The energy justice literature has seen a rapid surge in both academic and practical popularity. However, there has been less systematic reflection on the research conducted so far, its scope or contribution, nor what it might mean for the future of the concept. To provide insights, this paper presents the results of a systematic and comprehensive review of 155 peer-reviewed articles published across eight databases between January 2008 and December 2019. The aim is firstly to review the current state of the art in the energy justice literature and, secondly, to present findings that support novel recommendations with the potential to enhance the impact of energy justice research, including applications in the economic and planning policy sectors. Critically, our study demonstrates that the literature lacks diversity in its author basis and research design. By contrast, conceptual frameworks and the geographies and technologies of global energy injustice are proliferating. These results illustrate that energy justice has power and agency as a tool. It can act as a protagonist in energy research, provoking researchers to remain reflexively normative and active in identifying injustices and vulnerabilities, and it can act as a promising progenitor, creating new research methods and themes.

National and regional governments around the world are steering actors in the waste and resources management industry towards a more circular economy (CE). Such a hoped-for transition is set against a backdrop of neoliberal environmental governance. The private sector increasingly delivers outcomes via public-private initiatives. Similarly, voluntary quality assurance standards covering flows of waste and resources around the globe are increasingly central to markets and trade. The role of standards in contemporary environmental governance is critically reassessed by examining how they are involved in the upscaling or down-scaling of markets. This analysis matters to understanding how the CE is conceptualised at a range of scales and how neoliberal environmental governance can help or hinder CE development. To overcome the paucity of data on how and why public and private sector actors set and use voluntary standards for material flows, twenty-eight key actor interviews with those involved in standard setting and the CE in Europe are drawn upon. Results suggest that proponents of standards and the CE see the raising of the quality of recycled material as central to building up confidence and trust in existing and emerging markets. However, others suggest markets will always privilege cost over quality and that standards are peripheral. For the CE transition to accelerate, this research suggests that policy instruments like standards need to challenge existing neoliberal market relations rather than simply follow them.

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Wastes, like other materials, have become increasingly global in their flows. The circular economy (CE) is a multi-level sustainability transition linked to the global trade in waste. China has long been a key trading partner for the West's waste materials. However, its rethinking of the quality of traded recyclable materials has triggered a crisis in the global governance of waste flows. We utilise a Sociology of Knowledge approach to undertake comparative work to better understand how different governance arrangements may facilitate or constrain the unfolding of this sustainability transition. The UK and China were selected as models of liberal and authoritarian environmental governance respectively. A mixed-method approach was pursued using qualitative interviews with key stakeholders and analysis of quantitative and qualitative data from secondary sources. Thematic analysis is organised around: perceptions of the circular economy, meanings of standards, and perspectives on trade and materials.

This paper explores the use of health impact assessment (HIA) as a means of facilitating community engagement in spatial planning. The paper discusses the background to the development of HIA as a tool for assessing the likely impact of policies and wider changes on health with a view to building those into planning and decision-making, and describes the evolution of HIA into more participatory forms. It then goes on to describe a case-study of plans for a waste incinerator in an inner-city area in the UK, where HIA was used in response to community concerns about the development as a means of building in the views of local people to the decision-making around the plan. We describe in detail how the HIA was conducted and additional research undertaken within a timescale set by the planning processes. We discuss the difficulties involved in conducting any kind of research-based HIA so rapidly and in a situation of multiple, competing stakeholder interests. We argue that although the HIA failed to influence the final decisions in this particular instance it does, nonetheless, provide a model for how to create 'knowledge spaces' in which different perspectives and information can be brought around the table to create more democratic approaches to planning for waste.