# **Energy Poverty, Practice, and Policy**

Catherine Butler

## Progressive Energy Policy

#### Series Editors

Caroline Kuzemko, The University of Warwick, Coventry, UK Catherine Mitchell, University of Exeter, Penryn, UK Andreas Goldthau, Royal Holloway University of London, Egham, UK Alain Nadaï, International Research Centre on Environment and Development (CIRED-CNRS), Nogent-sur-Marne, France Shunsuke Managi, Kyushu University, Fukuoka, Japan

Progressive Energy Policy is a new series that seeks to be pivotal in nature and improve our understanding of the role of energy policy within processes of sustainable, secure and equitable energy transformations. The series brings together authors from a variety of academic disciplines, as well as geographic locations, to reveal in greater detail the complexities and possibilities of governing for change in energy systems. Each title in this series will communicate to academic as well as policymaking audiences key research findings designed to develop understandings of energy transformations but also about the role of policy in facilitating and supporting innovative change. Individual titles will often be theoretically informed but will always be firmly evidence-based seeking to link theory and policy to outcomes and changing practices. Progressive Energy Policy is focussed on whole energy systems not stand alone issues; inter-connections within and between systems; and on analyses that moves beyond description to evaluate and unpack energy governance systems and decisions.

More information about this series at https://link.springer.com/bookseries/15052 Catherine Butler

# Energy Poverty, Practice, and Policy

Catherine Butler University of Exeter Exeter, UK

#### Progressive Energy Policy ISBN 978-3-030-99431-0 ISBN 978-3-030-99432-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99432-7

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2022. This book is an open access publication.

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## Acknowledgements

First and foremost, thanks go to my husband Ian Wilson for his unending support in all things, without which this book would never have been completed. I would like to thank Dr. Karen Parkhill for working with me (amid much upheaval and change) in developing and delivering the research project on which this book is based and for her hugely important, thoughtful, and constructive comments on an earlier draft. Similarly, thanks go to Sarah Royston for incredibly insightful, helpful, and kind comments on an even earlier version. Big thanks go to Karen Bickerstaff, Gordon Walker, and Paulina Luzecka for their contributions to the research and project, and for generally being inspiring, excellent people to work with. Sincere thanks also go to the research participants who gave up their time and insights as part of the project. And thanks go to Rachael Ballard, Aishwarya Balachandar, and Helen van der Stelt at Palgrave-Macmillan for sticking with me for far longer than I (and I'm sure they) had ever imagined! Finally, the research was supported by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) under the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council award EP/M008150/1.

## About This Book

Energy poverty represents a pressing policy issue that intersects with wider concerns about inequality in society and cuts across different areas of governance. This book examines the implications of welfare policy for energy poverty, engaging with key academic conceptual debates at the forefront of energy demand research. These debates concern academic research that has given focus to the multiple factors that create and shape experiences of energy poverty. And work that has examined processes through which everyday social practices require increasing levels of energy use with impacts on sustainability. This book develops an analysis that reveals how novel insights can be made visible through combining these different ways of thinking about energy demand issues. It presents a distinctive approach to examining energy poverty that places inequalities at the heart of debates about the advancing energy intensity of contemporary societies. In doing so, it contributes to the frontiers of energy poverty research and responds to critiques of social-practice-informed analyses of energy demand that highlight the limited attention given to inequalities within such work.

## Contents

## About the Author

**Dr. Catherine Butler** is Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at University of Exeter. Her research centres around analysis of environmental governance processes with focus on the intersections between policy, politics, and everyday life. She has published extensively on topics including energy transitions in everyday life, behavioural change and social practice, wellbeing impacts of floods, and governance of climate adaptation. This book arises out of her four-year EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council) funded project that looked at how welfare policy has had implications for issues of energy demand.

## Abbreviations

# Introduction

**Abstract** This introductory chapter outlines the book's central concern with energy poverty and sets the context for the arguments addressed and advanced through its pages. A significant existing literature has examined issues of energy poverty, with key interventions using concepts of energy vulnerability, precarity, and capabilities. But an equally large body of work has examined problems of reducing energy demand by focusing on the importance of reshaping and shifting practices. Though these two major literatures on energy demand issues occasionally intersect, they have rarely been brought into direct conversation with one another. The book examines issues of energy poverty with focus on advancing conceptual debates by engaging with ideas that span these two areas, principally those concerning capabilities, precarity, and practice. In doing so, it contributes to the frontiers of energy poverty research and responds to critiques of practice-informed analyses of energy demand that highlight the limited attention given to inequalities within such work.

**Keywords** Energy poverty · Capabilities · Practice theory · Invisible energy policy · Energy needs

#### Energy Poverty, Practice, and (Invisible Energy) Policy

Energy poverty refers to issues that span access to energy, energy deprivation, and its under-use within daily life. Broadly, the central concern of research and policy in this space is with the negative outcomes that a lack of energy use has for wellbeing. Within the UK and many other global contexts, the focus has often been on those that cannot afford to heat their homes, with solutions posed as ones principally involving building efficiency and to a lesser extent affordability. Within the academic literature, however, there has been increasing recognition of the complex and multifaceted set of issues involved in both creating and addressing problems of energy poverty. This body of work has made key conceptual interventions that put forward important arguments about how energy poverty can, or even should be, understood. These concern centrally a shift beyond a focus on heat, efficiency, and affordability to take in a much wider range of issues, dimensions, and dynamics that are important in shaping energy poverty.

One such area of conceptual development has been in the move from understanding energy poverty as a static state that a person is either 'in' or not, to analysis of the conditions that shape or lead to such experiences—termed energy vulnerability (see Bouzarovski, 2018). Though this step within understanding has been extremely important, it has also been critiqued for displacing focus from the wider structural and social processes implicated in creating conditions of energy poverty. This is because vulnerabilities research tends to examine the characteristics and capacities of the person (such as whether someone is disabled, young, elderly, low income, and so forth), consequently individualising the causes of energy poverty (Middlemiss & Gillard, 2015).

Moving beyond this, then, energy poverty scholars, such as Bouzarovski and Petrova (2015), Petrova (2018), Day et al. (2016), Simcock et al. (2016), and Middlemiss et al. (2019), have worked with concepts of energy services, precarity, and capabilities offering a stronger basis for analysis of the socio-political dynamics shaping experiences of energy poverty. This work marks several important shifts within understandings of energy poverty. First, Bouzarovski and Petrova (2015) have engaged the concept of energy services to bring focus on the benefits that people derive from using energy, such as mobility, lighting, cooking, and so on, rather than the energy itself. This entails recognition of the ways that domestic energy poverty is only fully understood by looking across multiple energy services and their interconnections, as well as taking analysis beyond the confines of the home. It also brings focus on the ways that fulfilment of energy needs underpins many of the 'functionings' that enable people to have a (minimally) decent quality of life (Bouzarovski & Petrova, 2015, p. 34; see also Simcock et al., 2016).

This work highlights the importance of examining the driving forces of energy poverty in terms of the ways that abilities to meet energy service needs are affected by multiple factors. Such factors include vulnerabilities but also encompass the 'concatenation of activities, infrastructures, and resources necessary to provide households with energy' (Bouzarovski & Petrova, 2015, p. 35). A concern with provisioning thus brings into view the combination of social, economic, political, and infrastructural factors that contribute to people being in positions of energy poverty.

Second, a set of interventions have built on this to bring conceptual focus on the capabilities framework as a way to create a more sophisticated understanding of energy poverty (e.g. Day et al., 2016; Middlemiss et al., 2019). This draws centrally on the work of Sen (1999) and Nussbaum (2011) where 'capabilities' to support opportunities for functioning and achieving wellbeing are argued to be central to human development. Capabilities include things like the ability to secure healthy food, or to engage politically, or secure income. This framework, and its attendant concepts, has been advanced within the energy poverty literature as a key way to engage with more complex understandings of the issues. Central to this is recognition that many capabilities are underpinned by or related to various energy services. Starting from the capabilities that energy affords offers a conceptual approach that can draw in the wide range of human needs that energy is utilised in meeting and, therefore, the multiple social and political processes involved in the conditioning of energy poverty. Energy poverty analysis has, then, come a long way from a narrow focus on issues of heat, efficiency, and cost, moving towards approaches that emphasise *what energy is for* and recognise the complexities of the dynamics shaping both its causes and the nature of lived experiences.

Within these conceptual developments, which have come to shape debates about energy poverty, scholars make occasional references across to the major theoretical advances arising from a wider energy demand research agenda that is grounded in practice theory (e.g. Bouzarovski & Petrova, 2015; Day et al., 2016). The practice theory-inspired literature has been primarily concerned with issues of environmental sustainability related to energy demand, mounting an important critique of behavioural or efficiency approaches within policy (e.g. Shove, 2010, 2017). This critique asserts that such approaches are highly limited because they fail to engage with more fundamental questions concerning how our particular requirements for energy are constructed and reproduced (e.g. see Shove, 2003; Shove et al., 2012).

Shove (2003), amongst others, has asserted that rather than focusing on improving the efficiency of technologies that support and engender particular kinds of practices, energies should be directed towards examining the specification of need and the processes by which various forms of demand come to be considered normal. Equally, to understand why people do or do not buy more efficient technologies or drive more frequently, the challenge becomes one of 'understanding the collective transformation of convention and hence the dynamics of energy demand' (Shove, 2004: 1055). This approach to thinking about energy demand gives cause to examine the ways that everyday practice is shaped and comes to be seen as normal. In this, analyses have demonstrated the role of government objectives, investments, and ways of working in shaping social practice and, in doing so, constituting the need for energy in the home, at work, and in moving around.

Indeed, an emerging area of practice theory-inspired energy research has sought to explicitly examine the role of government strategies, policies, and processes in shaping practices with implications both for how we understand problems of energy demand and for how we define the parameters of relevant governance (Butler et al., 2018; Cox et al., 2019; Gormally et al., 2019; Greene & Fahy, 2020; Royston et al., 2018). A central claim of this work is that requirements for energy are shaped, shifted, and constituted through a wide range of different intersecting policy areas, reaching far beyond energy policy *per se*. This body of emerging work has coined the terms 'invisible' or 'non-energy' policy as ways to characterise the analytic endeavour. A range of policy areas have been addressed under this remit, including education (Gormally et al., 2019; Royston, 2016), health (Blue, 2017), digital communications (Morley et al., 2018), and in my own work, welfare policy (Butler et al., 2018). These analyses have worked to show how different policy areas have implications for energy demand and related issues.

These key ideas from within practice theory-based energy research have been developed within multiple studies addressed at the environmental sustainability implications of energy demand, but rarely have they been used to think about energy poverty. Conversely, a key critique of practice theory-based analyses of energy demand cites the inadequacy of such approaches to account for inequality and power relations (Walker, 2013). Though not inherent to wider practice theory (cf. Bourdieu, 1998; Foucault, 1991), relations of power and inequality have been largely neglected within practice-inspired energy demand research. A few existing conceptual contributions advance some areas of overlap, exploring inequality in discussions of practice theory and energy (e.g. Shove, 2002; Shove et al., 2012; Walker, 2013). But beyond this, these issues still remain largely unaddressed.

