In their uptake of the concept of energy justice, we observe a tension between social scientists on the one hand and ethicists and philosophers on the other hand. This tension seems to arise from the contrastive assumptions and expectations that are maintained within the disciplines of social science and philosophy. While philosophers often present theoretical constructions of non-empirical forms of justice that allow for systematic normative reflection, there are social scientists who demand operationalised and measurable conceptualisations in order to come up with clear policy advice. These assumptions show the incompatibility of the descriptive and normative logics that underlie their respective fields of study. With regard to the question of justice in the energy transition, the use of theory-based normative frameworks to qualify empirically established inequalities would provide a more comprehensive and suitable approach.

In dynamic sociotechnical contexts, values evolve over time and diverge across stakeholder groups, complicating the coordination of innovation processes through individual and collective commitments. This paper argues that sociotechnical agendas, which are structured sets of technology-related issues that shape attention and guide decision-making, can be a helpful framework for examining the interplay between personal and shared values. We demonstrate how three levels of agenda-setting contribute to the recognition and institutionalization of values: issue salience that determines what values matter, attribute framing that shapes how values are interpreted, and network interconnection that establishes how values relate to each other. We examine sociotechnical agenda-setting as a process through which personal and institutional values are negotiated, aligned, and contested, often under conditions of tension and uncertainty. While sociotechnical agendas can foster consensus and support responsible technological development, they also pose challenges, including power imbalances, selective framing, and psychological influence. The study calls for further research into how transparent and inclusive agenda-setting processes can promote responsible value sharing in ways that advance broader societal goals.

In this report, we present a framework for mapping the ethical dilemmas that arise in the development of offshore wind parks in the North Sea. The development of new technologies, such as offshore wind parks, gives rise to ethical dilemmas. These dilemmas can be characterised in terms of conflicts between relevant values, which we identified through a review of the literature on the ethics of technology and through consultation with stakeholders. With the input of stakeholders, these values have then been systematically categorised so they can be interpreted in terms of ethical dilemmas. Our analysis of the input from the stakeholder workshop reveals a deep concern for balancing the Dutch energy transition with the ecological preservation of the North Sea and its ecosystems. When identifying values, stakeholders noted that it is important that the energy transition is not considered in isolation from other pressures on the North Sea. This includes other significant energy-related developments, such as gas exploration and deep-sea mining in the North Sea. Stakeholders observed that the current EU regulations are not adequately addressing these cumulative pressures caused by wind farms, other activities in the North Sea, and the impact of climate change. Therefore, stakeholders believe that EU-level and Dutch-level regulations should reflect these complexities in a more ethically informed manner. Our reflections also highlight the need for adaptive policies and institutions that would better reflect the complexities of cumulative pressures on the North Sea in a more ethically informed manner, accounting for evolving knowledge and values; the moral responsibilities not only of the Netherlands but also of other countries impacting the North Sea; and the long-term sustainability of energy infrastructure development. At its core, the output of the stakeholder workshop is not limited to the exploration of offshore wind energy but expands to questioning how to ensure that the Dutch energy transition contributes to climate goals without disproportionately harming the North Sea or creating new, unforeseen environmental and societal challenges. In other words, based on our analysis of the insights from the workshop, we can confirm that the question is broader than environmental concerns regarding, for instance, bird mortality. The executed study shows the necessity of understanding the relations between spatial, temporal, and environmental challenges. From this perspective, ethical issues exceed an isolated focus on the ecological impacts of offshore wind energy to signify the importance of ethical scrutiny of cumulative and interrelated effects of Dutch energy transition development on the North Sea. Our recommendations expand on a proposed integrated values-oriented research agenda for the Dutch energy transition.

‘Energy justice’ has become a concern of professionals who are involved in the energy transition. However, many professionals in the energy domain seem to have difficulty understanding this concept, as it does not fit well into their institutional context. We will present a framework for understanding justice that allows energy actors to cope more effectively with energy justice. This framework, which is based on a re-articulation of the three tenets of energy justice, introduces justice both as an evaluation concept and as an organization principle. It further allows energy actors to navigate the normative uncertainties that characterize the energy transition.

Regions reliant on declining fossil fuel production often grapple with upcoming deindustrialisation, economic decline, and deterioration of liveability. In attempts to address these issues proactively, local change agents, including sub-national government authorities, increasingly collaborate to develop new, more sustainable and just regional pathways. A potential yet not uncontested stepping stone towards such pathways is co-creative asset redevelopment. In this paper, we focus on the role of sub-national government authorities in co-creative redevelopment. Particularly, we zoom in on the legitimacy challenges that these authorities face and must address for co-creative redevelopment to have transformative capacity. We draw on insights from the case of GZI Next in Emmen, the Netherlands, and identify six challenges, amongst others intra-organisational conflicts of interests, accountability issues, and competing claims to the right to a just transition. We reflect on these challenges and how to overcome them and propose avenues for future research.

