Examining Energy Justice in Dutch Sustainability Policy using Policy Theory Analysis

Abstract

Climate change is one of society’s largest challenges of the current age. To combat global warming, countries around the globe must decrease their dependency on fossil fuels and increase the efficiency of their energy use. To help accelerate this transition, the government of the Netherlands has implemented energy policies to encourage citizens to undertake sustainability initiatives. However, energy policy integration does not only have environmental impacts, but social impacts as well. Energy policy comes with costs and benefits, and how these costs and benefits are distributed across the population is an important consideration. Policymakers are often unconscious to the knock-on effects of the policies they create. An emerging field within the social sciences, energy justice, seeks to apply a more human centred approach to energy problems. Core to energy justice are distributive justice, concerning itself with the injustices occurring from imbalanced resource distribution, and justice as recognition, which concerns itself with the misrecognition and oversight of marginalised groups in society. This paper aims to shed a new light on energy policy with regards to fairness and equity, uncovering the underlying ideas and assumptions policymakers are basing their decisions on using policy theory analysis. This thesis has found that, in regards to energy policy aimed at providing households with sustainability measures, not enough attention is paid to distributive justice and justice as recognition during the policymaking process. Firstly, while energy services are available to anyone living in the Netherlands, lower income sections of the population do not have equal access to energy saving and energy generating measures. Most of the analysed policies do not aim to solve this problem, instead focussing on reducing greenhouse gas emissions as much as possible with little regard to who pays the costs and who benefits. Secondly, most policies do not acknowledge their impact on marginalised groups of society, while relying on passive responses from society instead of actively engaging with the section of the population targeted by the policy. Lastly, most policies do not recognise the externalities and benefits the government policy facilitates, giving no explicit explanation on who or what is responsible for the outcomes. If the Netherlands is to move towards a more just transition, it needs to consider policy that is socially equitable, increase stakeholder engagement, increase transparency, and take more responsibility.