Beyond the Economics: Energy Justice and the Non-Economic Dimensions of Renewable Energy Transitions

Renewable energy deployment is expanding at unprecedented speed as countries pursue decarbonization, energy security, and green industrial transformation. While technological innovation and falling costs have driven this momentum, renewable energy transitions continue to be assessed primarily through techno-economic metrics. The social, cultural, ecological, and governance dimensions of change remain comparatively underexamined and weakly institutionalized.Across diverse contexts, renewable energy policies and projects have generated both positive and adverse non-economic impacts, affecting livelihoods, land rights, ecosystems, cultural heritage, and community autonomy. These dynamics are particularly pronounced in fossil-fuel-dependent regions, post-colonial societies, and environmentally vulnerable areas, where historical inequalities shape the distribution of benefits and burdens. Although energy justice concepts are increasingly cited in academic and policy discourse, they are often insufficiently operationalized in planning, regulation, financing, and implementation processes. As renewable energy systems scale rapidly alongside growing mineral extraction and infrastructure expansion there is a pressing need to examine whether current transitions are genuinely transformative or risk reproducing existing social and ecological injustices under a green banner.Goal:Consequently, this Research Topic aims to advance understanding of renewable energy transitions by moving beyond techno-economic performance indicators to foreground energy justice and the non-economic dimensions of systemic change. It brings together interdisciplinary scholarship to examine how justice considerations are embedded, negotiated, institutionalized, or overlooked across the design, governance, financing, and implementation of renewable energy systems. Importantly, the collection also speaks directly to policy recalibration: how policymakers can adjust goals, instruments, regulatory approaches, and implementation practices in response to emerging evidence on social, cultural, ecological, and governance impacts so that transition pathways remain legitimate, inclusive, and sustainable as they scale. The objective is to generate analytically rigorous and policy-relevant insights that support more equitable, participatory, and context-sensitive energy transitions. By bridging energy systems research with social sciences, law, environmental governance, political economy, and development studies, this Research Topic aims to strengthen both scholarly debate and real-world decision-making on how to design and recalibrate renewable energy policies for fairer outcomes.Scope and Information for Authors:This Research Topic welcomes original research articles, reviews, perspectives, and policy-oriented contributions that investigate the non-economic dimensions of renewable energy transitions across diverse geographical, political, and institutional contexts. Submissions may be theoretical, empirical, comparative, or methodological, and should engage explicitly with justice principles and the implications for policy recalibration that is, how policies and regulatory frameworks can be adjusted over time to correct emerging inequities, strengthen legitimacy, and improve outcomes as renewable systems scale. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:• Advancing and operationalizing energy justice principles procedural, distributive, recognitional, and reparative justice within renewable energy planning, regulation, and project delivery• Evidence on social, cultural, environmental, and public health impacts of renewable energy deployment, and how these findings should inform policy adjustment• Community participation, stakeholder engagement, and local decision-making in energy governance, including mechanisms that strengthen procedural fairness and consent• Land use change, displacement, livelihood transformation, and conflict linked to renewable energy projects, and the governance tools needed to prevent or address harm• Policy design and implementation gaps, regulatory weaknesses, and accountability mechanisms that shape inclusion, transparency, and fairness• Policy recalibration pathways: adaptive regulation, monitoring systems, and learning-based governance that embed justice objectives and respond to unintended impacts• Institutional and financial mechanisms (e.g., tariffs, subsidies, benefit-sharing, safeguards, conditionalities) that improve distributive outcomes and protect vulnerable groups• Reparative and restorative approaches addressing historical and ongoing harms associated with energy extraction and transition processes• Non-economic loss and damage related to renewable energy and broader transition dynamics, including cultural erosion, ecosystem degradation, livelihood disruption, and social dislocation• Gender, youth, and intersectional dimensions of renewable energy governance, benefits, and burdens• Life-cycle and material sourcing challenges extraction, processing, manufacturing, and waste management and their uneven social and ecological impacts• Comparative and cross-regional analyses of renewable energy justice across the Global South and Global North, including institutional and regulatory contrastsSubmissions that deliver actionable insights for policy, planning, financing, and governance particularly those that demonstrate how justice principles can be embedded across multiple stages of the renewable energy value chain, and how policies can be recalibrated in response to real-world impacts are especially encouraged.All contributions must fall within the scope of Frontiers in Energy Research: Sustainable Energy Systems, with potential cross-listing in related Frontiers journals where appropriate. In particular, this Research Topic welcomes submissions that advance the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), especially SDG 7 (Affordable and Clean Energy), SDG 10 (Reduced Inequalities), SDG 13 (Climate Action), and SDG 16 (Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions). Topic editors: Hermas Abudu, Victor Azubike, Chinedu Nsude Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/78647/beyond-the-economics-energy-justice-and-the-non-economic-dimensions-of-renewable-energy-transitions