ABSTRACT
Energy poverty in post-communist Europe has regularly been mentioned as an important issue ever since the development of cross-country European comparisons on the topic. Studies based on European statistical surveys have often highlighted the magnitude of the problem in the region, and all European countries have been asked to acknowledge the prevalence of energy poverty in their Energy and Climate Plans that were due in December 2019. However, the topic of energy poverty seems to enter the policy debates of many European countries only slowly. The present chapter discusses some factors that might explain the slow recognition of energy poverty in post-communist Europe. It was developed from discussions among energy poverty experts that took place at various ENGAGER COST meetings and during the work on this book. Its central argument is that many problems related to energy poverty do not come to the forefront of national debates because some of their aspects have so little visibility to national policy-makers. The chapter is structured as follows. The first section discusses the lack of visibility of energy poverty symptoms to policy-makers, which implies that efforts must be made to find out what energy poverty is. The second section analyses the variety of energy poverty drivers and context factors and shows that many determinants of energy poverty are influenced not by individual characteristics of households but by factors that are part of the larger context, whether national or regional. Finally, the third section discusses some of these context factors which might be particularly relevant in the case of post-communist Europe.
