I. Introduction
This article explores a feminist approach to energy justice. Taking the participation of women in energy transition policy-making in Sub-Saharan Africa as a concrete example, we argue that a feminist interpretation of energy justice could be one way of operationalizing a more gender-transformative approach to energy transition in business and human rights (BHR).
Sub-Saharan Africa has the lowest energy access rate in the world.Footnote 1 In 2021, over 600 million people lacked access to electricity and 890 million still depended on unsafe, non-renewable traditional fuels.Footnote 2 Research shows that women and girls are deeply affected by energy systems, as they are in many societies responsible for critical energy-intensive activities in households and communities.Footnote 3 Despite this, women are often not involved in energy-related decision-making, and the gendered dynamics and inequalities in energy transition discourses and frameworks lack attention.Footnote 4 Yet, without such explicit attention, energy transition efforts risk maintaining, increasing or even creating new gendered inequalities, rather than diminishing them and their subsequent socio-economic and environmental repercussions.Footnote 5
The ‘energy transition’ concerns the transformation of the global energy sector, including the shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources to reduce carbon emissions. Focus on the energy transition in BHR to date has included attention to transition minerals, the human rights performance of renewable energy companies, indigenous peoples’ rights, the role of the financial sector, and the links between the energy transition and climate change agendas.Footnote 6 There has been limited attention to gendered relations in energy systems, such as the adverse impacts on women and girls from renewable energy projects, and their participation in energy transition policies. This reflects a broader neglect of women’s rights in energy systems and transition discussions.
In this article, we argue that if the BHR field wants to concern itself with the energy transition, attention to gendered dynamics and the rights of women and girls in energy systems and frameworks is imperative. With a focus on distributional, recognitional and procedural dimensions, the energy justice concept holds much potential for the BHR field, which is similarly concerned with power dimensions between stakeholders, North-South injustices, rights-holder voice, participation and accountability.Footnote 7 We, therefore, propose a feminist approach to energy justice as one of the strategies available to the BHR field in working towards a more gender-transformative energy transition.
The article is informed by academic and grey literature on BHR, energy justice and the gender-energy nexus in Sub-Saharan Africa, as well as the authors’ project work on the energy transition in the region.Footnote 8 Prompted by these sources and engagements, we examine the following questions: What are the links between energy justice and BHR? What might a feminist approach to energy justice look like? Could a feminist energy justice framework be useful for guiding further BHR research and practice on energy transition in Sub-Saharan Africa to advance women’s rights?
The article proceeds as follows. Section II contextualizes the concept of energy justice for the field of BHR. Section III provides some background on the gendered dynamics of the energy transition in Sub-Saharan Africa transitioning to Section IV, which explores what a feminist approach to energy justice might look like. Drawing together these framing sections, in Section V we examine how women’s rights and participation are addressed in renewable energy policies and policy-making, using select examples from Sub-Saharan Africa. In Section VI, we conclude and suggest areas for further BHR research and practice that could be undertaken to advance a more gender-transformative energy transition in the region.
II. Contextualizing Energy Justice for Business and Human Rights
Climate change presents one of the most pressing human rights issues of our time.Footnote 9 In many domains, also in the field of BHR, this has meant an increased focus on the role of energy systems, including through the framing of ‘energy transition,’ ‘just transition,’ ‘green transition’, or similar concepts. Essentially, these discourses are concerned with the shift towards a low-carbon economy while recognizing that social and environmental issues are interlinked, thereby broadening the focus from a purely technical discussion to one that considers the impacts on social justice, place and identity.Footnote 10 As such, access to energy and the rights of people and the environment in designing alternative energy systems are central considerations.Footnote 11 It is also important to situate energy transition approaches in the local context. Some stakeholders from the African region, for example, have argued that the pressing need for energy access must take precedence in energy transition discussions.Footnote 12 The scramble for transition minerals for export into value chains of renewable energy technology that are marked by environmental and human rights challenges, and ultimately end in Global North countries meeting their energy transition targets, has also been pointed out as hypocritical and paradoxical.Footnote 13 Furthermore, the development of large-scale renewable energy projects frequently prioritizes the needs of industry and foreign direct investors, rather than rights-holders locally.Footnote 14 Other authors bring attention to the historical context of Sub-Saharan African countries, which have and continue to shape socio-economic dynamics and how energy projects are ‘developed, funded [and] implemented.’Footnote 15 This highlights the need to engage in stakeholder dialogue to understand local priorities and develop a contextually relevant understanding of what the energy transition in the African region should look like.