Within the energy poverty literature, the existing engagement with practice theory or practices (e.g. Bouzarovski & Petrova, 2015; Day et al., 2016; Petrova, 2018) has signalled some clear touchstones for the ways that practice-theory thinking can be relevant for understanding energy poverty. For example, it has been influential in discussions about the importance of focusing on the practices for which energy is used, rather than energy itself. But this has not entailed a more detailed analytic endeavour to look across practice-theory conceptual work or engage in a deeper conversation with the fields of inquiry it has inspired. Both literatures offer central ideas that I argue here could be taken much further to advance understanding of energy poverty, as well as open-up avenues for future practice-based energy research that can better attune to relations of inequality.

This book is ambitious in seeking to explore how these different distinctive areas of analysis can be further advanced through dialogue with one another, developing the conversation along key conceptual lines. These concern, first, an interest in the ways that the invisible energy policy agenda—as a nascent area of practice-inspired energy research has potential for thinking about energy poverty. In particular, I argue it can have important application for advancing existing energy poverty work that aims to bring the social and political processes shaping energy deprivation into view (cf. Petrova, 2018; Middlemiss, 2016).

For example, research has looked at the ways that energy deprivation is institutionalised and normalised through policy and governance with important implications for political mobilisation (Petrova, 2018). Analysis has also been addressed at the ways that *subjects* of fuel poverty policy are constituted in particular ways compared with other policy areas. For instance, Middlemiss (2016) highlights how fuel poverty subjects tend to be cast as vulnerable and worthy of support, contrasting this with subjects of welfare policy that are often situated as undeserving and as harbouring individual deficits. I argue here that these ideas can be brought into dialogue with those from invisible energy policy to advance the research agenda with power and inequal relations more firmly in view. Though the invisible energy policy agenda offers potential for greater consideration of power, such issues and related conditions of inequality have yet to form a focus. I assert, therefore, that bringing analytic attention within invisible energy policy work onto energy poverty offers distinctive possibilities for developing future analysis across both areas.

Second, I bring a focus on the constitution of need and social reproduction of practice arguing this offers novel routes to further understand how energy deprivation is created and how it might be addressed. Working with these conceptual ideas takes analysis beyond looking at how abilities to *meet needs* are affected by wider social and political dynamics, to consider the processes through which those needs are actively constituted in the first place. Importantly, this brings into view the implications of the advancing energy intensity of societies for energy deprivation. Further, I show how by exploring the constitution of need in relation to energy poverty, insights can be opened up into how relations of inequality and power shape processes of social reproduction with implications for practice theory-based energy research. Centrally, these insights concern the specific ways that power relations operate through governance to differentially shape people's agency to resist, negotiate, and enact practices.

The book thus draws a line from practice theory-inspired ideas, arising from work on transitions and invisible energy policy, through to energy poverty analysis, wherein debates about vulnerability, precarity, and capabilities are advanced. In addition to generating insights relevant to both these areas of conceptual and empirical analysis, the book also intersects with the wider theoretical traditions on which these literatures draw, centrally practice theory, wellbeing, and capabilities. Though these different conceptual areas are well worn within energy demand and energy poverty research respectively, they are rarely integrated. For example, wellbeing is already important in debates about energy poverty but has been less central to debates about the constitution of need that are core to practice theory-based analyses of energy. In threading these different conceptual areas together and working through them with an empirical analysis, the book seeks to make a contribution to theory that has a wider relevance for those outside of energy research.

#### The Empirical Study: Methods and Approach

The contributions of this book are developed through engagement with an empirical study that looked at UK welfare policy as an area of invisible or non-energy policy (see also Butler et al., 2018). Welfare policy represents a core part of governance systems for many countries and territories. It has a long history as a part of governance arrangements in capitalist democracies and has often been contentious forming a focus for ideologically driven political battles. Centrally, these battles concern how societies should or should not tackle inequality and are underpinned by beliefs about what creates inequality in the first place. In the UK, in particular, welfare and employment policy represents one of the government's highest expenditure areas and is frequently the focus of public debate and media attention. The importance of this policy area combined with its distance from specific energy directives denotes this as an interesting empirical case for examining 'invisible energy policy' or 'non-energy policy' (Royston et al., 2018).

By focusing on an area of policy outside of energy, the locus of analysis is shifted and, I argue, a different way of looking at energy demand issues is revealed. Crucially, it takes analysis beyond definitions and categorisations of energy problems as they are currently formulated within existing governance structures. Here, I use this different orientation and starting point to provide distinctive insights into energy poverty and advance new lines of questioning concerning the processes by which energy demand is re/produced and created.

The three-year (2015–2018) project consisted of methods including document analysis, in-depth qualitative and biographical interviews, and workshops. Each method and the approach adopted within the project are explained here. The project involved detailed analysis of key documentary materials relevant to the project aims. This focused on documents related to contemporary welfare reforms and energy demand policy arising from the two UK government departments with responsibilities in this area—namely the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) and the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS—and the former Department of Energy and Climate Change [DECC]). Documents analysed included parliamentary speeches, political party election manifestos, reports, strategy documents, presentations, academic literature, and government department websites. The documents selected included ones predating the start of the research project in 2015, spanning back to the early 1980s. However, the focus for the document analysis was primarily on the time-period since 2010 when a Conservative led Government was elected in the UK. This time-period was selected as a focus because it marked the beginnings of major contemporary welfare reforms.

The interviews involved a total of 62 participants with people implicated in different ways in governance across energy and welfare policy. This spanned people involved in; (1) national policy, including civil servants, agencies, and NGOs; (2) those in professional governance roles at city scales, such as within local government, agencies, and charities; and (3) people directly affected by welfare policy within their everyday lives. The research thus takes in different actors implicated in processes of governance, looking far beyond the state. In-depth interviews lasting 1– 3 hours were conducted between September 2015 and July 2017 in two phases. A first phase engaged with those in national roles, while a second phase moved to focus on two city case study areas interviewing people working in agencies and organisations implicated in welfare and/or energy policy, as well as those directly affected.

The city case study areas selected were, York in the North-East of England and Bristol in the South-West of England. The interviews with people across these two case study cities offered insight into the ways that national policies are made manifest and negotiated as part of professional roles and everyday lives. While more conventional in-depth qualitative interviewing techniques were employed for those in professional and stakeholder roles, biographical interview techniques were utilised for those directly affected by welfare policies. This approach to interviewing focuses discussion on people's lives and their experiences eliciting narratives that reach backward and forward in time. It can be useful for studies, such as this one, that are seeking to build insight into complexity and often non-linear processes of intersection; in this case between policies and everyday life experiences (see Butler et al., 2014). The relevance of experience-centred approaches to examining governance has been foreshadowed within the literature on non-energy policy and energy demand more generally (e.g. Butler et al., 2014, 2016; Greene & Fahy, 2020). Such an approach offers insight into the ways that people integrate, respond to, and negotiate policy as part of their everyday lives, as well as bringing social differentiation and power relations more sharply into focus. By looking across these varied experiences and addressing different lines of questioning the project was able to build insight into the intersections between both the personal and political or the public and private, and different areas of policy that, while distinct at national scales, are intimately interwoven within the fabric of people's everyday lives. A final phase of the research involved three workshops (participant *n* = 28) with those working in roles related to welfare policy and/or energy to bring focus on possibilities for change that might arise out of considering invisible energy policy. These were held in 2018 across London, York, and Bristol engaging both national stakeholders and those from our city case sites. They offered further insight into the nature of policy intersections across welfare reform and energy poverty, as well as the potential openings, and constraints, for change.

The book does not develop a complete or exhaustive analysis of the data derived from the project. Rather, the empirical material is used in a more circumscribed way to draw together and engage with the core themes and ideas with which the book is concerned. This entails focus on the intersections of energy poverty and practice-based research, and on interweaving conceptual directions associated with capabilities, the constitution and specification of need, and invisible energy policy. The empirical analysis takes a first step towards realising insights that can be made visible by thinking across these different theoretical developments, and advances possibilities for future inquiry at the intersections. In this, greater focus is given to the biographical interviews with those directly affected by welfare policy in their everyday lives. However, the wider data and study inform and foreground the analysis, for example, by offering understanding of the core policy changes that are reflected in people's accounts of their life experiences.

For ethical purposes, the presentation of quotes as part of the empirical analysis does not attribute them using names of interviewees and/or their organisations. Instead, generic identifiers are used, with interview extracts labelled using the tags of 'biographical interviewee' and 'stakeholder interviewee' (either local or national), as well as the case site location and a participant number. These identifiers are not significant to the analysis *per se* but are used to distinguish between different interviewees.

## The Book's Structure

Throughout the book, I develop several areas of contribution that emerge from both conceptual analysis and engagement with the empirical materials outlined above. These contributions are advanced through the book's chapters as follows.

The opening two chapters explore the conceptual lines from within energy demand research that are of central concern in the book, looking at *Poverty* (Chapter 2) and *Practice* (Chapter 3) literatures. Chapter 2 synthesises key conceptual debates at the cutting edge of energy poverty research and contributes to thinking about how a capabilities-based analysis can be taken forward. Chapter 3 discusses key ideas arising from practice theory-inspired work—including those relating to the constitution of demand and invisible energy policy. It reflects on the ways that inequality can be (and has been) thought about within practice-theory energy research, as well as on how bringing energy poverty concerns into focus raises distinctive possibilities and avenues for analysis.

Chapter 4 moves to focus on *Policy.* It reviews the policy landscape relating to energy demand, with focus on the ways that fuel poverty has been defined and addressed. It examines change and continuity in policy over time reviewing past and present initiatives and strategies, and reflects on the gulf that exists between contemporary policy definitions of fuel poverty and academic analysis in this space. It then introduces the welfare policy case, as an area of invisible energy policy, outlining key policy changes and developments within this area that are relevant to the empirical analysis, as well as discussing points of connection and disconnect across to energy policy within this sphere.

The next two chapters (5 & 6) use key examples from the empirical data to show how combining ideas across the energy poverty and practicebased energy demand literatures can be important in bringing to light insights and avenues for further research. Chapter 5 focuses on how the invisible energy policy agenda can be advanced in relation to issues of energy poverty by looking at the case of UK welfare policy and its role in shaping energy deprivation. Building from the capabilities-based understanding of energy poverty, discussed in Chapter 2, the analytic endeavour takes forward thinking on invisible energy policy by going beyond examination of the ways welfare policies more directly affect energy deprivation. Although such direct forms of policy impact are discussed, the analysis moves to look at how wider political discourses that pervade different policy areas (cf. Middlemiss, 2016) are shaping experiences and manifestations of energy poverty in important ways. In particular, it offers insights regarding the normalisation and institutionalisation of energy precarity (see Petrova, 2018), looking at how such processes are intertwined with (non-energy) policy discourses and approaches.

Chapter 6 once again builds from a capabilities-based understanding of energy poverty, but the focus in this chapter is on ideas from practice theory that concern the constitution of need through (invisible energy) policy. It reflects on how arguments concerning the ways that needs come to be specified have relevance for energy poverty research by looking at how needs are created and imposed through welfare policy reform. Crucially, in this chapter focus is brought onto questions not only of whether people can meet needs, but also of how those needs are created, as well as how abilities to resist, negotiate, and constitute needs are also unequal. With emphasis on invisible energy policy, the analysis in the chapter develops deeper understanding of how power relations and inequality figure in the constitution of practices. It does so by making explicit the role of policy in processes of constitution and by highlighting how different policy areas act on their subjects in ways that reflect patterns of inequality. This suggests the importance, then, of a deeper analysis of inequality for practice-based understandings of social action. Finally, Chapter 7 concludes the book with reflection on the implications for energy poverty research, for practice theory and invisible energy policy, and for wider contexts of policy and practice.

