Understanding Institutional Exclusion in Energy Transitions
Achieving gender equality and social inclusion (GESI) is fundamental to a just energy transition. However, increasing the participation of women and marginalised groups in the energy sector is only part of the solution. Without broader institutional change, systemic inequalities can persist despite efforts to improve representation.
To advance a truly just energy transition, we need to understand how institutions operate in everyday practice and how exclusion can become embedded within organisational processes, policies, and decision-making structures.
Our handbook introduces Institutional Ethnography as a methodological and analytical approach for investigating these questions. By tracing and mapping how social relations and institutional processes are organised, Institutional Ethnography helps researchers uncover often-hidden forms of coordination, institutional relations, and systemic inequalities, providing valuable insights for advancing GESI across the energy sector.
What is Institutional Ethnography?
First developed by sociologist Dorothy E. Smith, Institutional Ethnography is a feminist research strategy and methodological approach that begins from people’s everyday activities, experiences, and work. It then examines how institutional texts, including policies, legislation, guidelines, procedures, monitoring frameworks, and reporting tools, coordinate actions across different sites and settings and shapes people’s everyday activities and experiences.
By mapping everyday work practices, tracing how policies are enacted in practice, and identifying gaps between lived experiences and their official institutional representations, Institutional Ethnography helps reveal how institutional relations are organised and how power operates through routine governance processes.
About the Handbook
This handbook introduces the core principles of Institutional Ethnography, demonstrates its relevance for the study of energy systems, and presents the context-sensitive, cross-comparative Institutional Ethnography methodological framework developed for the JustGESI project. Grounded in the everyday experiences and practicies of those who work within and engage with energy institutions, the framework illustrates how Institutional Ethnography approach that remains relatively underexplored in gender, inclusion, and energy studies can be applied to analyse gender equality and social inclusion in energy systems, while enabling both contextually grounded analysis and meaningful comparison across diverse settings.
We hope this handbook will serve as a valuable resource for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers interested in advancing gender-transformative and socially inclusive energy transitions. By offering practical guidance on applying Institutional Ethnography, it provides tools for examining and transforming the everyday institutional practices that shape energy governance.
