1. INTRODUCTION
The energy sector is a significant driver of climate change, and it is becoming clear that the energy system should be fundamentally transformed. The heat pump plays a central role in reaching climate goals, as is reflected in policy frameworks such as the European Union’s Green Deal (EC 2019) and the UK’s Heat and Buildings Strategy (BEIS 2021). Fully powered by electricity, with high energy efficiency, the heat pump is presented as a key solution to decarbonising the built environment, especially in countries that have cold to temperate climates, such as large parts of Europe and the UK (IEA 2022).
Despite its technical promise, heat pump adoption is falling short of net-zero targets (IEA 2022), and research demonstrates that European citizens remain strongly attached to natural gas heating and are reluctant to switch from carbon-intensive heating to (sustainable) alternatives (Sovacool et al. 2021). Heat pumps are not a simple substitution for gas boilers. Because they run at lower, steadier temperatures, homes warm up more slowly, maintain a more constant temperature and offer less radiant warmth, and air-source heat pumps in particular tend to be larger and noisier (Crawley et al. 2023). Furthermore, heat pumps require different usage patterns, new interactions with digital controls, and adjusted expectations of comfort and responsiveness (van Beek et al. 2024), which may lead to everyday frictions and concerns around noise and aesthetics, and changes in heating practices, control and thermal expectations (Calver et al. 2022; De Wilde 2020b; Judson et al. 2015; Psarra et al. 2024).
These issues surface most sharply within the home, where heating technologies are lived with and cared for (Psarra et al. 2024). However, domestic tensions are also shaped by market regimes that prioritise rapid diffusion and standardised solutions, often sidelining the relational and maintenance work required for successful adoption. At the political level, energy taxes and subsidies incentivising heat pump adoption provide fertile ground for right-wing populists framing themselves as defenders of financially vulnerable citizens and regional identities (Huber et al. 2021). In Germany, the Netherlands and the UK, the heat pump emerges as a symbol of polarisation in politics and media discourse, portrayed as a costly top-down imposition threatening household autonomy (Dirkx 2025; Haas et al. 2025; Harvey & Cooke 2023; Mathiesen 2023; Paterson et al. 2024; Von der Burchard 2023).
This article explains why residential heat pumps have struggled to take off as a sustainable heating technology by showing how their promotion and implementation reconfigure relations of care in and around the home. Rather than attributing faltering adoption simply to weak financial incentives or ‘irrational’ consumer resistance, heat pump controversies reflect deeper tensions between techno-financial and relational forms of domestic care, between visions of sustainable care through innovation and automation or maintenance and tinkering, and over who bears the burdens of disruption. At the same time, this synthesis opens up space to imagine alternative forms of technology domestication, market organisation and governance that better attend to relational needs and social difference.
2. CONCEPTUALISING CARE
To understand the heat pump as a matter of care, care ethics provides a useful starting point. This concept emerged from feminist thinkers of the 1980s, most notably Gilligan (1982) and Noddings (1984). They articulated care ethics in explicit contrast to the abstract, androcentric ethics of justice that dominated moral psychology and analytic philosophy. Care emphasises relationality, empathy and responsiveness to the needs of others by focusing on concrete situations and lived experience. Following Tronto’s canonical definition, care is:
everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair ‘our world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, ourselves and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web.
While early work overly valorised proximate care relations, subsequent feminist political philosophers (Held 1993; Held 2005; Tronto 1993; Tronto 2013; Robinson 1997) and political economists (Fraser 2016; Fraser 2022; Jackson 2025) expanded the ethical framework by exploring the way caring is (under)valued, the ways power and privilege shape care and the way care work intersects with gender, race and class inequalities, while science and technology scholars (de la Bellacasa 2017; Mol et al. 2010) deepened the concept by emphasising its material and ecological side.
Recent uptake of the concept of care emphasises its non-innocent, ‘darker side’ (de la Bellacasa 2017; Martin et al. 2015). Care is not inherently ‘good’; it can be a way to discipline bodies, generate indebtedness, reinforce dependencies and entrench hierarchies by placing recipients of care in positions where they cannot reciprocate. Furthermore, expansions of the concept of care bring to light moral dilemmas of paternalism and parochialism: how to hold fast to proximity while moving beyond parochialism, and how to widen care to include strangers, non-humans and the planet without falling into paternalistic universalisms? ‘Democratic caring’ (see Tronto 2013) means having to navigate the tricky tension of anti-paternalistic ‘negative freedom’ liberalism, tending towards uncaring neglect, and anti-parochial ‘positive freedom’ socialism, inclined towards unduly imposing the good life. Every extension of care holds a risk of paternalism, while every qualification of care holds the risk of exclusion and parochialism. At both extremes, they become self-defeating by detaching ethics from concrete caring practices and singularities to care for. But, precisely for this reason, care also provides a promising concept to navigate this dilemma: one grounded in relational responsiveness rather than abstract rule-following.
