Energy justice is a rapidly growing social science construct that allows policymakers, academics and practitioners to unpack how energy interfaces with modern society. There could be no better time to consider these links than now, as climate change is rapidly pushing governments around the world to permanently shift their systems of energy production and consumption.

In the last half a decade, energy justice has become a popular research agenda (Jenkins et al, 2016) and a robust conceptual, analytical and decision-making framework (Sovacool and Dworkin, 2015) to explore ‘injustices in the energy system related to aspects such as class, race, ethnicity, age, gender or spatial and economic inequalities’ (Hanke et al, 2021). A significant proportion of the contexts where this framework has been applied, however, have been situated in the Global North, mostly in Europe and the US. As Jones (2022) points out, the specific socio-economic, political and gender sensitivities that dominate the Global South are plainly absent in the North. As such, currently knowledge of experiences of energy justice or injustice is not robust enough to draw on and inform policymaking in the Global South, where the overwhelming share of the world's energy poor live.

Jones’ chapter makes a novel contribution by bringing to the academic discourse on energy justice a critical assessment of ‘lived’ experiences of energy injustice and long-term implications for human rights from the Global South. Collecting first-hand information from one of the world's most poor, densely packed urban slum regions, the chapter provides a ‘grounded’ assessment of what energy injustice means and how it manifests locally at an individual and household level.