Justice illuminated: Applying mid-level normative principles to energy justice in solar photovoltaic development across urban and rural Sweden

This paper examines how distributive, procedural, and recognition justice concerns arise in solar photovoltaic development in Sweden and proposes a case-based approach for strengthening three-tenet energy justice analysis with targeted mid-level normative principles. We compare three contrasting projects: a 55 kW rooftop installation on an urban church, a 21 MW solar park owned by a housing association on municipal farmland, and a planned utility-scale solar park of about 600 MW on 490 ha of rural forest. Empirically, the study draws on 13 semi-structured interviews and project documents. Interviews were coded iteratively and synthesized through joint review. The cases show that justice concerns shift with scale, ownership, and decision process. The rooftop installation generates limited local burdens but raises recognition issues and broader distributive questions about access to grid capacity and support schemes. The community solar park is widely supported locally yet raises procedural concerns about expedited leasing and distributive concerns about the returns on public land. The utility-scale project foregrounds concentrated local burdens alongside distant benefits and illustrates how consultation can remain formally inclusive while offering limited influence under information and agenda-setting asymmetries. We demonstrate how making the evaluative standard explicit through mid-level principles—such as affectedness-based inclusion, contestability, sufficiency, fair opportunity, and participatory parity—supports clearer diagnosis, disciplined comparison across cases, and more transparent justification of normative judgments in energy justice research and practice.