The study, conducted by Ana Stojilovska and Julia Noelle Suzuki of the ELTE Centre for Social Sciences in Budapest, emerges against the backdrop of what researchers increasingly call the polycrisis: the compounding of simultaneous shocks such as the energy price surge, inflation, and the lingering social effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. In such conditions, the authors argue, deprivation does not necessarily announce itself through unpaid bills or cold homes alone. A household may maintain its electricity supply while falling behind on water access, internet connectivity, or transportation, leaving essential needs unmet in ways that standard energy poverty indicators never register.

To confront this measurement gap, the researchers designed a survey in North Macedonia that was representative by age, gender, and ethnicity. The choice of country is significant. North Macedonia, a post-socialist state in the Western Balkans, exhibits many of the structural features common across the region: a legacy of inefficient housing stock, limited adoption of central heating, widespread use of inefficient heating fuels, and persistent income constraints that shape how households consume energy. These conditions make it an instructive setting for testing whether energy vulnerability, as conventionally understood, tells the full story of household deprivation.

The methodological core of the study is confirmatory factor analysis, a statistical technique that allows researchers to estimate latent variables—underlying conditions that cannot be observed directly but that manifest through a set of measurable indicators. Rather than treating each indicator of hardship as a separate phenomenon, confirmatory factor analysis tests whether a common underlying factor explains the pattern of responses. In this study, the latent variables represented three graduated constructs: energy vulnerability, multiple energy vulnerability, and material deprivation. The team then examined how these latent vulnerabilities were associated with a panel of socio-spatial characteristics describing where people live, how they travel, how they heat their homes, and what social positions they occupy.

The three constructs were built in a deliberate, layered fashion. Energy vulnerability was represented by grouping different energy services—those directly tied to energy consumption in the home. Multiple energy vulnerability extended this panel by combining the energy services with energy-related services such as water and communications, reflecting the reality that household energy systems are intertwined with water supply, telecommunications, and other infrastructures that depend on or interact with energy. Material deprivation, the broadest construct, added non-energy essential services to the mix, capturing the full spectrum of essential needs a household must meet to maintain a dignified standard of living.

What the analysis found is striking for its consistency. Seven socio-spatial characteristics were positively associated with all three types of vulnerability: use of public transport; absence of central heating; absence of energy efficiency measures; income insufficient to cover basic needs; reliance on others for basic needs; caregiving responsibilities; and ethnic-minority status. The high overlap between the socio-spatial features linked to energy vulnerability, multiple energy vulnerability, and material deprivation suggests that the same households tend to be exposed to compounded forms of deprivation simultaneously. Deprivation, in other words, clusters—and it clusters along identifiable social and spatial lines.

Each of these seven characteristics carries analytical weight. Reliance on public transport points to a form of energy-related vulnerability that falls outside the household entirely: mobility is an energy service, and households without private vehicles are exposed to the costs, schedules, and reliability of public systems. The absence of central heating signals dependence on individual, often inefficient, heating solutions such as wood stoves or electricity, which are more costly per unit of heat and more difficult to manage during price shocks. The absence of energy efficiency measures—insulation, efficient windows, modern appliances—means households must consume more energy to achieve the same level of comfort, a structural disadvantage that no amount of behavioral adjustment can fully offset.

The remaining four characteristics are more explicitly social. Insufficient income to cover basic needs is, unsurprisingly, central to every form of deprivation the study measured. Reliance on others for basic needs—depending on family members, friends, or informal networks to secure food, fuel, or services—reveals a fragility that formal welfare statistics often miss. Caregiving responsibilities, whether for children, elderly relatives, or others, constrain household resources and time while raising the stakes of any service failure. And ethnic-minority status emerged as an independent correlate of all three vulnerabilities, underscoring how social exclusion and infrastructural disadvantage intertwine in North Macedonia, where Roma and other minority communities frequently face compounded barriers to housing quality, employment, and public services.

The conceptual innovation of the paper lies in what the expanded constructs revealed that the narrower one did not. When the researchers combined energy services with the extended panel of energy-related services, the resulting measure of multiple energy vulnerability surfaced socio-spatial features associated with deprivation that would have remained hidden if the analysis had stopped at conventional energy services. This is the central practical warning of the study: some forms of deprivation are possibly hidden in times of crisis precisely because energy vulnerability, as commonly defined, does not capture the deprivation of all essential services. A household may appear adequately supplied with energy while being deprived of water, communications, or other essentials that the standard conceptual lens simply does not see.

The policy implications follow directly. The authors argue that studying energy vulnerability should involve consideration of a defined list of essential services, both energy and non-energy, to avoid hidden forms of deprivation and to prevent overlooking the socio-spatial features associated with higher levels of deprivation across compounded essential services. For governments and international organizations designing energy poverty alleviation programs—particularly in Southeast Europe, where energy price volatility has hit household budgets hard—the message is that targeting based on narrow energy indicators risks missing the very households most in need. A family struggling to pay for water access or mobile connectivity may be as materially deprived as one struggling with heating bills, yet it may fall outside the eligibility criteria of energy-focused support schemes.

The research was developed as part of the project Empowering Vulnerable Communities: Catalysing Climate Action through Climate Assemblies, implemented by the ZIP Institute in North Macedonia and funded by the European Union, with survey implementation carried out by Indago. The study was non-interventional and anonymous: no direct personal identifiers were collected, and respondents aged 18 and older gave informed consent before participating. The authors report no competing interests, and the work was published open access under a Creative Commons Attribution license, making the underlying analysis available to researchers and policymakers across the region and beyond.

Beyond North Macedonia, the study contributes to a growing international conversation about how deprivation should be conceptualized and measured in an era of overlapping crises. The idea of multiple energy vulnerability invites researchers in other countries to test whether the same socio-spatial signatures—mobility constraints, inefficient housing, informal support networks, caregiving burdens, and minority status—predict compounded deprivation elsewhere. If they do, the concept could reshape how social indicators are designed, how vulnerability is mapped, and how support is targeted, ensuring that the households hidden in the spaces between energy poverty and material deprivation are finally counted.

Subject of Research: Socio-spatial drivers of energy vulnerability and material deprivation in North Macedonia

Article Title: Exploring socio-spatial vulnerabilities in North Macedonia to develop a multiple energy vulnerability concept

Article References: Exploring socio-spatial vulnerabilities in North Macedonia to develop a multiple energy vulnerability concept. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43621-026-05012-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43621-026-05012-9

Keywords: energy poverty, energy vulnerability, North Macedonia, material deprivation, confirmatory factor analysis, essential services, polycrisis, energy efficiency, public transport, ethnic minorities, social indicators, post-socialist countries