A survey on energy justice: a critical review of the literature

Abstract

The increasing scarcity of resources and the escalating complexity of reality make the fairness ensuring in energy activities even more difficult. In this context, energy justice, as an emerging cross-field, tries to provide solutions based on practical problems. In the face of the surge of energy justice publications, it is necessary to review them in time, so that we can comprehend the significant achievements and the research directions worthy of further exploration. With the help of visualization tools, this paper conducts a comprehensive quantitative analysis of 1,910 energy justice publications. Based on the results, we reach the following main conclusions: (1) The energy justice publications have only emerged rapidly in recent years; (2) The research hotspots are closely related to the renewable energy transition; (3) The distribution of prominent contributors in this field is relatively concentrated. The main contribution of this study is to comprehensively display the essential characteristics of the literature in this field, such as the evolutions of research themes and the performances of research contributors in different dimensions, so as to provide readers with an effective way to understand the knowledge structure in this field, and help related researchers rationally examine the existing results.

Keywords:

• Energy justice
• bibliometric analysis
• renewable energy
• energy transition

JEL:

• K32
• P18
• P48
• Q4
• Q5

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [72071135]; the Social Science Youth Foundation of Ministry of Education of China under Grants [21YJC630030], the Sichuan Province soft sciences research plan project under Grants [2022JDR0305], the Funds for Sichuan University to Building a World-class University under Grants [2021CXC21].