Fostering justice through engagement: A literature review of public engagement in energy transitions

Abstract

Social science and humanities scholars have highlighted that energy transitions have unequal and unjust consequences on societies. This has strengthened the importance of energy justice in both policy and research on energy transitions. Public engagement in energy transition is an important cornerstone to mitigate such outcomes; however, it does not univocally equal nor lead to energy justice. Public engagement can also be used to maintain the status quo and the unequal distribution of burdens of benefits in energy transitions. In this review, we explore how justice considerations are addressed in the literature on public engagement in energy transitions. Our point of departure is that all three tenants of energy justice – procedural, distributional, and recognition justice – need to be considered when designing, implementing, and evaluating processes of public engagement. By dividing the literature into four categories of engagement – public consultation and deliberation, co-creation, community-led energy, and ecologies and collectives of engagement – we discuss how each strand of literature addresses the different dimensions of justice. We find that most of the reviewed literature does not explicitly address justice. Critical discussions in the literature can be linked to procedural justice issues, but only marginally to recognition and distributional justice. We argue that more explicit engagement with different tenants of justice is necessary in order to foster just energy transitions.