Thirty-five years of research on energy and power: A landscape analysis

Review article, 2024

The urgent need to mitigate climate change and decarbonise the energy sector brings the risk that wider social and environmental concerns about the sustainability of energy systems are neglected. Countries may achieve decarbonization goals while reproducing or worsening the unequal distribution of access, opportunities, costs and burdens that is inherent to current energy systems. This study is motivated by the tension between visions for change towards sustainable energy systems and historic and contemporary inequities on the ground. The study contributes a quantitative, global-scope overview of existing research that places energy users and their lives at the centre of analysis for inclusive and equitable transitions. It further identifies the themes, concepts and perspectives that dominate scholarly debate and analyses the presence and relative influence of work that explicitly considers relations of power. The stepwise review uses the Scopus database and multiple bibliometric tools, covering the period until June 2022. It adopts a novel approach to identify dominant and marginal topics, geographical contexts and theoretical lenses employed including the uptake of critical social science approaches. The results indicate that dominant studies fail to engage critically with relationships of power. Even within the debate on “energy poverty”, work based in critical theory approaches account for less than seven percentages of the total body of work. For work on “energy justice” and users, four percentages of publications account for gender. The dominant language is technical and depoliticized. The study identifies research gaps and promising avenues for further research.