The research emerges from a structural shift in power systems. International climate accords have driven national pledges to replace fossil-fuel infrastructure with renewables, and distributed energy architectures are replacing centralized utility models. Placing generation close to consumption reduces transmission losses and enhances grid resilience, while commercial entities and residential consumers become active market participants through rooftop photovoltaic installations, battery energy storage systems and small-scale wind turbines. Electric vehicle charging stations equipped with solar arrays can even bid strategically into electricity markets. In this landscape, peer-to-peer trading allows prosumers to exchange energy directly, bypassing conventional utility transactions—but it also raises questions about benefit sharing that economic efficiency alone cannot answer.

Those questions belong to the framework of energy justice, which analyzes fairness in the energy sector across distributive, recognition and procedural dimensions. As distributed generation penetrates deeper into grids, distributive justice—how benefits and burdens are shared among participants—becomes increasingly prominent. The authors note that unfavorable tariff structures and complicated interconnection requirements substantially reduce the economic feasibility of residential solar installations, and prosumers are often paid significantly less for grid exports through feed-in tariffs, creating a pricing disparity that deters investment in distributed energy resources. A well-designed decentralized market, they argue, can mitigate these barriers and foster a more equitable environment for small-scale renewable investment.

The study’s central contribution is the Adaptive Fairness-Based Allocation (AFBA) framework, which embeds fairness as a core objective rather than a post-hoc adjustment. The method works at the market layer of a five-node community microgrid, where a solar-equipped prosumer shares surplus energy with three buyers: an industrial consumer with a 300 kWh demand cap bidding ₹5.90/kWh, a commercial EV charging station capped at 250 kWh bidding ₹7.15/kWh, and a domestic consumer capped at 200 kWh bidding ₹5.58/kWh. Surplus energy is structured into six four-hour slots per day, and any energy left after all buyers are served is exported to the grid at a feed-in tariff of ₹4.5/kWh.

Technically, AFBA computes each buyer’s participation factor as the ratio of its weighted bid to the total weighted bids of all buyers, with weights updated adaptively from historical allocation outcomes. After every surplus slot, the framework stores one cumulative deviation per buyer—the gap between that buyer’s actual allocation and the equal-share level—using exponential memory decay with a factor of 0.95, so shortfalls in one slot can be corrected in subsequent slots. A bounded nonlinear mapping prevents stored deviations from producing oversized weight jumps, while a learning rate of 0.1, a compensation factor of 0.2 providing momentum, a nonlinearity factor of 1.2, and a smoothing factor of 0.5 stabilize the update. A minimum weight constraint of 0.1 ensures no buyer is ever completely excluded, and weights are normalized to sum to unity before each allocation.

The authors benchmarked AFBA against five alternatives: fixed contractual allocation, priority-first allocation with proportional redistribution, a price-weighted fairness method, linear programming (LP), and a genetic algorithm (GA). LP maximizes slot revenue subject to power balance and demand constraints and serves as the revenue benchmark; GA searches for near-optimal solutions stochastically, with results averaged over 20 independent runs. The evaluation used real-world data: solar generation from a private plant in Kuzhikattussery, Thrissur, Kerala, and EV charging demand from Perth & Kinross Council’s charging stations in Perth, UK, covering 2024 at 15-minute intervals, aggregated into 2,190 calendar slots of which 646 were surplus slots totaling 154,309.89 kWh of available energy.

The results reveal a stark trade-off. Under fixed pricing, LP achieved the highest annual revenue of ₹10.49 lakhs but the second-worst fairness at 0.4409, concentrating 72.74 percent of annual energy on the highest bidder while the domestic buyer received just 1.8 percent. The priority-first method fared even worse on fairness at 0.4162, starving the lowest-bid buyer to 3.98 percent of yearly allocation. AFBA, by contrast, delivered almost perfectly balanced yearly allocations of 33.33, 33.27 and 33.13 percent, a fairness index of 0.9995, value fairness of 0.9877, and revenue of ₹9.58 lakhs—only 9.0 percent below the LP benchmark. The price-weighted method offered the best revenue among fair-oriented approaches at ₹9.69 lakhs with fairness of 0.9882, while GA reached 0.9935 fairness but required roughly 28.6 milliseconds per slot on average, far too slow for time-critical clearing.

Computation time proved a decisive differentiator. AFBA completed each allocation in 0.0255 milliseconds under fixed pricing and 0.1467 milliseconds under time-of-day (ToD) pricing, while the price-weighted method ran in 0.0093 to 0.0183 milliseconds. LP required around 1.18 milliseconds and GA between 24.5 and 28.6 milliseconds. The authors also tested AFBA’s resilience under ToD tariffs derived from Kerala State Electricity Regulatory Commission regulations and Ministry of Power guidelines, applying multipliers that discount bids by 20 percent during solar hours and surcharge them by 10 percent at night. Fairness performance remained essentially unchanged under dynamic pricing, and the fairness progression analysis showed AFBA improving by roughly +0.4 percent over successive surplus slots, confirming that the system genuinely learns from experience—a property absent in static or optimization-only methods.

