Abstract
This chapter is based on a literature review of relevant information on the origin, organization, type, role and main characteristics of energy communities (EC) in Europe. The analysis of the literature shows the scope of energy communities in different regions in Europe, including Turkey and Uganda. Gender dimensions are described and applied to address gender-equitable energy policy and supply. The gender dimensions used in the analysis are productive work, reproductive work, power and decision-making power, public resources and infrastructure, body and health as well as institutionalized androcentrism, respectively. Good practices of energy communities in Spain, Turkey, Germany and Uganda are included to show the relevance of the gender dimensions and the realities of women in European ECs. It is shown that ECs (in most cases) do not meet the egalitarian claim to enable open participation and membership for all parts of society. Recommendations for policy and energy actors are developed to ensure gender mainstreaming across energy policies, directives and practices to engender the energy transition. This allows energy communities to become a feasible and viable alternative to capitalist individualism and isolation, and the incorporation of a gender perspective in community actions and strategies has transformative potential and can open a space for a new debate on an inclusive and economically and socially sustainable development model.
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Notes
- 1.
BINARY CONCEPT refers to the social classification of people into two categories, namely, male and female, and thereby hides the diversity of social and biological genders (Kuschan et al., 2020). Although we use the binary term ‘women and men’ in this publication, this does not refer exclusively to people who assign themselves to these genders, but to all of them. Nevertheless, the asterisk (*) stands for all genders. For a better flow of reading, we write women instead of women* and mean all people who feel themselves to be women, regardless of their biological sex with which they were born. Of course, this also applies to men or men*.
- 2.
Gender budgeting: Gender budgeting is a tool for determining and controlling how funds are distributed and what effects they have on women and men and on gender relations (Landeshauptstadt München).
- 3.
Around 170 years ago, Friedrich Wilhelm Raiffeisen implemented the first cooperative model to help smaller farms out of financial needs.
- 4.
The triple burden refers to the division of labour between genders. Typical roles of women are reproductive, productive and community managing tasks. In most societies, low-income women perform all three roles, while men primarily engage in productive and community activities that typically generate earnings, status or power (EIGE, 2021).
- 5.
Selective perception optimizes our cognitive resources and focuses them on something that we expect to happen. This is based on the ability to recognize patterns, a fundamental function of the human brain. The brain is constantly on the lookout for patterns in order to better classify new information into existing information. Selective perception is the—mostly unconscious—search for a specific pattern.
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Habersbrunner, K., Kuschan, M. (2024). Gender-Just Energy Communities: A Catalyst for Sustainable and Just Development. In: Rocha Lawton, N., Forson, C. (eds) Women and the Energy Sector. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43091-6_8
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