Introducing emerging technologies is often seen as successful when social acceptance has been achieved. In the case of ‘wicked’ problems, social acceptance might be an insufficient quality criterion for the desirability of technological developments, because the focus on social acceptance can risk overlooking crucial ethical considerations. As such, this paper addresses the research question of whether technology governance frameworks can go beyond mere social acceptance issues and incorporate ethical considerations. By exploring three projects in which potable water reuse has been introduced, we have identified the limitations of common governance approaches to enhance social acceptance, including common participation and ‘Opening Up’ participation strategies. Our explorative study indicates that even an ideal participation strategy is insufficient to ensure ethical acceptability due to the lack of critical reflection on the problem this technology development is solving. If a given problem is too narrowly defined to artificially favor one solution over another, the exploration of alternative solutions will be hindered, potentially reinforcing unsustainable practices. To extend on existing approaches to participation, we propose a socio-ethical assessment framework that integrates social acceptance measures with ethical acceptability considerations to address these shortcomings. This framework emphasizes the importance of ethical participation, including the representation of marginalized voices, future generations, and non-human entities. It also urges to critically examine the framing of the problem itself, acknowledging the wicked nature of issues like water scarcity. By doing so, technology governance can become more responsible by aligning societal and ethical considerations.

The European Union (EU) is committed to achieving a just and inclusive energy transition. Positioning citizen participation is an integral practice of this goal. The expectation for increased citizen engagement in energy initiatives has been conceptualised as energy citizenship. However, despite publicly committing to encouraging active, bottom-up participation, top-down, state-led approaches to promoting energy citizenship have been criticised for constraining citizen agency, often inadvertently leaving individuals feeling disempowered in their contributions to energy transitions. This paper examines a foundational EU policy document, Clean Energy for All Europeans (CEFAE), to unveil how the EU conceives the role of citizens within the energy transition. The findings suggest that the EU's conceptualisation of energy citizenship is shaped by liberal and neoliberal assumptions about citizenship itself. This is reflected in the frequent reference to citizens as ‘consumer(s)’ and the implicit framing of citizenship according to these democratic conceptions within the directives and regulations used for the implementation of the energy transition. Underlying conceptions of citizenship establish assumptions about what forms of citizen participation are considered suitable and appropriate in conceptualisations and operationalisations of energy citizenship in situ. By comparing the EU's articulation of energy citizenship with the three classical dimensions of democratic citizenship—membership, basic rights, and participation—this study identifies the underlying narrative of citizenship in the document and uncovers tensions that limit the potential for meaningful citizen engagement. In doing so, it contributes to the evolving discourse on energy citizenship by advocating for a more inclusive, citizen-led approach to the recognition of energy citizens and the definition of their agency.

The proposed solutions for sustainable development generally require new links and the involvement of multiple sectors. As a consequence, organizations can rely less on closed and rational analysis-based forms of strategizing; they increasingly see the need for joint strategy processes. However, a joint strategy process challenges the boundaries of the organizations involved, which creates tensions. This paper takes stock of conflicts and uncertainties that organizations which become involved in joint strategizing encounter. Our focal point is the sustainable development of infrastructure. We focus on an explorative single case study on the coordination of heat infrastructure development in the Regional Energy Strategy Rotterdam-The Hague (RES R-TH). The primary data were collected via three sources of information: observations from roundtable meetings, interviews with representatives of the organizations involved in the RES-TH and reflections from participants of these actors in research-led ateliers. We illuminate a wide range of tensions between organizations and identify three categories of dilemmas: input, throughput and outcome. By explicating dilemmas and identifying categories, we discard the idea that a universal solution exists for organizations engaging in joint strategizing. Instead, we provide evidence of different types of decision-making challenges, which emerges from a more granular analysis of the open strategizing process.

Wicked problems, such as climate change, poverty, and antibiotic resistance, are ethical problems, as moral plurality about the social good is one of their constituting factors. Although wicked problems cannot be fully solved, they are urgent and demand intervention. While design thinking was suggested in the 1990s to deal with wicked problems, it is still an open question how it can address moral plurality. In this article, we consider how design thinking can address moral plurality in wicked problems. We propose that designers using design thinking can adopt four normative paradigms toward moral plurality, namely moral agnosticism (design for solutions), moral pragmatism (design for aggregated preferences), moral unificationism (design for community-created values), and transcendental moralism (design for The Good). Then, we argue that designers can address moral pluralism and deal with wicked problems within the first three approaches to normativity, provided that designers acknowledge that their responses to wicked problems may fail over time and require new design responses. Ignoring that possibility fits within the paradigm of transcendental moralism, which does not give designers the means to deal with wicked problems.

