Citizen participation in energy transitions is needed to address energy injustices. Yet, the effect of energy justice on citizens' willingness to participate remains untested. This study examines whether citizens are more inclined to participate in local energy projects that consider justice factors or not. A representative survey collected data ( N = 768) from a Mexico-US cross-border region. We applied a Discrete Choice Experiment, using a Multinomial Logit Model for aggregate preferences and a Latent Class Choice Model to identify preference variation across citizen types. Interestingly, findings show that especially vulnerable groups and youth expressed greater willingness to participate as local leaders in projects prioritizing distributional justice (i.e., targeting energy-poor households) and procedural justice (i.e., involving civil organizations and multiple governance levels in decision making). This contrasts with common assumptions that vulnerable groups are disinterested in, or insufficiently informed about, participation in the energy transition. Our findings suggest that justice-informed project design may foster broader citizen engagement. The participation, and leadership, of vulnerable groups can be enabled when formal institutions recognize and engage with existing organizations representing these groups, such as traditional Indigenous authorities.

Many countries use Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) as an ex-ante evaluation method to support transport decision-making. A critique on CBA is that it favours policies which produce easy to monetize impacts (e.g. travel time savings), whereas it disfavours policies which produce difficult to monetize impacts (e.g. minimum level of accessibility for people with a disability and environmental effects). Public willingness to pay (WTP) experiments have been introduced to value difficult to monetize policy impacts. This paper investigates how citizens of the Transport Authority Amsterdam value nine social impacts of transport policies through five Public WTP discrete choice experiments. In the experiments, respondents were asked to choose between transport policies, trading of social impacts against a uniform tax increase. We show that participants particularly value that people can reach key facilities within 15 min and assigned a relatively low value to preventing delays. This suggests that citizens prioritize accessibility over mobility. We also observe that participants assign a significant value to all the nine social impacts and identify Public WTP metrics for all the impacts. This suggests that the Public WTP approach has to potential to resolve the critique on CBA that not all impacts can be monetized.