Keywords

Introduction

This final chapter draws together key contributions of the book. It looks across the different areas of analysis and thinking that have been addressed throughout, drawing conclusions relevant to both energy poverty and practice-inspired energy research. Key tenets of theoretical engagement that have been worked through here concern on the one hand capabilities approaches to energy poverty, and on the other, practice theory-based interventions related to the constitution of need and invisible energy policy. The synthesis and dialogue advanced through the book across these different areas has allowed for distinctive insights to be produced and opened up possibilities for future analysis. In what follows, each section is themed around key areas of contribution. The first discusses core contributions for thinking with energy capabilities approaches. The second moves to examine those arising from engagement with the invisible energy policy agenda in the context of energy poverty. The third is shaped around ways of working with concepts relating to the constitution of need and how they can be revealing for thinking about inequality in practices. Each section builds drawing together the different conceptual advances taken forward within the book and highlighting avenues for future thought and research.

Advancing Energy Capabilities

Though the analytic focus of this book has been on the insights afforded by looking across the energy poverty and practice-based energy research literatures, this has been grounded in a specific approach to energy poverty that adapts capabilities concepts bringing focus on the relations between energy and everyday actions required to achieve a minimally decent quality of life (Day et al., 2016). This first section of the conclusions offers insights relevant to advancing capabilities-based approaches to energy poverty, drawing out key issues and contributions that have arisen through the analysis and wider discussion.

The book takes forward work that has argued for alternative understandings of energy poverty and analyses that place such expanded treatments at their centre (e.g. Bouzarovski, 2018; Bouzarovski & Petrova, 2015; Day et al., 2016; Middlemiss & Gillard, 2015; Middlemiss et al., 2019; Petrova, 2018; Simcock et al., 2016). Key ideas encapsulated in the work of Day et al. (2016) relating to a capability framework for energy poverty have been pivotal in developing a flexible, multifaceted approach to understanding the issues. They suggest a focus on the capabilities that are underpinned by or related to various energy services as an alternative way of thinking about energy poverty and moving beyond heat and efficiency as the central tenets of analysis in this space. This work (and others) offers an expanded way of thinking about energy poverty taking analysis beyond kilowatt hours (kWh) and opening up narrowly defined understandings of energy poverty to encompass insights that can better attune to lived experiences, interconnection, and relationality.

This book has been grounded in these expanded ways of thinking about energy poverty to advance an analysis that is able to consider the multiple ways in which energy is required within daily life to support social participation and wellbeing. However, it also offers contributions to thinking with capabilities-based approaches across different areas of contemporary debate. First, the analysis and discussion here have spoken to debates about the need to distinguish between capabilities that can be understood as essential and those that are not. I argue that rather than seeking ways to specify essential capabilities and related forms of energy use at the outset, these issues might more fruitfully be worked through as part of analyses. By simply being attentive to questions about the essential nature of energy use—rather than attempting to specify uses or thresholds—and examining how it is linked to capabilities through empirical analysis, possibilities are created for important forms of insight. For example, in the analysis in Chapter 5, being alert to notions of essential energy uses and capabilities was revealing for thinking about processes of normalisation associated with experiences of energy deprivation. By interrogating the ways that people normalised experiences of often severe energy deprivation, questions about what essential uses are and how they connect to capabilities were opened up without recourse to either top-down more paternalistic assessments of need or overly narrow conceptions that obscure how processes of oppression shape what people see as acceptable.

One way into analysis, then, that is proposed here is to adopt a biographical methodology (see Butler et al., 2014) as an approach to understanding energy capabilities. Such an approach places the person and their relational context at the centre, rather than a specific form of energy use, sector, or service. It allows for exploration of interconnection between different forms of energy poverty and opens up the analysis to complexity by engaging with lived experiences. I suggest biographical approaches, such as those employed here, can facilitate movement past the traditional spatial boundedness of energy poverty research and offer a route to engaging with capabilities in a grounded way but without the goal being to specify essential needs.