Scalability testing reinforced the practical promise. When the number of buyers was increased from 3 to 100, average fairness rose from 0.931 to 0.984 and stabilized, while per-slot computation time stayed between 0.087 and 0.192 milliseconds. On the same machine, LP took about 1.18 milliseconds and GA about 31 milliseconds per slot with three buyers. The authors acknowledge limitations: the allocation operates only at the market layer, ignoring voltage limits, line ratings and power-flow equations, and the generation and demand profiles come from two independent regional datasets rather than a physically co-located microgrid. Equal energy allocation, they note, is also inappropriate when buyers have contracts of different grades, non-deferrable loads, or significantly varying demand constraints—in such cases a fill-rate criterion or priority rule serves better.

The study’s implications reach beyond the test system. Existing research had achieved at most a Jain fairness index of 0.94, lacked frameworks to track cumulative fairness deviations with memory decay, and had not integrated ToD tariffs for distribution fairness under real regulatory frameworks. By raising the yearly index to 0.9995 at the cost of an 8.8 to 9.0 percent revenue gap relative to unconstrained revenue maximization, AFBA quantifies precisely what equity costs in a local energy market—and shows that the price is modest. For community microgrids deciding how to split their solar surplus, the message is clear: long-term equality among participants is achievable in microseconds, and markets that prioritize it may retain the trust and participation needed to sustain the decentralized energy transition.

Subject of Research: Energy

Article Title: Achieving equitable and efficient energy trading in peer-to-peer microgrids: An evaluation of allocation strategies

Article References: Sreekumar, A. V., & Lekshmi, R. R. (2026). Achieving equitable and efficient energy trading in peer-to-peer microgrids: An evaluation of allocation strategies. Results in Engineering, 32, Article 113537. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rineng.2026.113537

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.rineng.2026.113537

Keywords: peer-to-peer energy trading, microgrids, energy justice, fairness algorithms, solar power, electric vehicles, distributed energy resources, Achieving, equitable, efficient, energy, trading

This contradiction sits at the heart of new research examining how Ghana’s ambitious just energy transition is experienced by the communities that physically host its fossil fuel infrastructure. Published in Frontiers in Environmental Economics, the study engaged 127 participants between February and April 2025 through six focus group discussions, 15 key informant interviews, 18 expert consultations with Ghana Gas personnel, and three community town hall meetings across Esiama, Atuabo, and Sanzule. Applying an energy justice framework, the researchers interrogated three dimensions: distributional justice, concerning who bears costs and receives benefits; procedural justice, concerning who participates in decisions; and recognition justice, concerning whose identities and knowledge systems are respected in governance.

The findings reveal a coherent structural pattern rather than isolated policy failures. Despite hosting major national energy infrastructure, residents report near-total exclusion from skilled and permanent employment. Recruitment processes are centralized in Accra, approximately 250 kilometers away, effectively excluding residents who lack the financial resources and social networks to navigate capital-city hiring. A youth participant from Nkroful captured the spatial injustice directly: all recruitments are done in Accra, requiring expensive and risky travel to submit applications and attend interviews for jobs located in Ellembelle itself. Community members learn of new hires only when external workers arrive searching for accommodation.

This occupational segregation follows a familiar extractive pattern: residents fill temporary, low-skill roles primarily as cleaners and security personnel, while professional and technical positions are occupied by workers recruited externally. National local content regulations under LI 2204, introduced in 2013 to maximize domestic employment and procurement, remain poorly enforced at the district level. The Ellembelle District Assembly lacks authority to monitor compliance or impose penalties; enforcement authority is vested in the Petroleum Commission in Accra, creating a fundamental accountability gap between where monitoring happens and where implementation occurs. Expert consultations with Ghana Gas engineers partially diverged from community narratives, attributing exclusion to skills gaps rather than systemic institutional failures, a framing the researchers identify as shifting responsibility from corporate and regulatory actors to community members themselves.

Skills development barriers compound the problem. The district contains no technical or vocational training institutions; the nearest facilities are in Takoradi, roughly 90 kilometers away. A senior high school graduate from Nkroful explained that pursuing technical training is impossible because his family cannot afford accommodation in Takoradi or daily transport costs. Ghana Gas engineers confirmed that renewable energy transition skills, including solar installation, wind maintenance, battery storage management, and energy-efficiency auditing, differ substantially from existing fossil fuel competencies, and current training infrastructure cannot bridge this gap. The researchers warn of a double exclusion: residents are excluded from skilled fossil fuel employment now and risk exclusion from renewable energy employment in the future due to the same structural barriers. Gender dimensions amplify these barriers, as women with childcare responsibilities face additional obstacles accessing training offered in distant urban centers.

Procedural justice deficits pervade corporate social responsibility project selection, environmental management, and transition planning. A community leader in Atuabo described how Ghana Gas constructed a six-unit classroom block in Aiyinasi even though communities had specifically requested a health post, because medical emergencies require traveling 18 kilometers to Esiama. The misalignment between company-determined projects and genuine community priorities erodes rather than builds trust, a pattern well documented across African extractive industry contexts. Traditional authorities are marginalized despite holding legitimate customary governance roles in land administration and dispute resolution. A sub-chief in Sanzule described being treated as a ceremonial figure invited for ribbon-cutting but excluded from substantive discussions about environmental impacts or employment, despite customary law granting authority to speak for communities.

