Who Gets to Define Energy Justice? A Decade of Research Maps a Divided Field

The global race to decarbonize has been sold to the public as a straightforward moral triumph: solar panels, wind turbines, and electric vehicles replacing the dirty machinery of the fossil era. But a new bibliometric study of a decade of scholarship on justice and governance in energy transitions reveals a far more uncomfortable picture. The research, published in Environmental Challenges, systematically mapped 201 peer-reviewed documents published between 2015 and 2025, and its findings cut to the heart of a paradox the clean-energy movement rarely confronts: the technologies celebrated as green in the Global North depend on nickel, lithium, and rare earth elements extracted under conditions that critics describe as neo-colonial, often at devastating ecological and social cost in the Global South.

The study, led by Muhammad Chaeroel Ansar and A. Hasyim Asyari Amir Husni, goes beyond the usual counting exercises of bibliometrics. Rather than passively charting publication growth curves and keyword frequencies, the authors set out to interrogate the sociology of knowledge production itself: who leads the field, whose theories anchor it, and whether the Global South appears in the literature primarily as a source of theoretical authority or merely as an empirical setting, a place where data is collected and policies are applied. Using the Scopus database, the Bibliometrix package in R, and a PRISMA-guided screening process that narrowed 5,729 initial records down to a final corpus of 201 studies, the team combined performance analysis, co-citation mapping, keyword co-occurrence networks, and thematic evolution tracking.

The raw numbers tell a story of explosive growth. Annual output in the field fluctuated between just 1 and 8 publications from 2015 to 2019, then climbed to 15 in 2020, 19 in 2021, 23 in 2022, and 22 in 2023, before surging to 43 publications in 2024 and 52 in 2025. Nearly 80 percent of the entire corpus appeared in the last five years, and the field is growing at an annual rate of 24.1 percent. Yet the expansion is strikingly dispersed: the 201 documents are spread across 169 different journals, with the leading outlet, Sustainability, publishing only six articles. This is not a field consolidated around a handful of flagship venues; it is a conversation happening simultaneously across sustainability science, energy policy, political geography, and law.

When the researchers examined who actually leads this conversation, the results were nuanced rather than uniform. The most influential authors by citation metrics are Carrington K and Sozzo M, while the most productive affiliations include not only the University of California and the University of the Basque Country but also the University of Cape Town, which tops the list with eight articles, and Stellenbosch University, both based in South Africa. Citation totals, however, remain concentrated in a small number of countries: Austria leads with 1,060 total citations, followed by the United Kingdom, Germany, Chile, and Switzerland, though the authors caution that some of these figures reflect single highly cited papers rather than sustained national research programs. The geography of productivity and the geography of citation authority, in other words, do not neatly overlap.

The collaboration network analysis adds further texture. Across 174 distinct country pairs and 227 collaboration instances, North-South ties form the largest category by number of pairs, while South-South ties remain comparatively few at 31 pairs. But South Africa emerges as one of the most connected nodes in the entire network, with 17 distinct collaboration partners, matching Germany and trailing only the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, and the Netherlands. Roughly half of South Africa’s ties are with other Global South countries, including Malawi, Mozambique, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, Ethiopia, and Brazil, indicating a genuine African and South-South sub-network rather than collaboration mediated exclusively through Northern gatekeepers. The single most frequent tie in the network, notably, links the United Kingdom and South Africa, showing that deep North-South and South-South engagement can coexist within the same national research system.

Perhaps the most revealing analysis concerns the field’s intellectual foundations. The co-citation network resolved into four distinct but interconnected clusters, and contrary to the expectation of a single dominant Western tradition, the theoretical core is strikingly plural. The largest cluster centers on Sovacool and Geels, representing socio-technical transition theory and energy poverty scholarship. A second cluster is anchored by David Harvey, whose betweenness centrality is the highest in the network, making him its most important structural bridge; it connects critical urban theory with environmental justice frameworks. A third cluster, anchored by Escobar and Gudynas, brings together decolonial political ecology and Latin American degrowth scholarship, including Quijano, Shiva, Svampa, and Hickel. A fourth links Amartya Sen’s capability approach to Southern theory and gender-and-development scholarship. Crucially, the decolonial cluster carries structural importance comparable to the network’s most prominent Global North traditions, with Gudynas recording the third-highest PageRank despite anchoring the smallest cluster.