#### *And finally… a note on key terms…*

The terms fuel poverty and energy poverty are often used to denote problems of energy deprivation across Global North and Global South countries respectively (Bouzarovski & Petrova, 2015). Fuel poverty, as such, often refers more to issues of energy affordability—particularly that associated with heating and cooling—while energy poverty tends to be used in reference to issues of energy access associated with lack of infrastructure and technology. In this book, I use the term fuel poverty to refer to narrower definitions of energy deprivation (e.g. as related primarily to heat), while energy poverty is utilised to refer to wider understandings taking in multiple and diverse uses of energy, including mobility and domestic heating and non-heat uses (e.g. lighting, computing). I also use the terms energy vulnerability, energy precarity, and energy capabilities but these are discussed in detail in Chapter 2. Other key terms include *practice-based* or *inspired energy research* (also see Walker, 2013), which I use to refer to the body of energy research that arises primarily from Shove's (e.g. 2003; with Pantzar and Watson, 2012) conceptual development of practice theory through application to environmental sustainability.

#### References

#### 14 C. BUTLER

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CHAPTER 2

## Poverty and Energy Demand

**Abstract** The starting point for this book is to explicate key conceptual interventions within the large body of existing work on energy poverty. This chapter discusses the trajectories of this research tradition from analyses focused more narrowly on notions of fuel poverty to those foregrounding issues of energy vulnerability, and through to concepts of precarity and capabilities. It examines the frontiers of analysis engaging with work that has sought to move beyond preoccupations with heat and the spatial domain of the home and advance more complex understandings of the issues. The chapter concludes setting out the key tenets of the literature and discussing how conceptualisations can be further advanced in analysis of energy poverty.

**Keywords** Fuel poverty · Energy poverty · Energy vulnerability · Capabilities · Precarity

## Introduction

Brenda Broadman (1991) is often credited with bringing prominence to fuel poverty as a focus for academic analysis. Her work underpinned the formulation of a key definition for fuel poverty within the UK. This definition positioned fuel poverty as arising in contexts where a household spends more than 10% of their income to afford adequate domestic

© The Author(s) 2022 C. Butler, *Energy Poverty, Practice, and Policy*, Progressive Energy Policy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99432-7\_2

energy services, particularly heat (though electricity for other energy uses such as lighting was also incorporated). An understanding of fuel poverty as related primarily to the ability of households to heat their homes to an adequate standard has since been pervasive across both academic and policy analysis (Simcock et al., 2016). In application, particularly in the UK, this focus has combined with a tendency to characterise fuel poverty as an issue experienced by older people (Day & Hitchings, 2011; Simcock et al., 2016). Such approaches to the analysis of fuel poverty have, however, been critiqued for failing to engage with lived experiences and underlying systemic causes, as well as for working from a narrow definition of the relevant energy uses to be considered (e.g. Bouzarovski & Petrova, 2015; Day et al., 2016; Gillard et al., 2017; Middlemiss & Gillard, 2015; Petrova, 2018; Simcock et al., 2016; Walker et al., 2016).

Academic debates about fuel poverty have advanced taking in the wider subfield of energy justice and introducing new concepts that offer a deeper basis for engagement with these issues (e.g. Bouzarovski & Petrova, 2015; Day & Walker, 2013; Day et al., 2016). In particular, the concepts of energy vulnerability, precarity, and capabilities have gained traction and discussion has moved on from a focus on older people, heat, and costs versus income towards consideration of the multifaceted nature of fuel poverty (e.g. Bouzarvoski, 2018; Bouzarovksi & Petrova, 2015; Gillard et al., 2017; Middlemiss & Gillard, 2015; Petrova, 2018; Simcock et al., 2016). These multidimensional understandings have also sought to traverse a traditional spatial focus on domestic social contexts, looking at interconnections and relationality beyond the home (Bouzarovski & Petrova, 2015; Day et al., 2016; Middlemiss et al., 2019). However, though mobilities are raised within this work as an area of energy poverty (e.g. Middlemiss et al., 2019), analyses have not yet gone as far as to connect with the burgeoning literature on transport poverty (e.g. Mattioli, 2017; Robinson & Mattioli, 2020). This literature offers important insights regarding the negative impacts of transport poverty in terms of wellbeing, hardship, and social exclusion, as well as advancing understanding of the drivers.

Scholarship building from a concern with transport poverty has also sought to make connections with the domestic energy poverty literature. Robinson and Mattioli (2020) take forward an extensive quantitative analysis of the potential within England for 'double energy vulnerability'—a situation whereby a household is doubly vulnerable to both domestic and transport poverty. However, the analyses in this area tend to be primarily substantive in focus engaging far less with the conceptual debates that have characterised the domestic energy poverty field.

This chapter discusses these key debates, concerns, and conceptual advances that characterise contemporary energy poverty research. In this, it brings together substantive insights from across fuel and transport poverty, conceptual concerns spanning ideas of vulnerabilities, precarity, and capabilities, and key issues that have been raised through engagement with lived experiences. Through discussion of these different contributions, I seek to advance conceptual understanding and set out an approach to energy poverty that encompasses the multiple dimensions, concerns, and spaces across this wide-ranging literature.

#### From Fuel Poverty to Energy Vulnerability and Precarity

Fuel poverty has gained prominence in academic research and policy since the 1980s but in recent years it has come to the fore as a prominent global issue that has been allied with problems of energy access (Bouzarovski & Petrova, 2015). Issues related to energy and poverty have come to be recognised within academic research as multifaceted phenomena that are constituted through interaction between multiple personal, social, economic, and political dimensions. Bouzarovski et al. (2021) have highlighted how energy poverty research has expanded well beyond concerns with low incomes, high energy prices, and residential energy efficiency. Instead, recent research trajectories have focused on a wide range of factors that produce *vulnerability* to energy poverty, as well as emphasising differences in lived experience across people and place (e.g. Butler & Sherriff, 2017; Gillard et al., 2017; Middlemiss & Gillard, 2015; Petrova & Simcock, 2019).

As an approach, 'energy vulnerabilities' have been argued to 'help draw a distinction between energy or fuel poverty as a descriptor of a state within a certain temporal frame, on the one hand, and vulnerability as a set of conditions leading to such circumstances, on the other' (Bouzarovski, 2018, p. 18). Indeed, Middlemiss and Gillard (2015, p. 147) have defined energy vulnerability as: 'the likelihood of a household being subject to fuel poverty, the sensitivity of that household to fuel poverty, and the capacity that household has to adapt to changes in fuel poverty'. But they also highlight how this is 'somewhat unsatisfactory' given its failure to engage with the complexity of lived experience. They discuss some of the critiques of 'vulnerability' and the linked concept of 'resilience'. They highlight arguments concerning the tendency of these concepts to depoliticise vulnerability challenges by individualising and displacing responsibility away from the wider social and political sphere. For Middlemiss and Gillard (2015), however, this does not mean vulnerability must be abandoned altogether but, rather, that it requires recognition of dimensions of power when used.

One of the departure points for energy vulnerability research, then, is the realisation that fuel poverty is not a static condition but is better understood in terms of the factors that might cause its emergence (Bouzarovski, 2018; Day & Walker, 2013; Meyer et al., 2018; Middlemiss & Gillard, 2015). Such factors that contribute to its emergence in domestic homes have been described as: quality of dwelling fabric; tenancy relations; energy costs and supply; stability of household income; social relations in and out of the household; and ill health (Middlemiss & Gillard, 2015, p. 149). Added to this are institutional and socio-political factors that shape vulnerabilities across different geographic contexts (Bouzarovski et al., 2015; Petrova & Prodromidou, 2019; Bouzarovski et al., 2021). This positions the responses to fuel poverty as ones that involve addressing the wider underlying factors that can see people move in or out of fuel poverty across different times and spaces (Bouzarovski et al., 2021; Middlemiss & Gillard, 2015). Here a focus on precarity has been used in efforts to characterise energy poverty and deepen the concept of energy vulnerability.

In particular, Petrova (2018) has given the concept of precarity a central place in understanding the constitution of energy vulnerability. She argues that while *precariousness* is a shared condition related, for example, to a particular sector such as housing, energy *precarity* is a politically induced phenomenon that is only generated under certain circumstances. Petrova explains that the concept of precarity, widely explored in other literature outside of energy research, has roots in Bourdieu's practice theoretical analysis and characterises people that are both vulnerable and marginalised but also transformative as a class of people in-the-making. In this sense, she highlights how the concept of precarity overcomes some of the critiques associated with 'vulnerability' and the related concept of resilience by positioning it as a politically induced phenomenon that also affords 'agency for political change and emancipation' (2018, p. 19). As such Petrova (2018, p. 20) argues that 'energy precarity' can be used as:

a double signifier that calls attention to the performative experience of multiple vulnerabilities in the home, while illuminating the political and institutional embeddedness of fuel poverty.

In this way, she proposes energy precarity as a complementary concept to those of fuel poverty and energy vulnerability suggesting that it expands 'understandings of energy deprivation beyond the home, and [links] them with the institutional and political circumstances that may im/mobilise particular socio-demographic groups to act on the issue' (Petrova, 2018, p. 20). Here, attention is brought onto the conditioning of precarity through wider social, political, and economic dynamics. For example, Petrova highlights how within the UK's private-rented and houses in multiple occupation (HMO) sectors, a lack of strategic governance and reliance on voluntary improvements by landlords has contributed to the dominance of poorly insulated and old homes. She further argues that the short-term and transient nature of much of the occupancy of private-rented accommodation in the UK disincentivises landlords from improving housing, as well as contributing to a normalisation of energy deprivation amongst young people. Petrova explains 'accepting the mainstream framing of poor living conditions as provisional and nonpermanent made living in fuel poverty tolerable for the interviewees' (2018, p. 26). Ultimately, Petrova shows how these socially and politically constituted trends in the UK private-rented sector shape experiences of energy deprivation.

The concepts of energy vulnerability and (following Petrova) precarity thus allow for a stronger characterisation of the variability of circumstances and processes through which experiences of energy deprivation are made manifest. Precarity, however, arguably has greater potential to move beyond the often neoliberal, individualised characterisations of energy deprivation that have tended to pervade the concept of vulnerability. Despite this, both energy vulnerability and precarity have proven useful for thinking outside of the preoccupations of particular contexts (such as domestic settings) and engaging with inequalities relating to energy use in less constrained ways, such as those dictated by frequently narrow policy definitions.

This is borne out by analyses that have specifically sought to think about energy poverty issues more expansively, moving past the conventional focus on particular energy uses (e.g. heat) and specific demographics (e.g. older people). In this vein, Simcock et al. (2016) bring focus on non-heat related energy uses, giving emphasis to domestic *electricity* using energy services. Looking at the UK case, their analysis shows how despite inclusion of non-heat home energy uses within policy (e.g. electric appliance use), there remains a strong emphasis on heat as the main focus for policy and governance responses. They assert that there is 'significant scope for further investigation… on how and why vulnerable households may suffer "under -consumption" in *non-heating* energy-uses, and moreover on how this impacts upon different dimensions of people's quality of life' (2016, p. 37).

