Energy poverty alleviation in social housing: Prototyping policies with practitioners

The European energy crisis of 2022 stresses the importance of protecting the most vulnerable households. Price peaks disproportionally affect households with low incomes, limited savings, and inefficient homes, and increased energy poverty: the inability to secure sufficient domestic energy services that allow for participation in society (Bouzarovski & Petrova, 2015).

Since European social housing countries have become increasingly residualised, a significant share of households in or at risk of energy poverty are being accommodated by social housing providers (Poggio & Whitehead, 2017; Walker, 2008). However, while most practitioners acknowledge that social housing providers (SHPs) have a responsibility in energy poverty alleviation, targeted intervention approaches have hardly been explored (Desvallees, 2022). The body of scholarship on energy poverty measurement has grown rapidly, but its use in practice has hardly been addressed (Bouzarovski et al., 2021). Sherriff et al. (2019) note that a possible explanation might be that insights from research are inadequately communicated to policymakers and practitioners. Charlier and Legendre (2021) add that the sense of urgency has substantially differed across countries.

This paper aims to combat these gaps, by proactively engaging with practitioners across Europe to find out which targeted intervention approaches are considered most effective, what their benefits and potential (regulatory) obstacles are, and whether these perspectives differ in different policy contexts. We indirectly examine the responsibilities SHPs are willing to accept within a ‘just transition’, and explore whether, and if so how, their apparent techno-economic approach to retrofit provision could be altered (De Feijter et al., 2019).