Speaker
Description
The call for justice is omnipresent in the planning of the energy transition, both in academia and policy practice. Over the past decades, research on justice has flourished, resulting in various frameworks and conceptualizations of justice (Basta, 2016; Fainstein, 2010; Stein and Harper, 2005; Weghorst, Buitelaar, and Pelzer, 2024). Despite the growing academic attention to justice and its aim to inform just decision-making in policy practice, key questions remain underexplored. These include how different conceptions of justice can be operationalised, how contradictory conceptions of justice can be addressed, and how justice theory can provide normative guidance for decision-making.
This paper aims to advance the operationalization of distributive justice to offer normative guidance for academics and policymakers in planning a just energy transition. It introduces five theories of distributive justice rooted in political philosophy: utilitarianism, libertarianism, egalitarianism, sufficientarianism, and communitarianism. These theories articulate reasons why a particular situation may be considered just or unjust and what a just distribution requires from a moral point of view (Kymlicka, 2001).
Those five theories of justice are used to reflect on the planning process for wind and solar energy projects in the Dutch Regional Energy Strategies. This approach facilitates an examination of the normative assumptions and decisions embedded in renewable energy planning and identifies the justice trade-offs inherent in the planning process. Special attention is paid to how spatial considerations shape justice arguments (Moroni and De Franco, 2024). By analyzing policy options, justice trade-offs, and the implications of certain decisions through the lens of distributive justice theories and spatial considerations, normative guidance in the planning process can be provided.
While there will always be multiple answers to the question of what constitutes a just distribution, addressing this moral issue is important because alternative distributions are always possible. Reflecting on these alternatives is therefore crucial for the deliberate and just planning of the energy transition, rather than accepting the status quo and risking to exacerbate injustices.
References
Basta, Claudia (2016) From Justice in Planning toward Planning for Justice: A Capability Approach. Planning Theory, 15 (2), pp.190–212.
Fainstein, Susan S. 2010. The Just City. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Kymlicka, Will. 2001. Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Introduction. Second Edition. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press.
Moroni, Stefano, and Anita De Franco (2024) Spatial Justice: A Fundamental or Derivative Notion? City, Culture and Society 38, 100593.
Stein, Stanley M., and Thomas L. Harper (2005) Rawls’s “Justice as Fairness”: A Moral Basis for Contemporary Planning Theory. Planning Theory 4 (2), pp.147–72.
Weghorst, Max, Edwin Buitelaar, and Peter Pelzer (2024) A Dynamic Justice Framework for Analyzing Conceptions of Justice: The Case of Urban Development Projects. Planning Theory, 14730952241280523.
| Keywords | justice in planning, distributive justice, energy transition, spatial justice |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | No |
