Gender and Precarity at the Energy Frontier

This project aims to generate novel insights into the social, spatial and political inequalities that underpin energy-related injustices and struggles, with a geographical focus on the Western Balkans. It does so by uncovering the relationships between gender and energy poverty - a condition characterized by the inability to secure adequate levels of energy services in the home. GENERATE posits that gendered experiences and contestations of energy poverty represent a form of precarity, and as such shape energy frontiers - understood as marginal(ized) sites of encounter between different forms of energy production and consumption. In foregrounding hitherto 'hidden' processes relating to, and emanating from, the domestic domain, the project seeks to transform understandings of energy circulations in society more broadly.

To date, work on the gender dimensions of energy poverty has tended to focus on the Global South, alongside treating the home and household in descriptive and monolithic terms. Very little is known how geographically and politically peripheral forms of energy use across the Global North and East both shape, and are shaped by, precarious practice. GENERATE responds to these challenges by developing a conceptual framework that places the homes and communities at the heart of the energy frontier. It analyses statistical data on energy and gender at multiple levels, in addition to developing an in-depth comparative case study approach in Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia. This includes a combination of household and institutional ethnographies, as well as a social innovation labs approach. Given the highly topical nature of energy poverty alleviation efforts in Europe and the world - not the least due to the rising imperatives of climate change and social inequality - the project is expected to result in policy-relevant insights relevant to the work of multiple global, national and local organizations.