Join the Just Transformations to Sustainability Initiative in welcoming Professor Benjamin Sovacool for the Notre Dame Seminars on Sustainability Series. We invite all attendees to stay afterward for lunch, conversation, and fellowship in 125 DeBartolo Hall as we work together to grow this vital network on campus.
Benjamin K. Sovacool is Professor of Earth and Environment at Boston University in the United States, where he is the Founding Director of the Institute for Global Sustainability. He is also Professor of Energy Policy at the Bennett Institute for Innovation & Policy Acceleration at the University of Sussex Business School. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society for Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, and a Fellow in the Academy of Europe (Academia Europaea).
This presentation explores how concepts from justice and ethics can inform energy decision-making and highlight the futurity, fairness, and equity dimensions of energy production and use. It defines "energy justice" as a global energy system that fairly distributes both the benefits and costs of energy services, and one that contributes to more representative and inclusive energy decision-making. Such an assessment brings together core understandings of distributional and procedural justice alongside cosmopolitan interpretations of equity and recognitional notions of fairness. The presentation then focuses on six new frontiers or fruitful areas of future research. First is making the case for the involvement of non-Western justice theorists. Second is expanding beyond humans to look at the Rights of Nature or non-anthropocentric notions of justice. Third is focusing on cross-scalar issues of justice such as embodied emissions. Fourth is identifying business models and the co-benefits of justice. Fifth is better understanding the tradeoffs within energy justice principles. Sixth is confronting utopian or falsely constructed justice discourses. In doing so, the presentation argues in favor of "justice-aware" energy planning and policymaking, and it hopes that its (reconsidered) energy justice conceptual framework offers a critical tool to inform decision-making.
Originally published at sustainabilityinitiative.nd.edu.