3. APPROACH
This article employs a qualitative, hermeneutic review strategy appropriate for conceptual synthesis (Boell & Cecez-Kecmanovic 2014). Rather than seeking exhaustive coverage or aggregating findings through a systematic review, a hermeneutic approach treats literature reviewing as an iterative and interpretive process aimed at conceptual development. Such an approach is particularly suited to bringing care ethics into conversation with energy-transition scholarship, where relevant insights are dispersed across bodies of literature rarely considered together.
The review proceeded through purposive keyword searches and iterative citation tracing across care ethics and heat pump, domestic heating and energy-transition scholarship. Searches began with combinations of heat pump and care-related terms (e.g. ‘relationality’, ‘maintenance’, ‘lived experience’), before broadening to heating and care, and subsequently to energy/sustainability transitions and care when relevant themes remained underdeveloped. Literature sampling continued until theoretical saturation was reached, resulting in a corpus of approximately 110 sources across heat pump, heating and energy-transition scholarship, in addition to the care-theoretical literature discussed in Section 2. While the heat pump remained the focal empirical object throughout, moving between more specific and more general literatures enabled insights from broader debates to inform interpretations of heat pump transitions and vice versa. Three questions guided the review and synthesis. First, what forms of care are explicitly recognised in discussions of heat pump adoption, heating practices and energy transitions? Second, how are responsibilities, vulnerabilities and maintenance organised and distributed within low-carbon heating transitions? Third, what forms of care remain implicit, marginalised or absent, and what alternative understandings of technological change, social life and energy politics become visible through a care-ethical lens? Rather than treating publications as evidence for or against heat pump adoption, they were approached as materials through which relations of care, dependency, responsibility, vulnerability and power, as well as the tensions between paternalism and parochialism discussed in the preceding section, become visible.
The analytical process proceeded in five iterative steps. First, key concepts and debates within care ethics were mapped. Second, the literature on heat pump transitions and adoption was reviewed. Third, studies that explicitly mobilised care-related concepts within domestic energy, heating and heat pump research were reviewed. Fourth, adjacent literatures were examined that revealed relational, socio-material and political-economic dynamics relevant to care, even where care itself was not explicitly discussed. Fifth, these literatures were synthesised through iterative comparison and interpretation.
This synthesis was abductive rather than deductive. Rather than applying predetermined categories, this analysis moved back and forth between care theory and empirical energy-transition research to identify recurring patterns, tensions and absences. Through this process, three analytical domains emerged as particularly significant for understanding the heat pump as a matter of care: domesticity, technology markets and policy. Section 4 develops these domains and examines how a care-centred perspective reorients understandings of low-carbon heating transitions.
4. SYNTHESIS: ANALYSING THE HEAT PUMP THROUGH THE LENS OF CARE
4.1 DOMESTICITY: FROM GENDERED PRIVACY TO NEIGHBOURHOOD COMMUNITY
4.1.1 Within house and home: Resource Man and his others
In review of domestic energy research, Ellsworth-Krebs et al. (2015) draw the distinction between ‘house’ and ‘home’. The house is described as a techno-economic object, enacted as a system to be optimised for efficiency and a financial asset, one managed through data, automation and rational oversight. The home, by contrast, is a lived space where people, materials and meanings co-produce everyday practices, including the rhythms, routines and sensorial textures through which energy is experienced, negotiated and given cultural significance.
Within this ontological divide, Strengers’s (2013) conceptual persona of the ‘Resource Man’ emerges as the ideal-typical subject of contemporary energy governance: a sovereign, rational consumer who manages the house-as-machine. Resource Man is technologically empowered, financially literate, self-sufficient and data-driven: ‘smart’. He is the early adopter who enacts a technical and ‘masculine care’ (Strengers 2013), surveying his household through digital meters and dashboards. Resource Man enjoys optimising efficiency and assembling a personalised decarbonised lifestyle with solar panels, home batteries, EV chargers and heat pumps. This authority is individualised, masculine-coded and typically mapped onto the person who pays the bills, makes investment decisions and sets household standards. Meanwhile, his techno-financial domesticity sidelines more ‘homely’ demands through which energy is entangled with caregiving practices such as cooking meals, creating comfort, attending to children and elders and maintaining a sense of safety and well-being. These practices, however, are central to home life.
