Erwin van Tuijl and I have just published a new article in the journal Politics and Governance on solidarity in just heating transitions, and why it isn’t enough on its own.
Heating is the neglected sibling of energy transition governance. It’s also where distributive conflicts bite hardest: who pays for ripping out the gas, who gets left in a drafty flat, and who bears the risk when a district heating network gets built around them rather than with them.
Drawing on a case study of Rotterdam, a major post-industrial city with the port, the housing stock, and the energy poverty to match, we identify three modalities of solidarity: institutional, economic, and civic.
Each drives cooperation between municipalities, housing associations, utilities, and community organisations. And each runs into a wall.
What we found:
? Collective action problems (hard climate deadlines, an acute shortage of installers, genuine willingness to tackle energy poverty) generate solidarity initiatives across all actor types.
? But coordination failures, distributional conflicts, and institutional rigidity block implementation. Solidarity without institutional coordination produces goodwill, not decarbonised homes.
? The productive combination is iterated practices of solidarity plus institutional coordination — which together open space for self-organisation in heating transition governance.
The broader point: energy justice literature tends to treat solidarity as a normative good. We’d argue it’s better understood as a governance capacity — one that can be built, exhausted, or squandered depending on whether institutions are structured to receive it.
Open access, in the thematic issue ‘The Politics of Resilient and Just Energy Transitions: Institutions and Critical Infrastructure.’
Thanks to Erasmus University Rotterdam’s Dynamics of Inclusive Prosperity Initiative and the Erasmus Trustfonds for their financial support for this study.
