Crisis and hope loom large in discussions around the UN’s COP28 climate conference. Climate change continues to be discussed as a crisis that requires rapid action. Governments around the world have made sweeping pledges to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. Meanwhile, businesses and political leaders raise hopes around accelerating technological innovation – or improved ‘solutions’ – that promise cleaner, greener ways to meet projected demands for food, energy, water, transport and places to live, while sustaining economic growth.
Both the threat of crisis, and the hope in solutions, feed into an agenda for urgent transitions in mining, agriculture, power generation, construction and so on. A common refrain is that these should be ‘just transitions’.
But who gets to define what is ‘just’ in these debates? ‘Just’ for whom? And why ‘transitions’? ‘Transitions’ are only one way among many to think about complex changes. How are these ideas defined and pursued in practice? And what’s missing?
Transitions, politics and ‘blind spots’
When talking about far-reaching changes to lives and infrastructures, considerations of politics and power should be front and centre. But the language of ‘transitions’ can lend itself to a rather instrumental, policy-oriented way of viewing change – implying a linear, orderly move from an undesirable present to a desirable future.
Mainstream policy approaches that adopt a ‘just transitions’ framing tend to place economic growth at the heart of the policy agenda. In the process, questions of justice and injustice are often depoliticised.
Depoliticistion creates ‘blind spots’ in the dominant debates around climate and environmental change and justice. Among them is the failure to recognise knowledges beyond traditional experts, authorities and disciplines. Another is the failure to recognise and acknowledge the implications of contestations and struggles for justice.
Events like COP28 tend to focus on the global or ‘planetary’ scale, as they aim to allow governments to work together for impacts that go beyond narrow national interests and seek solutions that work through institutions and mechanisms linked to international markets. To pay more careful attention to justice in practice, we need to shift our focus from top-down, scalable solutions, and think about particular places and people too.
Knowing and acting
Dominant policy narratives – the framings of problems, their causes and solutions that get taken up and amplified – aren’t ‘just the facts’. They carry authority precisely because they suit the needs of incumbent actors and institutions.
One way to break through this politics is to ask whose perspectives are privileged in policy framings. Who gets to define the problem? Whose experiences, knowledges and voices are privileged, and how does this shape the way that problems are presented and which ‘solutions’ are pursued? What sorts of evidence are considered? Do they recognise people’s situated knowledge, experiences of change and existing strategies and ‘solutions’? Or are they based on abstract models and received wisdoms that actively exclude people and can exacerbate structural violence, vulnerabilities and reproduce forms of injustice?
Overcoming this ‘blind spot’ means recognising different ways of knowing, learning and innovating. These often don’t come in the form of quantitative data, computer models or formal scientific theories, and they may not fit with conventional expectations for generalisability and scalability. Instead, knowledge and action are often entwined together in context, as people learn together over time about the land, technologies, materials and living things they share the world with.
Apart from formal science, or in dialogue with it, this knowledge in action can be passed on as skills, traditions, stories or moral expectations, providing different grounds for decision-making that better fits with lived landscapes and environments and the changes and challenges they face.
Struggles for justice
In depoliticised framings that associate justice with green economic growth, notions of justice can become disconnected from people’s real ongoing struggles for recognition and for decent working and living environments around the world.
For example, some framings of regional energy transitions equate ‘justice’ with job security for northern workers in high-emissions sectors. This creates blind spots to the global politics of the large-scale shift to renewable energy. New infrastructures and technologies are needed to capture, transport and store renewable energy, and markets are growing for so-called ‘transition minerals’ such as copper, graphite, cobalt, nickel and lithium, and the rare earth elements necessary to mass produce solar panels, wind turbines, batteries and cables.
These dynamics have already begun to reshape geopolitics and the international development landscape of the 21st century. The production and processing for specific transition minerals tend to be highly concentrated geographically. As modelled scenarios and forecast needs drive growing demand, global value chains for critical minerals are expanding. New extractive frontiers are opening up across the global north and south.
Seeing justice differently
How can we see justice differently, then? Rather than seeing justice as one-dimensional, or something that looks the same for everyone, there are four dimensions that can help us to understand struggles among particular people and places, and their implications.
These four dimensions are who gets what (distributional justice), whose knowledge counts (epistemic justice), who gets to decide (procedural justice) and, perhaps most crucially, whose interests, values and views are recognized and taken into account (recognitional justice).
If people are not recognized and respected, other forms of justice are unlikely to follow. But this means much more than consulting widely, finding ‘win-wins’ or balancing ‘trade-offs’. In contested landscapes, with long histories of colonisation and struggles between or within communities, the need for recognition has big implications for what just action on climate looks like. It might mean that, rather than trying to make a particular project as ‘just’ as possible, we take a step back and ask whether such a project is appropriate at all.
Using the framing of ‘transformations’ might help to change our perspective. We might think of change as a more messy, less linear, emergent process, involving multiple viewpoints, alliances and solidarities provoking change in unexpected ways. Responding to climate change might mean thinking more radically about the kinds of social arrangements that we would aspire to or consider to be ‘normal’.
Struggles, values, histories and alternatives come into the foreground, revealing neglected questions about justice and what kind of futures are desired. It can avoid us putting too much faith into the market or politicians to ‘engineer’ transitions – leaving more space to discuss the kind of futures we might want, and who can be involved in pursuing them.
