Short Abstract

This panel interrogates the contested nature of the just transition, examining how dominant narratives obscure plural experiences, structural inequalities, and alternative trajectories. It invites critical engagement with the assumptions shaping policy and practice.

Description

The notion of a ‘just transition’ has gained traction across climate policy, development discourse, and sustainability frameworks. Yet, its dominant articulations often reflect technocratic, state-centric, and market-oriented logics that risk reproducing existing inequalities and marginalising alternative ways of knowing and being.

This panel examines the contested nature of the just transition, foregrounding the tensions between global narratives and local realities.

Attention is given to how prevailing frameworks obscure the lived experiences of communities at the periphery of formal governance and economic systems—such as Indigenous groups, artisanal miners, informal workers, and rural populations—whose perspectives frequently challenge linear, extractivist, or universalist models of transition. The panel engages with the political economy of transition processes, the epistemic hierarchies embedded within them, and the implications for livelihoods, autonomy, and environmental justice.

By exploring alternative imaginaries and locally grounded responses, the panel seeks to open space for pluralised understandings of justice and sustainability. It invites reflection on how transitions are negotiated, resisted, and redefined in practice, and on the power relations that shape whose futures are made possible—and whose are foreclosed.

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