PhD Candidate: Realising a just and effective energy transition in challenged neighbourhoods

Are you an aspiring researcher looking for a new opportunity in the field of sustainability and energy transitions? Would you like to join a friendly and open environment where you can develop your skills and learn new things? Then you could play a part as a PhD candidate. Adopting a social science perspective, you will investigate the technical and societal dimensions of a just and effective energy transition.

In light of climate change, environmental care and the autonomy of our energy provision, the Dutch government stimulates a decentralised renewable energy system in which residents and neighbourhoods play an important role. However, while energy prices are rising, some people are worried about what the future may bring, for they are already struggling to pay their energy bills right now. Shaping an effective and just energy transition is easier said than done. As residents are crucial in planning and co-creation of housing renovation in their neighbourhood, such transformations are in need of knowledge about the in-house energy practices of residents, both now and in the future.

JUST PREPARE is a four-year research project funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO-KIC). It is about involving residents in tailoring in-home systems and renovation in the built environment to their practices and needs. Realising better energy performances and improving energy systems is particularly urgent in the housing stock in challenged neighbourhoods, in which technological interventions coincide with social issues such as inequalities, poverty, low trust in institutions, criminality and unemployment.

The JUST PREPARE project is based on co-creation of approaches and solutions for the energy transition with a forward looking dimension. You will work together with municipalities, housing corporations, residents and other relevant actors. You will contribute to developing the necessary methodological and substantive knowledge on energy practices and collaboration in challenged neighbourhoods. This is done with four living labs in different municipalities (the cities of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Nijmegen and the village of Gemert-Bakel). Your research will mainly focus on Nijmegen and Gemert-Bakel. The emphasis is on challenged households (sometimes labelled as underprivileged neighbourhoods), which are suffering from high energy prices, problematic access to solutions and lower degrees of involvement. This might lead to uneven distribution of costs and benefits and makes these households extra vulnerable in the process of the energy transition, while these households often experience a lack of agency regarding their own life and their lived environment.

In your part of the project you will be using ethnographic methods to explore and analyse the needs and in-house social practices of residents (e.g. in cooking, laundering, keeping warm, keeping cool) in challenged neighbourhoods. This information of daily social practices which will be translated to practice-based design of in- house energy infrastructure and tools.

Your research project includes the mapping of in-house energy practices and their expected future trajectories, and the development of effective methods for exploring needs and social practices in close collaboration with the residents. This knowledge ‘from the inside out’ will be used to inform researchers from Industrial Design and the Built Environment (technical universities) to redesign energy infrastructures and tools (e.g. effective and just energy interfaces). At a later stage, knowledge from these in-house practices of residents is brought together with knowledge from other work packages in JUST-PREPARE dedicated to methods of involving residents in designing renovation strategies at the building and neighbourhood level (‘from the outside in’). Joint information on in-house energy practices and their infrastructures and residents involvements in neighbourhoods is integrated with a justice and future-oriented perspective, creating a basis of municipalities to reflect on shared and opposing assumptions about the future and justice of residents, energy and retrofit installation companies and policy makers. Finally, you will be investigating the role and use of policy instruments that trigger residents to change social practices (or not) by selecting actors engaged in policy making, implementation, technology installation, and design, and residents by way of interviews and facilitating focus groups.