1 Introduction

The acceleration of the low-carbon energy transition has brought the issue of energy justice to the forefront of attention (Jenkins, McCauley, & Forman, 2017a). Since questions of justice arise when individuals and groups feel their rights over a specific good or to make themselves heard in decision-making procedures are being infringed, this attention is also indicative of a growing potential for conflict in the energy transition. For instance, by adopting a ‘Just Transition Mechanism’, the EU (European Union) now openly recognises that there will be both ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ in the transition to a low-carbon EU energy system and that the ‘losers’ (i.e. carbon-intensive EU regions) are entitled to receive financial and technical support for the transformation of their economies.Footnote 1 Beyond this specific issue of compensatory justice for carbon-intensive economies, the energy transition is fraught with a large number of other potentially contentious issues of justice, relating for instance to the development and implementation of wind power (Karakislak et al., 2021; Leer Jørgensen et al., 2020; Vasstrøm & Lysgård, 2021), solar power (Franklin & Osborne, 2017), nuclear power (Jenkins, McCauley, & Warren, 2017b; McCauley et al., 2018), the hydrogen economy (Dillman & Heinonen, 2022), shale gas (de Melo-Martín et al., 2014), community energy (Forman, 2017; Hanke et al., 2021; Lacey-Barnacle, 2020), critical minerals for the energy transition (Heffron, 2020), and whole-system low-carbon transitions (McCauley et al., 2019; Sovacool et al., 2019).

To provide a solid philosophical grounding of these various applications to specific technologies or policy fields, a growing number of papers addresses energy justice from a conceptual perspective (see e.g. Heffron & McCauley, 2017; Jenkins et al., 2016; Jenkins et al., 2020; Sovacool et al., 2017). Jenkins et al. (2021) give an overview of the prevalent approaches to energy justice and their relative frequency in the literature. Their overview reveals a rich variety of theoretical perspectives, including ‘principle-based’ approaches, ‘restorative justice’, ‘capability-based’ approaches, ‘energy sufficiency’, ‘energy system justice’, ‘spatial justice’, ‘procedural justice’, and ‘distributional justice’. Despite the eclectic nature of the energy justice literature, the Jenkins et al. (2021) review also reveals the emergence of a dominant perspective, i.e. the so-called ‘three-tenet’ model, which is used by 38% of the investigated papers.

As initially proposed by McCauley et al. (2013), the three-tenet model focuses simultaneously on ‘distributional justice’, ‘procedural justice’, and ‘justice as recognition’ (Heffron & McCauley, 2017; McCauley, 2018; McCauley & Heffron, 2018). Put briefly, the logic of the three-tenet model is that in order to tackle a specific issue of energy justice, one must (i) identify who will be affected and what claims these individuals or groups make (i.e. justice as recognition), (ii) identify the distribution of benefits and burdens implied in the issue (i.e. distributional justice), and then (iii) identify decision-making strategies leading to potentially more just outcomes (i.e. procedural justice). As further specified by Jenkins et al. (2020), the model should not be interpreted as a linear procedure, since the three tenets are mutually interdependent so that each is involved to some degree with the other two. For instance, to address recognition justice, it is first necessary to have at least a basic understanding of the distribution of benefits and burdens involved in the issue under discussion (i.e. distributional justice).

Our aim in this paper is not to provide yet another critical and comprehensive review of energy justice concepts and applications. Rather, we will start from the critical evaluations already available (see e.g. Iwińska et al. (2021) and Wood (2023) for good recent examples) to propose a new framework that, while being able to retain the core strengths of the existing three-tenet model, is able to better deal with some of its remaining shortcomings. As it stands now, we identified the following three challenges that will be addressed in the present article:

  1. (1)

    The ‘normative challenge’: Energy justice has so far been mainly discussed in interdisciplinary energy journals such as Energy Research and Social Science, Applied Energy and Energy Policy, but has received little philosophical exposure, with Galvin (2019) and Pellegrini-Masini et al. (2020), the notable exceptions. Most of the work in the field takes a descriptive approach—i.e. it is concerned with describing what the benefits and burdens of different energy projects, infrastructures, policies, or entire systems are, and which claims are being made regarding them. More fundamental philosophical questions such as what counts as a just distribution or a fair procedure have hardly been tackled. This leaves the energy justice literature vulnerable to criticism that ‘despite the aspiration to take on a normative perspective questioning what ought to be, Energy Justice research has focused more on establishing what the benefits and harms are that need to be distributed rather than how to distribute them in situations of scarcity’ (Jenkins et al., 2020: 7).

  2. (2)

    The ‘elite challenge’: By adopting recognition justice as one of its core tenets, the energy justice literature has given particular attention to individuals and groups that are routinely marginalised in energy-related decision-making processes (see e.g. Bartiaux et al., 2018; Samarakoon, 2019; Walker & Day, 2012). Following Fraser (2003), recognition justice focuses on acknowledging and affirming the diverse identities and experiences of individuals and communities. It involves giving voice and visibility to marginalised groups and their specific concerns and challenging systems of oppression and discrimination. Given the magnitude and widespread nature of marginalisation in the energy field, this focus is of course understandable and entirely justified, but it does leave the other side of the coin in the dark. Inevitably, energy-related decisions must be made, and resources must be committed, by those with a higher standing (which, for the sake of brevity we will call ‘elites’) and more power in decision-making bodies. ‘Elite power’ in the energy justice literature is mainly analysed from a descriptive perspective, i.e. how it functions, and from a prescriptive perspective as something that should be resisted (Sovacool & Brisbois, 2019). So far, the energy justice literature has left the question related to the justification of the higher standing and power of these ‘elites’ unaddressed: when, and under which circumstances, are certain people or groups entitled to specific positions of power in energy-related decisions?