Reading the house–home distinction through a care lens points us towards two ideal-typical ways in which domestic interdependence is organised. These personae are not rigidly tied to actual identities, yet in practice they remain strongly gendered (Aggeli et al. 2022; Bartiaux 2022; Pink et al. 2022b). Heat pumps, smart thermostats and automated systems align with Resource Man’s orientation, enabling black-boxed operation with minimal engagement. Where daily domestic labour persists, it is often delegated to Resource Man’s feminised counterpart: the ‘Smart Wife’ responsible for routine operations and the ongoing, increasingly datafied fine-tuning of energy-saving practices (De Wilde 2020b; Strengers 2023; Sadowski et al. 2024). Although service technicians actively attend to ‘feminised concerns’ about comfort, noise and aesthetics (De Wilde 2020b), thermal comfort may become a site of gendered negotiation between members of the household, and paternalistic and unequal relations materialise through subtle forms of sensory and comfort normalisation (Healy 2008; Petrova & Simcock 2019; Sintov et al. 2019). Additionally, heat pumps’ low-temperature and continuous heating may disrupt familiar sensory cues and intimate practices of warmth, especially for the elderly, children and pets, for whom visible or tactile heat (e.g. radiators) is part of ‘feeling at home’ (Day & Hitchings 2011; Devine-Wright et al. 2014; Judson et al. 2015; Madsen 2017). As Martiskainen and Sovacool (2021) emphasise in their review on emotions in sustainability transitions, changing heating technologies may evoke feelings of loss or nostalgia, for instance over the cosiness, embodied heating practices and collective enjoyment of keeping warm around a fireplace (cf. von Platten et al. 2025). These sentiments may go unacknowledged in the techno-financial management practices of Resource Man.
Against the figures of Resource Man and Smart Wife, ‘Mother-Multiple’ (Moroşanu 2016) offers an alternative ideal type grounded in relational care. Domestic energy consumption becomes visible as a shared achievement carried by caring interdependence, with everyday practices geared to anticipate and respond to the needs of others. Energy use here is a form of care labour: warming children’s rooms before they wake, coordinating meals around different schedules, leaving lights on for reassurance, or adjusting temperatures for frail or ill family members. This extends beyond humans: pets, plants and appliances act as ‘non-traditional energy consumers’ whose needs shape household routines (Strengers et al. 2016). These heterogeneous actors disrupt the imagined autonomy of the rational consumer and reveal how households are multispecies, socio-material assemblages whose energy practices are grounded in responsiveness, obligation and affect. Viewed through this lens, we may see how the heat pump can be part of caring heating arrangements: its low-temperature operation reduces the risk of children burning themselves on radiators (mentioned by participants of Calver et al. 2022), its combustion-free operation improves indoor and outdoor air quality (IEA 2022), its ability to provide cooling may help mitigate heat stress among vulnerable groups (IEA 2022) and its stable heating patterns may improve thermal comfort of some individuals (e.g. Crawley et al. 2023, hypothesising that this might be the case for women), thereby removing the need for forms of caring labour such as waking up earlier to turn up the heating before children wake up. However, the discussion in Section 4.2.2 on ‘black-boxing machines’ will consider whether outsourcing and automation may also hinder care between humans and technologies.
The contrast between Resource Man and Mother-Multiple highlights how heating transitions unfold within households, and how diverging forms of caring labour, as well as sensory, cultural, technological and financial values are unequally distributed among individuals. As the heat pump and smart home literature demonstrates, men are more often the ones who initiate the purchase of new heating and energy technologies, with heat pumps being more aligned with and marketed towards masculine identities and women more likely to be expected to adapt to, care for and maintain new (smart energy) technologies and household routines in smart homes (De Wilde 2020b; Johnson 2020). This also points outwards. As Strengers notes, ‘while there are many resource men, they are largely thought to be operating in isolation from one another’ (2013: 38), embodying a suburban ideal of individualised autonomy. The relational stance of Mother-Multiple invites the question of what it would mean to extend care beyond the front door, towards the wider socio-material infrastructures of the neighbourhood.
