of the energy transition to come into play. However, we must also understand that this shift is part of an existing movement which had its origins in grassroots organizations and activism challenging existing power systems and seeking the normative goals or ideals that we aspire to within this redefinition (Szulecki and Overland 2020).
It is important to note that, so far, this brief has been mainly framed by European and American thought—the regions where most of the literature comes from—and it is from the American conceptualization that we get the most commonly accepted goals of energy democracy: to resist existing energy systems and to reclaim social and public control over them as a way to restructure the sector so that it abides by democratic principles like the ones laid out when speaking of energy justice. However, disagreements persist regarding what each of these goals mean for every actor, for example, what role the state should play in this process.
Despite the quick progress of this relatively new concept, a just energy transition will inevitably clash with existing structures in the energy sector that operate under current global and regional power dynamics. The Energy Charter Treaty, signed mainly by countries in the European Union, is a good example. Originally conceived as a way to protect investments in energy projects that cross state borders, it is currently being used as a tool to sue signatory countries that are trying to move away from fossil fuels and/or nuclear energy and shutting down projects related to them. Similar examples are bound to appear as the energy transition progresses and the concept of energy democracy takes hold.
The conceptualization of the outcomes and the means to achieve them can happen to varying degrees. Ian Gough (2021), when visualizing the outcome of a fair transition, considers the redefinition that will have to occur to the existing welfare states, picturing two potential scenarios. The first of which establishes a Green New Deal Framework, meaning an expansion of green capital spending both in the private and public sector, coupled with what he names a “social guarantee” that ensures an acceptable level of human security and well-being, particularly in the collective provision of essential goods. In the second scenario there is an emphasis on the previously mentioned unfair distribution of costs and benefits in the energy sector, mainly through the recognition of the responsibility of rich welfare states leading to regulation on consumption levels.
Other authors, like Burke and Stephens (2017), undertake a more granular analysis of the intended outcomes of the materialization of energy democracy and the policy instruments commonly used for this purpose. They signal some essential instruments like the statutory priority for demand reduction and distributed generation, which aims to tackle the problems of unsustainable patterns of consumption and the decentralization of energy production; renewable energy standards that establish targets of the proportion of the total energy produced that derive from renewable sources; as well as practices they consider worth discussing despite not having widespread implementation like the use of public bonds as a financial tool for energy democracy.
“If there is any hope of achieving a just energy transition, there is an urgent need to address inequality at all levels and resolve unbalanced power relations.”
There is no universally effective solution to implementing a just energy transition and taking into account regional, national and local contexts will become increasingly important. For example, income is positively correlated with a rise in carbon emissions when using a consumption-based model instead of a territorial one. Furthermore, when observing emissions reduction drivers together, it is possible to cluster nations in groups that reflect existing hierarchies of development. This means that there is a core of wealthy consumers when compared to other groups in varying degrees of periphery (Lamb et al. 2014). If there is any hope of achieving a just energy transition, there is an urgent need to address inequality at all levels and resolve unbalanced power relations. Despite the diversity of circumstances, some general observations and recommendations have been made when approaching the energy transition in developing countries. One concern is that there will be a negative impact on unmet energy demand and generation costs for low-income countries which could deter them from carrying out large scale investment in renewable energy (Afful-Dadzie et al. 2020). Similarly, there is a need to rethink the centralization of incentives and mechanisms for clean and sustainable development in a handful of developing countries while also broadening national and international incentives beyond the power sector to include others like cooling/heating, transport or urbanism and infrastructure (Vanegas 2020).
An increasing sense of community is also an element commonly associated with energy democracy. There is a growing trove of practical and theoretical knowledge in the creation and regulation of energy commons. While the current energy sector has operated under traditional economic incentives, focusing on large-scale projects and infrastructure that generate natural monopolies and big barriers to entry, the energy commons is one way to foster and strengthen social relations based on cooperation and co-responsibility. The most common form to emerge from this approach is the establishment of renewable energy cooperatives locally owned and managed by communities. Exploring other ways of public ownership and management, like municipally owned utilities or community grids, is equally important (Burke 2021).
However, the energy sector does not operate in a vacuum. While the decarbonized energy sector becomes increasingly valued as the energy transition progresses, it forces us to confront issues largely ignored like the presence and effects of corruption, nepotism, tender rigging, bribery and tax evasion (Sovacool 2021). Proposing new forms of social contracts requires looking at the state of our current ones to identify obstacles, challenges and conflicts to come. At the policy level there is a need to create new ways of translating commitments into real policy action that promotes multi-disciplinarity in the energy transition and takes into account the lived experiences of the marginalized and their local contexts (Bouzarvoski et al. 2021).
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