Within BHR, focus on the energy transition has mainly included attention to the role of transition minerals in global value chains, the human rights performance of renewable energy companies, indigenous peoples’ rights, the role of investors and financial actors and linking energy transition and climate change agendas.Footnote 16 There has been little attention, however, to the distinctly gendered relations in energy systems, such as the disproportionate adverse impacts on women and girls from the development of renewable energy projects, or women’s participation in the development of energy transition frameworks and policies.Footnote 17 This mirrors the lack of attention to the rights of women and girls within energy systems and energy transition discourses more broadly. Against this backdrop, in this article, we argue that a feminist interpretation of energy justice could be one way of operationalizing a more gender-transformative approach to energy transition in BHR.Footnote 18 Our approach is intersectional to account for the different lived experiences and discriminations faced by women by integrating other ‘axes of power,’ such as race, class, geographical context and socio-economic status.Footnote 19 Intersectionality also enables us to go beyond the established observation of multidimensional discrimination, in order to transform ‘systems of intersectional disadvantage’Footnote 20 and address the power dynamics underlying public policy decisions, resource allocation and the design of participatory structures.
First of all, however, it is important to contextualize the links between energy justice and the field of BHR. Drawing on environmental justice and climate justice, the concept of energy justice has gained significant traction in the energy literature over the last ten years.Footnote 21 Energy justice can be defined as the ‘equitable distribution of, and participation in, renewable energy systems on the back of social justice claims.’Footnote 22 It is ‘a global energy system that fairly disseminates both the benefits and costs of energy services, and one that has representative and impartial energy decision-making.’Footnote 23 As such, it ‘is a conceptual, analytical and decision-making framework for understanding when and where ethical questions on energy appear, who should be involved in their resolution and ultimately which solutions must be pursued to achieve a sustainable energy system underpinned by fairness and equity.’Footnote 24
Energy justice can be understood as having three interrelated dimensions: distributional, recognitional and procedural justice.Footnote 25 Distributional justice ‘is concerned with how the benefits and burdens of energy policy implementation are shared across society, i.e., who pays, who benefits, and why.’Footnote 26 Inbuilt is the recognition that the global energy system is fundamentally unequal, including in terms of where technologies and resources are located and who can access them.Footnote 27 The distributional dimension also includes taking a whole-of-system approach that considers energy justice in each activity in the energy lifecycle as well as paying attention to temporal variations, such as potential impacts on future generations.Footnote 28
The second dimension, recognitional justice, requires identifying where inequalities emerge, including to ‘identify groups who are misrepresented or discriminated against as a result of policy outcomes due to their views, social standing, cultural background or gender.’Footnote 29 Informed by Nancy Fraser’s categories of misrecognition—cultural domination, non-recognition and disrespect, which are embedded in social structuresFootnote 30—recognition requires going beyond merely acknowledging that parts of society will unfairly suffer from the distribution of energy system inequalities to demanding that decision-makers identify where precisely these injustices occur and who may be marginalized and excluded, underlining the need for transformative solutions.Footnote 31 Intersectionality, which provides a way to recognize and respond to different lived experiences and potential marginalization, is therefore fundamental to achieving the recognitional aims of energy justice.
The third dimension, procedural justice, is concerned with the right to a fair process.Footnote 32 According to Benjamin Sovacool and Michael Dworkin, procedural justice demands that four key elements be reunited: access to information, access to and meaningful participation in decision-making, lack of decision-maker bias and access to legal processes for achieving redress.Footnote 33 It has also been suggested that the focus must go beyond decision-making, to include demands for more equitable outcomes of such decision-making.Footnote 34 This requires changes in culture, norms and values.Footnote 35
Energy justice focuses on ‘what it does’ rather than ‘what it is.’Footnote 36 This is in response to the growing recognition that ‘routine energy analyses do not offer suitable answers’ to issues such as energy-related pollution, scarcity and other risks and harms to people and the environment.Footnote 37 Instead, energy-related decision-making involves enduring questions of equity and morality that are seldom explicitly considered in contemporary energy planning and analysis.Footnote 38 Energy justice could help reframe energy projects in ethical terms, thereby helping producers and consumers to be more aware, accountable and responsible for their decisions.Footnote 39 As such, the transformative potential of energy justice is its ability to counter the dominance of current technical-economic analysis in energy decision-making.Footnote 40 Concerned with the political aspects of energy transitions, energy justice examines ‘how power is distributed and manifested in political and energy systems,’Footnote 41 including by ‘democratising energy through public participation and ownership.’Footnote 42 According to this view, problems associated with energy access, efficiency and distribution, are viewed as political and ethical issues, rather than purely technical or economic ones.Footnote 43 We, therefore, argue that the concept of energy justice has significant potential for guiding BHR engagement on the energy transition, provided that energy justice is interpreted through a feminist lens.