  3. (3)

    The ‘application challenge’: the three-tenet model so far has found little traction beyond academia. It pays only limited attention to how more just energy systems can be built ‘from the ground up’ by group, activist, or policy practices (Jenkins et al., 2020, 2021). According to Heffron & McCauley (2017), this is due to the dominant influence of economists and their reliance on cost-benefit approaches in energy decisions, but this does not explain the lack of attention in other energy-related planning contexts such as siting or public policy decisions. We suspect that the lack of application of the three-tenet model ‘in the field’ also relates to its failure to offer guidance in situations where the three tenets (and their underlying values) cannot easily be reconciled or be equally realised. How to reconcile for instance the procedural insistence on ‘giving everybody equal voice’ with the demands of recognition justice to ‘lend an ear’ specially to marginalised perspectives?

In the present article, we argue that a pragmatic and pluralist model of justice, based on the seminal work of Boltanski and Thévenot (2006), can contribute to the development of a more comprehensive and philosophically grounded understanding of the notion of energy justice.

Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot, leaders in the new school of pragmatic sociology developed at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, propose a multiple-sphere ontology of justice which is rooted in political and normative theory (challenge 1), addresses justifications of differential ‘moral standings’ in different ‘orders of worth’ (challenge 2), and proposes mechanisms to find a way out of situations involving conflictual demands for justice (challenge 3). In the first part of our article (Section 2), we introduce Boltanski and Thévenot’s ‘commonwealth model’ and illustrate their theoretical arguments with examples taken from a recent ‘hot’ topic in EU energy policy, namely, EU support for energy communities as a new vehicle to deliver energy justice in the form of citizen empowerment, providing local benefits beyond purely financial gains and accelerating the renewable energy transition (Anfinson et al., 2023; Blasch et al., 2021; Mundaca et al., 2018).Footnote 2 We end this section with an initial assessment of the extent to which Boltanski and Thévenot’s model is able to address the three challenges outlined above. In the second part (Section 3), we discuss the added value of this perspective compared to the three-tenet model. Our argument here is not that the three-tenet model should be abandoned, but rather that Boltanski and Thévenot’s model is well equipped to add theoretically informed empirical ‘flesh’ to the more formal ‘bones’ of the three tenets. Finally, the concluding part of the article (Section 4) summarises our argument, discusses limitations, and proposes lines for further research.

2 The ‘Commonwealth Model’ of Boltanski and Thévenot

In their book De la justification. Les économies de grandeur, sociologist Boltanski and economist Thévenot present a general theory to explain how people can come to agreement in potentially conflictual situations, without resorting to violence (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006).Footnote 3 The empirical core of their model is formed by the patterns of argumentation and justification that social actors use to coordinate their actions and thereby create social or political stability. According to the authors, the possibility of coordination among actors rests on shared systems of equivalence, called ‘commonwealths’ or ‘orders of worth’.Footnote 4 Commonwealths are coherent grammars of argumentation and justification organised around different visions of what is just in particular situations. They are conceived of as broad discourses geared towards fairness that individuals invoke in (non-violent) dispute situations—i.e. when they need to defend their own beliefs and actions or when they are criticising others’ positions. For each of the commonwealths, one basic or ‘superior common principle’ helps distinguish what is desirable or excellent from what is of lesser worth in any given situation. The commonwealths or ‘orders of worth’ therefore function as a kind of beacon for the coordination of social action by permitting the actors involved to characterise the relationships between themselves and between them and the objects deployed to stabilise these relationships and decide on a future course of action.

2.1 The Commonwealths

The commonwealths establish different registers of justification and denunciation to be employed in disputes, each with their own criteria of validity and internal consistency. Such regimes of justification make it possible for situated actors to engage in disputes with others on the common good. They are shared by the people who invoke them as well as by any observer (or researcher) standing outside of the dispute. The theoretical foundation of the commonwealth model is found in classical philosophical texts.Footnote 5 Boltanski and Thévenot’s focus on establishing legitimate orders based on normative justifications leads them to discard political theories based on achieving power and domination (e.g. Machiavelli). Furthermore, the process of choosing classical texts, which allowed the identification of various commonwealths, was guided by the following selection criteria: (i) their practical applicability—meaning the accounts can provide guidance for action, excluding utopian traditions; (ii) their general familiarity; and (iii) their usefulness as a foundation for the development of ‘political technologies’—i.e. the constitution of broad classes of equivalence based on ‘metrics’ derived from the accounts (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006: 60–61). The resulting selection of texts is then submitted to a ‘grammatical’ investigation, to establish the fundamental categories or ‘axioms’ needed to build a legitimate political order.

