The Public Engagement for Energy Infrastructure Task attended this year’s ESEE conference and presented the results from a multi-country survey on public preferences for engaging with green hydrogen, carbon capture storage and utilisation (CCUS) and advanced nuclear energy technologies. Many conference contributions resonated well with the Task.
As another heatwave settles over Europe, one line from this year’s European Society for Ecological Economics (ESEE) conference keeps coming back: nobody should be ashamed to say “I can’t afford to keep cool”. Energy poverty is not a personal failure, it’s a systemic one. That sentence turned out to be a fitting thread through four days of keynotes, papers, and hallway conversations, all circling the same underlying question: who gets to decide what counts as “enough”, and who bears the cost when the answer is wrong?
Ownership is the missing variable in the energy transition
The conference opened with Lucas Chancel’s (Sciences Po Paris) keynote on the political economy of energy regimes, and it set the tone for everything that followed. His argument is simple: we talk endlessly about how much energy we use and emit, but far too little about who owns the means of producing and distributing it. Ownership shapes everything downstream, who captures the rents, who is exposed to the risks, and who gets a say. The numbers make the point: the wealthiest 10% account for 77% of emissions when measured by ownership of polluting assets, compared with 47% when measured by consumption alone. Chancel’s history of energy, from the discovery of fire to solar panels, is a history of conflict over control: monopoly, nationalisation, municipalisation, cooperative ownership, each redistributing risk and reward differently. The current moment, with renewables reshaping who controls energy infrastructure, is just the latest round of a very old fight, and its outcome will help define the shape of global inequality this century.
Markets aren’t natural: they’re designed, and they can be redesigned
Naomi Oreskes’ (Harvard) keynote on Day 2 pushed on the same thread from a different angle: historically, not economically. Drawing on her book The Big Myth, she traced how the idea that markets are “natural” and freedom is “indivisible” was deliberately constructed, often by industries (oil among them) that needed a foundation against inconvenient regulation, from child labour laws to pollution controls. Even Hayek, she noted, recognised the legitimacy of some interference with markets to curb externalities, but those caveats were quietly edited out of the popularised, Reader’s Digest version of his ideas that shaped decades of policy.
The discussant, Erik Gómez-Baggethun, connected this directly to today’s climate debates: environmental problems get framed as market failures to be fixed with more market instruments, when the deeper issue, as William Kapp argued decades ago, is that environmental costs are not accidental byproducts but the result of active cost-shifting, a conscious choice baked into how profit and power are structured. His analogy was particularly interesting: today’s carbon offsets function a bit like medieval indulgences: paying a fee to keep doing the thing you’re not supposed to do. His provocation: economists have spent a century figuring out how to internalise externalities into markets; maybe it’s time to ask the reverse question: how do we restructure the economy so the externalisation never happens in the first place?
Courts are becoming climate policymakers, whether we planned it that way or not
A third keynote, Christina Eckes from Amsterdam University, on the democratic legitimacy of climate litigation, showed how this contest over who sets the rules is now playing out in courtrooms as much as in economics departments. Landmark cases (Urgenda, Neubauer, Klimaatzaak, KlimaSeniorinnen, and the ICJ AO) are establishing that States have a legal duty to base climate policy on the best available science(e.g. IPCC), and to justify themselves when they don’t. Meanwhile, the same legal terrain is being fought over from the other side: SLAPP suits used by fossil fuel companies against NGOs and municipalities, and in New Zealand’s case, a government rewriting climate law specifically to head off future lawsuits. The takeaway for economists: our models of “what if” climate scenarios still largely assume states and firms are free to choose their level of ambition. Increasingly, they’re not: legal obligations are starting to define the boundaries of that choice, and litigation is becoming a real lever for shifting incentive structures.
Energy citizenship, beyond acceptance
In the session “Social Norms, Identity, and Values: Well-Being Beyond Consumerism”, Nives Della Valle presented the research of the Public Engagement Task on citizens’ engagement with emerging energy technologies, namely renewable hydrogen, CCUS, and advanced nuclear.
The starting point was that most existing research asks whether citizens accept a technology and which factors can drive it, but says less about whether and how they want to be engaged in decisions about it. Equally, someone who doubts a technology fits a vision of a just energy future may still want a genuine say in its development. Framing this through energy citizenship, understood broadly, from everyday practices to sitting at the decision-making table, let us ask what engagement means to citizens, rather than assuming that more participation is automatically better or that non-participation reflects indifference.
That framing resonated with several other studies presented at the conference. A recurring theme was how ambiguous, and often top-down, the language of “social acceptability” is: it tends to cast citizens as simply accepting or resisting a plan that has already been decided, rather than as people with their own views on the technology itself, and on how that decision should have been made in the first place. Other presentations pushed on legitimacy more directly, arguing that a measure’s legitimacy cannot be assumed just because it is technically necessary or scientifically sound: it has to be earned, by genuinely hearing the voices of those affected.
Energy as a right, and is lack cannot be a shame
If there was one idea that may have tied the whole conference together, it’s this: energy should be treated as a universal basic service, not a commodity you either can or can’t afford. A UK study of a low-income Leeds neighbourhood found residents didn’t spontaneously name energy as among the potential universal basic services. The following discussion suggested that it could be that energy felt too private to claim as a right, as its lack is tied up with shame. Compare that with public transport, which people do readily discuss as a universal basic service, even while worrying it isn’t fiscally realistic to offer for free, for fear of overuse. That asymmetry says a lot about how differently we’ve been taught to think about different services and about energy commodification.
This connects to a broader normative debate running through several sessions: sufficiency. Sufficiency isn’t growth, and it isn’t degrowth by another name: it’s the more normative question of what counts as “enough” to live well within planetary boundaries, and who gets to decide. Unlike efficiency and consistency (doing things right), sufficiency is explicitly about doing the right thing, which makes it inherently a matter of justice: distributive (enough of what, for whom), procedural (who decides), recognitional (whose deprivation counts), and capability-based (enough to do what with your life).
What the Public Engagement Task carries forward
The single biggest reminder from four days in Ghent: a research community’s real strength lies in the diversity of the lenses it brings to bear: historians and lawyers alongside economists, philosophers alongside modellers, ethnographers, alongside behavioural scientists. Climate and energy inequality is not a problem that yields to any one discipline’s tools. It takes ownership analysis to see who benefits; legal analysis to see how obligations can be enforced; ethnography to hear who is too ashamed to name their own needs as rights; and a genuinely interdisciplinary sense of “enough” to imagine and start building an economy organised around care, belonging, relationships and wellbeing within planetary boundaries, rather than around growth for its own sake.