They also highlight the need for more forward-looking analyses of energy vulnerabilities that account for wider societal changes and shifts in the nature of basic necessities, highlighting consumer electronics as an important area for research (Simcock et al., 2016). Petrova (2018) similarly emphasises the importance of examining non-heat energy services in her work on the experiences of younger people; a demographic not typically addressed by energy poverty research. She shows the heightened importance of energy services connected to information and communication technologies within the lives of younger people, highlighting the significance of looking beyond both heat and older people in energy poverty research. Beyond this, a small but important body of work has brought focus on low income and disabled people (e.g. Gillard et al., 2017; Snell et al., 2015) as groups that are inadequately recognised and addressed through existing fuel poverty policy.

The shift to look beyond the prior preoccupations of energy poverty research and policy encompassing multiple dimensions, varied energy services, and different demographic groups has been accompanied by calls to move outside a focus on the spatial context of the home. This has taken different forms with some arguing for greater attentiveness to the ways that domestic energy deprivation is negotiated and constituted beyond the confines of the home (Bouzarovski & Petrova, 2015; Petrova, 2018). For example, Petrova (2018) highlights how the young people in her study often deployed strategies of visiting others or spending time in other spaces to which they had access, like offices or libraries, to mitigate their energy deprivation. Others have led calls to look at the intersections between domestic energy poverty and transport poverty (e.g. Robinson & Mattioli, 2020), seeking to bring focus on the relevance of mobilities for energy poverty research. Here, analysis highlights the lack of research addressing the intersections between transport poverty and domestic energy poverty. Though the emergence of more complex spatially integrated understandings offers significant potential to open-up analysis to mobilities, such integration has yet to form a focus for much empirical analysis within energy poverty research. The transport poverty literature has, however, begun to develop analyses that seek to bridge the divide, and it is to discussion of this the following section turns.

#### Bringing Transport Poverty and Mobilities into Focus

As highlighted above, an important precursor to work that seeks to draw mobilities into the wider domain of energy poverty research is found in the transport poverty literature. The body of literature around transport poverty, with links to work on mobility and social exclusion (e.g. Cass et al., 2005; Currie, 2011), emerged initially largely in isolation from work on domestic energy vulnerability and fuel poverty (Robinson & Mattioli, 2020). This research tradition has long addressed issues of car access, transport affordability, costs of motoring, and vulnerability to fuel price increases, with issues of 'forced car ownership' shaping research agendas in this space (e.g. Currie, 2011; Currie et al., 2007; Mattioli, 2017; Mattioli et al., 2017). Analysis of socio-spatial configurations has also formed a focus bringing into view the relations between income, place of dwelling, accessibility, and vulnerability to transport poverty (e.g. Curl et al., 2011; Mattioli, 2017). However, the work in this space has rarely engaged with the conceptual debates that characterise some of the wider energy poverty literature. It has developed instead focusing on concepts of social exclusion, accessibility, and more recently justice, producing distinctive insights.

For instance, Mullen and Marsden (2016) have used a justice conceptual lens to highlight the longstanding set of processes that have favoured private car travel as the primary mode of transport within the UK as pertinent to social exclusion. They argue that mobility systems that privilege those who can access a private vehicle and afford to use it raises important justice concerns as it inhibits the welfare of those for whom it is not possible (e.g. those without economic means to support car use). This suggests the importance of examining how demands for specific forms of travel are constituted over time, something that aligns with practice-oriented thinking about mobilities (discussed in the next chapter).

Though there is little work at the intersection of domestic and transport poverty, there are some notable contributions that have sought to bridge the divide. For example, Mattioli et al. (2017) offer an important comparison of fuel poverty and transport poverty. They argue that while transport affordability problems have typically been based on an analogy with the more dominant issue of fuel poverty, important conceptual differences between the two issues can be identified. For example, they discuss research that has shown how people are more likely to prioritise transport over other energy costs (such as heating), because of their requirements for work. This is suggestive of an important recursive link between employment and economic stress related to transport that they argue has no clear parallel in the context of fuel poverty (Mattioli et al., 2017). They assert the importance of examining the interaction between different dimensions of energy poverty (i.e. between fuel and transport poverty), given the connections and differences between them that have been identified. More broadly, they emphasise how the focus in most transport poverty research has been on car-dependency, rather than looking at mobilities and a diverse range of modal forms. And finally, they reflect a need, highlighted above (Petrova, 2018; Simcock et al., 2016), to examine the ways these issues affect different demographic groups beyond the elderly, given what they assert to be an overemphasis in policy on universal measures for older people.

In other work, Robinson and Mattioli (2020) have developed an analysis to show the relatively widespread occurrence of what they term 'double energy vulnerability' that arises where vulnerabilities to domestic energy poverty intersect with vulnerabilities to transport poverty. Developing a high-level spatial analysis, they look at the overlaps using quantitative indicators of vulnerability to transport and domestic energy poverty. They show that as many as 6% of neighbourhoods accounting for 3 million residents have a high propensity towards double energy vulnerability (Robinson & Mattioli, 2020). Though this work offers insights into the connections between transport and fuel poverty, I argue that it is important to go further and engage with mobilities as part of a broader conceptualisation. I propose that the conceptual advances in work developing vulnerability, precarity, and capabilities approaches can provide fertile ground for this. It is to a discussion of the interventions in energy poverty research developing capabilities-based analyses that I now turn.

#### The Capabilities Approach in Energy Poverty Research

A key intervention within the energy poverty literature has been to develop and apply a capabilities-based approach to understanding energy deprivation (Day et al., 2016; Middlemiss et al., 2019). This has built on existing work to facilitate understandings of energy poverty as a complex, multifaceted phenomenon, while also bringing focus on energy services and the connections between energy and human needs. As an approach to energy poverty, it has important appeal for the potential it holds to engage with the complexities of lived experiences and the manifold intersections that shape them.

The energy capabilities approach is predicated on Sen and Nussbaum's understanding of human wellbeing as requiring certain capabilities to support opportunities for functioning (see Sen, 1999; Nussbaum, 2003, 2011; Sen & Nussbaum, 1993). They argue that the focus for societal development should be on key basic functionings for human wellbeing, such as bodily health. They maintain, however, that there are multiple capabilities, such as the ability to secure healthy food, that underpin these basic functionings, and it is these capabilities that must be the goal because functionings can be an outcome of choice. For example, a person who has the means to secure food but chooses not to eat might have the same level of functioning as a person who does not have sufficient access to food, but these are clearly not the same.

Day et al. (2016), in particular, have applied this line of theorisation about human wellbeing to energy deprivation putting forward a framework for examining energy poverty. They draw on Smith and Seward's (2009) distinction between *basic capabilities*, such as maintaining good health, having social respect or being educated, and *secondary capabilities* that underpin basic capabilities, such as washing clothes or storing and preparing food or accessing information and resources. Day et al. argue that many of these secondary capabilities often require energy in some form and relate therefore to different energy services (see Fig. 2.1 from Day et al., 2016, p. 260)

They further highlight how the energy needs required to fulfil different capabilities are shaped by particular characteristics and circumstances (e.g. whether you are young, old, disabled, healthy or ill), material factors (e.g. the type of home you live in, the local climate), and the availability of

**Fig. 2.1** Conceptualising the relationship between energy, services, and outcomes

energy services beyond the home (such as through wider societal infrastructure and community services). This understanding, thus, connects to ideas of energy vulnerability in denoting the characteristics, circumstances, and materials that shape experiences of energy poverty.

They add to this an explanation of how societal norms, such as those pertaining to cleanliness, shape energy service needs in terms of how they relate to the basic and secondary capabilities. For example, in the UK showering every day has become a normal expectation for most people to ensure social respect is maintained. This means that many secondary capabilities, which for Day et al. underpin basic capabilities, have variable implications for energy services and resource use depending on the specifics of place and the prevailing social norms. They arrive at a distinctive and flexible definition of energy poverty that is as follows:

an inability to realise essential capabilities as a direct or indirect result of insufficient access to affordable, reliable and safe energy services, and taking into account available reasonable alternative means of realising these capabilities. (Day et al., 2016, p. 260).

There are several implications of this alternative definition. First, it offers a multidimensional approach that is closer to understandings of energy poverty typically used in Global South contexts, which recognise the importance of energy for capabilities and wellbeing (Bouzarovski & Petrova, 2015; Day et al., 2016). It thus allows for a greater ability to perceive the complex interdependencies between energy and poverty (Bouzarovski, 2018). Second, it encompasses key assertions from energy vulnerability research by highlighting how different characteristics shape energy needs, as well as abilities to meet them. Third, it recognises the role of energy services but does not specify services giving the required flexibility to engage with different cultural and material contexts and societal norms (Day et al., 2016).

Fourth, it offers a means of making visible 'the effect of evolving social norms in constituting energy demand and, therefore, relative energy deprivation' and explicitly identifying such processes as spaces of intervention for alleviation of fuel poverty (2016, p. 262). Day et al. assert that 'energy poverty can involve not being able to engage in accepted social practices' (ibid.) and suggest interventions designed to reduce demand for energy services might be as relevant to alleviating energy poverty as they are to sustainability. For example, it brings into view questions about how capabilities might be supported in ways other than increasing the amount of energy required (e.g. building design that incorporates cooling, rather than air conditioning), and how there can be different ways of providing services beyond an individualised focus (e.g. through community-based provision of ICT infrastructure).

Such understandings are foreshadowed in debates about 'energy services' as a basis for characterising energy poverty (Bouzarovski & Petrova, 2015). Here, the emphasis is similarly on the functions that energy affords and the abilities that people have for achieving those functions to a satisfactory level. Thinking in this way lends itself to consideration of the wider technologies and dynamics involved in fulfilling energy services and thus implicated in experiences of energy poverty. Bouzarovski and Petrova (2015, p. 34) highlight how 'while studies of consumption and sustainability have often explored the ways that particular patterns of energy use are normalised via social practices and everyday routines, there has been little work on the levels of domestic energy services that households require for full participation in society' (Bouzarovski & Petrova, 2015, p. 34). They argue that such an emphasis on required service levels that allow for opportunities to undertake actions and activities offers an important starting point for advancing global efforts to understand and address energy poverty. This suggests the importance of looking at patterns of energy use within energy poverty research, but it stops short of questioning the processes through which needs are constituted.

The capabilities approach, and related analyses, thus offer a great deal in terms of facilitating understanding of energy poverty that moves away from the modelled measures and definitions characteristic of current policy (see Chapter 4 for discussion). However, I aim to develop these conceptual ideas further by engaging with some of the wider energy poverty literature discussed thus far, as well as some existing critical engagement (Middlemiss et al., 2019). This is addressed in the final section of this chapter.

#### Advancing an Approach to Energy Poverty

A useful mechanism for explicating the expanded capabilities approach to energy poverty proposed here is to work through the ways that the conceptualisation differs from Day et al.'s (2016) intervention. In discussing key areas of difference, other concepts and analytic ideas are brought in to advance an approach to energy poverty that synthesises and solidifies major aspects of thinking in this space.

First, in a similar way to others working with wider perspectives on energy poverty, Day et al. (2016) do not explicitly use the flexibility inherent in their conceptualisation to look across to mobilities. They focus on largely domestic energy services (e.g. heating, lighting), though they do engage with forms of service provisioning beyond the home. For example, they suggest that their definition gives room for energy services provisioning, such as washing, to be outside of the home via more communal modes of delivery (Day et al., 2016). The intention here, however, and one of the appeals of this approach to defining energy poverty, is that it can take in deprivation associated with travel and mobilities, as well as those related to domestic contexts. Given that mobilities have received little attention in the debates about defining energy poverty, it seems a missed opportunity not to use the capabilities approach to further open-up the conception. For this reason too, mobilities form a focus for key parts of the empirical analysis that comes in later chapters of this book.

