/ Upholding the right to energy requires comprehensive and coherent policy, across many dimensions.

A policy framework for the right to energy ● Podcast

While carrying out field work related to energy access in rural China and Tibet, Dr. Chian-Woei Shyu recognised how lack of effective policy played key role in trapping people in energy poverty — in turn limiting their ability to fully participate in society, advance economically and achieve a higher level of health and well-being.

Returning to his role as researcher at the National Chung-Cheng University in Taiwan, Dr. Shyu took up the challenge of adopting a policy maker’s perspective to ask what it would take to implement legislation that truly upheld access to energy as a basic human right. In a literature review, he quickly realised few others had broached this topic so directly.

“In the past 20 years, most papers are talking about four main terms: access to energy, energy poverty, energy democracy and energy justice,” says Dr. Shyu. “In more than 100 papers, we found very mixed, complicated and different approaches.”

In this second of our podcast series on the right to energy, Dr. Shyu walks us through what he defines as five ‘fundamental’ and three ‘supplemental’ rights that should be embedded in this broad concept.