中国のエネルギー転換時代におけるエネルギー貧困：ケイパビリティ、脆弱性、構造的な地域ダイナミクス

Unofficial AI-generated summary based on the public title and abstract. Not an official translation.

🔬研究者:ケイパビリティ論とサービス提供体制論を接合し、進化ゲーム×ABMで移行の長期排除リスクをモデル化する手法は、エネルギー貧困研究の方法論的参照点になる。

🏢実務担当者:地域エネルギー事業や小売・製造のサプライチェーン脱炭素を進める際、顧客・地域の支払い能力とインフラ格差を無視すると需要が座礁しかねない点を実務的に示す。

🏛政策担当者:補助金拡大だけでは包摂の上限を超えられず、サービス提供体制（料金回収・維持管理・地域集約）の設計変更が必要という政策示唆は、地域脱炭素政策の設計に直接関わる。

Energy poverty is increasingly recognized as a multidimensional condition that exceeds inadequate access to energy or the inability to afford fuel. It is constituted through the uneven capacity of households to utilize energy sources, infrastructures, technologies, and social arrangements and turn them into reliable, affordable, and meaningful energy services. This problem is especially acute in rural northern China, where long winters, dispersed settlements, ageing populations, infrastructural unevenness, and the ongoing clean energy transition reshape both the experience and governance of domestic energy poverty. Existing research on energy poverty in China has generated important insights through quantitative measurement, index construction, and panel-data analysis. However, this literature remains shaped by two closely related limitations. Definitional approaches have tended to privilege dimensions of deprivation that are visible, measurable, and administratively legible, particularly access, affordability, and consumption. Such approaches are less able to capture the situated meanings of energy poverty in rural China, where hardship may be concealed through coping practices, normalized discomfort, seasonal adjustment, and the downward recalibration of expectations. Methodologically, the dominance of historical quantitative datasets has limited understanding of how energy poverty is lived, why it emerges in particular households and villages, and how it is reproduced through social relations, housing conditions, infrastructures, local governance, and policy implementation. A further gap concerns the clean energy transition itself: existing evaluations have focused largely on adoption rates, aggregate welfare effects, or technological outcomes, rather than on the implementation processes and service-delivery arrangements through which some households become included while others are left behind. This thesis addresses these gaps by developing a contextualized, mixed-methods account of how energy poverty is experienced, produced, and reproduced through rural clean-heating transition in northern China. The thesis develops a mixed-methods analysis based on two rounds of fieldwork conducted between 2023 and 2024 across 20 rural villages in Shanxi, Hebei, and Inner Mongolia. It combines qualitative interviews, field observations, documentary analysis, thematic analysis, and an evolutionary game theory–agent-based model. Qualitative evidence is used not only to interpret lived experiences and multi-scalar drivers of energy poverty, but also to inform the quantitative modelling of stakeholder payoffs, behavioural dynamics, and policy scenarios. In doing so, the thesis links situated empirical accounts of domestic energy hardship with a forward-looking assessment of clean-heating implementation under real-world institutional constraints. The first empirical study advances a capability-based understanding of energy poverty by incorporating conversion burdens and coping strategies into the capability framework. It shows that energy poverty in rural northern China is strongly seasonal, with winter hardship producing more severe capability deprivation than summer heat. Households reliant on traditional fuels experience the most acute burdens because obtaining, transporting, storing, and converting fuels into usable heat requires substantial labor, time, money, bodily effort, and practical knowledge. These burdens do not merely accompany energy poverty but also erode the very capabilities needed to secure energy services. The chapter therefore identifies a conditional Energy Poverty–Capability Deprivation loop, in which traditional-fuel households preserve basic functionings through conversion efforts and coping strategies that simultaneously constrain health, mobility, comfort, autonomy, care, and social participation. This finding extends capability-informed energy poverty scholarship by showing that energy poverty is not only a failure to achieve adequate energy services, but also a process through which securing and coping with those services can deplete household capability sets. The second empirical study examines how social, cultural, economic, material, geographical, and regulatory factors interact to shape energy poverty. It demonstrates that rural energy poverty cannot be reduced to household income alone. Agricultural livelihoods, unstable or limited cash income, ageing and shrinking households, substandard and thermally inefficient housing, partial heating practices, village location, infrastructural delays, and uneven access to modern energy services together produce differentiated vulnerability. Social relations and family arrangements can mitigate hardship through support, care, and resource sharing, yet they may also deepen vulnerability