A second point of distinction taken forward within the conceptualisation advanced here relates to arguments that Day et al. (2016) make about the need to distinguish between capabilities that are understood as essential, and those which are not, across different contexts and places. They suggest that there might be a need to decide 'threshold levels' for some basic and secondary capabilities (2016, p. 261). In discussing how this might be achieved, they refer to the wider capabilities literature and suggest two routes to identifying essential capabilities; to work from a list of capabilities (similar to that developed by Nussbaum) or to develop understanding of essential capabilities and their relationship to energy through some form of deliberative process within particular contexts (as advocated by Sen). Day et al. (2016) favour situated deliberation and grounded analyses of energy poverty as the best route to identifying essential capabilities.

However, while universal definitions (as developed by Nussbaum) have been challenged for lacking insight into important place-based differences, so too have relative characterisations that rely on deliberation as recommended by Sen. Indeed, this latter approach has been critiqued for obscuring relations of oppression and marginalisation that shape what people view as normal and acceptable in terms of human needs (Deneulin & McGregor, 2010; Mahali et al., 2018). Here, it is useful to reflect on Petrova's (2018) exploration of precarity as a concept that brings into view broader socio-political contexts and their implications for people's conceptions of fuel poverty.

It is possible to see how the argument that conceptions of need are shaped by socio-political conditions relates strongly to ideas of precarity that foreground the 'socio-institutional normalisation' of (energy) poverty in ways that 'immobilise' people from becoming politically active (Petrova, 2018, p. 18). In this context, while Day et al. (2016) suggest deliberation as a route to defining capabilities, I argue that such attempts to specify essential capabilities and their related energy requirements could do more to obscure connections and interrelations than they reveal. This is because, as Petrova's (2018) work demonstrates, people living without proper access to energy services to support basic capabilities do not necessarily problematise this deficit precisely because of processes of socio-political normalisation. This suggests a challenge to notions that the most fruitful way of taking forward a capabilities-based analysis of energy poverty lays in specifying capabilities and the links to energy.

For this reason, though the capabilities and energy services that are of interest for thinking about energy poverty must be discussed through analysis, I argue that it is not necessary (or perhaps desirable) to produce a comprehensive list of any sort. Indeed, I would suggest that the focus of analysis should not be on producing insight into the *range* of essential capabilities implicated in or affected by energy poverty as this would only serve to constrain and delimit the more flexible understanding of energy poverty that the capabilities framework affords. Instead, a capabilitiesbased approach could more fruitfully be used to facilitate an alertness to both a wide range of energy services beyond those that dominate debates *and* the interconnections between them and capabilities. Given this, in the later chapters of this book, the energy services addressed through the analysis are in no way exhaustive and do not address all areas of need. Rather, I select examples for the insights they give into the links between capabilities and energy services and for their relevance to understanding the dynamics of energy poverty.

The third area of difference concerns the different proposals for how to approach researching and analysing energy poverty using these wider conceptualisations. Where other analyses suggest a focus on energy services, needs, or the capabilities at issue, I adopt a biographical approach (see Butler et al., 2014) that places the person and their relational context at the centre. This prevents interconnections between different forms of energy poverty from being obscured and opens-up the analysis to complexity by engaging with lived experiences. I suggest it can facilitate movement past the traditional spatial boundedness of energy poverty research and offer a route to engaging with capabilities in a grounded way without the need to specify essential needs.

A fourth and final point concerns the way the relationship between capabilities and energy services has been depicted within energy capabilities work to date. Middlemiss et al. (2019) argue that Day et al. (2016) effectively suggest a sequential relationship between domestic energy services, secondary capabilities, and basic capabilities. This, they suggest, implies that basic capabilities are in effect served by secondary capabilities and the related energy services, not the other way around. Middlemiss et al.'s (2019) intervention focuses on social relations as a basic capability, highlighting a more bidirectional relationship than this conception affords. They argue that social relations cannot be adequately characterised as either 'secondary' or 'basic' capabilities as they 'might be both an end in themselves… as well as a means by which other ends could be achieved' (Middlemiss et al., 2019, p. 229). This brings into question the value of distinguishing between secondary and basic capabilities or characterising the direction of the relationship between them and energy services.

Given this, while the existing conceptual discussions of energy capabilities and services have been characterised by frameworks and schematics that offer means for navigating the complexities inherent in energy poverty (e.g. see Bouzarovski & Petrova, 2015; Day et al., 2016), I wish to advocate a movement away from specifications of this nature instead opting to embrace the complexity and unravel it through and within empirical analysis. Again, a biographical methodology can facilitate this as suggested above, but other methodologies could be applied with the same orientation. The important point is to maintain openness to the complexities inherent in the relations between energy services and capabilities.

This could be in the ways suggested by Middlemiss et al. (2019), but it is possible to think of other forms of complexity, such as in questioning what it means to have a capability and its relation to energy services. For example, the capability to shower can involve a 2-minute cold shower or a 20-minute hot shower—while both might be regarded as having capabilities to meet a basic need of cleanliness, the former does not achieve the same level of functioning as the latter. Understanding of self-rationing and self-disconnection also calls into question assumptions about 'access' to energy in terms of infrastructural provisioning, since it cannot be assumed that the capability automatically follows from availability of the service. This variability in the relations between energy services and capabilities means that it is extremely difficult—and I argue potentially not desirable—to apply either a broader top-down or a very closely specified approach to analysis of the relations between energy services and capabilities. Instead, it is possible to keep the contours of need and the *extent* to which needs are being met or not as an integral and emergent part of analysis, rather than attempting to develop and apply distinctions.

In sum, the approach to energy poverty advocated here is one that encompasses an understanding of energy in terms of *what it is for*, focusing on energy services and related capabilities. But it also extends beyond the preoccupations of capabilities and wellbeing research more generally in not seeking to provide a list of all relevant capabilities or detail specific connections to energy services. Rather, the approach is one that calls for focus on the situated and relational person and their experiences to keep complexity and interconnections in view.

### Conclusion

This chapter has discussed some of the major contemporary contributions to conceptualising energy poverty and argued for their value in instituting an approach that can keep complexity in view. The centrality of the capabilities approach, along with the related concept of energy services, has been explicated and explored. I arrive at a characterisation of energy poverty through the lens of lived experiences that reflects a distinctive understanding of the issues, departing markedly from contemporary policy definitions. Such an understanding entails a focus on the impacts of lack of access not just to energy but to the capabilities that energy use is implicated in, including being healthy, educated, and able to socially participate. Included in this is an ability to reflect on how issues of energy poverty are bound up not only with the point of energy use but with the materials, wider infrastructure, and social processes that shape energy services.

The understanding of energy deprivation advanced here, then, is one that affords space to different energy services bringing into view areas of interconnection and complexity in how energy use is prioritised and negotiated as part of efforts to live and fulfil basic functionings. In this, I argue it is paramount to understand energy deprivation in terms of what happens both within and beyond the home. For Day et al. (2016), such an unbounding of energy deprivation facilitates engagement with spaces beyond the home focusing on more communal forms of energy service. Elsewhere this approach has revealed how *strategies for coping* with fuel poverty often extend spatially too (Petrova, 2018). In this latter context, uses of spaces beyond the home as ways to meet needs for energy services have been cast critically. For example, Petrova (2018, p. 24) highlights how tendencies to use spaces outside of the home for warmth as a way of dealing with cold homes can contribute to 'the intensification and normalisation of [energy] precarity'. However, despite the inherent possibilities very little research has yet moved to analysis that draws in mobilities as well. I argue, here, this opening up is afforded by approaches grounded in capabilities and precarity and could be advanced much more strongly within future analysis.

The chapter has foregrounded the relevance of combining the multifaceted approach to energy poverty encapsulated in the capabilities framework (Bouzarovski & Petrova, 2015; Day et al., 2016; Middlemiss et al., 2019) with the concerns and complexities that Petrova (2018) brings into view by mobilising precarity. Crucially, for the intentions of this book, both approaches align with and link to practice theory. However, I argue there is also much more to be gained from a deeper and more explicit engagement with practice theory in concert with these approaches. For example, fruitful avenues for analysis can be found in the ways that practice theory research brings far greater focus on how energy needs are actively constituted by policies, processes, and interventions. In the following chapter, I turn to the practice theory literature on energy demand introducing the key tenets of this work that are important for the analysis in this book.

#### References

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CHAPTER 3

## Practice and Energy Demand

**Abstract** This chapter introduces practice theory-inspired energy demand research focusing on key concepts and insights that speak to issues of inequality. The discussion explicates core ideas that have relevance in this respect, while also engaging with existing works that have sought to address questions of inequality from within practice-based energy research. The chapter then examines an important frontier in practice theory-inspired energy research of key relevance, I argue, for energy poverty—that of invisible energy policy. Finally, I move to draw together the different conceptual threads that have been laid out through the book thus far and raise key questions that emerge for analysis of energy poverty.

**Keywords** Practice theory · Energy demand · Inequality · Invisible energy policy

### Introduction

The challenges of reducing energy demand and the development of approaches to understand energy use form the focus for a large body of work. Such work tends to be set within the broader context of environmental sustainability and particularly climate change. Indeed, central to the rationale for a research agenda on energy demand are the contentions that: (1) changes in forms of energy production (e.g. to renewable energy technologies) are not sufficient to address associated environmental problems and (2) *reductions* in energy demand are required to meet existing commitments to reduce carbon emissions (Shove, 2015). These two basic arguments are broadly accepted by those working on energy demand issues, but beyond this there is vociferous debate. One of the key debates has a conceptual basis and concerns how social action can best be understood.

On the one hand, a fairly extensive body of research has sought to address questions of reducing energy demand with focus on psychological approaches to behavioural change (e.g. Dietz et al., 2009; Frederiks et al., 2015; Stern, 2000, 2020). On the other hand, a critically engaged analysis has come from the broadly termed 'practice tradition', with roots in sociological and geographical thought, where the basis for understanding social action implicit in much of the psychological literature is brought into question (e.g. Shove, 2003, 2010, 2011; Shove & Walker, 2014; Strengers & Maller, 2015). Crucially, where psychological behavioural research remains tied to dualisms of individual behaviour versus structural constraints, practice theory represents an attempt to characterise the interrelations between agency and structure. These fundamentally different conceptual approaches have been examined for their implications in understanding challenges associated with energy demand reduction, producing important insights.

Between these two poles of thought and analysis, there exists a spectrum of research that takes a weaker or stronger position on these conceptual issues (e.g. Gram-Hanssen, 2014; Spaargaren, 2011). Some propose alternatives, such as the energy cultures approach (e.g. Stephenson et al., 2015), while others have sought to engage with and address some of the key critiques levelled at psychological approaches (Whitmarsh et al., 2021). These offer important insights and developments for understanding behaviour change relevant to energy and its environmental consequences, as well as wider sustainability challenges. However, the focus for this book is on the practice tradition (e.g. Shove, 2003, 2010) with its conceptual emphasis on the complex relations that characterise the constitution of energy demand and needs for energy.

