UNERGY

The UNERGY project aims to jointly explore public policy related to energy, household practices and protests in this field. It contributes to the development of recent work on the relations between those who are governed and the state and policy-feedbacks by paying attention to the way in which public policies are appropriated, not used or contested by the governed. The context of the 'energy crisis' invites us to explore how this crisis is translated into public policies and how the recipients of these policies modify, or do not, their practices in order to cope with rising prices, to respond to injunctions to sobriety or to benefit from certain incentives put in place by the state. UNERGY explores the development of energy policies that aim to help, encourage and discipline those who are governed; the practices of households to cope with rising energy prices, with a focus on inequalities in the access and use of the state aids or reliance on private market tools between different social groups; and, finally, the individual and collective contestation of how the state manages the ‘crisis’. This project is based on the comparison of different territories and on qualitative and quantitative methods in order to measure and explain territorial (rural/urban) and social (in the broad sense of class, gender and race relations) inequalities in relation to public action.