Environmental burdens compound these distributional and procedural injustices. Community members across multiple data sources reported health impacts including skin rashes and stomach ulcers attributed to oil and gas operations, with residents of Bakanta and Sanzule experiencing excessive heat from gas processing. Fishing communities described ecological changes: seaweed now covers areas where they previously fished, and catch volumes have reduced dramatically, with some attributing changes to wastewater from the gas plant. The company denies these claims, but the absence of accessible, independent environmental monitoring leaves communities without the technical capacity to substantiate or refute company denials. Local ecological knowledge is discounted in favor of formal assessment protocols that communities cannot access, constituting a recognition failure with procedural consequences.

The energy access paradox emerged as the most analytically striking finding, drawing unprompted comment across all community locations. A female participant from Esiama encapsulated the contradiction: Ghana Gas processes gas in Atuabo that goes to the whole country, yet Ellembelle residents cannot afford LPG and continue using firewood and charcoal despite health problems from smoke inhalation and time spent collecting fuelwood. The District Budget Officer confirmed that LPG pricing is determined nationally, with district assemblies having no authority to provide subsidies or negotiate preferential pricing despite the unique circumstances of hosting gas-processing infrastructure. This policy inflexibility represents a structural distributional injustice directly contradicting the energy justice principles that Ghana’s National Energy Transition Framework nominally endorses.

These findings situate Ellembelle within a broader sub-Saharan African pattern: the concentration of extractive burdens alongside exclusion from transition benefits. The researchers draw parallels to Nigeria’s Niger Delta, where oil company recruitment in Lagos and Port Harcourt excludes rural communities hosting offshore platforms, and to Mozambique’s Tete coal mining region, where nationals occupy unskilled roles while technical positions are filled by expatriates despite local content frameworks. The mechanisms documented in Ellembelle, including spatial exclusion from recruitment, enforcement authority disconnected from implementation sites, CSR governance without community participation, and energy access paradoxes in infrastructure-hosting communities, appear across diverse African contexts, suggesting structural features of extractive industry governance rather than idiosyncratic local failures.

The implications for Ghana’s energy transition are significant. With peak oil production projected for 2029 and the National Energy Transition Framework targeting 70 percent renewable electricity by 2030 and net-zero emissions by 2070, the governance failures documented here risk reproduction in the renewable energy sector absent deliberate corrective interventions. The researchers recommend devolving local content monitoring authority to district assemblies, establishing localized skills training infrastructure within Ellembelle, instituting genuine participatory governance mechanisms that bring together traditional leaders, youth representatives, and women’s groups, and developing community benefit programs including subsidized LPG distribution for communities within a defined radius of processing facilities. They also urge initiating long-term transition planning now, while fossil fuel revenues are still flowing, rather than waiting for operational decline to create urgency. Achieving socially just outcomes, the study concludes, requires prioritizing distributional equity, procedural inclusion, and recognition of local governance systems, ensuring that communities like Ellembelle are not merely passive recipients of transition impacts but active agents in shaping how energy systems evolve.

Subject of Research: Energy Justice

Article Title: Just energy transition in Ghana: community experiences from the fossil-fuel hub in the Ellembelle District

Article References: Akudugu, J. A., Addaney, M., Amankona, L. O., Dumenu, Y. C., & Aniah, E. (2026). Just energy transition in Ghana: community experiences from the fossil-fuel hub in the Ellembelle District. Frontiers in Environmental Economics, 5, Article 1835455. https://doi.org/10.3389/frevc.2026.1835455

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/frevc.2026.1835455

Keywords: just energy transition, energy justice, Ghana, fossil fuels, local content, community participation, renewable energy, sub-Saharan Africa, Just, energy, transition, community

The technical core of the collection begins with the integration of advanced technologies into climate-responsive planning and inclusive governance frameworks. As urban areas across the continent expand at unprecedented rates, the editorial argues that long-term sustainability in infrastructure development depends on coupling smart systems with people-centered design. The goal, according to research highlighted from the symposium, is to create intelligent and adaptable urban environments in which digital innovation serves residents rather than displacing them. This framing rejects the notion that technology alone can fix urban dysfunction; instead, it positions technological tools as one layer within a broader architecture of governance, planning, and community participation that must evolve together.

Energy poverty emerges as one of the most urgent and tractable problems. Many informal settlements and marginalized communities across African cities still experience unreliable electricity access and remain dependent on polluting fuels such as paraffin and firewood, with direct consequences for health, safety, and household economics. One study presented at the symposium examines the decentralization of solar energy systems as a mechanism for addressing energy poverty and advancing energy justice in these marginalized communities. Distributed solar generation, the research suggests, can bypass the slow and often inequitable expansion of centralized grids, delivering clean power directly to households that have historically been excluded from formal energy infrastructure. The editorial frames such decentralized systems as fundamentally important to any serious agenda of urban equity.

Closely related is the problem of municipal solid waste, which remains a critical environmental and social challenge for many African cities. Rather than treating waste purely as a disposal burden, research presented at the symposium explores renewable energy from solid waste as an innovative dual-purpose solution. By converting waste streams into energy, cities could simultaneously address the solid waste management crisis and alleviate energy poverty in marginalized communities. This kind of circular approach, in which one urban system’s output becomes another’s input, exemplifies the resourcefulness the symposium sought to champion, and it illustrates how technical interventions can generate social benefits when they are designed with equity in mind from the outset.