While there are strong links and synergies between climate, environmental and energy justice, scholars have posited that energy justice gives more specificity.Footnote 44 As demonstrated in the literature, both climate and environmental justice discourses and practices already have a firm foothold within the field of BHR.Footnote 45 The links between energy justice and BHR, however, are much less developed, despite the strong relevance of the energy justice framework for BHR.Footnote 46 Increasingly, scholarship and practice are articulating the fundamental importance of energy for human rights. At a minimum, there is broad agreement that lack of access to energy can have profound negative human rights impacts, such as on the rights to health or a clean environment, and that access to energy is a necessary condition for the realization of many human rights.Footnote 47 This has included explicit recognition of the relationship between access to energy and human rights requirements of substantive equality and non-discrimination, as women and indigenous peoples are often particularly adversely affected.Footnote 48 Some go further, arguing towards articulating an actual ‘right to energy.’Footnote 49 The focus on energy from human rights and development perspectives is also reflected clearly in Sustainable Development Goals 7 and 13, which, through their respective focus on ‘affordable and clean energy’ and ‘climate action,’ reiterate the intrinsic links between energy, environment and climate agendas.Footnote 50 Both human rights law and energy justice are concerned with issues of equity and fairness, as well as sharing a normative purpose to inform, guide and change practices such as law, policy-making and judicial decision-making.Footnote 51 A further strong connection between energy justice and BHR is that both speak to state duties, corporate responsibilities and access to remedy.
Building on these synergies, we are of the view that further articulating the connections between energy justice and BHR could make a valuable contribution towards building approaches to energy transition in BHR that more holistically contribute to human rights protection and realization. Firstly, bringing together energy justice and BHR perspectives gives increased attention to the role of different duty-bearers and their accountability towards specific rights-holders. While energy justice articulates the important role of the state, for instance in developing justice-oriented energy policies and frameworks, BHR centres the need to integrate human rights norms into such policies and clearly articulates the role of the state as a duty-bearer, thereby giving additional impetus to accountability within the recognitional dimension of energy justice.Footnote 52 Similarly, energy justice can provide guidance for the way businesses conduct human rights and environmental due diligence and approach stakeholder engagement to inform their decisions, as is expected of them in BHR frameworks.
Secondly, both energy justice and BHR share a focus on not only substantive but also procedural considerations, highlighting the importance of access to information, public participation and access to remedy.Footnote 53 From a human rights perspective, both substantive and procedural considerations contain distinct legal obligations and responsibilities. As explained by Kaisa Huhta, human rights law could therefore ‘provide energy justice with a legal framework for its operationalization, rather than a purely academic or policy-focused framework.’Footnote 54 As such, imbuing energy justice with human rights has the potential to concretize the content and obligations underpinning both substantive and procedural dimensions of energy justice.Footnote 55 For example, procedural rights in relation to the environment could helpfully guide the development of the procedural expectations in energy justice, thereby ensuring that it is firmly underpinned by human rights principles.Footnote 56
Thirdly, both energy justice and BHR focus on vulnerable groups. Within energy justice, however, the specific focus on gender discrimination from an intersectional perspective is arguably underdeveloped.Footnote 57 Taking a human rights-based approach could therefore bolster attention to gender in energy justice, including from intersectional perspectives. In this way, connecting energy justice and BHR could serve to strengthen the recognitional and distributional dimensions of energy justice. Energy justice can serve as a guiding framework for BHR by thoroughly integrating substantial and procedural rights concerns, and by focusing on achieving social justice results. We believe that further research and articulation in energy justice and BHR scholarship on these re-enforcing intersections could make a valuable contribution towards a more just energy transition underpinned by human rights. In this article, we explore the topic of women’s rights in energy transition as one example.
Looking at women’s participation in energy transition policy-making in Sub-Saharan Africa as a concrete example, we propose that energy justice has significant potential for advancing a more gender-transformative energy transition agenda in BHR. However, we also caution that this can only be the case if energy justice is interpreted and applied through a feminist lens that includes a strong focus on exposing and transforming the power relations currently at play in the energy transition. By ‘feminist approach’ we mean something broader than simply incorporating ‘women’ as a homogenous ‘vulnerable’ or ‘marginalized’ group into existing, unequal institutions and structures. Instead, we understand a feminist approach to also involve observing and reconceptualizing purportedly immutable frameworks and disrupting and reimagining the unequal power relations created and perpetuated in the energy transition.Footnote 58 Without this, women’s participation risks being relegated simplistically to the recognitional dimension of energy justice and opportunities for more transformative potential are lost.
III. Gender Dynamics in the Energy Transition in Sub-Saharan Africa
The topic of energy in Sub-Saharan Africa is deeply gendered. For the purposes of this article, we use the terminology of women and men because it is commonly understood. Our analysis focuses primarily on the situation and positionality of those who identify or are viewed as women and girls, rather than exploring issues related to sexual orientation and gender identity or interrogating the concept of gender itself. While these are important endeavours, they are not the focus of this article. We understand gender to be distinctly relational, where the distribution of power and resources among people is critical for understanding how their gendered social and biological roles and responsibilities are constructed and exercised.
