A woman in rural Bosnia spends a third of her household income on firewood because her home has no connection to the gas grid, yet energy policy rarely accounts for how this burden differs from her neighbour’s. This project investigates how gender shapes who experiences energy poverty—the inability to afford adequate heating, lighting, or power—and how that poverty is contested, across six Western Balkan countries. Most research on gender and energy poverty has focused on the Global South, treating households as uniform units. GENERATE argues that homes are sites of hidden, gendered precarity that shape entire energy frontiers—marginal zones where different forms of energy production and consumption meet. The team will analyse statistical data on energy use and gender, then conduct household and institutional ethnographies in Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia. They will also run social innovation labs to test practical solutions. If successful, the work could reshape how European and international organisations design energy-alleviation programmes, ensuring that policies address the specific, unequal burdens women carry in keeping homes warm and powered.
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This project aims to generate novel insights into the social, spatial and political inequalities that underpin energy-related injustices and struggles, with a geographical focus on the Western Balkans. It does so by uncovering the relationships between gender and energy poverty - a condition characterized by the inability to secure adequate levels of energy services in the home. GENERATE posits that gendered experiences and contestations of energy poverty represent a form of precarity, and as such shape energy frontiers - understood as marginal(ized) sites of encounter between different forms of energy production and consumption. In foregrounding hitherto 'hidden' processes relating to, and emanating from, the domestic domain, the project seeks to transform understandings of energy circulations in society more broadly. To date, work on the gender dimensions of energy poverty has tended to focus on the Global South, alongside treating the home and household in descriptive and monolithic terms. Very little is known how geographically and politically peripheral forms of energy use across the Global North and East both shape, and are shaped by, precarious practice. GENERATE responds to these challenges by developing a conceptual framework that places the homes and communities at the heart of the energy frontier. It analyses statistical data on energy and gender at multiple levels, in addition to developing an in-depth comparative case study approach in Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia. This includes a combination of household and institutional ethnographies, as well as a social innovation labs approach. Given the highly topical nature of energy poverty alleviation efforts in Europe and the world - not the least due to the rising imperatives of climate change and social inequality - the project is expected to result in policy-relevant insights relevant to the work of multiple global, national and local organizations.
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