Energy justice and gender

Globally, many of the most pervasive inequalities are those embedded in unequal gender relations. Despite this, gender has only recently emerged as a focus in conversations about energy justice. Understanding gender as an intersectional axis of social power that shapes social relations in an unequal way, this chapter reviews global energy-gender debates. In doing do, we set out a framework for understanding the ways in which energy justice is shaped by gender relations, and vice versa. We illustrate this framework with multi-scalar examples from the European context, evaluating both national scale gender-energy indicators and detailed qualitative evidence from households in Poland, Czechia and Greece. We set out an agenda for possible future research and policy on gendered energy injustices that considers: intersectional energy injustices; temporal dimensions of gendered energy injustice; and the importance of mixed methods approaches

The materiality of precarity: Gender, race and energy infrastructure in urban South Africa

Analysis of precarity has offered a critique of labour market experiences and politically induced conditions of work, housing, migration, or essential services. This paper develops an infrastructural politics of precarity by analysing energy as a critical sphere of social and ecological reproduction. We employ precarity to understand how gendered and racialised vulnerability to energy deprivation is induced through political processes. In turn, analysis of energy illustrates socio-material processes of precarity, produced and contested through infrastructure. Our argument is developed through scalar analysis of energy precarity in urban South Africa, a country that complicates a North-South framing of debates on both precarity and energy. We demonstrate how energy precarity can be reproduced or destabilised through: social and material relations of housing, tenure, labour and infrastructure; the formation of gendered and racialized energy subjects; and resistance and everyday practices. We conclude that analysis of infrastructure provides insights on how precarity is contested as a shared condition and on the prospect of systemic change through struggles over distribution and production

Discursive Framings of Low Carbon Urban Transitions: The Contested Geographies of 'Satellite Settlements' in the Czech Republic

The discursive and representational aspects of the multiple political, economic and cultural challenges associated with low carbon urban transitions remain insufficiently explored in the academic literature. This is particularly true in the post-communist states of eastern and central Europe, which have been undergoing an additional transition of their own—from a centrally planned to a market-based economy. This paper, therefore, explores the manner in which climate change and sustainability narratives have been implicated in the development of ‘satellite settlements’—a specific form of sprawl present in the Czech Republic. Much of the paper is focused on investigating the discursive framings of such areas by relevant state policies and the national media in this country. Several key themes and discursive shifts in the representation of satellite settlements have been detected. Such changes may be connected to wider interactions among the dynamics of post-communist and low-carbon urban transition. </jats:p

Expanding Cities

This chapter presents readers with an opportunity to engage with the concept of uncertainty through the lens of cities and urbanism. Operating within an environment of profound uncertainty relating to the future of humanity, contemporary cities present divergent narratives of hope and despair. They are chronically underfunded and over-burdened, home to deeply divided communities and decrepit infrastructure, and struggling with chaotic unplanned growth and chronic pollution. Yet they have the capacity to assemble social, material and technical actors and relations in novel, experimental and collaborative ways so as to respond to these emergent challenges. These insights lead us to the question, what can we learn from cities about living with, planning and governing uncertainty? The contributing authors answer this question by presenting five perspectives on urban uncertainties. Ranging from looking at the street level and ordinary uncertainty to looking at the governing of uncertain technological futures, to discussing the ethical outcomes of governmental solutions to climate change, the authors excavate the varying ways in which uncertainty stimulates experimental forms of urban development and governance, and with what social and political implications. They conclude with optimism: if a progressive, equitable and ethical socio-political milieu is fostered in cities, it is possible to effectively tackle urban challenges in uncertain cities

Illuminating austerity: Lighting poverty as an agent and signifier of the Greek crisis

Light – whether natural or artificial – plays multiple roles in the home: both as a material enabler of everyday life and as a device for exercising a variety of social relations. The post-2008 Greek economic crisis has endangered those roles by limiting people’s ability to access or afford adequate energy services. This paper focuses on the enforced lack of illumination in the home, and the strategies and tactics undertaken by households to overcome this challenge. I connect illumination practices and discourses to the implementation of austerity, by arguing that the threat of darkness has become a tool for compelling vulnerable groups to pay their electricity bills. The evidence presented in the paper is based on two sets of interviews with 25 households (including a total of 55 adult members) living in and around Thessaloniki – Greece’s second largest city, and one that has suffered severe economic consequences as a result of the crisis. I have established that the under-consumption of light is one of the most pronounced expressions of energy poverty, and as such endangers the ability to participate in the customs that define membership of society. But the emergence of activist-led amateur electricians and the symbolic and material mobilization of light for political purposes have also created multiple opportunities for resistance.</jats:p