Here, I argue that there are core lines of thought within this tradition of energy demand research that offer important insights for energy poverty that as-yet have been left largely unexplored. Though practice theory-based analyses have offered deep understanding of the dynamics of energy demand, there has been little attention given to inequality or the implications of insights for energy poverty (Walker, 2013). This chapter discusses key ideas, contributions, and agendas from within practice-based energy research that I suggest have relevance for thinking about issues of energy poverty. These concern theorisation and analysis regarding how energy needs come into being and are actively constituted, and the emergent field of invisible energy policy as an important area of work that can speak to questions about the socio-political dynamics underpinning experiences of energy poverty. The chapter delineates these areas of practice-based energy demand research and moves towards a conclusion focused on drawing out the key questions that arise for energy poverty research and analysis.

#### Practice Theory in Energy Demand Research

The practice approach to energy demand takes a strong position on the importance of rejecting behavioural and cultural conceptualisations. Shove (along with several close collaborators) represents one of the foremost advocates of this approach. Centrally, Shove argues that 'instead of seeking more environmentally friendly ways of meeting given levels of service', through efficiency or behavioural interventions, more penetrating questions concern the processes through which services are specified and constituted in the first place (2003, p. 396). For Shove, the core question is: 'How do new conventions become normal, and with what consequence for sustainability?' (2003, p. 396). A later adjunct to this relates to the processes through which some practices are made obsolete or subject to decline, such as cycling (Shove et al., 2012). A by now well-known example, which Shove discusses in one of her earlier works, concerns practices of laundering.

In her 2003 paper, Shove offers an analysis that shows how contemporary conventions of laundering have co-evolved through the interaction of multiple mutually interdependent dimensions including technological development, conventions of cleanliness, and changes in clothing materials (notably the advent of synthetic materials). She highlights how the practice of laundering has at one time become less resource intensive, as processes of boiling have declined, but more demanding in that people are washing more frequently and combining washing with tumble drying. This kind of analysis, then, highlights how processes of change involve multiple interacting elements that lead to specifications of new forms of need with major implications (good or bad) for levels of energy demand. This has been further developed in subsequent work to argue for a focus on 'what energy is for' within research and policy (Shove & Walker, 2014), rather than looking at energy as an abstract or underlying resource. As Shove and Walker (2014, p. 55) put it: 'energy is not used for its own sake but as part of accomplishing social practices'. Recognising this brings focus onto questions about how we live in ways that require energy use and how these particular configurations are constituted.

Shove is critical of existing focuses on efficiency and behavioural approaches because they 'obscure longer-term trends in demand and societal shifts in what energy is for' (2018, p. 779) and, as such, act to sustain increasingly energy-intensive ways of life. By way of an example these trends include things such as ongoing global increases in air conditioning. On this subject, Shove et al. (2013) offer a detailed analysis of the processes by which air conditioning is creating increasing demands for energy use, even in a context of broad recognition of needs to reduce energy demand. They argue that this is best explained by examining the ways that air conditioning has become embedded in specific forms of practice. In this regard, they highlight how the office environment has been fundamentally changed by a combination of computers, open plan spaces, and office wear, such that it increasingly involves air conditioning to cool equipment and space, as much as people. Or how the practices of nursing patients in intensive care have come to involve multiple new forms of technology such that air conditioning is now seen as a requirement of 'good' care. And how having air conditioning has become synonymous with quality in the hotel industry ramping up the requirements for these spaces to be routinely air conditioned (Shove et al., 2013). The analytic focus, then, is on the ways that practices come to require and depend upon ever higher needs for energy use.

This takes emphasis away from the individual as the unit of analysis towards practices themselves (Shove, 2010; Shove et al., 2012). Reflecting this position, Shove has developed a particular conception of practices that identifies three composite parts all of which require attention in processes of understanding how demands for energy come to be as they are. These three interrelated components have been identified as involving *materials*, *meanings,* and *competence* (Shove et al., 2012) or *material infrastructures*, *common understandings,* and *practical knowledge* (Shove & Pantzar, 2005). Though these elements have been characterised in slightly different ways, they offer a way into analysing and examining practices and the ways energy is implicated in what we do.

To give one example of how this can be applied analytically. Shove et al. (2012) use the practice of driving, working through the interrelationships between elements to show how these can be used to add to understanding of change. They point to *materials*, such as engines and carriages, *competences* such as mechanical expertise, steering, and braking, and *meanings*, such as exhibitions of wealth, links to adventure, work, and social relationships. This process of examining the interrelated elements that make up driving allows for examination of how they have changed over time. Crucially, by looking at the elements of practice, Shove et al. are able to show how the practice of driving had many precursors in daily life prior to the emergence of the car. They use this to highlight how the technology of the car and the materials that make up driving emerged and were moulded in interrelation with elements of competence and meanings.

These theoretical ideas about practice have been applied and developed further across a wide range of analyses (e.g. Hand et al., 2005; Hui et al., 2017; Maller & Strengers, 2013; Shove et al., 2012; Spurling & McMeekin, 2015; Strengers & Maller, 2015). These analyses have built insight into the ways that practices are formed and shaped within everyday life with implications for understanding the reduction of energy demand. For example, Maller and Strengers (2013) have shown how particular practices migrate with people as they move around the world, offering insights into the idea of practice memory and indicative of obduracy of practices across time and space, while Hui (2013) has developed a practice theory-based analysis of mobilities giving particular focus to the ways that examining practice (in this case leisure practices) can be far more revealing for understanding the dynamics of travel, than examination of distances traversed, or time spent travelling. In focusing on practices, Hui makes a case for mobilities as inseparable from the leisure activities she examines (namely quilt making and bird watching). This brings a way of thinking about mobilities as embroiled in multiple practices and the elements that compose them, rather than looking at them as something distinctive by focusing on flying or driving, for example.

Other contributions have sought to engage with practice theory through a focus on the person, as opposed to the practice. This has been central to debates about method and how we can empirically research practices, taking a position that some formulations of conventional social scientific methods, such as interviews, can be utilised in ways consistent with practice theory (Butler et al., 2014; Hitchings, 2011). A key focus for this research has been on life narratives and biographical trajectories and the insights scrutiny of these can provide into how practices are shaped through time (e.g. Butler et al., 2014; Fox et al., 2017; Groves et al., 2016; Hards, 2012). For example, in my own work (Butler et al., 2014, 2016), I have examined how people's biographical experiences through their life courses intertwine with and reproduce social and material structures of consequence for energy demand. Here, the focus has similarly been on the interrelationships between different elements of change but with an approach that explores the ways agency-structure interrelations are constituted over time within and through people's lives.

The wide-ranging body of work discussed thus far offers some key concepts and inroads for thinking about inequality and poverty. However, they have rarely been applied in this way and very little research has developed practice-based thinking with focus on energy poverty. I argue that there is, however, important insight to be gained from using practice-inspired analysis in understanding energy deprivation. Within the literature, there are a small number of works and references to issues that span practice and inequality, with a few making further connections through to energy poverty. It is to discussion of these that I now turn.

#### Bringing Inequality into Practice Theory: Key Concepts and Interventions

It is… hard to find examples of research that is inspired by theories of social practice and that explicitly addresses the reproduction of abject poverty, that analyses the failure to successfully perform everyday practices, or that directly engages with the reproduction of social inequality and justice. (Walker, 2013, p. 181)

This quote from Walker highlights how despite the importance of practice theory-inspired analyses for energy demand research, the relevance of inequality has been largely neglected. Here, I focus on the small number of existing interventions that have sought to bring practice theory to bear on questions of inequality, suggesting connections across to issues of energy poverty. Of particular interest for present purposes are concepts of *recruitment*, *defection,* and *reproduction,* along with notable interventions from Shove (2002) and Walker (2013).

Recruitment and defection refer to the ways that people—defined as carriers of practice—can be recruited to or defect from practices, effectively shaping which practices are reproduced and sustained through time and which decline (see Shove et al., 2012). One key example developed by Shove et al. (2012) is that of showering as a practice that has successfully recruited large populations of people into enacting it every day. They use examples like this to set out the dimensions of practice which appear to successfully recruit practitioners, including the embedding of practices with infrastructures, institutions, and norms, but also things like the possibilities for innovation and the 'rewards' (both internal and external) that different practices afford. Central to their argument here is the idea that 'people are unknowingly engaged in reproducing and enacting multiple and varied cycles of change, simultaneously shaping the lives of practices and being shaped by them' (Shove et al., 2012, p. 77).

Crucially, it is in the elaboration of these concepts that the issue of inequality is introduced, though not explored in detail nor developed in relation to ideas of energy poverty. Shove et al. (2012, p. 65) recognise that 'social and material inequalities restrict the potential for one or another practice to develop' and limit the chances that people have for becoming carriers of any one practice. However, they focus their analysis on the ways that practices are developed and sustained or decline and expire owing to the extent to which cohorts of practitioners enact them, rather than the possibilities of exclusions from practices that arise due to inequalities. Additionally, questions about differences between practices in terms of the extent to which practitioners are compelled to engage in them or not, are hinted at in a brief mention of law but left broadly unaddressed.

Walker (2013)—as highlighted in the quote at the opening to this section—offers a more detailed examination of these questions, taking forward a conceptual analysis that draws social practice theory [using Schatzki's work] into dialogue with a specific strand of justice thinking [Sen's capabilities approach]. The key issues that he brings to light through his analysis concern, first, the differential capabilities that people have for performing different practices successfully. Or drawing on Sen, the different capabilities and potential they have for enacting social practices (the capabilities approach to energy poverty is discussed in Chapter 2). And second, the ways in which patterns of 'recruitment' to and 'defection' from practices can be contentious.

He asserts that often discussions of recruitment to and defection from practices can make such processes appear unproblematic, referring often to leisure pursuits (Hui, 2013; Shove et al., 2012). But if the practice in question is one to which access is restricted in some way, they can appear far more normatively charged. Walker (2013) points out that many practices-as-entities have embedded rules and norms and they make certain physical or material demands that restrict opportunities to participate. In this way, recruitment can appear as inseparable from capability, as if a particular practitioner lacks the capabilities to fulfil a practice, they are unrecruitable and effectively excluded.

Equally, Walker (2013) suggests that a similar line of argument can be applied to defection, with people having varying degrees of choice over whether and how they defect from practices according to their capabilities. He offers the example of a person that defects from driving because of deteriorating health or loss of employment to illustrate. This analysis offers particular focus, then, on the ways that issues of inequality can be central to questions of recruitment and defection from practices, raising valuable conceptual openings that are pertinent for thinking across practice and poverty in the energy context.

This has been touched on elsewhere in work using practice perspectives, where the relevance of looking at variation in the experiences of different groups offers a further line of thinking for engaging with inequality. Fox et al. (2017) take forward a practice-based analysis of people in later life examining how life experiences within an older demographic are shaping energy demand trends in travel (i.e. towards increasing demand). They emphasise 'how travel desires come about through the production of certain shared expectations, aspirations and other normative dimensions' (Fox et al., 2017, p. 105). But they also draw out the importance of *personal and corporeal capacity* within consideration of the recruitment of people to practices, highlighting how there are differences in capabilities to carry out practices. In this respect, their focus is on ageing bodies, but this insight brings further questions about the role of inequality in processes of recruitment and defection.