Research shows that women bear the brunt of environmental destruction and the adverse impacts of climate change.Footnote 59 In many Sub-Saharan African communities, women are caretakers, domestic workers and subsistence providers responsible for gathering traditional fuels, such as charcoal and firewood, for household chores and cooking.Footnote 60 As such, they are frequently at the frontline of energy insecurity and the health and safety risks related to traditional energy sources.Footnote 61 Despite this, women are often excluded from environmental management and energy-related decision-making, be this at the local, national or regional level.Footnote 62 Research shows that women may be decision-makers where food and fuel options are concerned, but not, for example, when it comes to project-level agreement-making or energy policy design, which are important components of the corporate responsibility to respect and the state duty to protect in BHR.Footnote 63 Furthermore, energy transition discourses often fail to take the necessary intersectional feminist lens, which underlines the diversity of experiences of different women.Footnote 64 Existing gender inequalities are thus reproduced in energy governance.Footnote 65 For example, in 2018 only four out of 56 (or seven per cent) positions of lead energy sector ministers in Sub-Saharan Africa were women.Footnote 66 At the project level, adverse impacts of renewable energy projects have different implications for women and men. For example, women’s labour in Sub-Saharan Africa is often informal and/or unpaid, while men are more likely to have formal, paid jobs.Footnote 67 This means that women’s labour and loss of economic livelihood are usually not properly accounted for, if at all, in compensation schemes put in place by government authorities and energy companies. Female-headed households and elderly women are particularly at risk of energy poverty.Footnote 68 The development of renewable energy infrastructure can also be accompanied by a rise in sexual and gender-based violence, influenced by the in-migration of a (usually) male-dominated workforce, as well as other changes in the social fabric associated with large-scale infrastructure development.Footnote 69 Despite this, and paradoxically, the energy transition is frequently conceived as gender-neutral and therefore not warranting gender-responsive initiatives.Footnote 70
IV. A Feminist Approach to Energy Justice
Focus on gender in the academic literature on energy justice and the energy transition in the Sub-Saharan African region remains scarce. To the extent that gender considerations are advanced, these tend to have a narrow focus on energy poverty,Footnote 71 specifically household-level considerations such as clean cooking, solar home systems and energy access, rather than evincing more explicitly feminist aims of analysing and transforming power relations that underpin current energy decision-making at policy, community, household or individual level. As pointed out by gender and feminist scholars, focusing solely on the household is problematic.Footnote 72 Empirical research from several Sub-Saharan African countries on renewable energy projects targeting households, for instance, demonstrates that the design of such projects often fails to account for women’s needs, despite the assumption that increased access to electrification benefits women, as they are the ones responsible for most of the household chores.Footnote 73 While reduced time for cooking due to access to electricity may be welcomed, it does not necessarily translate into reducing women’s work time, with some research showing that increased access to electricity can extend women’s domestic work to after dark, whereas men have been more likely to use the additional time gained for recreation or business activities.Footnote 74
Such findings illustrate the necessity of addressing gender relations, the gendered division of labour and women’s empowerment as an integral part of energy interventions.Footnote 75 Furthermore, while a focus on energy access in households is of course critical, a correlative focus on gender and women’s participation in energy governance is lacking.Footnote 76 To the extent that arguments in favour of increasing women’s participation in energy transition governance and decision-making are made, these often rest on essentialist notions, such as that women’s participation should be increased because they make more sustainable and ethical decisions in energy governance.Footnote 77
This is problematic from a feminist perspective. Such arguments neglect the fact that our current economic system continues to be divided into the productive sphere and the reproductive sphere. This means that the gendered distribution of care work and the extensive care work performed by women is not sufficiently recognized, which also plays into why women may be unable to participate in decision-making or may benefit less from renewable energy projects. Perpetuation of such neoliberal discourses does little to expose and challenge gender relations and associated power structures more fundamentally.Footnote 78 Notable also, is that important connections between people and nature, raised for instance in different environmental feminisms, are arguably under-addressed in current energy transition literature.Footnote 79
Within the literature on energy justice specifically, we found only very few examples of authors focusing on gender, or examples of articles adopting a feminist analysis.Footnote 80 To the extent that gender is addressed, this is usually in relation to the recognitional dimension, with significantly less attention to distributional and procedural dimensions.Footnote 81 This is a critical shortcoming in energy justice theory and practice. That being said, some interesting exceptions are worth highlighting. For instance, taking an empirical approach, Katharine Wiese applied a gendered reading of energy justice in the context of community-based micro-hydropower cooperatives in Ethiopia to expose the need to delve deeper into procedural justice.Footnote 82 Studying four cooperatives, she found that even where women participated in the projects, they had limited opportunity to actually influence the decisions being made due to cultural norms and practices that influenced their willingness and ability to speak and access information about the decisions being taken.Footnote 83 Wiese concludes that energy justice was a helpful framing to reveal who is benefitting and to what extent, who is participating and who is being recognized, but that the concept still needs to be further conceptualized and linked with other justice issues to account for gendered and intersectional aspects of energy justice.Footnote 84