4.1.2 Outside house and home: neighbourhoods as (a)social infrastructures
Many care perspectives on sustainable practices (e.g. Godin & Langlois 2021) display a bias towards relationships within the home and among nuclear family members. Important as these are, care and domesticity do not necessarily stop or start at the front door. As van Oorschot and van Balen (2025) demonstrate, climatic care practices especially belong to the larger urban environment. The spatial sciences too have taken up this insight, exploring how care ethics can inform ‘infrastructures of care’, ‘caring neighbourhoods’ and ‘cities of care’ (Botha et al. 2025; Gabauer 2021; Raap et al. 2022). As Lopes et al. (2018) demonstrate, domestic thermal regulation technologies such as air-conditioners tend to orient comfort towards the private, enclosed home, encouraging withdrawal from public life and eroding the shared infrastructures of care that support social connection. However, ecological housing technologies can double as caring ‘social infrastructures’ when they are planned, adopted and maintained in coordination, enabling everyday encounters, mutual support and public belonging (Hill & Mazzucato 2024; Klinenberg 2018).
Likewise, heat pumps can either reinforce individualised, withdrawn and defensive environments or contribute to more caring, communal and ecologically responsive forms of living. The former dynamic has been described as one in which neighbourly relations are governed by logics of liberal privacy and non-interference, mainly heat pump noises and nuisances of installation and maintenance. Psarra and colleagues (2024) illustrate how this logic materialises in the agreements and negotiated boundaries that households and neighbours establish to contain and tolerate mutual externalities. Here, the heat pump remains a private asset whose social footprint must be controlled, and relations of proximity are managed contractually rather than in careful collaboration, limiting their capacity to conceptualise heat pumps as a shared infrastructure of care, that is, as sociotechnical devices whose installation, operation and effects are inherently distributed across neighbouring homes and shared atmospheres. Recent research on collective heating arrangements highlights the tension between individual heat pumps and more collective arrangements: the roll-out of individual heat pumps can be seen as an autonomous alternative to slower, time-consuming collective projects (Herreras Martínez et al. 2025), and recent Dutch audit work indicates that the adoption of individual heat pumps may even undermine the viability of collective heating solutions (Netherlands Court of Audit 2025). This is especially problematic since, as will be argued in Section 4.3, community-led, collective heating arrangements have the potential to function as infrastructures of care.
To understand and deploy heat pumps as ‘infrastructures of care’ is to shift from neoliberal models of private ownership and neighbourly tolerance towards more collective practices of attuning and adjusting across homes and neighbourhoods. Achieving this will also require a new politics of care, which will be addressed in Section 4.3. However, to understand why more collective, equitable forms of neighbourhood care remain marginal, this synthesis first turns to the innovation regimes organising heat pump adoption and domestication.
4.2 TECHNOLOGY MARKETS: FROM TECHNO-ECONOMIC PROMISES TO POST-GROWTH TINKERING
4.2.1 Technologism: innovation without care for user practices
A care lens reveals that the disruptions that technological transitions impose on daily rhythms, domestic routines and cognitive load are routinely underestimated. Part of households’ hesitation to adopt heat pumps is caused by burdens of the replacement process, including gathering information, coordinating installers, preparing the home and reorganising routines (Owen et al. 2013). The dominant narrative of inevitable adoption treats these disruptions as trivial, revealing the underlying assumption that households will accommodate technologies rather than technologies accommodating households. De Wilde (2020a) shows that this is not incidental but built into the promissory market logic surrounding heat pumps: industry actors, policymakers and installers rely on future-oriented tales of innovation to legitimate present-day lack of concern for household practices and relations. The costs of disruption are externalised onto households with limited time, energy or flexibility to absorb them. This is especially salient for tenants, for whom the challenges with heat pump adoption are compounded by constrained agency and structural disempowerment. Caird and colleagues (2012) find that renters report lower satisfaction and less understanding of heat pump operation than homeowners, reflecting both informational asymmetries and limited decision-making power. Calver et al. (2022) and Judson et al. (2015) describe how the installation of heat pumps leads to new dependencies between tenant and landlord, with tenants experiencing alienation and disempowerment. When landlords implement such technologies without adequate attentiveness, responsiveness, empathy or participation, heat pumps embody a paternalistic logic, and the burden of adaptation falls on tenants with little recourse and virtually no capacity for infrastructural negotiation (Calver et al. 2022; Tronto 1993).
