Beyond the household as a customer: 'Em-placing' the journey to equitable residential electrification in Victoria

Customer journey frameworks have become a central tool for understanding and designing interventions for household electrification transitions (Brown et al., 2025). Despite their prominence, these frameworks tend to model the journey as a linear progression through discrete psychological stages, abstracting households from the social and spatial context that shapes their decisions (Bertoldi et al., 2021; Brown et al., 2025; Looijen Bader & Oostra, 2022). We argue that customer journey frameworks must be “em-placed”, that is, grounded in the social, infrastructural, and institutional conditions through which transitions occur. Such an approach can highlight how hardship plays out differently depending on place, rather than treating place as backdrop or a variable to be controlled (Brown et al., 2025; Looijen Bader & Oostra, 2022; Marsden et al., 2025; Middlemiss et al., 2024). Existing energy hardship and retrofit literature has tended to detach the journey from the place-based conditions that enable or foreclose particular pathways, even where decisions are shown to be embedded in broader social practices (Boddington, 2025; Chandrashekeran et al., 2024). This paper attends to socio-spatial dynamics by tracing how peer influence, family relations and service provider ties shape program effectiveness (Hargreaves & Middlemiss, 2020; Middlemiss et al., 2024), how path dependency from prior infrastructure investment, including the promotion of natural gas as a clean fuel, weighs on present decisions alongside phase-out timing and household life events (Brown et al., 2025; Marsden et al., 2025; Willand et al., 2026), and how asset-based approaches to decarbonisation distribute these effects unevenly between owner-occupiers and renters or lower-income households (Chandrashekeran et al., 2024; García-Lamarca, 2025; Ricci et al., 2025). This paper draws on an empirical study of household electrification journeys across sites in Victoria, selected for variation in place-based characteristics, electrification support program presence, and socioeconomic composition. The findings suggest that the social relations shaping decarbonisation are not necessarily local or street-level. Instead, they extend through family, service providers, labour markets and broader economic and political dynamics. Households' decisions also carry the imprint of past infrastructure and policy, particularly the historical promotion of natural gas. Customer journeys are rarely linear and timing matters in multiple registers, from policy phase-out schedules to everyday household rhythms and life events. Asset-based approaches to decarbonisation produce uneven journeys, pointing to a need for energy and housing to be considered together. Finally, these findings raise policy questions as to whether repair, sufficiency, and tenure security should be recognised alongside electrification as legitimate transition pathways.