Social intervention for energy solidarity: the WISE Project in Bulgaria

Abstract

The article will present the Bulgarian component of the WISE – Women in Solidarity for Energy project as a social intervention for community building and feminist democratic learning, rather than a technical or policy-only initiative. It will argue that WISE functions as an embryonic infrastructure for collective care and civic imagination—a prototype of a pan-European movement for energy justice that transforms the very notion of “solidarity” from charity into mutual empowerment and political participation. Drawing on practice-based reflection, feminist theory, and social movement studies, the article will locate WISE Bulgaria as a living laboratory of how communities of care can emerge around material issues like energy poverty. It will link this to contemporary crises—ecological, democratic, and epistemic—and explore how feminist facilitation, storytelling, and social pedagogy turn “energy” from a technical problem into a social commons.