Thesis supervisor: François-Mathieu Poupeau
This doctoral research is conducted in a context of climate change marked by increasingly frequent heat waves and the emergence of new forms of social and territorial vulnerability. While energy poverty has long been considered from a winter perspective, focusing on heating homes and the difficulty of paying bills, summer energy poverty (SEP) has only very recently emerged as a subject of scientific debate and public action. It refers to the inability of certain households to protect themselves from excessive heat due to a lack of suitable housing, financial resources, or access to cooling devices. This situation is exacerbated in urban areas by heat islands and can have direct effects on health, quality of life, and energy budgets. While the European Commission has already broadened its definitions of energy poverty to include the summer issue, in France the national framework remains largely focused on cold weather. At the local level, various actors—local authorities, social landlords, associations, energy operators—are experimenting with measures, often motivated by the goal of summer comfort, such as the greening of urban spaces or the renovation of buildings. However, these initiatives do not yet fit into a stable definition of PEE, and their links with existing policies to combat energy poverty remain unclear. The proliferation of approaches reveals both a dynamic spirit of innovation and a fragmentation that raises issues of coordination between actors and the effectiveness of the measures. The objective of this thesis is to understand the conditions under which summer energy poverty emerges as a public problem and the processes of translation between its different frameworks. The approach is structured around three axes: (1) Identifying and analyzing national frameworks for EPI, comparing them with European frameworks and those of other countries, in order to understand how this problem is constructed and which dimensions are highlighted or left out. (2) Studying how territories appropriate and translate these frameworks, observing the definitions, instruments, and networks of actors mobilized. This analysis will focus on two contrasting local areas, allowing us to examine how socio-spatial and institutional contexts influence the structuring of responses. (3) Analyze the modes of coordination between the actors involved, whether cooperation, overlap, or competition, and the effects produced on the households concerned. To this end, the research will draw on contributions from political science and the sociology of public action. Framing concepts will be used to explore the processes by which a phenomenon becomes a recognized collective problem. The sociology of translation will help to understand how definitions circulate and transform when they come into contact with local instruments, mechanisms, and actors. Finally, approaches to energy vulnerability, energy justice, and capabilities will provide a framework for analyzing the inequalities generated by the PEE, integrating material constraints (housing, climate, resources), social constraints (status, networks, access to mechanisms), and symbolic constraints (representations of heat and comfort). This project thus aims to document and compare the forms of emergence, appropriation, and implementation of the PEE in a field that has yet to be explored by research. It will contribute to a better understanding of climate-related environmental inequalities, while questioning contemporary transformations in public action in the face of the challenges of energy transition and adaptation to heat waves.
Year of enrollment: 2026
Doctoral school: OMI – Organizations, Markets, Institutions