Towards a Feminist Energy Justice Framework

This article explores a feminist approach to energy justice. In business and human rights to date, there has been little attention to the gendered dynamics in energy transition, mirroring the lack of attention to the rights of women and girls within broader energy and energy transition discourses. Without this attention, there is a risk that energy transition efforts maintain, increase, or create new gendered inequalities, rather than diminish them. With a focus on the distributional, recognitional and procedural dimensions of energy systems, the concept of energy justice holds much potential for the field of business and human rights. Taking women’s participation in energy transition policy-making in Sub-Saharan Africa as a concrete example, we argue that a feminist approach to energy justice could be one way of operationalizing a more gender-transformative energy transition.