Also focusing on the community level, Carelle Mang-Benza et al looked at how rural women in Benin, Senegal and Togo experience energy justice principles. Drawing on empirical research, the authors demonstrate that women are disproportionately adversely affected by the availability and affordability of energy sources. To address these concerns, they demonstrate that the design of appropriate solutions to meet energy needs must be embedded in local contexts and take the perspectives of women into account, emphasizing the necessity to make gender equity a cross-cutting dimension in operationalizing energy justice.Footnote 85
Looking at gender in the context of energy policy, Mariëlle Feenstra and Gül Özerol observe that gender-energy nexus research lacks the conceptual basis to analyse energy policies from a justice perspective. Inter alia, the authors propose that power asymmetries in decision-making need to be addressed by moving beyond numerical representation to focus on actual influence in decision-making.Footnote 86 Furthermore, they suggest that a gender-just energy policy must acknowledge that women and men may have different needs, create access to energy technologies and services that match those realities and recognize women’s and men’s rights in policy processes by providing them with an enabling environment for equal participation.Footnote 87 Similar to Wiese, they suggest that a gendered energy justice framing could help expose gender injustices, in their case in the space of energy policy-making but also note that further application in practice is needed as well as the development of indicators to assess energy policies from an integrated gender justice and energy justice perspective.Footnote 88
While not framed explicitly under the ambit of energy justice, Shannon Bell, Cara Daggett and Christine Labuski’s article on ‘feminist energy systems’ also makes an interesting contribution.Footnote 89 The authors point out that to date in energy studies, gender-related research has focused narrowly on ‘women’s issues,’ such as women’s access to energy, representation in the workforce or disproportionate harm women experience; sometimes extending to consideration of how gender norms can influence perceptions pertaining to these domains.Footnote 90 They explain that while these aspects are critical, they miss a broader approach as the focus on women represents just one dimension of what feminism can bring to the study of energy.Footnote 91 They posit that the critical contribution of feminist theory is that it ‘also offers expertise in the study of power more broadly,’ which could apply to the full spectrum of energy research.Footnote 92 They suggest that a feminist approach could offer a paradigm for designing truly just energy systems, across political, economic, socio-ecological and technological domains.
Addressing the gender-energy nexus, Romy Listo presents a critical discourse analysis of energy poverty literature to problematize ‘gender myths’ found therein.Footnote 93 She points to compelling examples, such as a focus on female-headed households obscuring focus on structural causes of poverty, or how constructions of women and gender make particular technical energy interventions such as cookstoves or electricity provision seem logical, denying the complexities of existing evidence around such interventions and the need for more holistic or alternative approaches.Footnote 94 Sovacool et al point out the gaps in energy justice literature and contend that feminist, anti-racist, indigenous and postcolonial perspectives, for example, must be integrated into energy justice research and practice. Only by integrating these perspectives in an intersectional manner can energy justice have the transformative effect it strives for.Footnote 95
Building on these feminist insights, we propose that while an energy justice framing certainly has the potential for guiding further BHR engagement on the energy transition, this can only be the case if energy justice is interpreted, further developed and applied through an explicitly feminist lens. A strong focus on exposing and transforming the gendered power relations at play must be integral to such an approach.
An intersectional feminist interpretation of energy justice could embark from the starting point of centralizing the importance of attention to gender relations, including layers of discrimination, within each dimension of the energy justice framework, thereby making transformations in gender relations an integral part of the overall objective of energy justice. Further recognizing the deep connections between people and nature from feminist perspectives would likewise be integral to such an approach.Footnote 96 Interpreting energy justice through such explicitly intersectional feminist aims could open possibilities for analysing and transforming power relations that underpin current energy decision-making at the policy, community, household and individual levels.Footnote 97 Focusing on gender relations within the household, individual empowerment and women’s participation at the policy level would be given more attention, incidentally opening the possibility to shed light on the root causes of gender injustices. The instrumental focus on women’s participation, by which increased access to energy for women at the household level is equated simplistically to women’s empowerment, would be brought into question. Relatedly, the existing neoliberal paradigm in which enhanced energy access is primarily seen as a precondition for economic growth rather than social justice, would be challenged.Footnote 98 An intersectional feminist interpretation of energy justice could contribute to addressing critiques whereby ‘the dominant jobs-centric, and distributive justice-based operationalization of just transition through laws, policies, and programmes does little in improving the state of communities and persons for whom they are meant.’Footnote 99
To contribute to visioning what a feminist approach to energy justice might look like, we have mapped the three-tenets energy justice framework against the gender gaps identified in the literature and have proposed initial reflections on how a feminist framing of the different justice dimensions might be developed and integrated into energy policy-making and business practice (see Table 1, below).Footnote 100
Table 1. Developing a feminist approach to energy justice
V. A Feminist Energy Justice Analysis of Women’s Participation in Energy Transition Policy-Making in Sub-Saharan Africa
In this part of the article, we look at how gender and women’s participation are addressed in renewable energy policies and policy-making in Sub-Saharan Africa, to identify gaps and explore how a feminist approach to energy justice might contribute to addressing these. Our analysis is based on the literature review and our exploratory feminist approach to energy justice outlined above, through which we identified select examples of policies at the regional and national level that address gender in the context of the energy transition. As such, our observations are illustrative rather than conclusive, and more comprehensive research into a broader set of energy transition policies and policy-making processes in the region would be beneficial.
