Who and What Counts? Examining Recognition Justice in Energy Transitions
During one of my first home visits, I expected conversations about insulation, efficiency, and technical improvements. Instead, what stood out was something different—how the lived realities of households often introduced challenges and considerations beyond technical parameters. As professionals moved through the space, documenting renovation needs, residents engaged in different ways. Some actively participated, while others remained reserved, their priorities not always easily captured within standardized assessment frameworks. Throughout my ongoing fieldwork, I have observed how energy renovations unfold in homes with histories, social contexts, and material conditions. While policies are designed to optimize energy efficiency, affordability, and decarbonization, implementation takes place within everyday realities that may not always align with policy frameworks. Households navigate pre-existing maintenance issues, financial trade-offs, or uncertainties about how renovations will affect their living conditions—factors that, while crucial, are not always central in the design of energy policies.Yet, this raises an important but often implicit question: who and what is recognized in the energy transition?
Recognition justice is often framed as the fair acknowledgment of diverse identities, needs, and experiences in decision-making, complementing distributional and procedural justice. In policy debates, it is frequently treated as a corrective to exclusion, assuming that greater recognition inherently leads to more equitable outcomes. However, recognition is not a straightforward process of inclusion—it is shaped by interactions, meaning-making practices, and the ways different actors navigate competing priorities. It influences how problems are framed, whose realities gain legitimacy, and which interventions are prioritized in energy transitions.
Rather than treating recognition justice as a fixed outcome, my research examines how it emerges in practice—how it is granted, negotiated, contested, or sometimes overlooked in different real-world settings. Using an action-research action-research design grounded in institutional ethnography, I explore how recognition takes shape within governance processes, practices, and everyday interactions. This involves following renovation projects as they unfold, observing decision-making processes, and analyzing how different stakeholders shape transitions in practice.
Through shadowing different stakeholders, I examine how (mis)recognition manifests in everyday interactions and practices. I capture diverse perspectives on how energy renovations are experienced and understood by conducting interviews and focus groups. In participant observations at meetings, site visits, and living labs, I trace how recognition (or its absence) is constructed in discussions, negotiations, and policy experiments.
As this work progresses, I aim to contribute to discussions on how recognition justice operates as a process—not just as a policy goal, but as something shaped through interactions, negotiations, (in)formal practices, and governance processes.
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