Ecological citizenship zones: Integrating people-based and place-based approaches to energy and mobility transitions

Research on the social risks of low-carbon transitions has been shaped by two largely separate scholarly traditions. People-based approaches, rooted in the fuel poverty literature pioneered by Boardman and later expanded across European contexts, conceptualise vulnerability as a property of individuals and households, measured through income, expenditure and affordability thresholds. Place-based approaches, building on the spatial justice and regional inequality literatures, read vulnerability as a structural property of territories, shaped by infrastructural path dependency, housing stock quality and the uneven geography of public provision. This article proposes an analytical framework that systematically integrates the two perspectives across energy and mobility systems. Drawing on Castel's notion of social zones and recent work on energy citizenship and energy justice, it identifies four zones of ecological citizenship - integrated, vulnerable, sheltered, excluded - declined along both a people-based and a place-based axis. Their intersection generates a 4 × 4 matrix with sixteen configurations, discussed here through four emblematic cells that reveal the non-linearity of socio-ecological vulnerability and the structural limits of purely people-based policy designs. The framework is developed with reference to the European policy context - the Green Deal, the Social Climate Fund, the recast Energy Performance of Buildings Directive - and empirical research hypotheses are formulated for cross-national testing using comparative datasets such as EU-SILC. The paper closes by drawing out implications for the design of just transition policies that move beyond monetary transfers toward integrated people–place packages.