Doing my fair share: energy informatics to transparentize eco-equity and empower consumers

This study advances research on energy informatics by theorizing how digital systems can support fairness-aware participation in sustainability initiatives. While prior work has primarily emphasized eco-efficiency and eco-effectiveness, the sustainability goal of eco-equity—fairness in resource use within and across generations—remains under-specified at the level of individual consumers. Drawing on equity theory and eco-equity, we examine how consumers evaluate whether they are “doing their fair share” in a demand-side management (DSM) sustainability initiative in an interpretive case study in Australia. Our findings reveal that consumers assess sustainability participation across multiple referent relationships (self, other consumers, utilities, the environment, and future generations), and that environmental concerns reframe perceived inequities in these relationships. We theorize eco-equity calculus as a novel concept that explains how sustainability-conscious consumers integrate multilateral fairness evaluations. Utilizing the concept, we elucidate how energy informatics can facilitate transparency by providing credible, comparative information, and functionality to empower consumers to redress perceived eco-inequity. The study contributes to energy informatics by identifying consumers’ information needs under which fairness-aware participation can be sustained; to equity theory by extending it to multilateral and “voiceless” referent relationships; and to sustainability research by operationalizing eco-equity at the level of consumer decision-making.