Equity Consideration in Analytical Models Used for Decision Making: Conceptual Framework, and Case Study

Decarbonization is essential to combat climate change, but policies may unintentionally exacerbate inequities between communities. Although energy policy increasingly acknowledges equity concerns, most studies focus narrowly on distributional equity, often overlooking its procedural and contextual dimensions. Further, existing analytical tools used to inform policymaking rarely integrate all three aspects of equity systematically.

This study addresses these limitations by developing a framework for incorporating distributional, procedural, and contextual equity into decision-support models. The framework is applied to inform a strategy for the phaseout of natural gas power plants in California. Key equity-relevant metrics are identified through a structured literature review, and a large language model (LLM) is used with carefully designed prompts and operational definitions to weigh the relative importance of these metrics under different resource allocation (or shapes of justice) principles. This LLM-enabled procedure is used as a scalable, transparent method to rapidly synthesize the literature by systematically surfacing the range of interpretations reported in prior work and representing uncertainty in metric weights (rather than aiming for one optimized value). The resulting metric set is incorporated into a multicriteria decision-making (MCDM) model that assesses how different shapes of justice principles and equity metrics influence phaseout priorities. The framework is designed to accommodate broader stakeholder input and address common critiques of technocratic, top-down approaches. Together, these contributions introduce a novel methodological framework for integrating multiple dimensions of equity into energy transition decision-support models.