Experiencia, saber y agencia de las personas en situación de pobreza energéticauna aproximación desde el Trabajo social

Resumo

Energy poverty is a problem with an increasing social relevance caused by the energy crisis we are going through worldwide. Its domestic nature means that its magnitude is also considerable, due to the serious consequences for a household of not being able to access sufficient energy services. This qualitative research work is a novel contribution both in theory and in practice, that aims to place the person in a situation of energy poverty at the centre of the network of classic agents, and to vindicate Social Work as a discipline capable of generating new forms of social action based on the experience, the knowledge and the agency of the people that suffer it. To achieve this, the objectives that it addresses focus, firstly, on knowing these people¿s experiences with energy poverty and how it impacts their lives, understanding that our approach to their daily suffering and struggles allows us to confront their difficulties with the capacity of the available political measures to solve them. Secondly, the research seeks to incorporate their voices into the formal knowledge spheres, facilitating their inclusion in the social dialogue on energy poverty; this has been achieved through the application of appropriate participatory methodological processes to recover their discourses and take them as a matrix of knowledge, that is derived from their experience, and complementary to those of the rest of the agents. Finally, the third objective is aimed at boosting the capacity for action of energetically vulnerable people, since this is inseparable from the capacity for reflection and analysis that arises from participatory researches; thus, a collective training project on energy issues for vulnerable families has born, created and developed by them, which allows us to analyse the impact of their participation in their empowerment and their leadership capacity in the fight against energy poverty.