This white paper aims to provide an introduction to the topic of Design for Justice for a wide audience. It demonstrates ongoing research on this topic by the TU Delft community and contributes to the exchange of relevant knowledge and expertise, as one of the outcomes of the activities organised for the Delft Design for Values Institute’s annual theme ‘Design for Justice’. This document includes recommendations on how to foster Design for Justice, which are not just relevant for designers, engineers, and academic researchers, but also for educators and policy makers.@en

We investigate how the interplay between academic researchers’ and innovators’ entrepreneurial intentions and open innovation activities fosters their market commercialization activities. We qualitatively analyse five case studies of European research consortia to propose potential theoretical mechanisms that limit or abet market commercialization activities. Our results show that inbound and coupled open innovation activities compensate for lower entrepreneurial intentions among scientists. However, establishing partnerships remains challenging, particularly in pre-prototyping phases. Noticeably, our findings point towards prosocial motivation as an enabler to make innovation outcomes more publicly available.

@en

Hard-to-reach (HTR) energy users encompass individuals who are physically difficult to reach, underserved, or challenging to engage and motivate in demand-side energy programmes. Given a mix of societal challenges (e.g. inequity, energy poverty, decarbonisation, the COVID-19 pandemic), HTR energy users are receiving increasing attention. However, there is a lack of knowledge on the performance of interventions that target (explicitly or implicitly) HTR energy users, particularly from a behaviour change perspective. Our study addresses this knowledge gap, and aims to provide a systematic ex-post comparative cross-country assessment of nineteen case studies, implemented in eight countries. From a methodological point of view, our study explores and tests the usefulness of applying the ‘Building Blocks of Behaviour Change’ (BBBC) in assessing the extent to which interventions employ design and implementation practices that are known to drive behaviour change. Our findings reveal that interventions perform well with respect to the Audience, Behaviour, and Delivery building blocks, but show room for improvement in the Content and Evaluate blocks. Assessing the BBBC framework reveals promising results in terms of credibility, confirmability, transferability, and reliability; however, limitations and uncertainties are also present. Considering the exploratory methodological nature of our study, the results highlight numerous context-specific factors that frame our findings and the suitability of the research approach. We underscore that greater attention must be paid to both the integration of behavioural science methods into HTR interventions, and the systematic analysis of heterogeneity in future HTR-related energy research.@en

Fuelwood has been overlooked by European energy transition policies, despite its importance as a domestic energy source for many European households. We study fuelwood use for coping with energy poverty based on the lived experience of energy-vulnerable households in five diverse European countries (Portugal, Slovakia, Hungary, Austria, and North Macedonia). From their perspective, fuelwood is a central and multifunctional tool for coping with energy poverty because of its many favorable features, including enabling energy security and access, that overweigh its adverse environmental and health impacts. We argue that the use of fuelwood for coping with energy poverty is embedded in cultural practices building upon the interconnection of three stages of coping behavior. The first stage is fuelwood becoming a socio-cultural norm, which means it is considered a cultural practice for coping with energy poverty due to its many benefits that protect the energy vulnerable from increasing energy prices, disconnections, and further energy deprivation. This enhances the subsequent phase, featuring the normalization of subsistence which is the acceptance of life with minimal energy needs. This leads to the final stage with increasing system detachment which is continued reliance on individual and informal arrangements of satisfying energy needs and avoiding seeking or demanding institutional support.@en

Citizens’ participation in the energy transition seems mostly available for households with disposable incomes to invest in energy efficiency, renewable energy sources and retrofitting. Those who cannot afford the upfront costs might not benefit from the policy interventions, like tax benefits and subsidies. The energy crisis made energy poverty visible and a national energy policy issue. In the Dutch governance system, energy poverty mitigation measures are decentralized with mandate and budget for the municipalities. With decentralised budgets, municipal policy workers are the key actors in this: with tailored, local policies, they can financially support, stimulate energy-efficient behaviour and broaden access to the energy transition. This study provides insights and deepens the knowledge on value-driven decision-making. The research analyses Dutch policy workers at the municipal level on their mindsets regarding solutions to mitigate energy poverty. The gender-just energy policy framework provides a holistic conceptual approach that includes both distributive, recognitional and procedural perspectives to inform value-driven decision-making. Q methodology is applied to uncover the subjectivity (opinions, values, etc) of the policy workers that are designing and implementing energy poverty mitigation policies. Q methodology is an exploratory methodology that unveils cohorts of like-minded people regardless of characteristics usually used in quantitative studies (such as age and gender). The study uses Q methodology to group municipal policy workers’ mindsets into ‘institution-focused’ and ‘explorers’. These mindsets pinpoint bottlenecks in municipal energy poverty mitigation in the short term. Furthermore, the mindsets uncover subjectivity in the policy cycle and present a transparent method to overcome subjectivity.@en

Energy poverty is a far-reaching concept that intrinsically bridges numerous fields of study, ranging from engineering to anthropology and medical science to social psychology. The profound implications of energy poverty on the quality of life globally have also led to a wide range of metrics and policies aimed at measuring it and alleviating it, albeit with limited success. Using a mixed methods approach, our network has conducted research to advance knowledge and interpretations of energy poverty and boost scientific outputs' capacity to shape knowledge-based policies. In this article, we critically review this extensive research endeavor, as well as its results. We build on the conceptual, methodological, and policy dimensions of energy poverty research to set up pathways toward a new, interdisciplinary research and policy agenda on energy poverty mitigation better equipped to provide meaningful answers to the challenges posed by the current ongoing energy crisis.@en