Each of the selected texts proposes a ‘common superior principle’ (principe supérieur commun), orienting action like a distant point of light. The first axiom states that every human must have access to the commonwealth and is considered as someone having an a priori right to benefit from the common good relevant to a particular commonwealth. No one can be a priori or permanently excluded from the commonwealth, based on e.g. certain biological characteristics or specific psychological features. This ‘principle of common humanity’ represents a principle of simple equality in defining access to the commonwealths (A1—principe de commune humanité). In addition to this principle of basic equality, each commonwealth also includes a principle of differentiation. People can occupy distinct positions in the commonwealth, in different classes of equivalence (A2—principe de dissemblance). However, the second axiom cannot conflict with the first one, so all members of the commonwealth must have equal opportunities of accessing these different classes. One must assume and assure that people have certain basic capabilities (or ‘dignity’) to accede to the distinct levels of grandeur—i.e. a principle of ‘equal dignity’ must be respected (A3—principe de commune dignité). The fourth axiom states that the distinct positions people can occupy in a commonwealth can be ordered or ‘measured’ according to a value scale. Through a series of trials, each commonwealth establishes a framework of moral standards that enables the rendering of judgements and the resolution of disputes. People that act in accordance with the common superior principle are awarded with a certain standing (‘grandeur’), while those that choose to ignore the superior principle are denounced by the others because they lack morality or virtue (‘petitesse’) (A4—principe de l’ordre de grandeur). Those who live by the principles of a commonwealth must give up their egoism (or immediate pursuit of pleasure) to assure the establishment of the common good. They are by virtue of the distinctive classification scheme rewarded for this with ‘grandeur’: they are considered and can consider themselves as ‘great’ (A5—principe d’investissement). The last axiom states that, to establish a legitimate order, the benefits enjoyed by the ‘great’ in the commonwealth should also advantage the ‘small’ in some way—i.e. the grandeur of those who realise the superior principle must ‘radiate’ down towards the less fortunate (A6—principe du bien commun). Models of justification which do not have a principle of common good and which block access to the commonwealth for certain groups of people (e.g. by denying that they are human or human enough) cannot be genuine commonwealths. They cannot be seen as one of the broad types of argumentations which bring agreement without resorting to violence. As examples of such illegitimate orders, the authors refer to the models of eugenics and national socialism (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006: 103–106).

In De la justification, Boltanski and Thévenot identified six commonwealths, to which two additional ones have been added in further work.Footnote 6 The eight commonwealths, illustrated here by referring to the debate on energy communities, are the following:

  1. (i)

    The domestic commonwealth involves reference to heritage, communal identity, relations of closeness, familiarity, and habits. Applied to the case of energy communities, we can see that the argumentation that such communities can contribute to the establishment or tightening of local social bonds by bringing community benefits through cooperation is central in the EU discourse on the topic (EC DG Energy, 2019).

  2. (ii)

    In the opinion commonwealth, people or objects are assessed according to the judgements of their public audience. Worthiness is built upon the basis of the degree of notoriety or fame. Famous people or objects are the usual references in justification discourses. A good example in the context of energy communities is the claim that community ownership of local renewable energy infrastructures generally leads to higher public acceptance and more favourable opinions towards renewable energy in general (Bauwens & Devine-Wright, 2018).

  3. (iii)

    The civic commonwealth is built on notions of membership of a political community, with equality in membership and regulated conditions of access. Individual compliance with the general will is the basis of stature, based on an innate capacity of people to ‘have access’ to this general will. The general will defines rights and duties through forms of free political association. Civic values are commonly mobilised in support of energy communities, for instance, in the broad claim that they support ‘energy democracy’ (Filippo Barbera et al., 2018; Van Veelen, 2018; van Veelen & van der Horst, 2018), as well as in the justification for certain decision-making procedures in energy communities, for instance, the ‘one-member-one-vote’ rule implemented in energy cooperatives.

  4. (iv)

    In the market commonwealth, action is motivated by the desire for gaining wealth or advantage through commerce. Order and social coordination arise through the market. In this commonwealth, dignity is positioned as the capacity for self-interested behaviour and a desire for private property. Market justification of energy communities rests for instance on the novel profitable business models enabled by them (Brown et al., 2019).

  5. (v)

    In the industrial commonwealth, argumentation refers to technical performance and places emphasis on scientific and technical expertise as a basis for achieving excellence in system management and design. ‘Industrial’ justifications of energy communities invoke the benefits they can bring for a more efficient energy system management, such as avoiding congestion on local grids or providing flexibility to the system by adapting demand to renewable energy supply on a local community level (Gui & MacGill, 2018).

  6. (vi)

    The inspiration commonwealth is characterised by referring, in action and justification, to transcendent values and intuition. The claim that a widespread adoption of energy communities will lead to a ‘revolution’ or ‘radical transformation’ of the energy system with yet still unknown (but intuitively positive) consequences is a good example of inspirational justification (Hufen & Koppenjan, 2015).

  7. (vii)

    The projective commonwealth places emphasis on establishing flexible and diverse networks and partnerships in view of realising innovative projects. In The New Spirit of Capitalism—the book where this new commonwealth was first proposed—Boltanski & Chiapello (2005) contend that beginning in the middle of the 1970s, capitalism abandoned the Fordist hierarchy of labour and developed a new network-based form of governance based on employee initiative and relative work autonomy. This evolution however came at the expense of material and psychological security. The authors connect the ‘new spirit of capitalism’ with the libertarian and romantic currents of the late 1960s as epitomised by ‘cool’ capitalists such as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs—the ‘heroes’ of the projective commonwealth. Applied to the case of energy communities, justifications that stress the innovativeness, the diversity of organisational and ownership structures, and the embeddedness of energy communities in wider social movements and networks all stem from this projective commonwealth (Becker et al., 2017).

  8. (viii)

    The green commonwealth judges action considering its principles of sustainability and achieving ecological balance. The common denominator in justifications of energy communities is the argument that they will help unlock investments in local renewable energy production, thereby contributing to the ‘greening’ of the energy system (Moroni et al., 2019).

Admittedly, this abbreviated formulation of the commonwealth model could mislead one into thinking that the commonwealths have the status of a transcendental noumenal structure, accessible to ‘all of humanity’ as universal presuppositions of normative justification. While it is true that the different commonwealths allow people to transcend spatial/temporal contexts when trying to coordinate action by argumentation, this does not imply that the people involved in such argumentation have access to some noumenal realm. Perhaps the best way to understand the transcendental power of the commonwealth is through the analogy with the grammar of a natural language. Just like the grammar of natural languages, the commonwealths function as the built-in conditions for enabling a mutual understanding of justification arguments, which enable people to refer to other situations, places, or practices where such arguments have already proven their worth in settling disputes. The commonwealths can therefore be thought of as a grammar of the ‘natural language of justification’, which is, just like ordinary language, subject to historical changes (as witnessed by the emergence of the ‘green’ commonwealth in the 1960s or the ‘projective’ commonwealth in the 1970s).

