Empowering all. Gender in policy and implementation for achieving transitions to sustainable energy

Research Project, 2021 – 2025

The UsersTCP Task Empowering all. Gender in policy and implementation for achieving transitions to sustainable energy is an international collaboration gathering experts on gender and energy use. While the past years have seen a focus on gender issues in energy research, there continues to be a gap between findings of current research and the practices of energy policy making, implementation and technological design. This gap leads to inefficient and excluding policies as well as technical solutions being formulated and implemented. It further hinders upscaling of energy transition solutions due to a narrow scope of users and solutions being envisioned and implemented, leading to the exclusion of a large group of users. In this annex, we will gather the state-of-the-art research of gender and energy use and find best practices while also developing ways to counter organizational and institutional inertias and to design inclusive, just and efficient technologies. For policy makers and regulators, this annex will deliver cases and policy briefs outlining and assessing the main inertias hindering the formulation and implementation of gender aware policy and technical interventions in different cultural and institutional contexts. The annex will offer workshops to aid with reformulation and implementation of existing energy policies, as well as tools to counter the cultural inertias within the energy field. We will further provide a database with cases of best practices. For businesses, we will provide collaborative design work and educational material on how to use gender research to inform design of more efficient and including technology, including models for engaging users in design,  users templates for gathering data on energy use, and technology interventions to enable broad energy transitions. For researchers, the annex will offer opportunity to fill knowledge gaps as well as contribute to the practical implementation of gender and energy research on a global scale. The annex will also offer a collaborative platform with business and government, and a global community of researchers.