A lack of care for user practices and a disproportionate focus on innovation also reinforces consumerist and growth-oriented responses, even when the goal is sustainability. As Strengers (2013) argues, ‘smart’ energy technologies marketed as optimising consumption often become new material expectations that require additional devices, subscriptions and infrastructures. Furthermore, expected energy savings of heat pumps are partially offset because households heat more rooms, raise temperatures, extend their heating season or use heat pumps for cooling (Gram-Hanssen et al. 2012; Halvorsen et al. 2016). As Shove (2017) argues, such rebounds are not anomalies but expressions of the fact that energy use is shaped by evolving social practices and escalating norms of convenience, which can be situated in larger trends of higher indoor temperatures, warming more rooms and active control of, rather than adaptation to, climatic variations (Sovacool et al. 2021; von Platten et al. 2025). The design of the heat pump (i.e. its ‘low and slow’ operation), as well as experts’ recommendations not to use night setbacks or change temperature settings, may contribute to these outcomes (Halvorsen et al. 2016). This is not necessarily negative: especially for those emerging from energy poverty, rebounds reflect a long-denied comfort. Yet perceptions of ‘wastefulness’ of their continuous running may contribute to less efficient usage of heat pumps in more precarious households (Caird et al. 2012). These dynamics reveal how a techno-scientific focus on efficiency displaces the deeper relational and practice-based transformations required for sustainable energy use.
4.2.2 Black-boxing machines and techno-economic paternalism
Rather than conceptualising sociotechnical change through ‘frictionless innovation’ and viewing users as passive recipients of new technologies, care ethics foregrounds the ongoing, situated and embodied, relational work of everyday tinkering, maintenance and repair that is essential to sustaining our worlds (Mol et al. 2010; Meissner 2021; de la Bellacasa 2017). Such practices of care are crucial for sustainable transitions, because they redistribute expertise and responsibility beyond designers and manufacturers, and support more responsive and attentive sociotechnical arrangements.
Tinkering, maintaining, and repairing contribute to caring relationships between heating technologies and households. As De Wilde (2020b) demonstrates, installers actively enrol women in the care and maintenance of heat pumps, so that the heat pump is able to care for the home. In Finland (Hyysalo et al. 2013; Sovacool & Martiskainen 2020), this tinkering, tweaking, repairing and repurposing of heat pumps by users, as well as the subsequent exchange of experiences, was found to be key in the successful heat pump transition there. That said, technological tinkering was mostly performed by men, and most tweaks aimed to increase efficiency and monitoring (Hyysalo et al. 2013), which leaves open how tinkering might assist the more ‘homely’ caring labour of keeping others warm and comfortable in the home.
Furthermore, heat pump technicians regularly discourage households from tinkering and tweaking (Calver et al. 2022; Halvorsen et al. 2016; Wilkie et al. 2025). And, as Cherry et al. (2017) and Shirani et al. (2022) argue, low-carbon housing often ‘designs out’ user influence through automation. As Jensen and colleagues (2016) demonstrate, automated scheduling of heat pump energy use may negatively impact users: even though efficiency increased, they reported feeling distrustful of the opaque technology. From a care perspective, paternalistic removal of user engagement makes the development of reciprocal relations with the technology difficult: users cannot ‘care for’ or maintain the system in meaningful ways, nor can the system adapt to users’ diverging needs. And, because the heat pump does change residents’ everyday routines and sensations (Judson et al. 2015; van Beek et al. 2024; Wilkie et al. 2025), households effectively inherit a rigid infrastructure that quietly reorganises domestic life while remaining deaf to local knowledge, preferences and needs.
4.2.3 Eco-consumption and post-growth alternatives
These issues of control surrounding the heat pump reflect a broader reordering of class relations around care and habitability. Graeber (2019) and Velotti and Cigna (2024) suggest managerial actors increasingly redesign infrastructures from a distance while ‘caring classes’ bear the embodied labour of maintaining everyday life. Latour and Schultz (2022) argue that the emergence of an ‘ecological class’ is defined by shared exposure to deteriorating habitability and shared investment in engendering (caring for) liveable worlds. Fraser (2016; 2022) contextualises this picture from a political-economic angle, showing how contemporary capitalism cannibalises the infrastructures of social reproduction, shifting the burdens of sustaining habitable life onto those with the least power to refuse them. This dynamic is reinforced by climate politics dominated by technocratic ‘fixing’, which displaces climate action from everyday life into the domain of expert mastery (Greene 2018; van Balen & van Oorschot 2025). This marginalises alternative forms of sustainable living rooted in sufficiency, frugality, repair and communal care – practices often more accessible to low-income households. By privileging innovation over maintenance, and consumption over changing practices, the heat pump transition may embed classed assumptions about what it means to live ‘green’. Care ethics highlight these burdens and challenge the idea that sustainability must be purchased rather than practised.
