Energy citizenship as socio-ecological practice

Energy – renewable, fossil – is increasingly ubiquitous in our societies and at the core of the current polycrisis – of climate change, the rise in far-right wing populism, the Gaza genocide, the unaffordability of living -, and of its psycho-social-ecological impacts. However, Social Psychology is yet to fully recognise energy as an object of academic interest and engage with people-energy relations as a crucial arena of socio-psychological governance and socio-political structuring and subjectivation in today’s societies. This chapter will contribute to developing this area of research by proposing how a focus on people-energy relations is relevant to the social psychology of citizenship. For that, the chapter will discuss energy as a psychosocial object, diverse enactments of energy citizenship – neoliberal, social right, place-based – and their relevance to understand and address the multiple intersecting crises of our times.