The collection also turns its attention to the countryside, noting that rural communities in Global South countries are undergoing a radical transformation. Scholars cited in the editorial identify the major drivers of rural-urban interaction and trace their implications for land use, governance, and socio-economic organization in urbanizing rural regions. Their contribution goes beyond diagnosis: they conceptualize a novel framework for the governance and planning of rural-urban interfaces, recognizing that the boundary between city and countryside is increasingly porous. As settlements sprawl and economic activity straddles both realms, planning regimes designed for a neat urban-rural divide are failing, and new governance models are needed to manage the flows of people, resources, and land-use pressures that connect them.

In South Africa specifically, the editorial confronts a stubborn legacy. The expansion of dormitory settlements on city peripheries remains a dominant feature of the country’s post-apartheid urbanization, and this phenomenon persistently reproduces the spatial and infrastructural inequalities of the apartheid era, producing marginalized informal communities within cities. These communities face a housing crisis characterized by a growing backlog, unaffordability, and spatial inequality. Research presented at the symposium identifies divergent pathways to formalizing informal settlements, which often generate tensions between state-led urban modernization and community-driven adaptation strategies. The friction between top-down upgrading programs and the organic, incremental strategies residents themselves pursue is a recurring theme, and one that any workable policy must navigate rather than override.

Against this backdrop, the collection advances concrete institutional remedies. One contribution calls for the professionalization of the human settlements development sector, arguing that the scale and complexity of the housing backlog demand a skilled, accountable, and properly credentialed workforce. Another study operationalizes the Sustainable Development Goals principle of “leaving no one behind” by identifying and characterizing marginalized and vulnerable groups, including persons with disabilities, child-headed households, older persons, and refugees. By making these populations visible in data and policy, the research argues, inclusion can move from aspiration to measurable practice, ensuring that vulnerable groups are accounted for in all spheres of settlement planning and service delivery.

Climate change adds a further layer of hazard to already fragile urban systems. In Lagos, Nigeria, the interaction between urban expansion and flood occurrence was the focus of research presenting innovative strategies to enhance urban resilience. These strategies include integrating climate-tailored early warning systems and fostering active community participation in flood management. The Lagos case demonstrates that resilience is not merely an engineering problem of drainage and barriers; it is also a social problem of communication, trust, and local knowledge. Early warning systems only save lives when communities are organized and empowered to act on them, which reinforces the symposium’s broader emphasis on participatory governance.

Human-made hazards feature prominently as well. Artisanal cobalt miners in the Democratic Republic of the Congo confront exploitative working conditions, hazardous labor, and societal degradation, and the research presented calls for transformative policies and legal frameworks that prioritize equitable resource governance, social justice, and human rights. As global demand for cobalt, a critical mineral for batteries and the energy transition, continues to rise, the conditions under which it is extracted become a matter of international as well as local consequence. The editorial positions equitable resource governance as inseparable from the agenda of sustainable settlements: a city cannot be just if the resource economies feeding it are not.

The unifying conclusion is that the realization of innovative technologies, sustainability, equity, social justice, and resilient infrastructure for sustainable cities and communities cuts across jurisdictional boundaries and requires a multidisciplinary approach to solving these grand challenges. Broader stakeholder collaboration across inter- and intra-organizational systems, including researchers, policymakers, public and private practitioners, non-governmental organizations, and communities, is described as a fundamental requirement for co-creating innovative solutions. As one contribution notes, intentional resource coordination and sustained collaborative commitment can generate meaningful long-term effects on social and upward mobility within underserved urban communities. The message from the Pan African City Symposium is ultimately one of cautious optimism: the problems are interconnected, but so are the solutions, and the expertise to pursue them now spans the entire African diaspora and beyond.

Subject of Research: Sustainable, inclusive, and equitable human settlements in Africa and the Global South

Article Title: Editorial: The dynamics of sustainable, inclusive and equitable human settlements (volume 2): Pan African City symposium 2025

Article References: Khumalo, P., Lukhele, T., & Ntakana, K. (2026). Editorial: The dynamics of sustainable, inclusive and equitable human settlements (volume 2): Pan African City symposium 2025. Frontiers in Sustainable Resource Management, 5, Article 1969053. https://doi.org/10.3389/fsrma.2026.1969053

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fsrma.2026.1969053

Keywords: human settlements, urbanization, energy poverty, informal settlements, solar energy, solid waste management, flood resilience, housing inequality, rural-urban interface, sustainable development, energy justice, Pan African City Symposium

The collection stems from a collaboration between the Joint Program Clean Energy Transition for a Sustainable Society (e3s) of the European Energy Research Alliance and Frontiers in Sustainable Energy Policy. It spans original research, reviews, and policy and practice analyses, drawing on disciplinary traditions as varied as behavioral economics, text mining, Indigenous studies and socio-technical transition theory. What emerges is not a single blueprint but a multidimensional framework: justice in decarbonization is treated not as a technical prerequisite for cutting emissions but as a normative and political objective in its own right—one with real consequences for how policies are experienced and whether they endure.

