Energy Research & Social Science最新文献

There is an urgent need to decarbonize mobility. Yet, the necessary policies risk compounding existing vulnerabilities and controversies and creating new ones, potentially leading to political polarization. One affected population consists of people living in rural peripheries. Drawing from a Finnish public consultation survey (n = 18,378), we explore how rural participants (n = 4995) experience policies and proposals to decarbonize mobility: how they perceive the problem and what they propose as solutions. We draw on Noortje Marres' concept of attachments to understand the socio-material, discursive and subjective attachments that coalesce in rural experiences of policies and proposals to decarbonize mobility. We contribute to previous research on spatial inequalities in the mobility transition by showing how electric vehicles might not simply replace internal combustion engines in rural areas. We also show how distributive policies, i.e. subsidies, might not solve the problems, because different dimensions of attachments are intertwined and serve to maintain each other and thus reinforce existing experiences of inaccessibility and injustice. We conclude with suggestions for how to better address just and acceptable mobility transitions for rural dwellers.

The brick manufacturing industry in Bangladesh is characterized by informal inefficient coal-burning kilns that emit substantial greenhouse gases and air pollution. Despite decades of regulatory measures and the promotion of advanced kiln technologies, informal kilns persist. We employed a multiphase, interdisciplinary, mixed-methods approach to identify solutions. In this paper, we first summarize past approaches and discuss the key barriers we identified to improving the industry, then we present the design, and results of a randomized pilot energy efficiency intervention designed to overcome barriers to improved kiln operation. Our approach emphasized collaborating with informal zigzag kiln owners, who constitute the majority of brick producers, and carefully considering their incentives for changing a profitable business model. The intervention achieved high (60 %), including from non-study kilns, highlighting its appeal. Our findings provide insights into key elements for a successful intervention strategy that can be applied in larger-scale studies, not only for brick manufacturing but also for addressing broader environmental and health challenges.

In this paper, we develop a comprehensive behaviour model for residential buildings that considers the diversity among households. While existing behavioural theories from social and psychological sciences have been used in building research, they often lack technical detail, contextual aspects, and focus primarily on behavioural change. The authors propose an interdisciplinary theoretical model that integrates insights from behavioural science and engineering dimensions. This model aims to link measurable drivers directly to energy outcomes, consider building-related contexts, and reflect the complexity of high-performance buildings.

The research consisted of the quantitative analysis of building monitoring data and the analysis of interviews using thematic analysis. The mix-methods approach allowed to obtain new insights into the relationship between the aspects that affect occupants' behaviour. An interdisciplinary model is developed based on the results from the analysis, existing theoretical models used in building research, and previous studies on occupants' behaviour. The model is intended to support the identification of occupants' behaviour drivers, inform user-centric and energy-efficient building design, enhance decision-making for building monitoring and simulations, and aid in various practical applications such as performance assessment and energy contracting.

Artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) is the primary livelihood for an estimated 40 million people in 80 countries and supports an additional 130 to 270 million people in mining communities. With the emergence of critical minerals necessary for decarbonization efforts, ASM has emerged as a crucial form of production to help meet global demand. Despite its importance, ASM miners and communities are routinely ostracized and pathologized. Rather than the cause of social deprivation, this article argues that ASM reflects broader social, political, and historical inequalities. We contend with four main arguments against ASM before elaborating on three reasons that ASM ought to be responsibly supported. These reasons are ASM's ability to enable economic redistribution, meet increased global demand for critical minerals, and advance social justice. Inclusive regulation and governance rather than exclusion and plausible deniability constitute the pathway to addressing attendant social and environmental challenges associated with ASM practices. This paper identifies pathways to inclusive regulation of ASM and proposes avenues for future research and interventions. Ultimately, ASM must be understood as a central social justice issue of our time, especially in the context of global decarbonization efforts.

Solar photovoltaic technology is a suitable solution to meet water, energy, and food needs, improving people's living conditions, especially in remote Sub-Saharan Africa, while mitigating environmental impact. However, the speedy development of PV systems leads to competition for land resources between energy and agriculture. Hence, adopting agrivoltaic systems (AVS) can help ensure access to safe water, clean and affordable energy, and high-quality food for the growing population. Compared to the global north, there are few AVS projects in Africa, and minimal research and development have been undertaken within the West Africa (WA) region. This paper presents a comprehensive desk review examining the water-energy-food-environment nexus status in West African countries, emphasizing the potential of AVS in achieving sustainable development goals. This study underscores the significance of AVS based on land availability and photovoltaic targets. Further, it provides insights into ongoing AVS research initiatives in the WA region and discusses the opportunities and challenges associated with its implementation. Overall, the findings demonstrate that this emerging technology holds promise in WA, particularly in countries with limited land resources and ambitious sustainable energy goals. The paper's findings help inform solar developers, agriculture experts, land use planners, and governments to make informed decisions to effectively integrate agriculture and solar energy in WA toward achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG).