2.2 From the ‘Commonwealth’ to the ‘Common World’

So far, we have outlined the eight different commonwealths, rooted in firmly established political philosophy texts. These commonwealths each entail a specific superior principle that informs the formulation of discrete metrics for classifying people. Our discussion has however remained on the tenuous level of the ‘grammar of the commonwealths’ but has told us nothing about how agreements are negotiated in practical circumstances—i.e. how the actual language of justification is spoken. To explain coordinated action in the real world (after all, this was the authors’ main concern), Boltanski and Thévenot make the transition from a purely grammatical level of investigation to a hermeneutic one.

The key to understanding how this transition works lies in the axioms outlined above. We recall that, to describe a legitimate commonwealth, people could not be fixed forever in a certain state of grandeur within the commonwealth (i.e. axiom A3). Therefore, in principle, proofs of worth must be renewed each time people are engaged in common action. The position or status of individuals within a commonwealth is always surrounded by uncertainty and requires the support of tangible objects in the physical world in order to be stabilised (Boltanski & Thévenot 2006: 165). Thus, the proof of a person’s ‘worthiness’ cannot be based simply on an intrinsic property, which would forever fix this person’s status in a particular commonwealth. It must be based on objects external to persons, which will serve as a kind of instrument or apparatus to gauge the ‘extent of greatness’ each time the need for a test arises. The reference to qualified things thus entails the transition from the grammar of the ‘commonwealths’ to the network of situated objects of the ‘common world’.

With this fundamental insight that the commonwealths and the orders of ‘grandeur’ which are derived from them are not related to distinct groups but to different situations, Boltanski and Thévenot break with a strong institutional tradition in sociology. The focus on situational justification also takes issue with theories that limit justification to a mere ‘battle of ideas’ or an exchange of arguments. The ‘test of greatness’ engages people, with their physicality, in a world of things which serve as their support (Boltanski & Thévenot 2006: 166). Each ‘world’ makes possible the appearance of other ‘objects’ and requires a different kind of ‘proof of grandeur’. Hence, each world is characterised by different elements, which serve as distinguishing marks for people to recognise which world(s) they are confronted with in a specific situation (cf. Table 1 and the extended table in the Appendix).

Table 1 The 8 commonwealths (adapted from Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006; Boltanski & Chiapello, 2005; Lamont & Thévenot, 2000)
Full size table

Before discussing the added value of the commonwealth model in the field of energy justice in more detail, at this stage, we already wish to point out three of its most appealing features. First, the model attempts to bridge the traditionally sharp distinctions between different disciplines in social sciences and humanities, most notably between sociology and economics and sociology and political theory. Indeed, one of the most intriguing and original aspects of the commonwealth model is the assertion that empirical sociological research can be firmly grounded in political philosophy. This inherent interdisciplinarity certainly makes it an interesting prospect for analysing questions of energy justice. Second, the commonwealth model embraces both a radical pluralism—because there are several ways to define the common good, without the presence of an overarching common value to which they all refer—but is not relativist in a moral sense. With their notion of a limited set of regimes of justification, Boltanski and Thévenot try to find a middle ground between a formal universalism and an unbounded relativism of the ‘anything goes’ kind. Strong relativism is avoided firstly because the number of commonwealths is limited (cf. Table 1), but secondly, also because inasmuch as these orders are deployed in circumstances in when persons are striving to justify themselves—i.e. to persuade others of the righteousness of their behaviour—they must precisely be identifiable to others and therefore include an aspect of generalisation. Notwithstanding their adjustment to situated contexts, justifications also always aim at going beyond contingencies and claim a general validity. Third, the pluralism of the commonwealth model in itself is a valuable addition to the energy justice literature, because it opens the spectrum of justice concerns beyond those typically identified in the three-tenet model, without in any way downplaying the importance of these concerns (cf. next section).

2.3 Initial Assessment of the Added Value of the Commonwealth Model

Having arrived at this point in our discussion, we can also give an initial assessment of the extent to which the commonwealth model is able to address the three challenges outlined in the introductory section, to wit the normative, elite, and application challenge.

First, by positing a limited number of ‘superior common principles’ to guide justification debates considering coordinated action, it addresses the ‘normative challenge’ identified in the literature to some extent. To some extent, because of the central assumption of the commonwealth model, there is nothing intrinsic to each of the commonwealths that allows its normative precedence over other commonwealths in practical situations. Everything depends on the unfolding of the practical ‘test’, mobilising different objects and people, in that situation. As Boltanski and Thévenot explain in their article ‘The Sociology of Critical Capacity’, their aim is to describe the actors’ sense of justice and to build models of the competence with which actors must be endowed to face ordinary critical situations (Boltanski & Thévenot, 1999). This approach thus departs from moral philosophy, which typically attempts to discover normative rules and procedures leading to justice independently from the actors engaged in a particular situation. Boltanski and Thévenot advocate an empirical approach based on interrogating people in situations of crisis, when the need for justification and coordination to restore the action potential is clearly felt. In other words, moments of interruption of action and crisis are the privileged entry points for sociological observation. It is here that the different models of justification (i.e. the commonwealths), will reveal themselves. The role of the analyst is then to carefully record this process as closely as possible—an approach made possible precisely because the analyst shares knowledge of the different commonwealths with the actors, the only difference being that the analyst’s knowledge is more profound and reflexive (i.e. through the knowledge of the political philosophies underlying the different commonwealths). Since this is a crucial point in the application of Boltanski and Thévenot’s model to a political philosophy of technology, we will return to the normative limitations of the model in more detail in the concluding section of our article.