The keyword analysis delivers the study’s most headline-worthy finding: global south is the single largest node in the entire co-occurrence network, larger than energy transition, energy justice, or any other term. Specific Global South countries, including Africa, China, Brazil, India, South Africa, and Colombia, recur across three of the five thematic clusters. The field’s vocabulary, in other words, is substantially oriented toward Global South contexts even as its institutional and citation leadership remains concentrated elsewhere. Thematic evolution analysis, splitting the corpus into 2015-2020 and 2021-2025 periods, shows global south rising from a modest position to become the dominant keyword of the recent period, while energy policy vocabulary has reframed toward broader transition language. A trend-topics robustness check confirmed this shift is not an artifact of the chosen period boundaries.

This matters because of what the patterns imply about the field’s own politics. Energy justice scholarship is built on the triumvirate of distributional, procedural, and recognition justice, a framework rooted in Western philosophical traditions. The study argues that when this vocabulary is applied as the primary lens across radically different contexts, it risks hardening into a standardized template that travels more easily than the conditions it was built to explain. Empirical cases illustrate the limits: offshore wind conflicts in South Korea where fishing communities’ claims exceed distributional categories, Norway’s Fosen wind case where renewable expansion collided with Sámi indigenous rights, and Indonesia’s nickel boom, where land dispossession and labor precarity in battery supply chains are only partially captured by procedural or distributive frameworks. Post-colonial agrarian conflicts, informal energy economies, and systemic extractive violence sit uneasily within the established three-tenets model.

On the question of whether justice concerns have been displaced by technocratic governance agendas, the study’s answer is bifurcation rather than displacement. Justice-oriented keywords and policy-material keywords both persist and both grow across the decade. One research trajectory consolidates around energy justice, just transition, participation, and Global South perspectives, treating transition as a contested political process; another organizes around decarbonization, efficiency, security, and an emerging focus on critical minerals and geopolitics. The state, the authors suggest, sits where these orientations most often meet, asked simultaneously to guarantee justice and accelerate decarbonization, a tension that may favor the second demand in practice. The authors also acknowledge limitations: the search strategy required records to reference both global south and global north, trading recall for geopolitical specificity, and bibliometric mapping can identify structural patterns but not the mechanisms behind them.

The implications reach beyond academia. As long as theoretical authority in energy justice remains concentrated in a limited set of Global North institutions, the field’s frameworks will continue to travel more easily than the political and material conditions they are meant to explain, and the intellectual architecture risks reproducing, at the level of knowledge production, some of the very asymmetries the field seeks to critique. The authors call for treating the Global South as a source of theoretical insight rather than only an empirical setting, for closer analysis of the state as a contradictory actor in transition, and for sustained attention to the emerging nexus of critical minerals, geopolitics, and justice. The energy transition, this mapping makes clear, is not merely a technical project of swapping carbon for electrons; it is a political struggle over who controls resources, who sets agendas, and whose harms count, and the scholarship meant to illuminate that struggle is itself an uneven terrain of power.

Subject of Research: Bibliometric mapping of justice and governance in global energy transition research, 2015-2025

Article Title: A bibliometric review on justice and governance in energy transitions

Article References: A bibliometric review on justice and governance in energy transitions. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envc.2026.101678

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.envc.2026.101678

Keywords: energy justice, energy transition, Global South, bibliometrics, just transition, decolonial theory, energy governance, critical minerals, green colonialism, science mapping, energy democracy, knowledge production