Shifting away from residential gas is important for decarbonisation, however there is little understanding of the equity implications, especially for low-income households. In this mixed methods study, we recruited a cohort of lower-income households in Australia and conducted a survey and focus group discussions to understand the barriers and enabling factors to electrifying homes. Drawing on key frameworks on energy vulnerability and adaptive capacity we show that rising energy costs shape energy hardship but can also drive some households to electrify to lower energy costs in the future. We identify home ownership and roof space as key assets influencing electrification, enabling the installation of solar panels which creates a positive feedback effect to shift to all-electric appliances. However, assets and resources alone are insufficient to enable electrification. We show the importance of trusted intermediaries and other social-relational factors for adaptation. We argue that the energy vulnerability literature, with its attention to needs and structural inequality, can enrich adaptive capacity approaches by focusing on how infrastructural politics and energy injustice shape electrification opportunities for lower-income households. We devise a relational framework based on a typological analysis to counterpose those lower-income households with strong and weak adaptive capacities, and high and low vulnerability to energy hardship. We argue that high adaptive capacity and low energy hardship can drive a virtuous cycle of upgrades to reduce the risk of energy hardship, whereas the combination of low adaptive capacity and high energy hardship can produce negative feedback that compounds hardship and makes electrification even less accessible.

Much scholarship in the nascent field of climate crisis and labour assumes that trade unions can readily become agents of “just transition” to post‑carbon energy systems but simply lack a willingness to do so. We investigate this problem more deeply by asking: under what precise circumstances might unions drive “just transitions”? Drawing upon a case study of one union's effort to build a just transition in the energy generation sector of one fossil-fuel reliant region in Australia, we show that union leaders have seen themselves as agents of change, capable of driving internal change and deploying power resources for a just transition. This transition from a carbon energy system is, however, fragile because the shape of a post-transition region remains unclear and sits in the hands of capital and the state.

It is crucial that the energy transition enfolds democratically, to increase its legitimacy and improve its outcomes. Although practitioners and scholars increasingly point to renewable energy communities (RECs) as legitimate agents for governing a democratic energy transition, RECs' democratic practices are poorly understood, which challenges assumptions about their legitimacy. We therefore analyzed how and to what extent democratic legitimacy is being pursued and met by RECs in their governance of renewable energy generation projects. Our comparative case study examined four different RECs in Utrecht, The Netherlands. We found that three out of the four studied RECs broadly meet the principles of energy democracy in the initial, developing and implementation phase of their energy generation projects. Significant differences between principles and RECs were found, which refutes the simplistic general assumption that RECs are either fully democratically legitimate or are not democratically legitimate at all. In reality, RECs face several trade-offs between democratic principles, which arise from the different legitimacy needs related to the REC's stage of maturity and the type of energy source it uses. To overcome these trade-offs and uphold legitimacy internally as well as with various stakeholders, RECs strategically organize participation and decision making in different governance spaces and prioritize certain specific legitimacy principles over others. Combining the concepts of energy democracy and democratic legitimacy has brought novel theoretical insights to the fore, and we recommend other researchers to further bridge these distinct but related fields of study.

IPCC Assessment Reports narrate a particular story of possible futures within a climate constrained world. The Shared Socioeconomic Pathways that are used to model these futures afford economic growth a prominent place, with its absence indicating negative sustainability outcomes. Critical post- and beyond growth perspectives, however, have shown the incompatibility between socially just and environmentally sustainable climate outcomes and compound increases in material and energy use. This Perspective piece outlines the opportunities to rethink Shared Socioeconomic Pathways based on degrowth principles to trouble dominant ways of narrating climate breakdown. Our approach is rooted in the need for future approaches (such as CMIP7) to adopt new economic models that ground climate-changed futures beyond economic growth. We follow recent work by others that has argued for, sketched out, or formulated new approaches to understanding climatic processes using alternative post-growth and degrowth processes; and build on it by outlining what a degrowth-infused Shared Socioeconomic Pathway might look like and highlighting the transformative potential of such an approach.

Current energy-related practices in bioenergy-dependent households and communities regularly reinforce social inequality and exacerbate environmental challenges. By investigating women's influence on rural energy service provision, this study sheds light on gendered practices and women's agency in a case study of three villages in central Ethiopia.

Women's lives in these communities revolve around practices such as collecting wood and using fire for cooking, hygiene, or space heating. Energy-efficient technologies like cookstoves are peddled as solutions to the day-to-day challenges women face. While these can enhance health and well-being, a one-sided focus on technology overlooks the deep-seated social meanings that limit the agency of women. Energy research urgently needs to improve its understanding of how women may alter energy-related social practices, to avoid that technocratic approaches entrench the provision of energy services as a gendered female chore.

This interdisciplinary research employs a Stock-Flow-Practice nexus perspective to analyse interlinkages between agency, practices, meanings, and the use of materials. Study results reveal that the agency of women to change their engagement in energy-related practices is curtailed by social prescriptions within the investigated households and communities. However, in households where women can garner higher levels of agency, they are able to shift how their households engage in practices.

Our findings highlight the importance of understanding women's agency as unfolding through their engagement in social practices and reflecting negotiated social prescriptions. Policies and programmatic interventions towards sustainable and equitable energy transitions in bioenergy-dependent communities need to incorporate a practice-centred concept of agency to reach their goals.