Infrastructures of energy justice: enabling equitable energy transitions in an infrastructural world

Amid dire climate risks new low-carbon energy infrastructures are pioneered across the world, yet energy justice research underlines how renewable energy projects can reinforce gender, race- and class-based inequalities. By stressing ‘legal rights’, however, current justice frameworks overlook the physical infrastructures through which energy transitions materialize.

Infrastructures are never socially neutral; they catalyze social inequalities by directing flows of capital, people and pollution. This 3-year project pioneers an interdisciplinary approach to energy justice by accounting for how energy infrastructures themselves create
opportunities for social transformation of inequality.

The project has 3 aims:

i. Analyze how renewable energy infrastructures catalyze and intersect with existing inequalities to (re)produce uneven outcomes.

ii. Recenter infrastructures in energy justice frameworks to understand how inequalities are imbued in technologies and electric grids.

iii. Develop policy tools for infrastructural energy justice through community workshops and stakeholder dialogues, bridging social science, planning and engineering.

The project builds on participatory mapping of renewable energy infrastructures in rural Zambia, and is designed to co-produce knowledge with marginalized groups and key stakeholders to generate actionable recommendations for how EU and Swedish energy policies and projects