One cluster of studies focuses on participatory governance and democratic engagement. Kambo and colleagues demonstrate how a structured deliberative process can bridge the gap between citizens, policymakers and industry actors in shaping Australia’s future energy and fuel systems. Using the “diamond of participatory decision-making” framework, their analysis reveals that while considerable alignment exists across cohorts on the broad direction of a low-carbon future, divergences surface around the social and environmental justice dimensions of specific technology choices—including hydrogen and biogas. Navigating those divergences, the authors argue, requires innovative governance mechanisms rather than simple majority rule. In a complementary contribution, Kunlere and Shah challenge the simplistic binaries that dominate public debates on renewable energy. Their PARO framework categorizes public responses to energy injustice across a spectrum of positions that conventional “supporter versus opponent” dichotomies cannot capture, offering a more granular analytical lens for diagnosing and addressing public resistance. Both studies make one thing clear: how decisions are made matters as much as what is decided—a lesson that is easy to articulate and difficult to institutionalize.

A second cluster turns to sustainable energy systems and socio-technical transitions. Singh and Clough critically interrogate the global bioenergy system, challenging the widespread assumption that bioenergy is inherently carbon-neutral or renewable. Through causal loop analysis, they examine how current production regimes can shift negative social and ecological impacts—including threats to food security, land use change and biodiversity loss—from consumer to producer regions. Their work highlights the uneven distribution of burdens that can arise within particular configurations of globalized bioenergy production and trade. Oduro and Taylor, drawing on expert interviews from industry, academia and policy, map the challenges facing energy networks in Great Britain during decarbonization. Their findings reveal broad agreement on electrification and decentralization, yet deep uncertainty about the future role of gaseous fuels, particularly hydrogen. They also identify a regulatory gap: existing structures may be too rigid and slow-moving to enable networks to drive—rather than impede—the net-zero transition. Soloviy and colleagues expand the debate further by conceptualizing what they call the “triple transition,” linking green, digital and just transitions. Drawing on 28 real-world case examples and five distinct analytical perspectives, their interdisciplinary review argues that tensions between these three policy streams are not merely obstacles to be managed but productive sites of institutional learning if properly engaged.

A third cluster centers on Indigenous knowledge, justice and inclusion. Oliveira and colleagues provide a compelling examination of Sámi perspectives on reindeer herding and energy transition policies in Norway. Through semi-structured interviews with Sámi herders, the authors document how wind turbine development encroaches on grazing lands and disrupts the economic, social and cultural fabric of reindeer herding communities. Crucially, the article does not merely catalog grievances; it also explores the hesitance many Indigenous communities feel toward integrating their Traditional Ecological Knowledge into mainstream transition frameworks, given past experiences of co-optation and tokenism. This nuance—that recognition justice requires more than a formal invitation and demands genuine epistemic respect—is an important contribution. It reminds readers that just transitions cannot be reduced to technological substitution; they must also confront colonial legacies and create institutional space for diverse knowledge systems.

A fourth cluster addresses social vulnerability and climate equity through two complementary scales. Moleskis and colleagues tackle one of the most pressing social dimensions of Europe’s green transition: the unequal capacity of households to access decarbonization support. Framed around the EU Social Climate Fund and illustrated through the case of Cyprus, the authors draw on behavioral science to identify cognitive barriers—such as status quo bias, present bias and information overload—as well as structural barriers including digital exclusion and administrative complexity that prevent energy-poor households from claiming available support. Their policy recommendations move beyond standard subsidy design toward a more human-centered, trust-based approach. Working at the global level, Ayompe examines how distributive, procedural and recognition-based justice have been integrated—or neglected—in international climate governance. The article argues that colonial legacies continue to shape governance structures in ways that systematically exclude the communities most affected by climate change, and calls for interdisciplinary collaboration spanning public health, urban planning and environmental protection.

A fifth and final cluster highlights the cultural and urban dimensions of sustainability transitions. Costanzo and Alderuccio investigate how culture, heritage and the creative industries are being integrated into urban climate-neutrality strategies across European cities. Focusing on Climate City Contracts produced under the EU’s 100 Mission Cities program, the authors apply a text mining methodology to detect the presence—or absence—of New European Bauhaus principles in these planning documents. Their findings reveal that cultural participation is slowly being acknowledged as a driver of climate action, with potential contributions to social cohesion, behavioral change and community-led urban renewal. Methodologically, the article breaks new ground by developing a human-annotated corpus designed to train future AI models capable of analyzing cultural-climate linkages at scale, broadening the understanding of just transitions beyond infrastructure and economics.

Reading across the nine articles, four cross-cutting themes stand out. First, participation matters, but depth counts: whether through deliberative citizen panels, Indigenous consultation processes or community-based climate planning, the legitimacy of sustainability transitions depends on whose voices are genuinely heard and whose knowledge is meaningfully incorporated. Several studies show that participatory processes can remain superficial if institutional follow-through is absent. Second, transitions are inherently systemic and produce feedback effects that extend across sectors, scales and geographies; technological shifts in energy systems interact with regulatory structures, supply chains, cultural identities and global inequalities in ways that can produce new injustices even as they address old ones. Third, justice must be understood in both procedural and distributive terms, and the two cannot be traded off against each other—policies that achieve technically equitable outcomes through opaque or exclusionary processes will struggle to secure the social license they require. Fourth, different kinds of knowledge—scientific, local, Indigenous and experiential—are not competing claims to be arbitrated but complementary resources that policy needs to learn to use together.

