Book Review: Global Energy Justice: Problems, Principles, and Practices
Global Energy Justice: Problems, Principles, and Practices by Benjamin K. Sovacool and Michael H Dworkin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2014. 414 pp, £24.99 paperback 9781107665088, £64.99 hardcover 9781107041950, $32 e-book 9781316056554
Imagine you’re an engineer working for an electric utility company in Kazakhstan. It is freezing cold outside, but your task is to disconnect five homes who have failed to pay their bills for the past two months. How do you feel about this? Are their hard and soft rules to guide you? What if you know there is a storm coming up? This is one of the many energy justice dilemmas that feature at the start of each chapter in the book Global Energy Justice: Problems, Principles, and Practices.
In Global Energy Justice, Benjamin K. Sovacool and Michael H. Dworkin make an important contribution by taking energy justice as the main lens – ‘concept and a tool’ in the words of the authors – to look at global energy issues. The authors show that energy and justice are interrelated in many and sometimes surprising ways, from human rights violations to NIMBY effects, to debate about fossil fuel depletion, to name but a few. As these and many other examples in the book show, their emphasis is mainly on the many forms of energy injustice, rather than energy justice.
Most of the book is devoted to linking different aspects of energy production and consumption with certain theories of justice. For example, energy efficiency is discussed in relation to virtue; externalities with utility; energy subsidies with freedom, etc. This is a clever move to link concrete energy issues with these concepts that have been used by different thinkers. The chapters are all structured in the same way, outlining first what is happening, then how things ought to be (justice discussions), and finally providing some examples of what could be done.
The book is extremely comprehensive when it comes to energy issues. For those with less background knowledge, chapter 2 is devoted to all aspects of energy starting from the basic units, to the laws of thermodynamics to prime movers, to delivery mechanisms to various sectors and finally social and environmental impacts. The rest of the chapters build upon this, with a large number of interesting and up-to-date overviews, insights and references, including from the wide experience and extensive publication record of Benjamin Sovacool. While there is a slight bias towards examples from the United States, the authors still manage to provide a truly global picture without losing sight of small-scale energy dilemmas, such as the gendered health impacts of cooking on wood fuel in the Global South. Some issues, like renewable energy and energy efficiency, are discussed more than once throughout the book, but the accessible writing style and the many interesting quotations, tables and figures prevent it from getting boring and repetitive.
In comparison, the justice parts are treated somewhat differently. There is no full chapter dedicated to ‘theories of justice’. Instead, each chapter discusses one to three philosophers/theorists (or key ideas) who have made important contributions to the debate; some contemporary, but also including Plato and Aristotle. This provides a nice introduction to some of the debates in this field, but the parts are too short and fragmented to really go in-depth. Moreover, and partly by design, the justice discussions remain a bit disconnected from the parts about energy.
A similar argument could be made for some of the energy problems and examples. Because the authors have the ambition to capture all aspects of the global energy system, by necessity not all issues get the attention they deserve. For some examples, the reader might still be wondering about some devils and details, while the next few examples are already lined up. The many excellent footnotes and references only partly remedy this.
More fundamentally, many of the different perspectives on justice in the book could be seen as diametrically opposed to each other, such as a utilitarian and a human rights point of view. While the authors do acknowledge this and come up with a synthesis energy justice framework in the final chapter, the reader might still be left wondering which principles of justice to follow, let alone how these could be applied consistently to the many energy-related challenges the world is facing.
One of the ways of going more in-depth would have been to link the discussions about justice to social science approaches that explicitly incorporate elements of (social) justice and environmental considerations, such as the environmental justice, social movements and political ecology literature. While the first one is only mentioned in passing, the latter two do not feature at all in the book. Including these frameworks would also nuance the authors’ starting claim that energy justice is an issue that gets limited attention.
Notwithstanding these points of critique, Global Energy Justice is a very interesting read, providing an excellent overview of the energy-related aspects and issues. While the link with justice theories could be more comprehensive, the book triggers important questions and provides compelling arguments for both well-established and novel forms of energy policy that could lead to a more energy-just world that, in the words of the authors, “equitably shares both the benefits and burdens involved in the production and consumption of energy services as well as one that is fair in how it treats people and communities in energy decision-making”.
Mattijs Smits is Assistant Professor at the Environmental Policy Group of Wageningen University. His research interests are energy and climate transitions and practices in the Global South. He recently published the monograph Southeast Asian Energy Transitions: Between Modernity and Sustainability (Ashgate, 2015).