This also connects with debates about the nature of the relations between capabilities and energy services (see Chapter 2; cf. Middlemiss et al., 2019). Middlemiss et al. (2019) assert that while a sequential relationship has been inferred in previous work, their analysis reveals a more bidirectional one wherein energy services can be important to capabilities, but capabilities can also underpin access to such services. Building on this, I have argued for the need to maintain such an openness in analysis of the relations between capabilities and energy services. In this, the analysis has created insights that align with Middlemiss et al.'s contention but also extend this to highlight a cyclical relationship between energy services and capabilities. One example discussed in the book concerned the requirements placed on people to travel and access information and communication technologies. Where these energy service needs could not be met, there were severe implications for people’s capabilities relating to securing income, which in turn restricted access to energy services. In this sense, then, in addition to the bidirectionality identified by Middlemiss et al. (2019), such relations can be seen as cyclical.

Beyond this, the analysis in the book has sought to draw out an inherent flexibility within the energy capabilities approach to look beyond the bounded focus on domestic contexts often associated with studies of energy poverty. Though existing work recognises services can be met through means outside of the confines of the home (Bouzarovski & Petrova, 2015; Day et al., 2016), analyses have yet to move to take in mobilities as well. While this is a possibility encapsulated in energy capabilities frameworks, to date little research adopting this approach has worked outside of domestic contexts or moved to look across and between mobilities and domestic forms of energy poverty. By building from an approach to analysis through the book that is grounded in biographical interview data and lived experiences, distinctions between mobilities and domestic energy provision come to be seen as limiting for understanding the ways that different forms of energy deprivation interconnect. The conceptual synthesis here offers an expanded and flexible way of defining energy poverty and combines it with a methodological approach that is focused on lived experience, bringing to light the value of looking at multiple different energy services, including mobilities, their interrelations, and their importance to daily life.

For example, in Chapter 5, data extracts focused around mobilities were revealing for extending thinking about self-rationing and self-disconnection to recognise the ways that people live without some energy services entirely. Within the mobilities space, participants frequently discussed always walking and never using public or private transport because of the associated costs, even where the distances were extremely long and the lack of energy services severely affected capabilities, for example, relating to social respect and securing income. A focus on mobilities has been revealing too for thinking about the processes through which needs are constituted in and through policy with important implications for experiences of energy deprivation and poverty (see Chapter 6). As an area of energy deprivation, it affords insight into how energy poverty can be related to demands for travel that are placed on people through policy, as well as owing to policies that shape options for and costs of travel. Mobilities are perhaps more revealing in this respect precisely because they do not form a focus of fuel poverty policy in the same way as domestic energy use does. The advantages a capabilities perspective affords for looking across different forms of energy use and drawing in mobilities, then, could, I argue, be made far more integral to analyses in this space and afford possibilities for important insights. Overall, applying and utilising a capabilities-based understanding within the book has afforded opportunities to explore possibilities for analysis embedded in this approach and to offer further avenues for its development and expansion within energy poverty research.

Implications for Invisible Energy Policy Analysis

An important starting point for the book was to examine the ways that processes of governance—far beyond energy policy—have implications for the constitution, reproduction, and exacerbation of energy poverty. This arises from engagement with the area of practice-based energy research that has been termed ‘invisible energy policy’ (Royston et al., 2018). Working with the invisible energy policy approach has brought insights important to understanding the emergence and reproduction of energy poverty, but I want to argue it also offers insight into trajectories for research and analysis taking forward the invisible energy policy agenda.

This research began life as an initial attempt to develop the invisible energy policy idea, focusing on a case example policy area, but what it has revealed has been telling for research more widely. Crucially, by moving beyond the predefined categories, classifications, and distinctions of existing government institutions and focusing on lived experiences and enactments, the intersections and messy realities of policy are revealed (Butler et al., 2018). This approach, then, widens the scope of analysis in important ways for those working on governance both within energy research and beyond. First, it creates space for asking different questions of the processes by which (energy) problems are re/produced and created. Second, it takes analysis beyond definitions and categorisations of the problems as they are currently formulated within existing governance structures. This lends important opportunities for more critical forms of analysis that trouble existing ways of understanding and viewing social challenges.