Importantly, the collection also demonstrates that tensions within sustainability transitions should not be viewed solely as obstacles. Divergences between stakeholders, conflicts over land use, disagreements regarding technology pathways and competing policy priorities all reveal the complexity of transforming societies. Yet these tensions can also become productive spaces for democratic negotiation, innovation and institutional learning. The challenge for policymakers, researchers and practitioners is therefore not to eliminate disagreement but to create governance structures that can handle complexity while maintaining fairness and legitimacy. The editors also identify a set of research gaps that future work should prioritize: most contributions focus on Europe, North America and Australia, leaving the just transition experiences of communities in the Global South—where climate vulnerability is highest and adaptive capacity often lowest—underrepresented. The role of gender in shaping both exposure to transition risks and access to transition benefits is raised but remains undertheorized. The political economy of transition, including the influence of fossil fuel incumbents, financial flows and trade regimes on the pace and direction of change, is notably absent. Methodologically, the field would benefit from longitudinal studies able to track whether participatory processes translate into durable policy change over time, and from closer examination of implementation fidelity—whether well-designed interventions are actually delivered equitably on the ground. Naming these gaps, the editors stress, is not a criticism of the contributions collected here but an invitation for the next wave of just transition research to take them on.

At a time when there is serious concern that climate targets and their implementation remain insufficient relative to the pace and scale of emissions reductions required, just transition research faces the challenge of demonstrating how greater attention to fairness can contribute to the social acceptability and political legitimacy of decarbonization pathways. The nine studies collected here range from Norwegian reindeer pastures and Australian deliberative panels to EU urban climate contracts and global bioenergy supply chains. They provide critical and diverse guidance for governments, industries, communities and scholars seeking to align decarbonization with social inclusion and democratic accountability. Viewed through this lens, the Research Topic shows that a just transition cannot be assessed on technical performance alone: the question of who bears the costs and who shares the benefits is political and deserves explicit attention. Just transition scholars therefore face a continuing task—to demonstrate how attention to distribution, participation, recognition and legitimacy can contribute to rapid and effective decarbonization while addressing its social consequences, at a moment when the gap between policy ambition and lived social reality remains substantial.

Subject of Research: Just transition research on equity, participation, governance and legitimacy in decarbonization

Article Title: Editorial: Advancing the just transition: navigating towards a sustainable future

Article References: Paier, M., Sari, R., Pellegrini-Masini, G., Sciullo, A., Menon, M., & Carley, S. (2026). Editorial: Advancing the just transition: navigating towards a sustainable future. Frontiers in Sustainable Energy Policy, 5, Article 1936488. https://doi.org/10.3389/fsuep.2026.1936488

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fsuep.2026.1936488

Keywords: just transition, energy justice, decarbonization, participatory governance, Indigenous knowledge, energy poverty, socio-technical transitions, climate equity, bioenergy, urban climate policy, Editorial, Advancing

The study, conducted by Marzouqa Lamsaf and Mariem Liouaeddine of the Laboratory of Economic and Public Policy Sciences at Ibn Tofail University in Kénitra, Morocco, takes an unusual approach to a sprawling subject. Rather than analyzing energy systems directly, the researchers analyzed the scientific literature itself. They examined 107 documents indexed in the Scopus database, all published between 2010 and 2025, that address Africa’s renewable energy transition. Using two widely adopted bibliometric software packages, VOSviewer and Bibliometrix, they mapped publication trends, identified the most influential works, charted the scientific actors and collaboration networks, and reconstructed the keyword structures that reveal how researchers have framed the problem over fifteen years.

Bibliometric analysis of this kind works by treating publications, citations, and keywords as data points that can be clustered and visualized. When researchers repeatedly cite the same papers or use the same terms, those items group together in network maps, revealing the intellectual architecture of a field. In this case, the analysis surfaced four dominant research clusters. The first, labeled Technological Decarbonization and Energy Systems, covers the engineering and systems-level questions of deploying solar, wind, hydropower, and other renewable technologies across African grids. The second, Green Finance and Economic Development, addresses the capital flows, investment frameworks, and growth strategies needed to fund the transition. The third, Energy Access, Poverty and Security, focuses on the social dimension: who gets electricity, at what cost, and with what reliability. The fourth cluster, Emissions, Efficiency and Socioeconomic Co-benefits, examines how decarbonization policies interact with health, employment, and broader welfare outcomes.

What makes the review’s findings striking is not the existence of these four clusters but the way they interlock. The authors emphasize that the clusters do not represent isolated scholarly silos. Over the study period, the literature has increasingly converged on a trilemma framing, in which economic development, energy access, and decarbonization are treated as jointly necessary and mutually constraining objectives. A solar mini-grid that lifts a rural community out of energy poverty but remains financially unsustainable fails on one axis. A utility-scale wind farm that attracts foreign investment but displaces local communities fails on another. A coal plant that delivers cheap power and industrial growth fails on the climate axis. The research community, the review suggests, has progressively recognized that no single-axis solution will work for a continent with Africa’s specific emissions profile, development needs, and vulnerability to climate impacts.

