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How can conditions be created for decent living standards for all without exceeding planetary limits, during an energy transition and beyond?
This question is at the heart of this special issue. The aim is to examine fundamental questions about what is necessary to live a good life: to have the capabilities to satisfy human development, to live enjoyably, and to participate fully in civic life. This exploration will include analysing how energy services are embedded in ways of living and working, and the social and environmental consequences of how cities are organised. By better understanding the past and present, in diverse settings, and by projecting towards futures, this special issue will explore how pathways towards energy sufficiency can be developed and consolidated for cities, buildings and infrastructures. This implies changes to infrastructures and institutional frameworks, but also changes in consumption, habits, meanings and everyday life dynamics.
Contributions
Contributions are sought that complement, challenge or further develop current conceptions of ‘sufficiency’: the aim is not to argue about definitions, but rather to explore sufficiency practices, policies, programmes, projects or experiments, to then discuss the relevance of sufficiency to socially just change. They can address both operational and embodied energy in the provision of energy services, as well as the relation between energy and land use and infrastructure, freshwater consumption, and biodiversity loss, among other topics. Questions of (in)equity and energy sufficiency are central and we particularly welcome perspectives from scholars based in the Global South and those who research focuses on or includes Global South locations.
A key focus is on how far the concept of sufficiency can help deliver significant change. In practice, this will mean papers that consider socio-technical arrangements and their governance that have an important energy dimension in buildings and cities. It will not cover, for example, the design of individual technologies unless this is linked to design principles for energy-using equipment in general.
For the full submission details and further information, visit the B&C Community Website.
Deadline: 15th January 2024