With the increasing reliance on technological advancements, it becomes imperative to critically examine and evaluate their implications on society and the environment. The concepts of acceptance and acceptability have gained prominence among researchers shaping technology implementation strategies. However, the lack of precise definitions for these concepts leads to diverse interpretations, compromising their usefulness in technology development and impeding further progress in research endeavours. This paper illustrates how these important concepts have been used in the energy technology discourse and develops a schematic overview highlighting the varied overarching interpretations of these concepts: the funnel of acceptance and acceptability. It underscores how different research levels – institutional, societal, and individual – affect the relevant understanding of these concepts. The funnel metaphor emphasises the interconnectedness of these interpretations and underlines the importance of addressing all research levels to ensure technology implementation processes advance in a desirable and responsible manner.

As global issues such as climate change and diminishing resources become increasingly pressing, water recycling has moved into the focus. However, the successful implementation of Direct Potable Water Reuse (DPR) projects hinges on securing public acceptance, which remains challenging. This paper aims to flesh out possible reasons for the lingering public rejection of DPR. We will do so by conducting a literature review on how public acceptance is understood and what approaches are proposed to enhance it. These approaches are analyzed using Responsible Research and Innovation principles and the `opening up', `closing down' and `leaving ajar' approaches. Our research identifies an overreliance on the controversial information deficit model, closing down large parts of public engagement. We advocate for becoming more inclusive through the `leaving ajar' approach. Particularly, attention should be paid to reflexivity and responsiveness to public concerns to ensure meaningful public engagement.

Interdisciplinary collaboration is often seen as the approach to deal with wicked problems, which are problems that involve both scientific uncertainties and normative uncertainties, meaning that there is no consensus on the problem definition and the best course of action. One of the reasons for the difficulty in establishing effective interdisciplinary collaboration is that the normative assumptions of academic disciplines are usually left unarticulated. This paper presents four ideal-typical characterisations of the normative paradigms that are maintained by different disciplines. These paradigms can be sketched out as follows: the moral positions that are considered legitimate are ignored (‘moral denialism’); located at the level of the individual (‘aggregated subjectivism’); located at the level of the community (‘moral collectivism’); or found at a transcendental level (‘transcendental realism’). Each of these paradigms brings about its difficulties for dealing with wicked problems. The paper will also present a heuristic framework that guides interdisciplinary research in dealing with normative plurality by aligning the different scales of contextualisation that appear to underlie the four normative paradigms.

Land use change, managed retreat, and relocation programs are examples of exposure reduction measures in flood risk management (FRM). Exposure reduction measures are especially prone to conflict at the local level due to competing interests, values, and attachments. In this paper, we build upon the capability approach to justice and specifically the concept of political capabilities to advance justice in exposure reduction measures in FRM. A capabilities-based approach to justice helps to recognize the multiplicity of valuable ways of life and addresses a wide range of inequalities including concerns related to recognition justice. The innovation of our capabilities-based approach to justice is that we include both actors who have too little political influence as well as those who have too much and can thus excessively steer FRM in their advantage. A political capabilities analysis is different than a focus on principles or rights because it draws attention to realized political influence and includes the informal stages of FRM politics such as lobbying. The political capabilities concept also shifts the focus from vulnerability to human agency, thereby addressing concerns in the FRM literature about the loss of self-determination and misrecognition. The paper concludes with a critical discussion of the opportunities and limitations of using the political capabilities concept in FRM.

In this thought-provoking book, Udo Pesch examines how values articulated by society are incorporated into institutions and technologies in order to overcome what they consider to be a lack of democratic control over their progress.

Energy justice is often approached through the four tenets of procedural, distributive, restorative and recognition justice. Though these tenets are important placeholders for addressing what type of justice issues are involved, they require further normative substantiations. These are achieved by using principles of justice to specify why – normatively speaking – something is just or unjust within each category or tenet of justice. In addressing the principles of justice, it is important to acknowledge normative uncertainties, or the fact that different (incompatible) conceptions of justice might be morally defensible, leading to different normative conclusions or policy recommendations. This paper reviews the definitions of tenets in energy justice scholarship, the occurrence of normative claims, and how these claims are justified. The review shows that the scholarship ignores to a large extent normative uncertainties. In response, we propose a revisited energy justice framework, focusing on four aspects that help us to articulate the normative uncertainties in both the principles and the tenets of energy justice. These aspects are (i) the scale of justice (i.e. whether justice is considered at a local, national, regional, multinational or global scale), (ii) the subject of justice, (iii) the body of knowledge that is assumed and (iv) the time frame in which justice issues are being considered. We hope to provide a conceptual framework that make explicit the different types of normative assumptions underlying claims of justice, which will ultimately improve the quality and legitimacy of normative conclusions such as policy recommendations that follow.