where older people live alone, support networks are thin, or household labor is insufficient. The chapter further shows that energy transition can generate unintended forms of exclusion, including temporal service gaps, higher energy expenditure, and uneven access to infrastructure. These findings foreground energy poverty as a relational and context-specific condition produced through the interaction of household circumstances, village environments, and transition processes. The third empirical study examines whether current clean-heating transition arrangements can alleviate energy poverty over time. Focusing on Yangcheng County in Shanxi Province, it couples evolutionary game theory with agent-based modelling to represent interactions among households, village committees, and heating enterprises across district heating, coal-to-gas, and coal-to-electricity pathways. The simulations compare an idealized implementation setting with a constrained setting parameterized from observed zoning, contracting, and tariff under-recovery. The results show that, as subsidies decline, policy targets and realized access increasingly diverge. In the constrained scenario, up to 40% of households fall outside effective access over a 20-year period, with energy-poor households facing the greatest risk of exclusion. This exclusion is driven by a self-reinforcing service lock-out mechanism: weak cost recovery leads providers to ration maintenance, which reduces household willingness to pay, further undermines enterprise finances, and ultimately strands marginal villages. The analysis shows that subsidy expansion alone cannot remove this inclusion ceiling because the underlying problem lies in the design of the clean-heating service delivery regime. This discussion synthesizes the three empirical studies by demonstrating how, collectively, they address the six research questions posed at the outset of this thesis. It begins by clarifying the research's contributions to existing scholarship in relation to the gaps identified in the literature review. Taken together, the three empirical studies make a more specific contribution to energy poverty scholarship by shifting the analytical focus from energy access, affordability, and technology adoption towards the service relationships through which deprivation is produced, managed, and prolonged. First, the thesis extends capability-based energy poverty analysis by showing that deprivation is not confined to the absence of adequate energy services. It can also arise from the burdensome work required to obtain fuels, convert them into usable services, and cope with partial or unreliable provision. This reframes coping strategies not simply as household resilience, but as a capability-consuming practice that may preserve basic functionings while narrowing wider possibilities for health, comfort, mobility, care, autonomy, and social participation. Second, the thesis advances a relational account of rural energy poverty by demonstrating how household vulnerability is constituted through village infrastructures, kinship arrangements, housing conditions, local governance capacity, and energy-service markets. Energy poverty therefore appears not as an isolated household deficit, but as a structurally embedded condition unevenly distributed through socio-material and institutional arrangements. Third, by linking qualitative lived-experience evidence with evolutionary game and agent-based modelling, the thesis shows how present forms of hardship may become future patterns of exclusion under the clean-heating transition. This methodological integration enables the thesis to move beyond retrospective explanation and to identify the service-delivery mechanisms through which policy ambition can translate into long-term lock-out for energy-poor households. The thesis also develops three cross-cutting themes that emerge across the empirical chapters: (1) energy poverty under hybrid energy systems—spatial–temporal dynamics and household vulnerability; (2) from household vulnerability to market retrenchment—demographic decline and energy poverty entrapment in clean energy transitions; and (3) direct clean energy transition toward energy justice in the absence of targeted policy intervention to address energy poverty. The thesis concludes that alleviating energy poverty in rural northern China requires more than fuel substitution, infrastructure expansion, or household subsidies. Durable alleviation depends on strengthening the institutional and collective conditions through which households can secure adequate energy services without eroding their own capabilities. Three policy directions follow. First, targeted subsidies should combine seasonal energy-cost support with housing-efficiency assessment, retrofit assistance, and minimum consumption support. Second, community-based collective infrastructures, including warm spaces, emergency heating support, coordinated fuel access, village funds, energy advice, and peer learning, should be developed to reduce household-level conversion burdens. Third, clean-heating delivery regimes should be reconfigured through enfo

• openalex https://doi.org/10.7488/era/7710first seen 2026-09-13 04:49:21