From this perspective, post-growth alternatives resonate strongly with a care-centric approach, as it emphasises maintenance, repair and ‘exnovation’: the careful phasing out of harmful technologies or the foregrounding of good care already in place (Heyen et al. 2017; Maldonado-Mariscal & Hölsgens 2024; Mesman 2011). At the same time, a relational care ethics should avoid romanticising the old and the local; phasing out fossil-based systems itself is a form of care towards distant ecosystems and future generations. Heat pump adoption is therefore important but it must be situated within a broader ecology of care practices. Rather than treating heat pumps as a means of sustaining ever-expanding consumption, technologies should be adapted through collective experimentation grounded in practices of sufficiency, repair and care.
4.3 POLICY AND POLITICS: TOWARDS A POLITICS OF CARE
4.3.1 Neoliberal paternalism and parochialism
Under neoliberal governance, the state largely withdraws from collective infrastructure, instead guiding markets through rules, incentives and regulations. Environmental responsibility is shifted onto individual households, with citizenship depoliticised and framed around nuclear family units expected to act through market consumption. Responsibility for the heating transition is assigned to the individual household, treated as a private sphere whose internal relations should remain untouched by policy. Households are pushed onto the heat pump market through phase-out regulations or rising fuel prices. However, implementation is left to markets structured by policy instruments following the liberal-individualist ‘attitude–behaviour–choice’ (ABC) model of governance (Shove 2010). While neoliberal citizens are ‘nudged’ (Leggett 2014; Greene 2018) to behave as rational utility maximisers aiming to optimise investment decisions in the face of inevitable transition, monopolistic suppliers compete for market capture through consumer dependencies (black-boxing, platformisation), leaving households exposed to technical opacity and commercial asymmetries (cf. Sadowski et al. 2024).
This way, neoliberalism not only imposes ‘libertarian paternalism’ but distributes the burdens of transition unevenly (i.e. ‘parochially’) across gender, class and space. Responsibility is devolved onto individual households in the (inter)domestic sphere, regardless of their internal interdependencies, time constraints or care obligations, with women disproportionately absorbing the day-to-day labour of managing disruptions during installation, caring for dependents and adjusting social routines to accommodate new systems (Bartiaux 2022; De Wilde 2020b; von Platten et al. 2025). Individualised subsidies and loan schemes determine which families can ‘go green’ and which must shoulder ongoing care labour in less efficient, more precarious homes (Sovacool et al. 2019). Financialised responsibilisation also fragments neighbourhood cooperation and undermines collective forms of support, while extended care chains extract labour and time from disadvantaged communities, and state subsidies effectively become regressive when geared towards upper middle-class homeowners who can afford high upfront costs (Voeten 2024). Likewise, banks market green financing schemes only to the safely creditworthy, and industry suppliers focus on affluent households. Taken together, these arrangements shift the burdens of decarbonisation downwards while concentrating public support and market attention upwards.
4.3.2 An alternative politics of sustainable heating
An important subtlety is how prevalent behavioural governmentalities and their limited prescriptions of energy citizenship are not altogether careless. As a relatively benevolent and ‘soft’ paternalism (Leggett 2014), they can be interpreted as modern-day pastoral ‘powers of care’ (Foucault 2007; Schuilenburg & Peeters 2018), especially when they show responsiveness to individual needs and real asymmetries in ability. Drawing on disability studies and care-centred accounts of technology (Callon 2008; Mol et al. 2010; Moser 2000), heating transition policy could try to habilitate the ‘differently-abled’: instead of normalising a single Resource Man-type consumer-citizen, policies could start from the premise that citizens are bodily, sensorily, technically and culturally heterogeneous and thus design sociotechnical environments that work with rather than correct these differences. This, in turn, foregrounds a politics of care which marks a shift away from technocratic ambitions of control (Scoones 2024) towards governance attentive to relational complexity, vulnerability and shared responsibility in heating transitions. Such caring engagement not only reorients heat pump policy from optimisation to accompaniment and repair but also enables practices of ‘conviviality’ in which the heat pump becomes one of multiple, democratically negotiated pathways to sustainable heating that can coexist beyond technocratic monopolies (Arora 2019; Arora et al. 2020).
