Saska Petrova

Unpacking the spaces and politics of energy poverty: path-dependencies, deprivation and fuel switching in post-communist Hungary

This paper focuses on the embeddedness of energy poverty – understood as the inability to secure a socially and materially necessitated level of energy services in the home – in the socio-technical legacies inherited from past development trajectories, as well as broader economic and institutional landscapes. Using Hungary as an example, we explore the recent expansion of energy poverty across different demographic and income groups. While much of the mainstream literature focuses on cases where energy poverty affects distinct social groups and issues, our analyses examine the systemic implications of a form of deprivation that involves a much wider range of social and spatial strata. We develop a framework that highlights the different ways in which inadequate access to energy services has resulted in the emergence of new political reconfigurations among a variety of actors, while prompting the articulation of household strategies with far-reaching structural consequences.

From Fuel Poverty to Energy Vulnerability: The Importance of Services, Needs and Practices

This paper charts the emergent body of new approaches towards the research and amelioration of energy deprivation in the home. It starts from the premise that all forms of energy and fuel poverty – in developed and developing countries alike – are underpinned by a common condition: the inability to attain a socially- and materially-necessitated level of domestic energy services. Emphasizing the functionings and capabilities provided by energy use in the residential domain has led us to question binary divisions between the fields of ‘fuel poverty’ and ‘energy poverty’ within, respectively, the global North and South. In order to move towards an integrated understanding of energy service poverty, we rely on ‘systems of provision’ paradigms to highlight the multiple socio-technical pathways that prevent the effective fulfilment of household energy needs. Based on such approaches, the paper identifies the main components and implications of ‘energy vulnerability’ frameworks, whereby the driving forces of domestic energy deprivation are seen through a dynamic heuristic predicated upon issues of resilience and risk. Using recent developments in Hungary as an example, we employ energy vulnerability thinking to illustrate the systemic driving forces and implications of domestic energy deprivation.

Multiple transformations: theorizing energy vulnerability as a socio-spatial phenomenon

ABSTRACT The on-going transition towards low-carbon forms of energy provision (frequently termed ‘energy transitions’) has triggered far-reaching material, economic and institutional reconfigurations at the global scale. There is evidence to suggest that energy transitions increase the social vulnerability of actors involved in and affected by them, including entities operating at different scales, from individual households to entire states. However, the link between energy vulnerability and energy transitions remains poorly understood. We aim to formulate an explicitly geographical perspective on this relationship. The paper is based on an analysis of documentary evidence and 170 expert interviews undertaken between April 2013 and March 2015. This research took place in the post-communist states of Central and Eastern Europe where systemic change has fundamentally altered the institutional landscape of the energy sector since the early 1990s. Our findings point to the need for understanding energy vulnerability as an evolving socio-spatial phenomenon embedded in multiple layers of institutional change and organizational practice. We identify urban landscapes as the primary site for the geographic expression and articulation of domestic energy deprivation.

The EU Energy Poverty and Vulnerability Agenda: An Emergent Domain of Transnational Action

This chapter explores the organisational and political complexities surrounding the adoption of energy poverty agendas and policies at the EU decision-making level. Theoretically, it is based on the literature on policy mobilities. Empirically, it engages in a triangulation of data from the secondary literature and interviews in various EU institutions. The analysis shows that agenda-shaping in the EU poverty domain has been mainly driven from above and has been highly contingent on attempts to ‘define’ and ‘identify’ the problem. There is little evidence to suggest that particular events or dynamics have provided a central impetus for European action in this domain. Only in recent years have energy poverty concerns started to enter mainstream EU policy agendas, principally as a result of the Commission’s efforts surrounding the implementation of the Third Energy Package.

Encountering energy precarity: geographies of fuel poverty among young adults in the UK

This paper develops the notion of “energy precarity” in order to uncover the governance practices and material conditions that drive and reproduce the inability of households to secure socially‐ and materially‐necessitated levels of energy services in the home. The overarching aim is to foreground a geographical approach towards the study of domestic energy deprivation, by emphasizing the complex socio‐spatial and material embeddedness of fuel poverty. The paper operationalizes these ideas via a field‐based study of a group that has received limited attention in research and policy on fuel poverty: young adults living in privately rented accommodation. In evoking the experiences of such individuals, I employ energy precarity as a means of unpacking the spaces where energy deprivation is produced, experienced and contested. Among other findings, I highlight that peoples fluid lifestyles and specific end‐use energy demand patterns mean that energy deprivation metaphorically and physically overflows the limits of home, creating multiple performativities of precarity that have received very little attention to date.

Using action research to enhance learning on end-use energy demand: lessons from reflective practice

This paper responds to the need for a greater integration of energy and environment themes in the higher education curriculum. We explore the practical implications of empowering students towards the implementation of individual action research projects focused on investigating and addressing insufficient or wasteful energy consumption among households and businesses. The paper scrutinizes a series of teaching and assessment activities within this domain, undertaken during 6 consecutive academic years – between 2008 and 2013 – within a third-level undergraduate course unit at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom. Using questionnaire surveys, assessed projects and interviews with the students, we have found evidence to suggest that the action research projects contributed to the emergence of constructive alignment in the entire teaching process, while opening the space for informal action learning ‘sets’ leading to the generation of new problem-solving skills useful in the job market.

Energy vulnerability trends and factors in Hungary

Academics and policy-makers alike are becoming increasingly interested in the wider societal implications of situations where a lack of domestic ‘energy services’ is systemic and pervasive. Energy services are commonly understood as the ‘benefits that energy carriers produce for human well being’ (Modi et al., 2005, page 9). Social science research in this domain has commonly taken place under the auspices of research on ‘fuel’ or ‘energy’ poverty: conditions characterized by the inability of a household to secure a socially- and materially-necessitated level of energy services in the home (Bouzarovski, 2013).

Market-based low carbon retrofit in social housing: insights from Greater Manchester

ABSTRACT In recent years, social housing providers in the UK have become influential actors in realizing the national government’s decarborization agenda. However, when decarbonization is considered in light of austerity measures and the privatization of public housing, a number of contradictions arise. From interviews and a workshop with policymakers and registered providers in the city-region of Greater Manchester, three tensions are highlighted. First, since the 1980s, the housing stock condition has been used as a political pawn in successive reforms to demunicipalize social housing. Second, local authorities continue to harness the collectivities that remain in the social housing sector to realize their decarbonization goals. Third, the retrofit practices of social landlords are only superficially aiming for carbon control; instead, they focus on the social aims that are seen as important to the ethos and business model of the landlord. The article concludes that there are unavoidable conflicts between the interests of different actors whose low-carbon economy is conceived at different spatial scales and with different underlying objectives. As social landlords are foregrounded in subregional low-carbon policy, they are effectively co-opted into market-based retrofit, resulting in unintended consequences for the social housing sector.