Second, regarding the ‘elite’ challenge, Boltanski and Thévenot maintain that people can occupy distinct positions in a commonwealth. People that act in accordance with the common superior principle are awarded with a certain standing (‘grandeur’), while those that choose to ignore the superior principle are denounced by the others because they lack morality or virtue (‘petitesse’). Furthermore, these positions can be ordered or ‘measured’ according to a value scale that allows one to pass judgement on the relative ‘grandeur’ or ‘petitesse’ of different actors involved in the dispute. To attain a position of ‘grandeur’, one must prove by repeated trials that one contributes to the establishment of the common good, relative to one of the commonwealths. For instance, an entrepreneur can legitimately claim a position of ‘grandeur’ in the market commonwealth if he/she has successfully built up a commercial enterprise in a competitive market by strictly following the rules of the free market. However, if this success is achieved because of e.g. good connections with political authorities that have favoured this enterprise above others by granting generous subsidies, the position of ‘grandeur’ can be legitimately attacked by other actors.

Third, our discussion so far has left the ‘application challenge’ unattended. To remind the reader, the ‘application challenge’ arises because of a lack of concrete guidance on how to deal with situations where the three tenets of the prevailing energy justice framework (procedural, distributive, and recognitional) point in different directions, as will commonly be the case in real-world energy justice disputes. So far, we have only explained how disputes arising within each of the commonwealths outlined by Boltanski and Thévenot could be addressed—i.e. by following the ‘grammatical rules’ of the commonwealths and stabilising them into a common world by making use of the requisite objects—but not what happens in a conflict where different actors mobilise different commonwealths to justify their position. In fact, Boltanski and Thévenot are not only interested in knowing what is happening within a single commonwealth, but above all in situations in which different regimes clash or compromise with one another. What is more, they underline that the idea of a completely stabilised world, in which one commonwealth is completely realised through the assembly of suitable objects, would possess a character of completeness and self-sufficiency which is quite simply impossible to uphold in the real world. Situations requiring new tests of justification which come to challenge the established order happen more as a rule than as an exception. Think of e.g. the discovery of new and unexpected impacts of the use of existing technology, contestation caused by a shift in the relative societal importance of moral norms, or sudden unexpected and disruptive events. The plurality of commonwealths creates a constant uncertainty so that the justification of a particular stabilised context may always be questioned from within alternative commonwealths. Even contexts that seem to be completely stabilised in one commonwealth can thus become subject to instability at the fringes. In the following section, we therefore take up this question of how to address the—in most situations unavoidable—pluralism of justifications, by proposing a three-step procedure for negotiating energy justice.

3 A Three-Step Procedure for Negotiating Energy Justice

So far, we have offered our readers a new framework that helps in the interpretation of energy justice debates as they arise in concrete situations. The commonwealth model promotes an understanding of such situations as involving actors motivated by many different moral orientations. These actors use different moral languages, which underlines the difficulty of reaching an agreement on moral grounds. Boltanski and Thévenot’s model is therefore not meant to prescribe how people should behave or make decisions, but rather to analyse the ways in which people with different moral orientations (supported by the different ‘objects’ they use as references) come to agreement about what is valued, important, and legitimate. The model is aimed at providing an interpretative account of how actors in different social contexts establish and negotiate their common good, rather than prescribing what the common good should be or how it should be achieved. Thus, in proposing a procedure for negotiating energy justice, we use the commonwealth model in a way that was not originally intended by the authors themselves. Nevertheless, we feel justified in promoting this use of Boltanski and Thévenot’s model, because their theory also contains an account of how actors are supposed to produce a morally valid justification—i.e. by providing a ‘grammatically’ correct moral statement (cf. Section 2.1). So, instead of concealing moral arguments, dodging responsibility, or simply pressing through a ‘solution’ in a situation of moral disagreement, we propose a procedure that would allow actors engaged in the conflict to exercise their ‘right to justification’—i.e. a right to make explicit the moral justifications that are implicitly at play in the situation at hand. Although it is an empirical undertaking to identify the specific circumstances that enable actors to exercise this ‘right’ (e.g. when they perceive the necessity of depoliticising an issue because continued conflict would be detrimental to all parties involved), our objective in this article is not to present a sociological analysis of (energy) justice debates, but rather a conceptual exploration. Should the need for a peaceful resolution of a debate involving different justifications arise, we offer a conceptual framework (building further on Boltanski and Thévenot’s groundbreaking work) that enables actors to look for such a solution, without of course giving guarantees that they will succeed in this attempt.

The following sections give the outlines of a three-step procedure for implementing energy justice, like the one proposed by the three-tenet scholars but enriched by insights from the commonwealth model. To remind the reader, the three-tenet model relies on the following three steps to tackle a specific issue of energy justice: (i) identifying who will be affected and what claims these individuals or groups make (i.e. justice as recognition), (ii) identifying the distribution of benefits and burdens implied in the issue (i.e. distributional justice), and then (iii) identifying decision-making strategies leading to potentially more just outcomes (i.e. procedural justice) (cf. Section 1). To provide more empirical content to an otherwise very conceptual discussion, we again draw on the example of justice concerns in the policy field of energy communities, a topic that has recently also drawn the attention of energy justice scholars (Astola et al., 2022; Hanke et al., 2021; Laes & Bombaerts, 2022; van Bommel & Höffken, 2021).

