Can Enhancing Capabilities Promote Energy Justice? An Agent-Based Model Approach

The Capabilities Approach has been recently invoked in efforts to study questions relating to energy and justice, enabling a better understanding of the relationship between energy and well-being or deprivation. This framework allows for a flexible analysis of human needs in their local context and suggests a variety of possible interventions, beyond merely increasing energy consumption. At the same time, research in other areas such as decarbonization as well as environmental justice has derived important insights from agent-based models (ABMs). ABMs are especially useful in studying complex phenomena as they allow for a bottom-up interactions of heterogeneous agents with simple behavior rules, and give rise to emergent properties at the system level which are not reducible to any individual agent’s action or intent. This approach is thus very suitable for studying questions relating to energy justice, and is employed in this paper by creating an agent-based model of energy and capabilities. We study the differential needs of people for an energy service (heating) and their effect on a secondary capability (thermal comfort) and a basic capability (health). Furthermore, we look at several conversion factors – both personal and environmental – which mediate the transformation of commodities (e.g. energy services) into capabilities. We then utilize the model over numerous iterations to study questions such as whether equalizing agents’ secondary and basic capabilities can contribute more to energy justice than merely raising the floor of the most vulnerable in terms of energy consumption (a version of Sen’s question “inequality of what?”), and also look at whether such an approach is linear or has a threshold effect. Finally we analyze the results of the simulations for alternative ways of enhancing both human capabilities and ecological functionings, thus promoting sustainable energy justice.

The attached files incolde the NetLogo code, as well as output data from the various scenarios described in the paper.

能力方法最近被应用于研究能源与正义相关的问题，从而加深了对能源与福祉或剥夺之间关系的理解。该框架允许对人类需求进行灵活的分析，在其本地语境中进行，并提出了多种可能的干预措施，而不仅仅是增加能源消费。与此同时，在脱碳以及环境正义等其他领域的研究中，基于智能体模型（ABMs）也获得了重要的启示。ABMs特别适用于研究复杂现象，因为它们允许异质智能体以简单的行为规则进行自下而上的交互，并在系统层面上产生不可还原于任何单个智能体行为或意图的涌现性质。因此，该方法非常适合研究与能源正义相关的问题，并在本文中通过构建能源与能力智能体模型来应用。我们研究了人们对能源服务（供暖）的不同需求及其对次级能力（热舒适）和基本能力（健康）的影响。此外，我们还考察了多种转换因子——包括个人和环境因素——它们在商品（例如能源服务）向能力转换的过程中起到中介作用。然后，我们通过多次迭代利用该模型来研究以下问题：是否通过平等化智能体的次级和基本能力比仅仅提高最脆弱群体能源消费的底线（即森的“不平等是什么？”问题的版本）对能源正义的贡献更大，以及这种方法的效应是线性的还是具有阈值效应。最后，我们分析了模拟结果，以探索增强人类能力和生态功能性的替代途径，从而促进可持续能源正义。所附文件包含了NetLogo代码，以及论文中描述的各种场景的输出数据。