A. Women in Energy Policy-Making
The lack of representation of women in the energy workforce, including in decision-making spaces and governance institutions, is consistently pointed to as a persistent challenge. Analysis of gendered power dynamics in energy policy-making must be a first step in challenging gendered disparities and lack of attention to systemic issues of discrimination and exclusion. In Sub-Saharan Africa, in 2018 women occupied only seven per cent of lead energy sector positions as ministers.Footnote 101 This means women are not only under-represented but also that there is a lack of female role models and mentors, which has been identified as critical for strengthening women’s participation in policy-making.Footnote 102 That women are insufficiently involved in energy transition governance is a key concern for realizing recognitional justice. Exclusion of women from policy-making has the consequence of failing to reflect the lived realities of women in the energy transition and integrate valuable input to foster inclusive and responsive policies, thereby implicating distributional and procedural justice dimensions. This is not to essentialize or instrumentalize women’s participation as constituting gender-transformative action in energy justice. However, there are positive indications that stronger representation of women with diverse lived experiences in energy policy-making can make significant contributions to generating more equitable distribution of benefits and outcomes.Footnote 103 This strengthens distributional and procedural justice dimensions.
B. Gender in Energy Policies
Attention to gender in energy policies in Sub-Saharan Africa is significant. In 2017, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) conducted a worldwide study of energy policy frameworks to analyse whether they included gender considerations. It found that, out of the 192 analyzed frameworks, the majority of those including gender were from Sub-Saharan Africa (32 frameworks, representing 56 per cent).Footnote 104 For example, at the regional level, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) Centre for Renewable Energy Efficiency adopted the first gender-responsive energy policy on the continent in 2017. The ECOWAS Policy for Gender Mainstreaming in Energy Access acknowledges the gendered impacts of climate change and energy governance and recognizes the existing gaps in the energy (renewable and non-renewable) sector at the policy, supplier and consumer levels.Footnote 105 The policy also has an implementation strategy with guiding principles to ensure gender-responsiveness and maps the relevant stakeholders to drive implementation.Footnote 106 Drawing lessons from the ECOWAS Gender Policy, the Clean Energy Solutions Center developed the Blueprint Guide for Creating Gender-Sensitive Energy Policies in 2019.Footnote 107 The guide aims to support governments wishing to make the energy sector more gender-responsive by learning from the ECOWAS Gender Policy process.Footnote 108 At the country level, Nigeria’s 2013 National Energy Policy brings attention to gender-specific energy-related needs in the household, underlining women’s role in the sector.Footnote 109 The Senegalese Renewable Energy Policy included women as a target group as a direct consequence of the Minister for Renewable Energy having been a member of the gender audit team.Footnote 110 The Kenyan Ministry of Energy launched its Gender Policy in 2019,Footnote 111 making it the first African country to adopt a national policy on gender mainstreaming and gender responsiveness in the energy sector.Footnote 112 These developments are commendable but opportunities to strengthen all three energy justice dimensions can also be identified.
C. Distributional Justice
Increased participation of women has the potential to generate policies that demonstrate a better understanding of the gender-related dynamics of the energy transition, thereby contributing to fulfilling the distributional dimension of energy justice. Here, the involvement of relevant women’s organizations providing education on gender and discrimination within social and cultural norms could be particularly relevant. Conversely, the failure to undertake more advanced gender analyses of projects and policies on the access and use of renewable energies could mean that the transition will not be accompanied by a shift in the way women access energy and in gender dynamics at the household or community level. For example, the emphasis put on solar cookstoves as a simple means of achieving energy access for women across Sub-Saharan Africa is often refuted by practitioners who provide evidence that such projects do not actually benefit women as users if the beneficiaries are not involved in the project design.Footnote 113 Similarly, the interpretation that electrification per se will lead to women’s empowerment and contribute to their autonomy has been refuted if it is not accompanied by gender-responsive energy policies and project design.Footnote 114 Strengthening attention to gendered dynamics within households, including the gendered division of labour, could be an invaluable contribution to a feminist framing of the distributional justice dimension.
Relatedly, questions of distribution more broadly could lead to more gender-responsive decision-making regarding how to balance focus on large-scale, small-scale, on-grid and off-grid renewable energy efforts in terms of gendered access, availability and development implications. The dominant focus on the rapid deployment of large-scale renewable technologies may need to be nuanced, in particular its ability to contribute to the equitable reduction of energy poverty. Furthermore, a feminist framing of the distributional dimension of energy justice would demand attention to gender implications at each stage of the energy lifecycle. For instance, increasing attention to women beyond impact assessment to also consider women’s participation and rights in areas such as company-community negotiations, investment decision-making and women’s access to remedy for harms caused by renewable energy projects.
