Human Scale Energy Services: Untangling a ‘golden thread’

Prioritising human well-being while avoiding further damage to the planet is a key challenge in the era of climate change. This paper examines the role of energy as an intermediary between climate change and socio-economic outcomes, with the ultimate goal of identifying ways of decoupling human well-being from energy use. Building on Max-Neef’s “Human Scale Development” framework and conceptualisation of human needs, we propose a novel community-level participatory approach to identify connections between energy services on the one hand and human need satisfaction on the other. This approach then enables communities to collectively consider and propose alternative ways to provide energy services. We compare the outcomes and reflect on the process of two exploratory workshops, undertaken in an urban and a rural area in Medellín (Colombia). Our results indicate that these communities view energy services as satisfiers of human needs, with significant differences between the communities. Furthermore, our approach enables the communities to broaden the solution space of energy service provisioning possibilities, thus constituting a promising alternative to the top-down technocratic perspectives currently prevalent in research and policy. We argue that this type of bottom-up approach is necessary to address the complex sustainability challenge of living well within environmental limits.