Categorizing experiences of misrecognition in energy contexts

Abstract

Within energy justice, distinct categories or “tenets” of justice are distinguished, such as procedural, distributive, and recognition justice. However, many tensions still surround the concept of recognition justice. By going back to the philosophical roots of the concept, Van Uffelen distinguishes between three modes of recognition: love, law, and status order (Van Uffelen, 2022). Although this is a valuable analytical tool for understanding grievances of misrecognition, its categories are wide-ranging and, at first sight, abstract and distant from the energy space. Because of this, it remains difficult to analyse qualitative data in energy contexts from a recognition lens. In this paper, we pose the following research question: how can experiences of misrecognition in the energy context be categorised? This paper proposes a more granular typology of recognition justice, building on literature on recognition justice in critical theory and taxonomies of human needs. We test the typology to see (1) whether it is sufficiently comprehensive and (2) whether its subcategories are relevant in energy contexts. To do so, we analyse a small sample of interviews in which participants express various experiences of misrecognition in relation to energy policies or infrastructure. In this, we adopt methodological triangulation, as Researcher One coded the interviews deductively through the framework, while Researcher Two conducted an inductive, thematic analysis of the same data. The resulting typology for recognition justice can support researchers and decision-makers in identifying and analysing experiences of misrecognition in energy contexts.