Keywords: Gender and Renewable energy, Energy Transition, Rural Depopulation, Energy Justice, Spatial Justice

Despite most renewable energy production plants being situated in rural areas, most demand for its consumption is concentrated in large cities. However, according to what is set out in the 2030 Agenda, the energy transition’s rural component has been almost completely overlooked by both the UN and the European Union in its Green Deal (Naumann et al., 2020).

Effacing territoriality from the energy transition creates numerous problems, with two that can be highlighted especially:

1. it puts the sustainability of rural areas at risk (Zografos & Martínez-Alier, 2009; Madanipour et al., 2022), and

2. it threatens the legitimacy of the 2030 Agenda project as its objectives cannot be met unless a balance is achieved between all the Sustainable Development Goals (Sompolska & Kurdys, 2021).

The depopulation and abandonment of the most peripheral and backward rural areas of southern Europe create a high risk of forest fires and desertification processes and, therefore, of their inhabitants and communities becoming marginalized (Velasco et al., 2021). As a result, expectations around the potential benefits of installing renewable energy plants in rural areas started high (Delicado, 2018).

Our research indicates that the energy transition can be an opportunity for rural areas as it represents an operational and approach framework that enables the channelling of rural development strategies (Naumann et al., 2020). Energy generation can even be made compatible with other land uses, such as in APV-agrivoltaics systems, for example (Weselek et al., 2019). However, the benefits of siting renewable energy plants for rural development do not have a knock-on effect with an obvious improvement in rural women’s living conditions and empowerment. As the energy sector is highly masculinized in human resources and a top-down organizational focus, rural women do not receive these benefits except as people subordinated to male supremacy [(Moniruzzaman & Day, 2020; Bagdi et al., 2022). In this context, studies focused on the energy-gender nexus take on enormous relevance as effective energy justice policies cannot be generated without including the gender and intersectionality perspective (Johnson et al., 2020; Joshi, 2024). Including women in energy sector decision-making is fundamental for achieving the 2030 Agenda objectives and goals. As the UN has recognized, equality policies are necessary for achieving the SDGs (Opoku et al., 2011). They are not only essential for reasons of representative justice but also on the strategic level.

Therefore, while the energy transition is, without doubt, a good opportunity for reassessing the future of rural areas, this future also needs to be just. Including women becomes an essential part of decision-making in the energy transition and for this, cross-gender policies also become a fundamental requirement (Lazoroska et al., 2021) and must be implemented in rural areas, where we know that they are implemented the least (UNDP, 2013; Lieu, 2020). Let us take this opportunity to create new rural policies that are fair and just and include a gender perspective (Westlund & Borsekova, 2023).

Acknowledgement

This work was supported by the Ministry of Science and Innovation of Spain and FEDER (Grant PID2021-123940OB-I00) Innovación Socio-territorial para la Transición Energética en la Península Ibérica - STEP (MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033/).

— Marta Pallarès-Blanch, Carolina del Valle, María-José Prados and Ana Delicado

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