Recognition as Justice-in-Practice: Feminist Governance, Care Ethics, and Imagination in Rotterdam’s Energy Transition

This paper examines how recognition justice can be enacted in practice by analyzing the energy transition in Rotterdam’s Bospolder-Tussendijken (BoTu) neighborhood. Building on an earlier study of Amsterdam, which identified tripartite modes of misrecognition structured by technocratic governance logics (Leiwakabessy, under submission), this contribution explores Rotterdam as a counter-case. Here, recognition does not remain primarily deferred or constrained but circulates through institutional bricolage and care-informed practices that open alternative pathways for justice. The analysis engages with feminist governance and feminist care ethics. A feminist governance perspective highlights how power operates not only through formal rules and structures but also through informal, relational, and gendered practices that shape everyday institutional life (Bee et al., 2015; Bell et al., 2020). Feminist care ethics foregrounds attentiveness, responsiveness, and responsibility (Caretta & Vela-Almeida, 2025), showing how residents are engaged as whole beings rather than as administrative categories. Together, these perspectives reveal recognition justice as simultaneously institutional and relational (Feenstra & Özerol, 2021; van der Wel et al., 2024). In tandem, the paper foregrounds the role of radical imagination. Following Ruha Benjamin, radical imagination is both a refusal of the “imagination gap” produced by dominant technocratic logics (Benjamin, 2016) and an opening toward alternative futures (Benjamin, 2024). The Rotterdam case shows how institutional actors and community workers co-create imaginaries of housing and livability that exceed narrow energy-efficiency framings. Methodologically, the paper applies Interpretive Recognition Analysis (IRA), a novel method for analyzing recognition as an interpretive and transformative process (Leiwakabessy et al., under submission). The analysis is based on action-research fieldwork combining participant observation, shadowing, interviews, and engagement in living and learning labs. The paper contributes to energy justice scholarship by showing how feminist governance, care ethics, and radical imagination expand the conceptual scope of recognition justice. Rotterdam thus provides an empirical counterpoint to technocratic exclusion, pointing toward more caring, imaginative, and institutionally embedded pathways for justice in energy transitions.