What is at stake, then, is the formation of political-ecological subjects capable of assuming responsibility for (‘caring about’ and ‘caring for’) energy transitions without falling into paternalism or parochialism: caring for inclusive energy systems becomes inseparable from caring for the democratic conditions under which those systems are debated, problematised and self-governed (Gray & McArdle 2025). Through this lens, recent suggestions of (thermal) energy communities, energy citizenship and energy democracy (Gray & McArdle 2025; Herreras Martínez et al. 2025; van Veelen & van der Horst 2018) can be understood as ethical practices of caring (for) democracy (Tronto 2013). Energy communities experimenting with collectively owned and maintained energy infrastructures have been theorised as infrastructures of care (Liodaki & Apostolopoulou 2026). In doing so, they cultivate political and ecological capacities to judge, speak and act collectively in relation to energy futures shared among humans and non-humans, and under conditions of uncertainty and interdependence, foregrounding a previously obscured dimension of collective self-care (Leggett 2014; Posselt 2021).
Accordingly, a key question becomes how specific technologies such as heat pumps might be configured to contribute to such caring practices. Heat pumps can operate in collective systems, either as central systems serving multifamily housing, as centralised district systems serving multiple buildings or as individual units connected to low-temperature networks, and increasingly these technologies play an important role in community-led heating projects. Although research remains limited, recent scholarship emphasises its transformative potential in terms of experimenting with new forms of cooperation (Herreras Martínez et al. 2025) community engagement and democratic self-organisation (van der Schoor & van der Windt 2023) and commoning practices (Kaandorp et al. 2024). The emergence of collective and community-led heating initiatives points to promising possibilities for more caring forms of sustainable heating.
5. DISCUSSION
5.1 RESEARCH DIRECTIONS
As this article demonstrates, tensions around scale, relationality and ‘dark sides’ of care emerge with particular force in energy transitions, yet explicit uptake and development of care ethics has remained limited in research. From this synthesis four directions can be identified in which care is notably undertheorised and understudied within energy research. First, while energy studies have developed a rich focus on social practices and infrastructures (Shove 2017; Strengers 2013; van Beek et al. 2024), care itself is rarely foregrounded as an analytical category. This renders many accounts of energy use rather descriptive and technical and underemphasises many moral and sociopolitical dimensions of technological change. Second, empirical studies disproportionately examine owner-occupied, middle-class, nuclear family households, paying insufficient attention to intersectional differences shaped by class, gender, age, disability and migration status (Karakislak 2025). This restricts our understanding of how unequal distributions of care labour and limited agency shape everyday experiences of heat pumps, and signals an important agenda for future work on care and low-carbon heating. Third, although a limited number of studies attend to more-than-human dimensions in energy research, these often lack the ‘matters of care’ perspective (de la Bellacasa 2017) to fully appreciate the ethico-political obligations surrounding non-human beings (cf. Damgaard et al. 2022; De Wilde 2020b; von Platten et al. 2025; Wågström & Michael 2023). Further work is needed to examine how responsibilities, vulnerabilities and dependencies are configured across human and more-than-human actors in energy systems. Fourth, where care is taken up in energy research, it is typically confined to the domestic sphere (De Wilde 2020b; Godin & Langlois 2021, Gram-Hanssen 2024; Madsen 2025), rarely investigating extra-domestic power relations within neighbourhoods, technology markets, property regimes, policy institutions and political arenas (De Wilde 2020a; Lucas-Healey et al. 2022; Pink et al. 2022a).
This article has synthesised how caring practices, extra-domestic relations and more-than-human entanglements matter for energy transitions. However, this synthesis also points towards the necessity of more sustained empirical and conceptual work along these lines. Additionally, it is, as much as possible, focused on heat pumps, so as to stay with the troubling complexity of situated socio-material practice. However, other heating technologies could equally benefit from a care-centred analysis. In district heating, for instance, tensions of care might arise from limited control and high fixed prices (Kaandorp et al. 2024). Similarly, while this synthesis focused on contexts with strong decarbonisation policies in which heat pumps play a central role, notably in Europe and the UK, its analysis of care could be extended to other places where heat pumps are significant but policy context and usage differ, for example when they are primarily used for cooling (IEA 2022).
5.2 DIRECTIONS FOR POLICY AND TECHNOLOGY DESIGN
By investigating heat pump adoption through the lens of care, it becomes clear that heating policies must foster attention and response-ability for diverging physical capacities, sensory sensitivities, uneven technical and financial literacies and cultural practices. These differences are not deficits to be corrected or nudged away but legitimate starting points for policy and design. Inclusive heating transitions require policies that address relational complexity, vulnerability and shared responsibility, extending care for ‘our world’ not only to other human household members but also to non-human beings and environments affected by our heating choices.
