Abstract

Quantitative tools for evaluating energy justice allow users to make quickly comparisons across options. Most of these tools overrepresent distributional justice at the expense of other dimensions that are more difficult to measure (e.g., procedural, recognition, and reparative justice). Although funding, time, and an openness to incorporating qualitative knowledge can overcome these deficiencies, efforts to do so are often undercut by neoliberal commitments to unrelenting growth, with metrics-dominant policymaking on energy justice. Drawing on critical ecofeminist, decolonial, and degrowth perspectives, we offer the concept (and praxis) of "metrics-last" as an alternative approach to the evaluation of environmental and energy justice. The approach makes room for data science, but only as it complements methods that prioritize relational and collaborative information-gathering. Our approach repudiates the epistemic discrimination of purely quantitative approaches to energy justice and elaborates a more disruptive set of principles that should be non-negotiable in decision-making processes and taken early. These principles are widely available but are typically sidelined by funding and other institutions because they point toward radically different energy worlds that challenge power and profit. We highlight existing frameworks that are consistent with a "metrics-last" approach in the work of the Molokai Clean Energy Hui, which undertook a deeply community-engaged energy-planning process on the island of Molokai, Hawai‘i from 2021-2023. We illustrate how a metrics-last approach and "moving at the speed of trust" not only engender better energy relations but can also help communities move beyond points of impasse. Embracing slow energy justice—taking time to repair energy relations and refusing the trap of urgency—can lead to better energy outcomes for the communities and ecologies that are affected by these projects.

Keywords: energy justice, ecofeminism, metrics, epistemology

How to Cite:

Mayapple Energy Transition Collective,  (2026) “Putting metrics last: A decolonial feminist approach to evaluating energy justice”, Journal of Political Ecology 33(1): 7789. doi: https://doi.org/10.2458/jpe.7789