What Counts as the Problem? Misrecognition as Governance-in-Practice in Dutch Housing Renovations

The EU Renovation Wave casts retrofits as both climate policy and a remedy for energy poverty. Yet in low-income neighborhoods, energy renovation projects sideline residents’ needs pertaining to habitability and repair. This paper reframes recognition not as a moral add-on but as a situated mode of governance-in-practice and shows how misrecognition is produced by recurring mechanisms in everyday encounters between residents and transition professionals. Based on institutional ethnography in Amsterdam Zuidoost from December 2023 to June 2025, I apply Interpretive Recognition Analysis (IRA) to link interactional moments to institutional logics. I identify three mechanisms that narrow what counts as the problem: selective visibility (needs outside energy KPIs disappear), deferral (concerns acknowledged but shuffled across organisations/phases), and conditionality (acknowledgement granted only when residents meet institutional thresholds). I argue that misrecognition arises primarily from problem definitions embedded in energy renovation governance rather than from isolated lapses in ‘listening’. The paper positions recognition as a situated practice, showing that problem definitions in renovation governance sustain misrecognition by narrowing what is rendered visible as a need and as justice.