Centring those most affected in energy transitions: justice, voice, and the politics of vulnerability

Abstract

Low-carbon transitions are reshaping energy systems at speed, but the resulting burdens fall unevenly, and those who bear the greatest costs are rarely those with the greatest power to shape the decisions that affect them. This panel centres the experiences, voices, and agency of those most affected by energy transition policy, examining what energy justice means to them, and what it requires of the energy systems in which they find themselves. Papers in this panel span a range of affected groups and contexts: renters and low-income households navigating retrofit and electrification; culturally and linguistically diverse communities facing market complexity and information barriers; people experiencing chronic energy hardship whose struggles are poorly recognised in existing support systems; regional communities who feel powerless to stop new transmission lines being built on their land; and households whose electrification journeys are shaped by place-based disadvantage and the uneven legacies of past infrastructure decisions. Each paper highlights that voice and political agency are not optional extras for energy justice; they are constitutive of it. Together, they reveal that energy injustice is multidimensional, encompassing not only the distributional and procedural dimensions that dominate policy discourse, but temporal, spatial, and capabilities dimensions that are less commonly foregrounded. In each case, these injustices tend to land hardest on those with the least voice in the decisions that produced them and least power to influence change. The panel's collective contribution is to extend and enrich our understandings of energy justice and how to apply it, by grounding it in the situated experiences of affected communities, demonstrating that a genuinely just transition requires attention to when and where participation happens, whose capabilities are recognised, and who bears the costs of urgency. A genuinely just transition is not just about better outcomes for vulnerable communities; it requires that governance arrangements, policies and practices centre their experiences, recognise the heterogeneity of their needs, and create meaningful opportunities for participation in the decisions that shape their energy futures. This panel is designed to complement its partner panel, ‘Governing the energy transition at scale: the frameworks and politics of energy justice’, which tackles the same questions of what energy justice means and requires, but takes as its starting point the governance frameworks that will enable or inhibit a just transition. We encourage you to attend both if you can.

Title	Details
Renter capability and vulnerability in energy transitions: A climate justice approach to retrofit in Australia and the UK	View Paper Details
Making sense of the energy market: Supporting energy justice and household resilience in culturally and linguistically diverse communities	View Paper Details
Administrative burdens as a form of energy injustice: investigating energy hardship support pathways and dead ends in NSW	View Paper Details
Beyond the household as a customer: 'Em-placing' the journey to equitable residential electrification in Victoria	View Paper Details
Too late, too brief, too short-term? Temporal (in)justice in planning for electricity transmission in regional Australia	View Paper Details