Developing the analysis from the invisible energy policy agenda has brought focus on the ways that energy poverty and vulnerabilities are actively created and shaped by policy and governance, often emanating from areas other than energy (see also Middlemiss & Gillard, 2015). The focus on welfare policy brings into sharp relief the ways that policy beyond energy policy is deeply implicated in shaping people’s abilities to meet their needs and in affecting how those needs manifest. For example, welfare policy (along with other areas of policy) has been shown through this analysis to have implications for where people live and for the inadequacy of housing. Contemporary welfare reforms have also been shown to have had severe impacts on people’s abilities to afford energy services and meet basic energy needs, both in the home and in the context of mobilities. The analysis in this book has gone further, however, in considering not only the direct impacts of policy on people, their energy access, and their capabilities, but broader forms of influence that shape experiences of energy poverty in equally important ways.

In this respect, looking across to welfare policy has been revealing for recasting problems and developing lines of analysis within energy poverty in at least two ways. One concerns the fuel poverty-wider poverty divide. Previous research on energy poverty has highlighted the importance of fuel poverty being identified and addressed within policy as a distinctive problem, separate from wider conditions of poverty (Bouzarovski, 2018). The significance (rightly) afforded to such a conceptual and policy distinction has, however, underpinned tendencies to not address the relations between fuel poverty and wider poverty within analyses. By beginning with a different area of policy, the analysis here was poised and pushed to confront such relations allowing for the central significance of energy services in contributing to the cyclical temporalities that characterise poverty (see Macdonald et al., 2020) to be brought to the fore. This underscored, rather than undermined, then, the importance of addressing energy poverty precisely because of its relation to wider poverty.

A second way in which starting from welfare policy has been important for rethinking how problems are typically understood and situated is by bringing a focus on the nature of political subjectivities within different policy areas. In previous work, Middlemiss (2016) has highlighted the different ways that subjects of welfare policy and subjects of fuel poverty policy are positioned within their respective policy areas. Crucially, she highlights how welfare policy is politicised in ways that fuel poverty policy is not. Where fuel poverty subjects are assumed as worthy recipients of policy support and the framings and problematisations tend to be technical, those in welfare policy tend to be cast as unworthy and problems are positioned as arising out of individual deficits, such as in skills, abilities, and willingness.

In Chapter 5, the ways that these different subjectivities play out in the context of lived experiences of both energy poverty and welfare policy are examined. But in these concluding comments I wanted to draw attention to how this type of questioning only arises out of looking beyond the specifics of one policy area. Critical engagement with how political subjects are positioned across different policy areas is important for analyses of governance, but can easily be overlooked with a narrower framing. Crucially, the research and analysis in this book have given focus to the lived experiences of policy allowing for analysis of the ways that these different subjectivities reveal themselves within daily life and are negotiated with consequences for the ways that societal problems take form.

In this case, the ways that the kinds of severe energy deprivation—encapsulated in discussion of ‘living without energy’—are accepted and normalised as part of living in poverty have been brought to the fore (see Chapter 5). The subjectivities associated with welfare policy appeared far more dominant than those encapsulated in fuel poverty policy arenas. The analysis reflected on how some of the successes that arise from having fuel poverty as something distinctive and apart from poverty, such as its depoliticisation and policy support, are not necessarily carried through, therefore, to the experiences of energy poverty. It has further highlighted how concerns about eroding the distinction between poverty and fuel poverty in contexts like the UK have perhaps resulted in less attention being given to the ways that energy deprivation is foundational in the creation and cyclical reproduction of wider poverty. Though in Global South contexts these relations might be readily recognised and even core to analysis and policy about energy access (Bouzarovski & Petrova, 2015), they are far more marginal in debates about poverty in the UK and other areas of the Global North.

Starting from the invisible energy policy agenda as a way into the empirical research and analysis has been important, then, in bringing to light insights important to contemporary debates about energy poverty. Concerns relating to the role of wider socio-political structures and processes in institutionalising and normalising energy poverty are brought to the fore, as are issues relating to policy and political definitions of fuel poverty (cf. Middlemiss, 2016; Petrova, 2018). But there are also insights relevant for thinking about research trajectories in the area of invisible energy policy arising from the focus on energy poverty. Engagement with energy poverty research has brought focus on the wider discourses and political subjectivities that shape and are engendered by different policy areas. This focus on the role of different policy areas in shaping energy concerns through broader processes and forms of discursive construction takes analysis beyond specific policies, giving emphasis to alternative routes for analysis of invisible energy policy.