Shove has also—in earlier work—more deeply grappled with questions of inequality using practice theory to theorise social exclusions relating to mobilities (Cass et al., 2005; Shove, 2002). In this conceptualisation, social exclusion is positioned as an emergent property of three elements; (1) social practices and the obligations to perform them; (2) individual resources and capacities to meet obligations; and (3) infrastructures that shape people's abilities to meet obligations as well as the expectations of 'normal' social participation. This brings in possibilities for thinking about how inequality is woven through these different intersecting elements. For instance, abilities to meet obligations are related to the extent of available resources and the level of access to infrastructures, both of which are unequally distributed across societies. But it also directs attention to the ways that obligations and abilities are created. Shove highlights the role of policy, in particular, as being 'deeply implicated in the construction of…demand and in the shaping of social expectations and practices' (2002, p. 10). This hints at the importance of power in the construction of practices and the requirements for participation—something that I argue could form a far more explicit and important area for analysis in energy poverty research and, as such, is given attention in the empirical analysis in the later parts of this book.

Focusing as it does on mobilities, this work (and others) also speaks to the ways that practice theory thinking can reorient analysis of transport poverty. Centrally, it shifts focus away from *enabling access* to transport, towards questions about why people travel (i.e. to enact which practices), and the ways that particular mobilities are constructed (e.g. through the favouring of infrastructure for car travel) (Cass et al., 2005; Hui, 2013; Mullen & Marsden, 2016; Shove, 2002). The notion of travel being about getting from A to B is supplanted by thinking of it as intricately woven into the accomplishment of practices. As Shove puts it, mobility… is about integrating everyday life and the activities required of 'normal practice' (2002, p. 9). This calls attention to what comes to be regarded as 'normal', and to how and why practices, and the requirements for mobility that they entail, come to be as they are. With this at the fore, transport poverty can be thought about in very different terms, with less focus on enabling access and more thought given to the constitution of needs.

Overall, the contributions, debates, and analyses from practice theorybased energy research have had major implications for the ways that energy demand is thought about and addressed. They have moved focus away from individualised decisions and choices towards the interrelationships between human agency and socio-material structures in shaping processes of change. They have highlighted the need to think beyond technical efficiency and economic rationality to bring into focus processes that are contributing to global increases in energy demand. And, crucially, they have brought attention to questions concerning 'what energy is for', highlighting the ways in which demand for energy has been, and continues to be, constituted by processes of governance. Though there are some key interventions and nods to issues of inequality within this literature, I argue this remains an area that could be advanced much further and with greater attention across to energy poverty.

This chapter moves towards extrapolating key questions that arise for thinking about energy poverty when practice theory ideas are brought into play. Thus far, key concepts and insights related to the constitution of need have been foregrounded, but the next section delineates the other area of practice theory-based analysis that I suggest has potential for exploring challenges of energy poverty—that of invisible energy policy. Here, the relevance of governance and policies in shaping and shifting practices across diverse areas of policy far beyond energy is made the focus. This burgeoning literature has thus far primarily sought to emphasise and trace the connections between policy, practices, and environmental sustainability, but I argue offers an equally important agenda for energy poverty research.

#### Practice Theory and the Emergence of Invisible Energy Policy

The fundamental contention of the invisible energy policy literature is that when focus is brought onto practices and *what energy is for*, it becomes possible to see how multiple areas of policy far beyond energy have implications for shaping, shifting, and instituting demand (e.g. Butler et al., 2018; Cox et al., 2019; Royston et al., 2018). Although the role of policy in constituting needs for energy has been identified within several practice-inspired studies of energy demand, this had not previously formed an explicit focus of analysis. The wider influence on energy demand of policies from areas as diverse as health, work, education, and housing is identifiable but very rarely is this at the fore. This emerging body of work seeks to address this gap by bringing focus on key areas of policy that, while identifiable as having important implications for energy demand, have yet to receive sufficient attention (Cox et al., 2019).

The work in this space has set out some key tenets around which a research agenda has begun to be formulated. First, the idea that policies can be regarded as invisible where they are explicitly designed to address policy priorities outside of energy but nonetheless have impacts on energy demand and issues. 'Invisibility' in this context is referring to the ways that such impacts are either 'unacknowledged or insufficiently acknowledged' (Royston et al., 2018, p. 128), somewhat softening the intended implications of the 'invisible' concept. And the boundaries between what constitutes visible or invisible energy policy are also recognised as being 'complicated and blurred' (Royston et al., 2018, p. 128). Second, the links between policies and their impacts for practice and energy demand are recognised as being non-linear, complex, and varying from direct to indirect in the forms their effects take (Butler et al., 2018).

Of course, one might expect to find resources for these more crosscutting analyses of governance within existing literatures and disciplines, such as political science. But Royston et al. (2018) have argued convincingly that these do not necessarily offer a good grounding for examining the kinds of issues with which this agenda is concerned. For example, while political scientists are adept at addressing policy causes and effects more broadly, they have given relatively little attention to specific functional policy areas, meaning that policy processes relating to an area like energy demand have rarely been addressed (Royston et al., 2018; and for an exception see Kuzemko et al., 2017). Equally, when the focus is on particular policies, as in impact assessments, the remit is often extremely narrow excluding possibilities for looking across the broader policy spectrum or for thinking about long-term trends. And where analysis is directed at issues of joined-up policy (Davies, 2009), studies tend to focus on the governmental processes involved, rather than attempting to understand the lived experiences of policy and their implications for practice.

At the same time, the fields of political economy and political ecology frequently address processes of global and local energy and environmental crises and offer explanatory power in terms of the role of political forces in shaping them, but tend to be either rooted in structuralist conceptual traditions that focus on political and economic power and the regulatory processes within governments (e.g. Mitchell, 2008), or engaged in post-structural analysis of altered subjectivities in the face of global economic processes, but again rarely tuned into the specifics of policies (e.g. Escobar, 1996). It is possible to assert, therefore, that there are limited available resources or methods within established traditions for investigating precisely how non-energy policies shape practice with consequences for energy demand issues.

Royston et al. (2018) make a case for a more ambitious agenda that seeks to address; 'more fundamental questions about the changing array of 'services' that energy makes possible, about the amount of energy 'needed' in society, [and] about the role of policy in constituting these 'needs'' (Royston et al., 2018, p. 127). While, as noted, some conceptual traditions might situate governance as some form of driver or external influence on social action, understandings consistent with practice theory bring a different orientation—one which is more attentive to complexity and non-linearity (e.g. see Butler et al., 2018; Urry, 2010), while also recognising processes by which practices are shaped and shifted.

Arising from these wider conceptual developments and agenda-setting papers are a number of studies of invisible energy policy focused on different policy areas, including health (Blue, 2017; Nicholls & Strengers, 2018), digitalisation (Morley et al., 2018), and education (Gormally et al., 2019; Royston, 2016), as well as my own work on welfare policy (Butler et al., 2018). There are also studies looking at the ways that multiple different policy areas intersect within daily life to shape domestic energy practices, moving outside of the focus on specific policy areas that have dominated elsewhere (Greene & Fahy, 2020). As a body of research, this has highlighted the ways that invisible energy policies are constitutive of new needs for energy demanding services (e.g. Butler et al., 2018; Morley et al., 2018; Nichols & Strengers, 2018); how they can have direct impacts on energy issues and practices, as well as much longer-term and indirect forms of impact, for instance in shaping how energy issues are framed or delimited (e.g. Butler et al., 2018); how boundaries within governance processes can be constitutive of in/visibility (e.g. Cox et al., 2019); and the ways in which the demands of different policy agendas are negotiated by people in and through practice (Gormally et al., 2019).

Though the agenda-setting papers in the invisible energy policy space include scope for examining energy poverty and to some extent highlight it as an area for analysis (Cox et al., 2019), it is fair to say that the focus to date has primarily been on issues of energy demand reduction (with some notable exceptions, e.g. see Butler et al., 2018; Nicholls & Strengers, 2018). This is likely because the concern with invisible energy policy has emerged from the practice theory-inspired literature that as highlighted has focused on energy demand reduction and sustainability with far less consideration of inequality and issues of energy poverty.

Equally, the differing concepts found in much of the energy poverty literature (e.g. vulnerabilities, capabilities, precarity) have tended to mean invisible energy policy has not been taken up as readily by scholars working on these issues. Though there are a small number of studies that look at the impact of welfare reform on fuel poverty (e.g. Snell et al., 2015), these tend not to engage with the wider practice theory literature in which the invisible energy policy agenda is grounded. This means that though they identify areas of impact, they do not bring focus on the conceptual insights afforded by working with practice theory and energy poverty together.

Across these key areas of practice theory-inspired research, I argue there are important ideas that can be brought to bear in analysis and thought about energy poverty. The existing interventions that foreground questions of inequality and practice signal possibilities for thinking about the constitution of needs in the context of energy poverty. And the invisible energy policy literature brings closer attention to the role of policies far beyond energy policy in both processes of constitution and calling attention to how such policy is shaping experiences of energy poverty. The conclusion of this chapter serves to draw these conceptual insights from practice theory together with those advanced in the previous chapter around energy poverty, capabilities, and precarity, to introduce key lines of enquiry for this research area.

#### Conclusion

This chapter has discussed the practice theory-inspired literature on energy demand drawing together key ideas and concepts that arise from this tradition for thinking about energy poverty and inequality. Two major areas of thought have been examined—first, ideas about *the constitution and specification of need* involving processes of recruitment to and defection from practices, and second, the *invisible energy policy agenda* where the effects of policy outside of energy are given focus. I argue that these different areas of conceptual development can be brought into closer conversation with concepts from energy poverty research to inform analytic endeavours and research agendas.

First, the capabilities approach to energy poverty has already been cast in terms of how it affords possibilities for exploration of the ways that societal norms shape energy service needs. At present, thinking in terms of energy poverty more widely often focuses on the ways that energy service needs can be met in some way. Day et al. (2016), however, denote an understanding of energy poverty derived from capabilities that begins to call in to question the specification of needs for energy in a similar way to that found in practice theory-inspired energy research. They bring focus on how social norms shape the relations between energy services and capabilities with implications for understanding energy deprivation. For example, they highlight how showering every day as a normal expectation for people in the UK can be cast in terms of its importance to maintaining the capability of social respect. This marks out showering, then, as an energy service that should be considered within energy poverty analysis in the UK context because of its links to basic capabilities. Such an approach thus offers a way of thinking about the links between social norms, energy services, and capabilities but it also signals potential to go further and bring attention to how different energy service needs come to be *made* essential to capabilities, i.e. by asking—in line with practice theory-inspired work—how social norms come to be as they are.

In this respect, I suggest a capabilities approach is well suited to alignment with the concerns of practice theory-inspired energy analysis. While analysis of capabilities brings focus on the implications of energy service needs for energy poverty, practice theory concepts force attention onto how those needs are created and, moreover, invisible energy policy insights emphasise the role of diverse policy areas in such processes of constitution. Within this, key concepts of *recruitment* and *defection* from practice theory can be used to frame questions about inequality in the processes through which people become enrolled in energy demanding practices and related social norms. Such questions concern who has the power to constitute needs and how do abilities to resist, be recruited, or defect from new norms of practice vary across different people and policy areas. All this speaks to openings for an analysis of energy poverty that places the increasing energy intensity of daily life more firmly at the heart of debates.