Experts in the Netherlands have lately debated the novel policy idea to freely apply municipal solid waste incineration bottom ash (MSWIBA). In this paper, we map this ambivalent and unforeseeable, subjective, expert debate. This will help policymaking because more knowledge on subjective expert viewpoints and perceptions allows for clustering conflict and consent as well as gaps in common understanding in this complex debate. We applied Q-methodology which resulted in four distinct perspectives in the expert debate that reveal insights into the social licence to operate and into the legitimacy of the novel bottom ash regime. The freely applicable quality of BA itself is accepted in all perspectives. Conflicting views were found about new risks, trust and socio-political acceptance of the novel BA applications. An important practical contribution of this study is that a higher acceptance of the freely applicable MSWI BA quality in the Netherlands within the expert community can be achieved if the new risks of the free application regime are tackled. We are the first to use Q-methodology in this field, and our academic contribution is that we show that this method can be a helpful tool to unravel complex expert debates also related to MSWI BA applications.

Coastal megacities all over the world face challenges related to climate adaptation, ecosystem protection and inclusive development. In response, governments develop high-level and long-term climate adaptation plans to guide coastal development. In Metro Manila, a consortium of Dutch and Philippine consultants developed the Manila Bay Sustainable Development Master Plan (MBSDMP). The planning team stressed the importance of inclusive and participatory planning, yet, the pre-set premises of the masterplan, such as the high-level and long-term planning scale and corresponding problem formulation, determined which justice claims were foregrounded in the project, disadvantaging small-scale fishing and informal settlement communities. ‘Justice’ is a contested concept. Hence, we deploy a critical theory and politics of expert knowledge lens to investigate how struggles over competing justice claims unfold in water development planning. The scalar politics as manifested in the MBSDMP planning process hides particular conceptions of justice while privileging others in congruence with the larger scale uneven political-economic development dynamics. We provide three examples of scale framing in the planning process that functioned to legitimize the contested displacement of informal settlements by pointing to economic development, disaster risk reduction, or environmental protection. Planning design choices involving scalar out-zooming enabled the uptake of these justice claims, while backgrounding the justice claims of negatively affected groups: namely, the urban poor and small-scale fishing communities. The case analysis provides conceptual-empirical insights relevant for coastal cities' grassroots and policy action platforms anticipating climate change impacts and strategizing their stance in the politics of climate adaptation planning.

Decarbonisation of the built environment is needed to abate the use of fossil fuels and greenhouse gas emissions. In the city of Amsterdam, multiple bottom-up initiatives have been initiated to reach these goals. In this paper, we explore how energy justice is reshaped by these initiatives on an urban scale. This is done by a case study on a platform that aims to connect, support and inform community energy initiatives. Based on ethnographic fieldwork performed between 2019 and 2022 on the heat transition in Amsterdam, we describe how relations between governmental bodies, businesses and urban residents are contested through this platform. Additionally, we describe how the platform shapes the access of citizens to decision-making spaces, financial tools and information to foster new forms of local autonomy, physical heating infrastructures and decision-making procedures. By analysing the motivations and activities for increasing users’ influence and ownership of resources with the notion of ‘commoning practices’, we show how activities of the platform do not only shape physical heating infrastructures, but also the decision-making processes for achieving low-carbon and renewable heating systems in Amsterdam. We, therefore, propose that the notion of ‘commoning practices’ can be used in future research to contribute to a dynamic understanding of how energy justice concerns are expressed and shaped in practice.

Societal value co-creation is an emerging practice in renewable energy projects. Despite its increasing popularity, however, unclarities persist regarding its operationalisation. This paper provides relevant insights by explaining how expectations of societal value co-creation evolved and became performed in a co-creative energy hub project in Emmen, the Netherlands. Over the course of project development, different and sometimes conflicting expectations co-existed of the hub's societal value potential. Drawing on observations, interviews, and document analysis, we describe the developers' efforts to synthesize these different value expectations into a coherent co-creation approach. The results indicate that timing in and of expectations, actor positions and organisational design are influential in how expectations become operationalised in renewable energy projects. Recommendations are provided for the design of societal value co-creation processes in future renewable energy projects.

Smart cities are proposed as a solution for problems of urbanization. Technologies associated with smart cities involve the monitoring of human activities and resulting data streams. These technologies affect certain public values, which may be subject to change depending on their sociotechnical development. This paper presents a method that enables decision-makers to anticipate on this pattern of value change. This method uses two axes that allow a technology to be plotted in terms of different value-laden functions: a first axis in which projects are classified that collect either personal information or impersonal information; a second axis that classifies projects as to whether they collect data for the purpose of service or surveillance. For 37 sensor-based projects in the city of Rotterdam, it has been studied how projects may shift from one quadrant to another. These shifts inform decision-makers so they are better capable of anticipating undesirable impacts of technological developments.