The asymmetry at the heart of this debate is worth spelling out. Africa’s cumulative and annual contributions to global greenhouse gas emissions are small by any measure, which means the continent’s decarbonization efforts have limited direct effect on global climate trajectories. Yet the stakes of the transition for Africans themselves are enormous. Energy access deficits remain deep, and the continent’s population is growing rapidly, which means electricity demand is set to expand substantially in the coming decades. The path that demand growth takes—whether it is met with renewable capacity, fossil fuels, or some mixture—will shape both African development prospects and the global emissions picture for generations. This is why the review insists that Africa’s transition cannot be read purely as a decarbonization agenda; questions of affordability, reliability, and industrial development are inseparable from it.

The temporal scope of the analysis, 2010 to 2025, captures a period of dramatic change in both the global energy landscape and African energy policy. Over these fifteen years, the cost of solar photovoltaic technology fell dramatically worldwide, off-grid and mini-grid solutions matured, and international climate finance mechanisms expanded. The publication trends identified in the review reflect this evolution, with scholarly attention intensifying as the practical possibilities of renewable deployment in Africa grew. The mapping of influential works and collaboration patterns also reveals which institutions, regions, and research communities have driven the conversation, and where the networks of co-authorship and citation remain thin—a signal of where research capacity and international collaboration may need strengthening.

Beyond mapping the existing literature, the review devotes significant attention to what the literature has missed. The authors identify several persistent gaps. First, the measurement of energy access and renewable energy themselves remains inconsistent across studies, making it difficult to compare findings or aggregate evidence. Different papers use different indicators, thresholds, and data sources for what counts as adequate access or meaningful renewable penetration. Second, financing and governance constraints—the political economy reasons why capital does not flow to promising projects, or why regulatory frameworks fail—are treated unevenly in the literature, often as background context rather than objects of rigorous analysis. Third, the methodological toolkit of the field leans heavily on approaches that identify correlations rather than causal effects, leaving open questions about what actually drives successful transitions.

The fourth gap is perhaps the most consequential for policy. The review finds that energy justice, gender, and digital inclusion remain poorly integrated into transition research. Energy justice as a framework asks who benefits and who bears the burdens of energy systems, and it has gained traction in European and North American scholarship but has been slower to penetrate African energy studies. Gender dimensions matter because women are disproportionately affected by lack of access to clean cooking and because energy entrepreneurship and employment are not gender-neutral. Digital inclusion connects the energy transition to the broader digital economy, since modern energy services increasingly underpin connectivity, education, and financial technology. A transition literature that ignores these dimensions risks producing policies that expand electricity supply while reproducing or deepening existing inequalities.

For researchers, the review functions as both a map and a research agenda. By consolidating fifteen years of scholarship into identifiable clusters and gaps, it gives newcomers an entry point into a fragmented field and signals to funders and journals where new work is most needed. The call for stronger causal methods is particularly pointed: as African governments and international institutions commit to renewable targets, the evidence base for which interventions actually deliver affordable, reliable, low-carbon energy at scale remains thinner than the urgency of the problem demands. Better measurement, more attention to governance and finance, and explicit incorporation of justice and inclusion concerns would, the authors suggest, make the next fifteen years of scholarship far more useful to decision-makers.

The broader significance of the study lies in its reframing. For much of the past decade, international climate discourse has treated Africa primarily as a victim of climate change or as a future emissions problem to be managed. The trilemma framing that this review documents in the literature offers a more accurate and more demanding picture: Africa’s energy transition is simultaneously a development project, an access project, and a decarbonization project, and the scholarly community has increasingly organized itself around that reality. Whether the continent can navigate all three objectives at once will depend not only on technology and capital but on the quality of the evidence guiding policy—a quality that this review suggests still has considerable room to improve. As the literature continues to grow, the challenge will be ensuring that research keeps pace with the real-world decisions being made today about grids, investments, and the lives of the more than half a billion Africans still waiting for modern energy.

Subject of Research: Bibliometric review of research on Africa's renewable energy transition, energy access, and decarbonization

Article Title: Reconciling economic development, energy access, and decarbonization in Africa’s renewable energy transition: a bibliometric review

Article References: Lamsaf, M., & Liouaeddine, M. (2026). Reconciling economic development, energy access, and decarbonization in Africa’s renewable energy transition: a bibliometric review. Discover Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43621-026-04805-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43621-026-04805-2

Keywords: renewable energy transition, Africa, energy access, decarbonization, economic development, bibliometric analysis, green finance, energy security, energy justice, energy poverty, Scopus, VOSviewer

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: Ansar, M. C., & Husni, A. H. A. A. (2026). A bibliometric review on justice and governance in energy transitions. Environmental Challenges, 25, Article 101678. 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

The central argument of the book, as framed by the review, is that climate policy and social policy cannot be treated as separate domains. When governments phase out internal combustion engines, retrofit homes for energy efficiency, or restructure energy systems around renewables, the costs and benefits of those changes are distributed unevenly across society. Low-income households, older people, renters, and communities dependent on carbon-intensive industries often face the steepest barriers to participating in the new low-carbon economy. Snell and Middlemiss, both established researchers on energy and poverty, argue that a transition which ignores these distributional questions risks being both unjust and politically fragile.

