The Just Transitions Learning Project will support more inclusive and effective advocacy strategies, among marginalised communities and groups affected by energy transitions in high-inequality, resource-rich nations of Africa and Latin America.
The urgency of accelerating ‘just transitions’ away from fossil fuels for planetary survival is now well recognised. Yet the voices of marginalised groups in resource-rich yet economically poor regions are missing from debates. Without widespread social engagement and acceptance, conflict around energy transitions will intensify. This project addresses how to build more inclusive, effective and empowered strategies of engagement for marginalised voices in national and global debates on achieving just transitions.
It focuses on resource-rich countries with severe governance and social challenges: significant numbers in extreme poverty, weak democratic institutions, high inequality, limited civic space, a tradition of authoritarianism, gender backlash, and risks of reprisal against human rights and environmental defenders and indigenous peoples.
The project follows on from two earlier IDS programmes. In A4EA, an IDS-led research programme which explored citizen engagement in countries with weak democracies, closing civic space and growing authoritarianism, energy rights emerged as increasingly affecting all aspects of daily life. Particularly affected are women, disproportionately burdened with daily tasks and reliant on cheap, accessible energy; indigenous groups whose traditional territories and livelihoods are affected; and youth populations, for whose futures sustainable climate and equitable energy scenarios are critical.
Our research on ‘Making Space for Dialogue on Just Transitions in Africa’s Oil and Gas Producing Regions’ highlighted several knowledge and action gaps:
- The views of marginalised communities on the frontline of energy production in resource-rich countries on what ‘justice’ might mean in ‘just transition’ processes are scarcely known.
- Many emerging ‘solutions’ are technical in nature, failing to acknowledge the entrenched, complex power and political dynamics of energy in these settings.
- Many CSOs work on aspects of this problem, but generally focus on single dimensions of it. Few spaces bring these groups together for deliberation over their diverse goals and associated trade-offs, or for learning across strategies, issues and sectors and scales to strengthen advocacy for inclusive and effective change.
Lacking pathways for inclusive deliberation involving these various groups, energy transition processes, especially in patriarchal and authoritarian settings, threaten to reproduce existing forms of political power, not transform them. As pressures grow globally for extracting remaining fossil fuels while also developing transition minerals, there’s a growing danger that spaces for dialogue will narrow further and backlash increase against those who question dominant energy interests.
The challenge is how to build more effective, better-connected spaces for engagement which ensure that energy transitions are equitable, sustainable and transformative of unjust power relations – and how to do so in increasingly hostile settings. Through an action-research and learning process with activist groups in Mozambique, Nigeria and Colombia, this project helps to fill these knowledge and action gaps.
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