D. Recognitional Justice
The above policy examples can satisfy recognitional justice requirements in that they acknowledge women as a group that has been left out of renewable energy governance, both in terms of policy content and policy-making processes. However, while women and/or gender are considered the object of these policies, the policies do not consistently address the issue of women’s participation in the design process. Ministries and government agencies specializing in women’s issues or gender may be designated as implementing entities but frequently these are not headed by or constituted by many women. Sometimes, women’s organizations are targeted as additional entities for facilitating implementation, but the degree of involvement, participation and decision-making in the implementation phase is not detailed.
Authors such as Monica Maduekwe et al commend the share of women in relevant ministries,Footnote 115 while others, like Njeri Wamukonya, warn against practices such as favouritism, nepotism and ‘rubber stamps.’Footnote 116 The belief that increasing women’s participation in policy-making will necessarily positively affect women is overly simplistic. While clearly not constituting a silver bullet, greater participation of diverse groups of women with diverse interests and lived experiences, including women’s organizations and their representatives, in the development and implementation of energy policies is an essential component of living up to the recognitional expectations of energy justice, as the greater representation of stakeholder groups can more effectively inform policy- and decision-making.
Looking at intersectional diversity is a further integral component of recognitional justice, understanding that women’s participation faces issues of socio-cultural domination in patriarchal societies; and non-recognition of their concerns but also considering other potential layers of marginalization and misrecognition through stereotyping and/or homogenization.Footnote 117 In terms of delving deeper into recognitional justice dimensions, the ECOWAS Gender Policy is interesting as it looks precisely beyond recognizing inequalities to focus specifically on identifying where those injustices occur and who may be marginalized and excluded. For example, the policy recognizes that poor and rural women are more affected by discrimination in energy governance and addresses how policies can positively influence patriarchal social norms that have excluded women from policy and project design as well as the workforce.Footnote 118
E. Procedural Justice
Procedural justice concerns remain with regard to who is involved and who is allowed to meaningfully participate in all stages of policy-making. The Blueprint Guide for Creating Gender-Sensitive Energy Policies, for instance, while useful in terms of gender-sensitive content of energy policies, says little to nothing about women’s participation in the policy development process. Indeed, a concern that has only grown with the increasing demand for gender responsiveness and women’s participation in energy policy-making is the evaporation of gender in those documents, wherein policy commitments to gender equality tend to disappear or not manifest once they reach the implementation stage because of a lack of financial and technical capacity.Footnote 119 This focus on procedural justice, including the focus on decision-making, decision-makers and actual outcomes, was also reflected in the 2017 IUCN study, which described the Sub-Saharan African region as leading in terms of integration of gender into national energy frameworks, but also suggested that countries should ‘develop gender action plans specific to their energy sector policies, include clear targets and objectives, and elaborate on the steps a country can take … to ensure gender mainstreaming is tangible in a country’s energy work.’Footnote 120
Strengthening women’s participation in a just energy transition demands fair, non-discriminatory approaches that foster meaningful participation opportunities throughout the entire policy-making process. As part of this, the structures for making decisions about the energy transition could be further examined and adjusted to become more gender-responsive by, for example: identifying and exposing gender biases in existing decision-making processes; drawing on different philosophical thinking for the development of decision-making procedures; and developing measures to meaningfully engage different types of women in decision-making, including providing the necessary support to marginalized or under-represented women to participate in decision-making. Lastly, to satisfy the procedural justice dimension, the focus on open and fair decision-making would need to include a clearer focus on access to remedy and redress, not currently well covered in the policies. Increased attention to benefit-sharing models and opportunities for community ownership could also be explored as part of strengthening procedural justice.
F. Summary
In conclusion, applying a feminist energy justice reading of women’s participation in energy policy-making and the content of these policy examples points to persistent gaps in terms of recognizing the gender dynamics of the energy transition and fostering women’s participation in the energy transition. More comprehensive gender analysis and application of a feminist approach to all three energy justice dimensions could make a valuable contribution to further exposing and understanding the gendered power relations behind these gaps and provide innovative solutions for addressing them.
VI. Conclusion
In this article, we have argued that an intersectional feminist interpretation of energy justice could be one way of operationalizing a more gender-transformative approach to energy transition in BHR. As we highlighted in Section II, energy justice aligns with BHR principles through its focus on addressing power imbalances, ensuring meaningful stakeholder participation and accountability for duty-bearers. Likewise, integrating energy justice into BHR discourse and practice can support the implementation of distributional, recognitional and procedural energy justice dimensions through a human rights-based approach. In summary, if the BHR field were to frame its attention on energy transition in energy justice terms, this could increase the focus on: viewing energy questions and systems as distinctly political and ethical issues, rather than technical-economic issues; practical application to drive actual change to reach more socially just outcomes; and the transformative potential of renewable energies to address injustices and drive empowerment in energy access and delivery. Therefore, we have suggested that the concept of energy justice has significant potential for guiding BHR engagement in the energy transition, provided that energy justice is interpreted through a feminist lens.
