INCLUSIVE ENERGY

Energy poverty is becoming one of the most urgent social and urban challenges in Europe. Tens of millions of Europeans struggle to adequately heat, cool, and power their homes, with disproportionate impacts on elderly people, low-income households, migrants, tenants, single-parent families, and residents of inefficient housing stock.

At the same time, the European Green Deal and the Fit for 55 agenda are accelerating the transition towards decentralized, renewable, and citizen-centred energy systems. Across Europe, cities are experimenting with renewable energy communities, collective self-consumption schemes, social retrofitting programmes, local energy advisory services, and participatory climate governance mechanisms.

However, a major gap persists between policy ambition and implementation reality. Many energy transition instruments disproportionately benefit households that already possess financial, technical, or administrative capacity. Vulnerable residents often remain excluded due to structural barriers (lack of home ownership, low digital literacy, limited access to finance, unstable housing conditions, weak participation in local decision-making processes)

As a result, the populations most affected by energy poverty risk becoming the least included in the energy transition.

European cities are increasingly aware that tackling energy poverty cannot rely on isolated technical interventions alone. What is needed is an integrated urban governance approach combining social inclusion, energy transition, participatory democracy, and local institutional coordination.

Despite growing experimentation across Europe, municipalities still lack:

- shared methodologies to identify and map vulnerability,

- governance models capable of structurally embedding inclusion,

- participatory mechanisms for fair redistribution of benefits,

- operational frameworks transferable across different national systems.

This URBACT Action Network aims to address this gap by helping cities co-design adaptable local governance frameworks to combat energy poverty through inclusive energy transition policies and community-based mechanisms.

The network will not finance infrastructure investments or deploy energy systems directly. Instead, it will develop transferable governance tools, policy models, participatory methodologies, and local action plans that can later be implemented through national and European funding instruments.

General Objective:

To design and validate transferable urban governance frameworks that enable European cities to reduce energy poverty through inclusive, participatory, and locally adaptable energy transition strategies, ensuring that vulnerable households are placed at the centre of policy design and implementation.

Specific Objectives:

●        SO1 – IDENTIFICATION & OUTREACH

To design and test local methodologies for identifying and engaging households affected by energy poverty through integrated institutional and community-based outreach systems.

●        SO2 – INCLUSIVE ENERGY GOVERNANCE

To design governance models that structurally integrate social inclusion into local energy transition policies and initiatives.

●        SO3 – PARTICIPATORY DECISION-MAKING & FAIR REDISTRIBUTION

To develop participatory mechanisms that allow citizens, particularly vulnerable groups, to actively shape local energy transition priorities and the allocation of related social and environmental benefits.