Energy poverty: Understanding and addressing systemic inequalities

In this chapter I document the emergence of a socially systemic approach to understanding and addressing energy poverty. This approach, which has grown out of studies of the lived experience of energy poverty, understands energy poverty as a fundamentally social phenomenon, which has emerged from a range of policy agendas (energy, welfare, health, housing), and conceives of this systemically, emphasizing the multiple causal interconnections between a wide variety of drivers and outcomes of energy poverty. Here I characterize this socially systemic understanding, drawing on work on the lived experience of energy poverty in the UK, and the politics of energy poverty policy in a range of European nations. A socially systemic understanding of energy poverty has three key facets: (1) energy poverty has to be understood in the context of social, physical and technological conditions; (2) people's experiences are affected by intersecting challenges according to these conditions; and (3) the nature and the progression of these challenges is variable over time. This suggests a need for a politics of energy poverty that embraces the multi-dimensional experience of the energy poor, and that reaches beyond a narrowly focused energy poverty policy.