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Short abstract:

This paper examines the capabilities approach applied to participatory energy planning in First Nations communities in remote, northern Australia. It offers insights into how capabilities approaches can be explicitly embedded low carbon energy programs to center well-being rather than technology.

Long abstract:

Sustainable energy transitions brings together two important normative goals: energy system decarbonisation and universal energy access, mobilizing significant policy and financial resources to deploy energy technologies and infrastructure. This technology-centric framing does not necessarily deliver on its intended well-being benefits and risks reproducing existing inequities. In this context, capabilities theory offers important tools to critically engage beyond technology deployment to focus on wider justices concerns e.g. the role of energy in securing Nussbaum’s core capabilities and to ensure all are included by focusing on individuals as a unit of evaluation. However, to date, there is limited analysis interrogating how capabilities theory might be explicitly embedded in energy interventions. Further, some scholar’s question capabilities theory’s individualistic and universal approach to well-being particularly in non-western or collectivist cultures. This paper responds to these critiques by presenting analysis of participatory energy planning in First Nations communities in remote, northern Australia. I draw on ethnographic data through the lens of capabilities theory to investigate how capabilities are deliberatively prioritized in energy system design and operation, in order to support Indigenous relational ways of being with community and land. By examining the capabilities theories in use, this paper expands existing energy-capabilities theoretical frameworks. While focusing on Indigenous and off-grid experiences of the energy transition, this paper offers insights into how low carbon energy programs can deliberatively engage with technical, financial and environment limits while centering well-being. It will be of interest to scholars of energy poverty in particular but also scholars of energy over-consumption.