One suggestion for care-oriented domestic heating policies is to support a wider diversity of heating solutions to fit various needs, echoing suggestions from von Platten and colleagues (2025) based on past heating transitions. Central heating solutions, such as heat pumps, could be set to a lower temperature when combined with more localised additions, such as individualised technologies (PECS/personal environmental control systems, e.g. infrared panels and heated cushions), as well as more collective heating infrastructures, such as fireplaces and tile stoves, drawing individuals together in one place. As shown by van Beek and colleagues (2024), experimenting with additional heat sources reflects current heat pump adoption practices and can open up space for renegotiation of comfort. The aim here is not to promote an ever-expanding array of gadgets; when fitted into everyday practices with care, heterogeneous heating configurations can contribute to more sustainable heating practices while enhancing thermal comfort, situated caring for the needs of different individuals, and a sense of conviviality.
A care-oriented heating transition also requires rethinking how heat pumps and their control systems are designed, installed and serviced. Heat pump design through the lens of care entails ongoing, meaningful participation and valuing of situated knowledge of (potential) end users, as well as designing responsive technologies that allow for ongoing adjustment and low-threshold tinkering. Following design justice principles, this entails a shift from designing for ‘average’ or ‘optimal’ users, such as the tech-savvy Resource Man, towards designing with affected groups (Costanza-Chock 2018). This synthesis identifies tenants as one of the groups bearing the greatest burdens, while having the least agency over this transition (Calver et al. 2022; Judson et al. 2015), and who should therefore be centrally involved in the design and evaluation of heating technologies affecting them. This also implies a significant role for installers and service technicians in supporting users with adjustments and maintenance (cf. De Wilde 2020b). Ultimately, this depends on policies that recognise postinstallation care as ongoing, time-intensive and relational work, and that therefore organise follow-up visits and peer learning opportunities, rather than treating the moment of installation as the end of policy responsibility.
A caring democracy and political ecology foregrounds an anti-parochial commons of shared ownership of energy infrastructures, cooperative financing and provisioning, and state guarantees that secure access to warmth as a common good (Hill & Mazzucato 2024; Lopes et al. 2018). Infrastructural justice reorients the transition away from technocratic optimisation effectively benefiting the propertied classes, towards collective approaches to living well in neighbourhood and community environments and sustaining the material conditions under which all households, communities and ecologies can endure, adapt and participate. This requires stronger support for grassroots energy cooperatives, neighbourhood heat networks and collectively owned heating infrastructures, as well as broader recognition of the value they bring in terms of community care. Such recognition concerns the wider political and institutional ways in which sustainability transitions are legitimised, towards a more relational understanding of outcomes, including comfort, inclusion, conviviality, health and well-being.
6. CONCLUSIONS
Current contestation of the heat pump demonstrates how a combination of technocratic paternalism and capitalist parochialism is generating a backlash against green energy policies to the benefit of right-wing populist parties (Huber et al. 2021). Policy responses to this backlash follow the familiar neoliberal ABC script: introduce more choice, communicate better, avoid ‘politicising’ (Quinn 2025; Sullivan-Thomsett et al. 2024), leaving underlying material inequalities untouched. Depoliticising the transition altogether, however, is exactly what makes it easy prey for these symbolic politics.
By synthesising care ethics with research on energy, heating and heat pumps, a new perspective is offered on this issue, highlighting how heat pump promotion and implementation reconfigure caring relations in and around the home, and unequally distributes responsibility and vulnerability. However, it is important to note that the analysis presented here does not oppose the heat pump as such: heat pumps cannot be understood in isolation from the infrastructures, policy frameworks, markets, housing arrangements and everyday practices that configure how they are installed, operated and governed; that is, there is no heat pump ‘as such’. Instead, the lens of care draws attention to both deficits and potentials for caring for our world. Heat pump adoption may disrupt relations of care (e.g. through new practices, routines and sensations), yet it can also cultivate more caring ways of life (e.g. through cleaner air, reduced emissions and safer low-temperature radiators). Realising this care-full potential, however, requires a different democratic politics of heating, a more material ‘politics of care’ (Scoones 2024), for which this article has outlined the first directions.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The authors thank the reviewers for their constructive feedback, which greatly improved this article’s clarity. We also thank Irene van Oorschot for providing thoughtful comments on a prior version of this article.
DATA AVAILABILITY
The list of articles included in this review can be obtained from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.