Concretely, we have contributed to envisioning what such a feminist approach to energy justice might look like by mapping the gender gaps identified in the literature against the three-tenets energy justice framework and based on this proposed a feminist framing of the different energy justice dimensions. A feminist approach to energy justice would involve integrating gender analysis into energy policies and projects to transform gendered power relations and inequalities. This approach calls for addressing gender dynamics within households and communities, and challenging gendered divisions of labour. It also involves the active participation of diverse women and women’s organizations in energy governance, recognizing the intersectional nature of gender discrimination, and ensuring women’s voices are heard in policy and project design. Additionally, it advocates for fair and inclusive decision-making processes, addressing issues like nepotism and corruption.
It is also critical to appraise the utility of a feminist approach to energy justice in terms of its ability to provide a practical guiding framework for policy-makers and other stakeholders. To explore an example, we looked at women’s participation in energy transition decision-making in Sub-Saharan Africa. Overall, we found that while ‘women’s issues’ and ‘gender’ have been addressed as topics in the substance of policy documents, gender has yet to be mainstreamed throughout processes. This partially answers to the recognitional dimension of energy justice, though a deeper focus on intersectionality would be desirable. Distributional justice issues, however, such as those relating to access, benefits and persisting burdens shouldered by women, are far from being corrected. To properly account for women’s participation and other rights, energy transition policy-making must also answer to distributional justice challenges, whereby women and women’s organizations must be involved in a fair and non-discriminatory way. Likewise, the procedural dimension of energy justice warrants much more attention, as current decision-making processes work to exclude women and do not sufficiently account for gender analysis. Relatedly, as patterns of nepotism, corruption and political elitism often remain unchallenged, energy justice demands for more equitable outcomes remain unrealized. The integration of a feminist approach to energy justice in BHR has the potential to bring gaps such as these to the forefront of the energy transition agenda.
However, given the current Global North biases in the energy justice literature, further research and theorizing from the Sub-Saharan African region is necessary to better understand the potential relevance of energy justice. In collaboration with different relevant stakeholders, BHR scholars and practitioners working with energy transition in the region could play a role in this regard. Below, we have suggested some potential areas for further research and practice.
As a first step, multi-stakeholder dialogues could be held bringing together relevant government, civil society and academic actors with the objective of further appraising the potential of energy justice as a framework for the energy transition in the region. This could include examining how energy justice might be further developed through feminist framings. Building on this, pilot projects could test the implementation of feminist energy justice approaches and their effects. This could be at the project or policy level, with comparative case studies from one or multiple countries. Developing and utilizing more locally-contextually defined understandings of energy justice could be a key aim. It could also involve the development of an AAAQ (availability, accessibility, acceptability and quality) model for access to energy that strongly integrates gender from the start. As part of driving initiatives to realize Sustainable Development Goal 7 (affordable and clean energy), as well as moves to develop a human right to energy, the utility of an AAAQ framing for defining and implementing such initiatives might usefully be explored. Driving such an agenda from Sub-Saharan Africa could contribute to ensuring that the objectives and targets fed into global agendas better represent the lived realities of women and gender dynamics in the region.
Further exploration, evaluation and implementation of existing gender and energy policy frameworks could also yield invaluable insights. For example, empirical studies into the implementation and effects of leading examples such as the ECOWAS Gender Policy or country-level gender energy policies would be beneficial to better understand what works in practice, what the barriers are and how they can be addressed. Such empirical work could include a particular focus on the participation of women and women’s organizations, as well as accountability aspects such as independent monitoring of policy implementation. An aim could be to feed into the design of targets and indicators for tracking implementation, which, according to the literature, still need to be developed for some of these policies. Such practical learning could inform further refinement of important guidance, such as the Blueprint Guide for Gender-Sensitive Energy Policies, to strengthen the focus on process, as well as provide further practice examples on what works for actors engaged in energy transition policy-making. The studies could also inform regional-level peer learning, with a focus on strengthening the participation of women and women’s organizations in energy transition decision-making.
Acknowledgements
This article is based on an earlier working paper: Nora Götzmann and Mathilde Dicalou, ‘Towards a Feminist Energy Justice Framework: Women’s Participation in the Energy Transition in Sub-Saharan Africa,’ Danish Institute for Human Rights, Matters of Concern Human Rights Research Papers, 1/2023 https://www.humanrights.dk/publications/towards-feminist-energy-justice-framework (accessed 24 October 2023). We would like to thank Jasmijn van Dijk and Josephine Bellows Wender for their research assistance. We would also like to thank the reviewers for their helpful suggestions.
Competing interest
The authors declare no conflicts of interest.
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