The energy transition crucially involves social and institutional innovations, carried by new narratives and discourses. A prominent example is ‘energy citizenship’. Coined as an emancipatory counter-narrative of capable and politically involved citizens, it has also proven vulnerable to analytical dilution, ideological appropriation and narrow instrumental interpretations. Arguing for a critical but empirically concrete engagement with the concept, this paper reaches beyond conceptual discussions. Responding to methodological discussions in social-scientific energy research, we address the elusiveness of energy citizenship as an object of study: Is it a policy slogan, a set of concrete actors and activities, a social-scientific category, or all of these at once? As research may silently reproduce implicit assumptions and stereotypes about energy citizenship, we propose a reflexive methodology approach. Building on empirical investigations in a large international research project and critical analysis of recent energy citizenship studies, we identify three key reflexive methodology concerns: 1) the associated normative ideals, 2) the ideological representations of it and 3) the empirical observables, actors and ideal-types that it can be taken to refer to. Disclosing 9 reflexive-methodological strategies, the analysis provides concrete methodological guidance for critical social-scientific energy research more broadly.
Pel, B., Debourdeau, A., Kemp, R., Schmid, B., Vadovics, E., Markantoni, M., Dumitru, A., Bornemann, B., Schäfer, M., Rau, H., Fahy, F., Fransolet, A., Losada Puente, L., Stirling, A., Pansera, M., Batel, S., Goggins, G., Raufflet, E., & Halloy, J. (2026). How to study energy citizenship reflexively? Research questions and methodologies for an elusive research object. Energy Research & Social Science, 139, 104862. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2026.104862