3.1 Step 1: Making an Inventory of Claims for Recognition

Leading scholars working in the three-tenet tradition refer to Walker (2009) to define recognition justice as the requirement to address ‘ … various forms of cultural and political domination, insults, degradation, and devaluation. It [i.e. recognition injustice] may manifest itself not only as a failure to recognise, but also as misrecognising—a distortion of people’s views that may appear demeaning or contemptible’ (Jenkins et al., 2016: 177; McCauley et al., 2013: 2). Within the energy justice discourse, the condition of having precarious access to energy is frequently cited as a prominent illustration of a matter that necessitates attention from the perspective of recognition justice. Situations of precarious access to energy can lead to various forms of vulnerability (e.g. inadequate heating of houses leading to health problems), and to the exclusion of these vulnerable groups from social life in general (Simcock et al., 2018). Furthermore, research on situations of scarcity in general conclusively shows that poverty changes the way households think and make choices (Haushofer & Fehr, 2014). In the context of energy communities, exclusion mechanisms such as impaired cognition of basic energy issues, lack of time caused by the more pressing need of simply muddling through the exigencies of everyday life, or the lack of financial resources to e.g. pay the membership fee for a local energy cooperative might lead the energy poor from also being excluded from reaping the benefits of local energy communities (Hanke et al., 2021).

We certainly concur with the key message from current energy justice literature that identifying and understanding instances of recognition injustice should be a key concern for energy justice research as a necessary precondition for rendering justice to the needs of vulnerable and underrepresented groups. The commonwealth model can be used as a valuable heuristic tool for this task. Instances of recognition injustice fall under a situation of injustice that Boltanski and Thévenot call the ‘transfer of misery’ (transport de misère)—i.e. a situation where the ‘position of smallness’ within one commonwealth (cf. table in the Appendix Table 2) excludes people from proving their worth in the other commonwealths. Structural poverty limiting people’s chances of political participation and access to good education and work, etc. are prime examples of such ‘transport of misery’. Returning to the example of precarious access to energy, the position of ‘smallness’ of the energy poor does not appear as a problem from the perspective of the market commonwealth (under the presumption that energy is a commodity like any other and therefore is submitted to the rules and regulations of the energy market), but it does become a strong issue of injustice when this position translates into a position of smallness in the other commonwealths as well—e.g. when the opinions of the energy poor stand less chance of being heard (in the opinion commonwealth) or impedes their ability to become knowledgeable in matters of energy production and use (in the industrial commonwealth). Such ‘transfer of misery’ is particularly relevant in the context of energy communities because their justification as being instrumental to the promotion of energy citizenship (i.e. an argumentation drawn from the civic commonwealth) ushers in the need to prove that they can be ‘open to all’ for participation (van Bommel & Höffken, 2021). Hence, the commonwealth model can be helpful in tracing marginalised groups (i.e. those that occupy a ‘position of smallness’ in one or more of the commonwealths involved) and in systematically asking the question whether this ‘position of smallness’ results from a voluntary lack of engagement or investment in these commonwealths, or rather from an imposed ‘transfer of misery’.

Going beyond the issue of marginalisation—i.e. of an unjustified lack of recognition for particular perspectives—the commonwealth model also provides a nuanced perspective on the converse problem—i.e. that of the justification of differential levels of recognition in justice debates. According to Boltanski and Thévenot, the ability of actors to successfully mobilise arguments from larger moral orders will determine their power in settling a debate in a non-violent way. Each commonwealth provides a template for what is regarded valuable and worthy, as well as who can have access to a state of ‘grandeur’ (cf. Table 1). Justifications are therefore also justifications of power, as they emphasise the normative regulation of power relationships (Reinecke et al., 2017). This explains why not every situation involving people in a position of power, who are able to ‘impose’ courses of action in a situation of conflict, necessarily indicates a situation of recognition injustice. It all depends on whether those in power draw their power from having passed the necessary ‘trials’ for achieving a position of ‘grandeur’ in the commonwealths relevant to the situation. For instance, the fact that members of energy communities upon reflection choose to grant decision power to those members that are particularly knowledgeable in the energy field (i.e. the proverbial white pensioners who previously held professional positions in the energy sector) does not necessarily point to a problem of recognition justice (Creamer et al., 2018; Van Veelen, 2018).

The first step of our procedure would therefore consist in identifying the different claims for recognition that are made in a particular contentious energy issue. Typically, there will be ‘elite’ players (from business, policy, academia, etc.) who each have a well-articulated view on the rightfulness of their preferred approach to the problem. In some cases, there will also be opponents who argue in opposite directions, by mobilising argumentations from other commonwealths. The argumentations of both types of actors will usually be relatively ‘out in the open’ and easy to catalogue. However, recognition justice forces us to think beyond the justice claims that are put forward spontaneously. A thorough search for marginalised perspectives beyond the will of the actors involved (i.e. ‘transport of misery’ in the words of Boltanski and Thévenot) must be made by the researcher. In line with the emphasis on recognition justice in the three-tenet model, the commonwealth model in this first step helps to reduce bias in including a wide range of justice claims and to lend an ear to those claims that are usually overheard because they are systematically prevented from becoming fully articulated. Beyond that, however, it also makes the researcher attentive to claims for justified access to decision power made by the different actors engaged in an energy justice debate.

3.2 Step 2: Exploring Alternative Distributive Solutions

Existing definitions of distributional justice in the energy justice literature are unclear about the scope of this tenet. The common denominator appears to be that distributional energy justice refers to ‘the even distribution of benefits and ills on all members of society regardless of income, race, etc.’ (Jenkins et al., 2016: 176). On the other hand, Walker (2009) extends distributional understandings of justice to the unequal distribution of impacts, responsibilities, and the spatialities that are implicated within these. The overall impression from the existing literature is that, while it rightfully stresses the importance of a just distribution in matters of energy justice, it remains inconclusive regarding important questions such as how these ‘goods and ills’ should be weighed against each other; what the difference is between distributing material ‘goods and ills’ and rights and obligations; and whether there are any principles available for deciding on the just distribution of goods, ills, rights, and responsibilities.