The Constitution of Need in Energy Poverty

The consequences of not being able to meet energy demands or access energy services for wellbeing are of central concern in the energy poverty literature (e.g. Bouzarovski & Petrova, 2015; Middlemiss & Gillard, 2015; Middlemiss et al., 2019; Simcock et al., 2016). In contrast, the nature of increasing needs for energy as part of contemporary life has formed the focus for energy demand research (e.g. Shove, 2003; Shove et al., 2012) but with little consideration of how this relates to inequality and wellbeing. In this context, the ways that ever-increasing needs for energy have implications for energy poverty and wellbeing have been largely overlooked, as have the ways that people are differentially placed to enact new needs within everyday practice or to resist them as they take hold.

By combining these two major areas of conceptual development in energy consumption research, the analysis here has been able to develop the arguments regarding problems with escalating demand to include implications not only for environmental sustainability but also, more directly, for energy poverty and wellbeing. The discussion develops insight into how people have differing degrees of agency in their ability to resist and shape practices, as well as in their capabilities to successfully perform them. This takes thinking beyond a concern with how people with different characteristics are vulnerable to energy poverty, to consider the constitution of requirements for energy use and the ways this is enshrined in policy emanating from different areas of government. This brings in consideration of power and of differential patterns of agency in the enactment and defection from practices, foregrounding questions about governance and intervention in distinctive ways. Crucially, it brings attention to the ways that governance and policy are deeply implicated in constituting needs for energy and, consequently, the conditions for energy poverty. And onto how the move to consider non-energy policy within energy demand sustainability research (see Royston et al., 2018) also has relevance for studies of energy deprivation.

From the analysis I argue that existing inequalities affect people’s engagement with practices in important ways. First, existing capabilities afford variable possibilities for subverting, resisting, and reshaping practices constituted, in part, through policies. Consequently, as new forms of practice emerge and become normalised, they produce new forms of exclusion and vulnerability. One of the ways that this is exemplified is in examining the ways that welfare policy has actively constituted new needs for information and communication technologies (ICTs) such that these energy services come to be prioritised above heat and other forms of energy use that are more conventionally the focus of energy poverty. The constitution of needs for ICTs in this context places requirements on people to fulfil these needs or have no way of accessing their income or completing the duties necessary to receive welfare benefits. This highlights the limited agency that exists in some people’s abilities to negotiate the enactment of practices (and related energy needs), or to play an active role in shaping the ways that practices are constituted in the first place.

Second, and related to this, is recognition of how different forms of policy act on different people in different ways. For example, different areas of governance are often far more coercive and punitive than others. Within welfare policy, though it is shaped by problematisations of individual behaviour and characterised by forms of governance ‘at a distance’ (Rose, 1999), it leaves far less latitude for enactments that divert from the dictates of policy. Centrally, this is because any diversions from the requirements of welfare policy are met with punitive sanctions to income and severe hardship. These clear and punishing mechanisms within welfare policy can be contrasted with the less overt mechanisms through which other areas of governance operate. For example, Gormally et al. (2019) show through their research on higher education how the negotiation, and prioritisation, of policies instituted through governance was often, ultimately, aligned with central government priorities (e.g. economic success). Though their research is suggestive of diffuse forms of power operating through people to engender particular kinds of practice, it also suggests a far more negotiated form of engagement with policy in everyday life than is evident in the welfare policy context. The research discussed in this book showed severe limitations on how far policy enactment entailed negotiation and the exercise of power by those subject to it, along with variable capabilities to be able to act in the ways required of them. In Chapter 6, this enforced nature of engagement with or ‘recruitment’ to practices related to energy services was highlighted, as were the ways that people were unable to (successfully) enact these practices in ways that denote full capability.

For energy poverty research, this represents engagement, then, with the other side of the picture, taking in consideration not only of how people’s abilities to meet their needs are shaped and conditioned by socio-political processes, but of how those needs are constituted. Conversely, thinking about the relations between policy and practice in this way brings inequality more firmly into view as important for understanding both invisible energy policy and wider conceptualisations arising from practice theory-based energy analysis. Excepting two conceptual interventions (Shove, 2002; Walker, 2013), there has been only very limited engagement with issues of power and inequality in work addressing energy sustainability from practice perspectives. The analysis in this book brings to the fore the unevenness that exists in people’s abilities to both shape the enactment and institutionalisation of practices and emergent ‘needs’. It highlights the exclusions and vulnerabilities that are created and exacerbated in the processes through which practices take hold. And it signals something far more draconian and darker that the concept of social norms denotes in the ways that some forms of energy service and related practice are effectively enforced. This, then, brings a more critical politics into the thinking about agency and structure that underpins practice-based approaches to energy sustainability.

