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 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.

‘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.

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.

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.

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.

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.