Here again, we believe that Boltanski and Thévenot’s commonwealth model can bring some much-needed clarity. The different commonwealths not only specify the range of goods that are considered to be of specific worth within each of the commonwealths (the ‘repertory of objects’—cf. Table 1) but also the specific ‘investments’ that need to be put in by actors in order to enjoy more of the goods or the ‘tests’ that need to be performed in order to verify whether a just distribution within a specific commonwealth has been reached (situations involving distribution of goods over different commonwealths will be dealt with in the next section). Therefore, as a second step in our procedure, we propose that the researcher, preferably in conjunction with the actors involved in the issue at stake, in a deliberative setting, encourages the group of actors to elaborate and defend plausible implementations of the commonwealths that would deal with the justice issue at hand.

To continue our example of energy communities, we could for instance think of the following solutions to the distributive problem according to the logic of the commonwealths that are most likely to be heavily involved (to wit the market, civic, industrial, and green commonwealth). Under a market logic, it would for instance make sense to organise an auction that would put potential energy communities into competition with commercial project developers for constructing a renewable power plant on a municipal piece of land. From the perspective of the civic commonwealth on the other hand, it would make sense to attribute the decision on who gets the right to develop the plant to the municipal council. Additional provisions to ensure that the developer works in the interest of the common municipal good could be put in place, e.g. by requiring that the developer sets up a social fund from part of the profits. Proponents of the industrial commonwealth could base their decision on comparing the efficiency of the various alternative renewable energy plants that might be built—i.e. the amount of electricity that they could generate per square metre of occupied ground. Finally, green argumentations would draw attention to the so-called ‘embodied injustices’ (Healy et al., 2019) or overall environmental impact of the power plant; not limited to the local burdens such as noise or visual pollution, but extending along the entire lifecycle of the installation, from the ‘cradle’ (i.e. the mining of the resources) to the ‘grave’ (i.e. the re-use or disposal of the materials at the end of its productive lifetime). As illustrated by these examples, the purpose of the second step would thus be to generate a range of viable solutions to the problem of distributive justice, without yet committing to one or other alternatives. The advantage of conceiving of this step as a collective deliberative exercise lies in the fact that by stimulating the participants in the exercise to produce well-founded solutions from each of the commonwealth would be helpful in getting across the idea that there is no unique solution to the problem of distributive justice. Instead, a (limited) range of alternatives presents itself as reasonably justified.

3.3 Step 3: Negotiating Justice Concerns Under Conditions of Due Process

Finally, in deciding between the different reasonable solutions identified in step 2, the issue of procedural justice gains front stage. In the three-tenet model, procedural justice is commonly defined as ‘ … a call for equitable procedures that engage all stakeholders in a non-discriminatory way. It states that all groups should be able to participate in decision making, and that their decisions should be taken seriously throughout’ (McCauley et al., 2013: 2). But again, very little guidance can be found in the energy justice literature what precisely counts as ‘equitable procedures’ or what it means that ‘decisions should be taken seriously’. In matters of procedural justice, Habermas’ (1993, 1996) seminal work on discourse ethics often stands as a reference, advancing transparency, non-discrimination, power-free dialogue, and consent as necessary procedural conditions for the legitimation of policies. The commonwealth framework has in common with the Habermasian concept of discourse that it focuses on justice and the common good in terms of argumentation and generalisation. The ‘imperative to justify’ (cf. Habermas’ ‘forceless force of the better argument’) forces people to abstract from specific circumstances to mobilise higher-level constructs of the common good. However, while the Habermasian approach implies that forms of reason and justification can be freely and creatively constructed during the dialogue process, the commonwealth model provides a useful framework for understanding how actors give substance to their moral legitimacy claims through justifications that are subject to requirements resembling those of a grammar. Here, the big advantage of the commonwealth model as a procedural guide for discussion is that it also indicates a way out of situations where conflicting justifications drawn from different commonwealths call for different courses of action.

Depending on the degree of conflict, Boltanski and Thévenot (2006) indicate three ways out (without having to resort to violence or power):

  1. (1)

    Clarification within one world: the solution to the difference of opinion is found within the limits of the world which seems most relevant for the situation in question (e.g. in the market world, a difference of opinion as to what is the right price for the land on which a renewable energy plant would be built could be settled by commissioning a comparative market study). The fact that an agreement can be reached within the limits of one world reinforces the relevance of that particular world (and its specific way of defining proof, relationships between people, etc.) towards other action logics.

  2. (2)

    A compromise: if actors cannot agree on a legitimate ‘test’ of their environment because they keep referring persistently to different commonwealths, a temporary compromise might help to solve that problem for the moment. They then need to agree on a compromise solution, without however letting prevail a specific ‘grandeur’ of one of the commonwealths of the different actors in conflict. They do so by extracting elements and objects from the different worlds in question to arrange them in a specific disposition. In the context of energy communities, a good example would be the appointment of a management board composed of energy experts (as required by the industrial commonwealth) overseen by a general assembly of citizens (as required by the civic commonwealth). Consequently, the compromise is always vague and fragile. It includes an orientation towards the common good (this is what sets the compromise apart from the local arrangement), but this common good is not further specified in terms of the principles underlying the different commonwealths. An ‘intrinsically’ stable compromise is only possible when the creation of a new commonwealth (with a corresponding superior common principle) is undertaken, which usually takes many years to complete (as witnessed by the emergence of the projective and green commonwealth).

  3. (3)

    A local bargain or arrangement: here, the actors involved agree to settle down to a deal—i.e. a temporal agreement that only holds good for the people involved. The stability of the local bargain cannot be assured, as no appeal to general validity is made.

