Landscapes of (in)justice: Reflecting on voices, spaces and alliances for just transitions

Abstract

Transitioning to a low carbon global economy will inevitably create winners and losers. Such rapid and far-reaching changes in the adoption of low-carbon technologies, lifestyle changes and labour relations require meaningful public engagement for policy to be both effective and equitable. But despite a large body of work on just transitions, there has been less attention paid to questions of citizen engagement in just transitions. In particular, the process of how and by whom social needs, priorities and demands are articulated and acted upon. While some research has mapped public participation on climate change, and there is a larger body of work on questions of social acceptance, there is a gap in our understanding of how citizen engagement with just transitions can be deepened and enhanced by drawing on experiences to date from other related and parallel processes. On one level, this neglect is unsurprising given the limited nature of processes explicitly designed to promote just transitions, such as the Just Energy Transition Partnerships (JET-Ps) or experiences of national level dialogues and commissions, despite recent interest in the related use of climate assemblies to enable citizen engagement. But, we argue, there are significant lessons to be drawn for citizen engagement with just transitions from a long and rich experience of previous attempts to amplify voices, create spaces for citizen engagement, and build alliances to address justice issues across a range of struggles over resource pathways.