Second, beyond offering understanding of the constitution of needs, the invisible energy policy agenda has further value for extending thinking about how experiences of energy poverty are being shaped by non-energy policy areas. This line of analysis is more concerned with examining the ways that non-energy policy affects the prevailing conditions for energy poverty, with less focus on the constitution of need and more attention to other important points of intersection. For example, work from within the energy poverty literature building from concepts of vulnerability and precarity has already signalled the importance of social and political processes emanating from non-energy policy areas, such as housing and welfare, in shaping experiences of energy deprivation (Middlemiss, 2016; Petrova, 2018). This research highlights complex forms of influence that shape things like the normalisation of poor housing for some demographics or what can be counted as fuel poverty as distinct from wider poverty. With invisible energy policy as a starting point for analysis, these types of concerns can be foregrounded with potential to advance understanding of energy poverty in ways that extend beyond the preoccupations and concerns of fuel poverty policy.

In the following two chapters, the areas of governance and the policy contexts within which the book's analysis is situated are discussed. Though the empirical research in this book is concerned with welfare policy as an area of invisible energy policy, it is nonetheless important to discuss wider energy demand policy too. This is revealing for understanding how definitions of energy demand issues, across poverty and demand reduction, are characterised in UK policy. Chapter 4 thus examines the UK energy demand and fuel poverty policy context before moving to address welfare policy and discuss existing connections across these policy areas. In the remaining Chapters (5 and 6), attention turns to the empirical research and its exploration in relation to the areas of theory and conceptual contribution discussed here. The ideas advanced through discussion of the literature across energy poverty and practice theory-inspired energy research are developed further, and the empirical materials are used to explore avenues of analysis at the intersections.

#### References

and theories of social change." *Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 43*(2), 262–264.

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# Policy: Energy Demand and Welfare in the UK

**Abstract** This chapter presents a detailed discussion of contemporary UK energy demand policy and welfare policy. These two areas of policy form the focus of the empirical research that will be utilised to examine and develop the conceptual ideas discussed in Chapters 2 and 3. Through this chapter, I first discuss policies relating to fuel poverty, contextualising them in relation to wider energy demand strategies, before going on to address welfare policy with focus on contemporary reforms. In concluding the chapter, I explore existing forms of interconnection for these different policy areas and issues, explicating some of the key challenges that arise for thinking across different domains.

**Keywords** Invisible energy policy · Energy demand policy · Fuel poverty policy · Welfare policy

### Introduction

Fuel poverty, as a distinctive policy problem, is a relatively recent phenomenon tied to a particular set of social and political projects, as well as specific metrics and social groups that were initially the focus in bringing it onto the public agenda. Many countries around the world still do not recognise fuel or the broader category of energy poverty as a specific issue (Bouzarovski & Petrova, 2015). Correspondingly, it does

<sup>©</sup> The Author(s) 2022 C. Butler, *Energy Poverty, Practice, and Policy*, Progressive Energy Policy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99432-7\_4

not form a focus for analysis, funding, or associated policy initiatives. The UK was one of the first nations to recognise fuel poverty as a distinctive policy problem and dedicate resources and policy attention to addressing the associated challenges (Bouzarovski, 2018). This has meant it has been particularly influential in the development of fuel poverty policy around the world (Mattioli et al., 2017), making a focus on the UK interesting beyond the specific country context (Bouzarovski, 2018). Though the focus within this book and chapter is on fuel poverty policy, it is necessary to contextualise this area in relation to wider energy demand strategy since the two are intimately interlinked.

Over the past several years, there have been some important developments in energy policy agendas related to energy demand. The UK's Climate Change Act (2008), which enshrined in law a target to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80% (relative to 1990 levels) by 2050, has been amended to implement a new 'net zero' target (Parliament UK, 2019). At the same time, the current UK Government has been criticised for 'dismantling' much of the policy intended to ensure delivery of such targets (Parliament UK, 2019). Indeed, the Climate Change Committee (2019, p. 11) has stated that 'current policy is insufficient for even the existing targets'. Crucially, these targets are asserted to require a far greater focus on energy demand if they are to be met (Eyre & Killip, 2019).

Since 2010, however, shifting political agendas have seen fuel poverty policy being prioritised over energy demand reduction, with alterations made to the primary energy demand policy—the Energy Company Obligation scheme (ECO). This scheme is characterised by a market-led approach that focuses primarily on improving housing efficiency and, while originally it was aimed at all housing, it has increasingly shifted to be focused on the worst housing and those on low incomes. The nature of UK fuel poverty policy is thus directly tied to a strategy initially designed to address energy efficiency across all forms of housing.

With the UK's climate leadership role as hosts of the Conference of Parties (COP) 2021 a newly renewed focus on climate policy had begun to emerge, but there have also been further moves towards fuel poverty being the principle focus for energy demand policy with the publication of the *Sustainable Warmth* strategy (BEIS, 2021). Though the shift to focus policy on fuel poverty is important and necessary, little has arisen to address energy demand reduction issues more broadly. These shifts are important to highlight to provide context for the nature of fuel poverty policy in the UK. The chapter first offers an examination of these moves toward an increasing emphasis on fuel poverty within energy demand policy.

The shifting landscape of energy demand policy also gives insight into definitions and understandings of fuel poverty, with a relatively narrow focus on housing efficiency and heat evident in official narratives. In UK policy, this is reflected in changes in the specific approach to defining fuel poverty and the targeting of measures to enhance efficiency (BEIS, 2021; Hills, 2012). In this chapter, I discuss the dominant policy definitions and highlight how such approaches are in distinct contrast with the wider framings of energy poverty delineated in the academic literature and discussed in Chapter 2 (e.g. Bouzarovski & Petrova, 2015; Day et al., 2016; Middlemiss & Gillard, 2015).

The chapter finally moves to address welfare policy as the area of 'invisible energy policy' (i.e. non-energy policy areas that have implications for energy demand issues) that forms the focus of the research. I examine existing links, connections, and boundaries with fuel poverty policies, and set out the policies, framings, and politics that dominate in this area. The chapter highlights how there are interconnections across to welfare policy but these are narrowly conceived and offer relatively little scope for more reflective thinking across different areas. While the invisible energy policy literature (e.g. Butler et al., 2018; Cox et al., 2019; Greene & Fahy, 2020; Royston et al., 2018) directs analysis towards links and interconnections, there are clear limitations on the extent to which these are (or even can be) currently considered within existing policy landscapes.

#### From Energy Demand Reduction to Fuel Poverty Policy

Energy demand reduction has been highlighted as central to delivering the net zero carbon emissions target and for meeting sustainability goals more widely. In a report on UK energy demand policy, Eyre and Killip (2019) assert that 'Energy demand reduction, flexibility and decarbonisation will need to play a critical role [in sustainable transitions] and this should be recognised in energy innovation policy' (2019, p. 7). At the same time, they point to inconsistency in policy development and implementation, with many successful policies having been reduced in scale or abandoned in recent years (Eyre & Killip, 2019). These include the Carbon Emissions Reduction Target (CERT), the Community Energy Savings Programme (CESP), the Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC), and the proposed Zero Carbon Homes (ZCH) standard. These latter two policies were aimed at large organisations and new build housing, while the former two were targeted at the domestic sector. While the CRC and ZCH policies were ended with the election of a new conservative/liberal coalition government in 2010, the CERT and CESP policies were replaced with a similar but distinct mechanism, namely the Energy Company Obligation (ECO).

CERT required larger gas and electricity suppliers to achieve targets for reducing carbon emissions from domestic premises. The policy, which was enshrined in the Electricity and Gas (Carbon Emissions Reductions) Order (2008) and subsequent amendments, specified both the level of savings required and the ways that these were to be achieved—in particular, and increasingly as the scheme went on, the focus was on insulating homes. The target was set at 293 million lifetime tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions by December 2012. Suppliers delivered savings of 296.9 Mt CO2 by the end of the scheme, fulfilling the policy aims and causing it to be recognised as a success.

CERT also gave focus to a 'priority group' and required that at least 40% of the target had to be achieved through uptake by people and households within this group. There were further additional requirements to target a 'super priority group', which was defined as including people that qualified for welfare benefits, such as child tax credits, and below an income threshold. These requirements embedded an aim to align carbon reduction measures with addressing energy vulnerability and fuel poverty, though some argue it did not go far enough with the majority of measures still being deliverable to households outside of the priority groups (CSE, 2014).

CESP was also an obligation on suppliers to deliver energy saving measures but targeted specifically at low-income areas. This scheme was designed to promote a 'whole house' approach and to treat as many properties as possible within geographically defined areas selected using measures of multiple deprivation. Under this scheme, energy companies achieved over 85% of the target savings. Despite having been regarded as successes, in 2012 CERT and CESP were replaced by the most recent policy addressing energy demand—the Energy Company Obligation.

This policy continued in a similar vein to CERT and CESP by placing obligations on energy suppliers to deliver carbon emissions reductions or energy savings but with some marked differences. For example, under ECO, greater emphasis is placed on the fuel poor and 'hard to reach' properties, and companies have a larger degree of freedom in *how* they deliver on their obligations (i.e. which measures they implement). The components of ECO at its inception were as follows: the *carbon emissions obligation* is a requirement for energy companies to promote free instalment of energy saving measures (this includes loft and cavity wall insulation but there is no requirement as under CERT to prioritise this measure). The *carbon saving community obligation* targets low-income areas and promotes insulation more directly along with other measures such as connections to district heating systems. Finally, the *home heating cost reduction obligation* is an initiative targeted at improving the ability of low-income and vulnerable households to effectively heat homes. This typically includes measures such as boiler replacement.

ECO has since been amended through three further phases ECO2 (April 2015–March 2017) and an extension ECO2t (April 2017– September 2018), ECO3 (October 2018–March 2022) and ECO4 (April 2022–March 2026). Over this time, the changes to ECO have seen a move toward focusing on fuel poor households, with ECO3 being dedicated in its entirety to support for low income, vulnerable and fuel poor households and effectively ending the *carbon emissions obligation* component. This move has been regarded as progressive by many of those working in fuel poverty. However, it does leave a gap in terms of energy demand reduction policy for those outside of low-income groups. This, of course, does not require redirection of funding from ECO away from fuel poverty, but rather distinct and new policy initiatives that are able to address the major challenges facing the UK in reducing energy demand.

ECO was introduced initially in conjunction with the Green Deal a financing mechanism designed to deliver energy efficiency retrofit to housing. Households could apply for loans toward the cost of home energy-efficiency measures, which would be repaid through the savings made on energy bills owing to the improvements. The policy was deemed unsuccessful due to low take-up and concerns about the quality of installations and was abandoned in 2015. With nothing to replace the Green Deal, and with the end to wider policies such as Zero Carbon Homes, this has left a lacuna in energy demand reduction policy.

Several other policy proposals and initiatives have failed to get off the ground or have been very short lived. One of the most prominent being the Green Homes Grant scheme that saw grants of between £5000 and £10,000 offered to fund up to two-thirds of the cost of energy efficiency and sustainability improvements (e.g. insulation, double glazing, heat pumps and biomass boilers) but was abolished after only 6 months amid major problems with the administrative complexity of the scheme for householders and contractors alike. The only lasting policy in this area since 2010 is the minimum energy efficiency standard for the Private Rented Sector (BEIS, 2019, 2021). This sets a minimum energy efficiency standard for landlords wherein all privately rented properties must receive an Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) of band E or above. The aim is to tackle the least energy-efficient (bands F or G) private rental properties in England and Wales. These minimum standards have also become an increasing focus within fuel poverty policy amid recognition that '33.6% of fuel poor households in England are living in private rented accommodation' (BEIS, 2021, p. 22), discussed in more detail below.