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This short report is one of a series of outputs to flow from the international,interdisciplinary project ‘Looking back to move forwards: a social and cultural historyof home heating’ (JUSTHEAT), funded through the Collaboration of Humanities andSocial Sciences in Europe (CHANSE) initiative, which began in 2022 and runs until2025. Within this project, we aim to understand how major changes to home heatingand heating technology over the last 70 years have impacted our lives in diverse andoften profound ways and how these impacts are experienced differentially acrossplace, time, social groups and even between different members of the same household.Ultimately, we aim to distil learning from these historic accounts to promote a morehumane, user centred and just approach to the current transition from fossil fuelled tolow carbon heating systems across the UK and the EU. In pursuit of this, the projectemploys a combination of oral histories, archival research, a network of fine artists andinnovative approaches to bridge the chasm between policy makers designing lowcarbon heating transitions and the needs and expectations of the citizens they serve.

Energy poverty is a far-reaching concept that intrinsically bridges numerous fields of study, ranging from engineering to anthropology and medical science to social psychology. The profound implications of energy poverty on the quality of life globally have also led to a wide range of metrics and policies aimed at measuring it and alleviating it, albeit with limited success. Using a mixed methods approach, our network has conducted research to advance knowledge and interpretations of energy poverty and boost scientific outputs' capacity to shape knowledge-based policies. In this article, we critically review this extensive research endeavor, as well as its results. We build on the conceptual, methodological, and policy dimensions of energy poverty research to set up pathways toward a new, interdisciplinary research and policy agenda on energy poverty mitigation better equipped to provide meaningful answers to the challenges posed by the current ongoing energy crisis., Economics of Technology and Innovation, Ethics & Philosophy of Technology

Trust is a fundamental ingredient of prosperous democracies. In Europe, trust in existing elected democratic institutions is fading while authoritarian nationalist movements grow. Experiences of neglect, ignorance, and inferiority are one explanation for this. This paper explores the link between the experiences of households in a state of energy poverty and their trust in institutions and social networks. Using qualitative data from ten different European countries, we show that a lack of trust in both public and private institutions is widespread among energy-poor households. Our interviewees show distrust in various dimensions. In their contacts with institutions, they report experiences of powerlessness, bad and unfair treatment, and feelings of inferiority. While some interviewees do trust single individuals within institutions, others trust only their own social networks and some have no trust in anyone. We further show how trust in networks or (people in) institutions can strengthen the coping capacities of energy-poor households while a lack of trust even cuts people off from the support they could attain and thus deepens their state of energy poverty.