White Paper: Design for Justice

By Nynke van Uffelen

Concerns about social justice in relation to energy systems and technologies are not new. Where the right to sustainable and clean energy for all are acknowledged globally, energy infrastructure is known to be harmful to humans, animals and environments.

Energy justice is generally understood as a pursuit to “provide all individuals across all areas with safe, affordable and sustainable energy”. In other words, energy systems, technologies, and policies should be just, rather than unjust. Energy justice is often understood as a combination of procedural justice, distributive justice, recognition justice, and restorative justice.

Designing just energy systems faces an important challenge, because justice is a contested concept. Different stakeholders often interpret ‘justice’ differently. Competing conceptions of justice often cause resistance, social movements, and energy conflicts.

By Anna Melnyk and Edo Abraham

Climate justice addresses ethical dimensions of climate change and its disproportionate impacts on current, past, and future generations. Its tenets of justice encompass the recognition of historical responsibilities and the equitable distribution of the benefits and burdens of climate action.

Climate justice emerged as an intersectional notion that connects environmental, social, gender, decolonial, and racial justice concerns regarding current, past, and future generations. It became a topic at the crossroads of academic research, policy-making, and social movements.

Technology and complex sociotechnical systems like energy systems are at the forefront of many climate justice challenges and discussions; addressing climate mitigation and adaptation will require systemic transformations of water, energy, agricultural, transport and other essential systems for society.

By Roberto Rocco and Marielle Feenstra

Social processes unfold within particular spaces, where varied claims for justice compete for recognition and resolution, hence the expression “spatial justice.” Spatial justice is a framework that seeks the fair and equitable distribution of burdens and benefits of spatial development and our life together in cities and communities.

It addresses how geography and space can contribute to or alleviate social inequalities, aiming to ensure that all individuals and groups have access to the benefits of urban life, such as public transportation, green spaces, social services, and political representation.

Spatial justice challenges the idea that space is neutral, highlighting how spatial arrangements can perpetuate disadvantages for certain populations while advantaging others.

By Cynthia Liem

Ever since large-scale digitalization and datafication led to the incorporation of algorithmic predictive routines in decision-making processes, concerns have risen with regard to the degree to which the resulting systems automate biases and reinforce inequalities.

When phenomena are to be translated to computer-readable data, inevitably, reductions take place in the representation. With human designers choosing what will be measured, represented and optimized, choices made will encode their own world views and biases.

Research communities have acknowledged this, and the topic of algorithmic fairness has become actively researched. More inclusive participation by more diverse audiences, starting from the design phase, will be beneficial.