This concern sits within a broader intellectual tradition known as the just transition. The concept originated in the labour movement as a demand that workers displaced by environmental regulation should not be abandoned, and it has since been widened considerably. Scholars such as Newell and Mulvaney, whose work on the political economy of just transition is cited in the review, have traced how the term has travelled from union bargaining tables into national climate plans and international governance frameworks. More recent analyses, including a 2023 study by Newell and colleagues on the global governance of just transitions, have highlighted persistent gaps between the rhetoric of justice and the institutional machinery needed to deliver it.

Parallel to this, the field of energy justice has developed a conceptual vocabulary for evaluating energy systems. Jenkins and colleagues, in a widely cited 2016 conceptual review, distinguished between distributive justice, which concerns who bears costs and receives benefits; procedural justice, which concerns who participates in decision-making; and recognition justice, which concerns whose needs and identities are acknowledged by policy. Healy and Barry extended this framework by politicising energy transitions, arguing that questions of who owns and controls energy infrastructure are inseparable from questions of fairness. Schlosberg and Collins similarly traced the evolution from environmental justice to climate justice, showing how the discourse has broadened from the siting of polluting facilities to the global inequities of climate impacts and responses.

What distinguishes Snell and Middlemiss’s contribution, according to the review, is its explicit integration of social inclusion research into this justice-oriented landscape. Social exclusion, as conceptualised in the influential multi-dimensional analysis by Levitas and colleagues, is not simply a lack of income but a compound condition involving restricted access to resources, services, social relations, and political voice. By bringing this framework into conversation with climate policy, the authors are able to show that the populations most at risk of exclusion from mainstream society are frequently the same populations most burdened by decarbonisation measures. A household in fuel poverty, for instance, may be unable to afford the upfront costs of a heat pump, may rent a property where efficiency upgrades require landlord consent, and may lack the political leverage to influence local energy planning.

The review situates the book within what Wibeck and colleagues describe in 2026 as the widening scope of just transitions research. What began as a concern with coal miners and oil workers has expanded to encompass consumers, communities, and entire regions, and increasingly to questions of global equity between the Global North and South. Wang and Lo’s 2021 conceptual review documented this proliferation of meanings, noting that the term just transition is now invoked by actors with sharply different interests, from trade unions to corporations to multilateral institutions. In this crowded conceptual space, a book that grounds the discussion in the concrete, measurable realities of social exclusion performs a valuable clarifying function.

Technical detail matters here, because the mechanisms of exclusion in the net zero transition are often embedded in the design of policy instruments themselves. Grant-based retrofit schemes typically require homeowners to pay upfront costs and reclaim money later, a structure that systematically excludes households without savings or access to credit. Electric vehicle subsidies disproportionately benefit higher-income buyers who can afford new cars, while the used-car market, second-hand market, and public transport alternatives receive less support. Carbon pricing, the economist’s favoured tool, is frequently regressive in its incidence, taking a larger share of income from poorer households unless revenues are recycled progressively. Snell and Middlemiss’s analysis, as reflected in the review, pushes policymakers to examine these design features rather than treating injustice as an unfortunate side effect to be remedied after the fact.

The book also speaks to a growing mobility justice critique of technology-centred transition strategies. Henderson’s 2020 argument that electric vehicles are not the answer exemplifies this line of thought: replacing every internal combustion car with an electric equivalent would do little to address congestion, road danger, sedentary lifestyles, or the exclusion of those who cannot drive at all. A genuinely just climate future, on this view, requires rethinking systems of provision rather than swapping the energy source that powers them. This systems perspective aligns with the book’s emphasis on inclusion, since questions about who benefits from transport, housing, and energy systems are inherently questions about social structure, not merely about technology.

Zhao’s review, published on 2 October 2026, presents the book as a synthesis that will be useful to researchers, students, and policymakers alike, drawing together literatures that too often run in parallel. The reviewer, who conceived and wrote the review independently and declares no competing interests and no specific funding, frames the book’s core achievement as demonstrating that social inclusion is not an optional add-on to climate policy but a precondition for its success. Transitions that leave large groups behind generate resistance, erode public consent, and can stall precisely the decarbonisation they were meant to advance. The political turbulence that has accompanied fuel taxes, low-emission zones, and boiler replacement schemes in several countries illustrates the practical stakes of this argument.

As net zero deadlines draw closer, the questions raised by Just Climate Futures are likely to become only more pressing. Who decides which communities are transformed first, and who sits at the table when those decisions are made? How are the costs of grid upgrades, home retrofits, and industrial restructuring shared between taxpayers, energy users, and shareholders? And how can policy be designed so that the households with the least capacity to adapt are protected rather than penalised? Snell and Middlemiss do not claim that these tensions can be resolved by technical fixes alone. Their contribution, as the review makes clear, is to insist that a credible climate strategy must be measured not only in tonnes of carbon avoided but in the fairness of the society it builds, ensuring that the path to a low-carbon future is one that people from all walks of life can walk together.

Subject of Research: Social inclusion and justice in the net zero climate transition

Article Title: Carolyn Snell and Lucie Middlemiss. Just climate futures: integrating social inclusion into the net zero transition

Article References: Zhao, S. (2026). Carolyn Snell and Lucie Middlemiss. Just climate futures: integrating social inclusion into the net zero transition. Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13412-026-01150-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s13412-026-01150-8

Keywords: just transition, net zero, energy justice, social inclusion, climate policy, fuel poverty, social exclusion, decarbonisation, environmental justice, climate equity, energy transition, book review