Thus, as a last step in our three-step procedure, participants in the deliberation should critically reflect on why reasonable people might be willing to adopt each of the solutions directly derived from applying the commonwealth logics. Group members should also, of course, reflect on the difficulties of implementing each solution and preferably frame their objections as questions on which they need other group members’ help rather than as decisive refutations of different commonwealth logics. The ultimate goal would therefore be to identify compromises or (if agreement on the level of the common good cannot be reached) even temporary bargains or ‘truces’ that could be effective in solving the energy justice issues at hand, but do not violate deeply felt moral intuitions about the right way to proceed. Decision-making of this sort will most likely take the form of oscillating back and forth among competing considerations, in search of some kind of shared reflective equilibrium (Rawls, 1999).

4 Discussion and Conclusion

In this paper, we have used Boltanski and Thévenot’s commonwealth model to provide the basic contours of a three-step pluralist and pragmatic dialogue model for questions of energy justice. The model proposes to create moral legitimacy in the face of plural demands for energy justice by engaging actors in an inclusive dialogue based on an explicit recognition of the language of the commonwealths as a kind of ‘lingua franca’. We proposed that this dynamic dialogical process can result in a variety of moral truces: clarification within one commonwealth, compromise, or a local bargain. In doing so, we make three contributions to the existing literature on energy justice, which mainly draws on the three-tenet model of recognition, distributional and procedural justice as a conceptual framework. First, the commonwealth model’s rootedness in normative political theory provides a stronger philosophical underpinning than was available up till now in the literature (challenge 1). Second, it allows one to go beyond the (almost exclusive) focus on injustices perpetrated on disempowered or marginalised groups, to include questions on the justified exercise of power (challenge 2). Third, the commonwealth model shows us practical ways out of situations where conflicting demands for justice are being made (challenge 3).

Of course, we understand in this conceptual paper that we were only able to give the rough outlines of our model and that therefore the ‘proof of the pudding will be in the eating’, i.e. in the further specification and practical application of the model. Next to the question of further enriching the model by empirical insights, however, there are also some fundamental theoretical questions related to the use of Boltanski and Thévenot’s commonwealth model that deserve further attention. One way or another, these theoretical issues have to do with the ‘middle ground’ between the ‘transcendental’ (the commonwealths) and the ‘material’ (the common worlds) that Boltanski and Thévenot wish to cover with their model.

In the previous sections, we have already pointed out that in finding a solution to questions of justification, it is not simply the ‘force of the better argument’ that wins the day, because there is nothing in principle that would allow the logic of one commonwealth to prevail over another. In situations where numerous commonwealths are being invoked with almost equal strength (i.e. when each of the commonwealths invoked are backed by an already established strong network of supporting subjects and objects), it is probably easier to invite the actors involved to a dialogue with the aim of finding a practicable ‘truce’ that is able to satisfy to some degree each of the demands for legitimacy. However, in situations where one or a limited number of commonwealths carries greater strength due to a stronger supporting network, these commonwealth logics stand a good chance of winning the argument because of the greater certainty and stability they offer for the further coordination of action. Returning to our core matter of energy justice, it is clear that neo-liberal regulation of the energy sector (drawing on the logics of the industrial and market commonwealth) is dominant in many Western societies. It will therefore be hard to challenge established institutions or practices in the energy sector based on other commonwealth logics.

The issue of the normative orientation of the commonwealth model merits further attention. For Boltanski and Thévenot, understanding a situation means having access to the representations people give of the situation, as the descriptive basis of their investigation. This means interrogating people in situations of crisis, when the need for justification and coordination to restore the action potential is clearly felt. In other words, moments of interruption of action, crisis, and subsequent search for compromise are the privileged entry points for sociological observation; it is here that the different commonwealths involved will reveal themselves. The sociologist’s role is then to carefully record this process as closely as possible—an approach made possible precisely because the sociologist shares knowledge of the different commonwealths with the actors, the only difference being that the sociologist’s knowledge is more profound and reflexive (i.e. through the knowledge of the philosophies underlying the different commonwealths). Inherently, the model has a descriptive purpose. Using the analogy of the way a natural language is spoken, Boltanski and Thévenot describe the way ‘moral language’ is used by speakers and writers in everyday communication. They are concerned with analysing and understanding the rules and patterns that govern the way this language is used in different contexts and seek to describe moral language as it is spoken or written, rather than prescribing how it should be used. On the other hand, because of the ‘grammatical’ nature of Boltanski and Thévenot’s investigations, concerned with what is considered to be ‘correct’ or ‘proper’ forms of speaking the language of justification, their model also contains an implicit prescriptive component. However, it remains the case that the commonwealth model itself does not offer any critical evaluation of the different commonwealths. In principle, all of them are equally worthy of being deployed in particular situations.

These observations point to the need for supplementing Boltanski and Thévenot’s model with additional investigations on the conceptual links between particular commonwealths and the ‘inherent logic’ of certain goods, practices, or institutions. For instance, following Rawls, one might inquire whether energy belongs to the category of primary goods to be distributed in society, and if so, which justice logic imposes itself as a design principle for the basic institution governing the distribution of energy. Another fruitful avenue for further research, as suggested by Sharon (2021) in the context of healthcare technologies, would be to investigate to what extent Walzer’s work on multiple ‘spheres of justice’ (Walzer, 1984) can offer additional normative directions for the application of the different commonwealths in the different ‘spheres’ of social life (economic, political, etc.) that regulate energy systems. Yet, another line of critical inquiry could take up the question to which extent in situations of differential power actors would seriously consider the possibility of opening up the dominant discourse to justification challenges coming from other commonwealths. In other words, we certainly do not advance our pragmatic and pluralist model as a kind of ‘silver bullet’ for every issue of energy justice but invite careful investigation into the boundary conditions for the model to work.