When shocks enter the home: Household energy insecurity and compound vulnerability in emerging economies

Climate hazards can turn inadequate housing, insecure household energy services, and limited recovery finance into lasting welfare losses. However, research on climate vulnerability, energy poverty, housing precarity, and household risk management seldom examines how these conditions interact within the home. We develop an integrative conceptual synthesis of these four research streams, focusing on low- and middle-income countries. The synthesis distinguishes climatic hazards from the resulting disruptions to services, prices, and livelihoods, and explains how dwelling quality, effective energy services, and financial coping capacity influence harm and recovery. We derive five ideal-typical vulnerability regimes, namely resilient but exposed, energy-constrained, shelter-constrained, repair-constrained, and compound-vulnerability households. The first three describe structural positions, the fourth identifies a realised failure of post-shock recovery, and the fifth reflects interacting constraints. Financial fragility can exist before a shock without establishing that recovery has failed. We set out an empirical approach that separates pre-shock conditions, subsequent coping responses, and later welfare outcomes. The framework explains why interventions addressing only energy, housing, or finance may leave households vulnerable when another constraint remains unresolved. It also offers testable implications for household panel research and for designing interventions suited to the mechanism sustaining vulnerability.