Insights for Policy and Wider Responses

For this final section, I turn to reflect on some of the implications for policy and practice related to fuel poverty. The arguments and analysis presented in this book depart markedly from that which forms the current focus for policy in the UK and many other countries. By casting energy deprivation as an issue of capabilities related to energy services, the understanding of energy poverty is taken far beyond that of official definitions that tend to be focused on the domestic context and are principally concerned with heat. Such an understanding of fuel poverty has been highlighted as grounding a specific problematisation (Rose, 1999) that results in an emphasis on building efficiency as the approach to addressing the issue (Middlemiss, 2016). Though within policy, account is taken of vulnerabilities (such as being disabled, very young or very old), there is little space for recognition of the many dimensions of the problem that are brought into view by a wider focus on capabilities, quality of life, precarity, and lived experiences (Day et al., 2016; Middlemiss & Gillard, 2015; Petrova, 2018; Simcock et al., 2016). Moreover, there appear few openings for consideration of the ways needs for energy services are (re)produced and constituted through policy in ways that have important effects for energy poverty.

The implications of this research, then, do not sit easily within the existing scope for policy interventions. But this does not preclude opportunities for taking forward some of the implications of this analysis within other spaces of action on fuel poverty. As existing practices by those working in fuel poverty demonstrate, it is possible to both campaign and work outside of the (sometimes) narrow definitions and understandings prescribed by policy and to use (or subvert) existing mechanisms to achieve better outcomes for people living in situations of energy deprivation. Understanding of the importance of energy deprivation for wider cycles of poverty derived from this analysis could form a space for campaigning about the relevance of energy poverty to social inequality challenges more widely, as could the insights relating to the ways that policy can be constitutive of needs for energy (services), while simultaneously limiting people’s abilities to meet those needs.

In terms of policy, the frames and ideas that dominate fuel poverty are not currently directed towards such issues of emerging need, but there is no reason to think that this could not be the case. There could be room for a more reflective politics that involves thinking across policy and highlighting intersections that are relevant to the constitution of needs for energy and for abilities to meet those needs. Though this does not in itself represent a clear recommendation, it may be that simply opening up spaces for intersection and processes of constitution to be recognised could be productive of new thinking. This work would be usefully facilitated by a focus on lived experiences as part of both policy and impact analysis.

There might also be greater room for thinking about how other areas of governance intersect to affect the issues within existing policy. The recent Sustainable Warmth Strategy in the UK (BEIS, 2021) moves to consider the relevance of low carbon transitions and sustainability policy for energy poverty, as well as to think about the role of health policy. This suggests openings for insights into the importance of policy areas beyond energy to be at least reflected on within fuel poverty governance. The extent to which energy services and areas of emerging need such as information and communication technologies, or wider energy service priorities, such as transport and mobilities, can be brought more strongly into focus within fuel poverty debates remains an open question. But this research highlights how these areas of need are an important part of the picture in building understanding of energy poverty generally and, particularly of how different energy services intersect and are prioritised.

A clear challenge for policy to be responsive to the more dynamic complex picture of energy poverty created within this book (and the work of others) is the reliance on energy market mechanisms for policy delivery. The primary means through which policy seeks to reduce energy poverty are delivered through private energy companies and this produces a particularly constrained environment in which to address the issues. However, even within this there is much scope for more to be done that would at least be in some way responsive to the severe forms of deprivation delineated within these pages.

With a capabilities-based understanding of energy poverty comes recognition that energy companies could work to address the issues in ways that extend beyond the financial commitment under the Energy Companies Obligation (ECO). For example, in their pricing for poorer households (particularly those on prepayment meters) in their handling of debt and in their communication of options available for managing debt, in their communication more generally so that vulnerable people find it easier to engage, and in the nature of the support they offer for customers living in energy poverty. All this could be improved and expanded, as well as embedded more fundamentally in the culture and approach of energy companies. This, of course, does not take interventions to the places that are suggested by the analysis set out here, but the point is to highlight that much could be done even within the constraints of current approaches and understandings to better support those living without energy.