Assessing energy justice in low-carbon transitions: Can system dynamics modeling contribute?

The growing awareness of asymmetries in low-carbon transitions has intensified efforts to integrate energy justice into quantitative assessment tools. However, guidance remains limited on how to incorporate justice considerations into modeling processes while preserving their normative and context-dependent character. This study proposes a conceptual-methodological meta-framework for systematically relating energy justice to system dynamics (SD) modeling. Rather than prescribing an operational modeling framework, the meta-framework provides structured guidance on how justice concerns and tenets, spatial and temporal scales, and stakeholder perspectives can and should inform problem framing, operationalization, model development, and interpretation. This paper examines the meta-framework's usefulness through a retrospective and reflexive analysis of research activities on Portugal's electric vehicle (EV) transition conducted between 2021 and 2025. The analysis illustrates how justice considerations shape model boundaries, indicator selection, causal structures, and the interpretation of model outputs, while simultaneously exposing key limitations in operationalization and normative assumptions. The contributions and limitations of SD modeling for this type of assessment are also discussed. Particularly, SD should not be used as a standalone tool for justice assessment, but as one component of a broader, methodologically plural approach. Overall, this work provides conceptual and methodological guidance for more explicit and reflexive integration of energy justice into quantitative assessments of low-carbon transitions.