- Convenors:
-
Aysha Valery
(Institute of Development Studies at University of Sussex)
Paula Alejandra Camargo (Institute of Development Studies)
Send message to Convenors
- Discussants:
-
Aysha Valery
(Institute of Development Studies at University of Sussex)
Paula Alejandra Camargo (Institute of Development Studies)
- Format:
- Paper panel
- Stream:
- Climate justice, just transitions & environmental futures
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.
Accepted papers
Paper short abstract
The paper analyzes (1) persistent power structures (re)produced through multinational-led discourses in the Brazilian wind energy sector, and (2) local civil society engagement challenging these hierarchies at both the discursive and action-oriented levels.
Paper long abstract
This paper explores the dynamics between multinationals and civil society movements contesting green grabbing, illustrated by the case of Brazil. Green grabbing is not a new phenomenon in the country; however, the recent expansion of wind farms has exerted additional pressure on local communities, particularly in the Northeast. Between 2011 and 2021, the share of wind power in the country’s electricity generation capacity increased from 1.2% to 11.4%. While 89% of wind farms are officially claimed to be run by Brazilian companies, 68% are subsidiaries of mainly European corporations. Affected neighbouring communities are sparsely compensated. Instead, they face exclusion from deliberative processes, lawsuits involving multinationals, and environmental damage. Nonetheless, Brazilian civil society has repeatedly demonstrated its capacity to contest land grabbing by both national and multinational stakeholders.
The aim of this paper is twofold. First, it explores the ways in which Brazilian civil society successfully counters so-called “development projects” promoted by land-grabbing multinationals. Lessons are drawn from ProSAVANA, a contested intervention that was halted by Mozambican and Brazilian civil society. The paper investigates whether these lessons can be applied to the case of wind farms. Second, it seeks to dismantle the hegemonic discourse (re)produced by European wind energy multinationals in order to maintain established hierarchies. For this purpose, press releases and interviews are analysed.
Hence, the paper does not only dismantle existing power structures but also examines the capacity of civil society to mobilize resistance.
Paper short abstract
This paper analyzes how the ICJ Advisory Opinion on Climate Change (2025) strengthens legal obligations for just transition, using Botswana’s coal sector as a case study. It analyzes gaps between international law and national implementation and offers practical frameworks for practitioners.
Paper long abstract
The ICJ’s 2025 Advisory Opinion on climate change has been characterized as transforming political commitment to legally binding obligations. This paper examines whether, how, and with what implications this purported shift affects just transition implementation in coal-dependent developing countries, using Botswana as a case study.
Adopting a practitioner-scholar approach the paper leverages Botswana’s just transition policy process while maintaining analytical distance through institutional analysis. This methodology bridges international climate law with implementation studies, examining how the ICJ AO strengthens the UAE JTWP’s provisions on local communities and Indigenous Peoples, reframing them as enforceable legal obligations rather than aspirational goals.
Through analysis of Botswana’s draft NDP12 and NDC, alongside semi-structured engagement with policy actors, the paper identifies gaps between emerging international legal obligations and national policy frameworks. It demonstrates how abstract legal principles translate, or fail, into concrete protections for workers and mining-dependent communities.
The paper advances scholarship in four ways: theorizing the shift from political to legal obligations as institutional reconfiguration requiring active translation work, not automatic compliance; it provides empirical evidence from a coal-dependent African economy where most literature focuses on industrialized contexts; developing a multi-scalar implementation framework linking international legal obligations to national policy architecture; and identifying how legal clarity paradoxically creates new implementation challenges requiring institutional reform beyond financial resources.
By interrogating this distinction in climate governance, the paper contributes to debates on international law’s efficacy in producing domestic policy change, arguing that legal obligations create necessary but insufficient conditions for just transition implementation.
Paper short abstract
Workers are seldom included in just-transition discourse. Therefore, this study focuses on the gendered impacts of formalisation on artisanal and small-scale mining livelihoods in the Congolese Copperbelt.
Paper long abstract
The Democratic Republic of the Congo contains vast high quality deposits of two key critical minerals-copper and cobalt. Artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) plays an important role in these value chains, accounting for about 15 to 30% of national cobalt production. Attention to environmental pollution, poor working conditions, and human rights abuses in the sector have fuelled several formalisation efforts. However, few studies have examined their impacts on ASM livelihoods, and even fewer, the gendered dimensions of these impacts. This study seeks to unpack these through a comparison of livelihood outcomes across formal and informal ASM sites through a combination of ethnographic, qualitative, and participatory methods. These results will then be analysed through the current literature on formalisation, real governance, and gender.
Paper short abstract
Focusing on volcanic sand mining in Indonesia, this paper argues that dominant Just Transition frameworks prioritise carbon-based metrics, excluding informal extractive workers facing climate risk. Using a political ecology lens, it calls for pluralised, locally grounded transition pathways.
Paper long abstract
The Just Transition (JT) framework has gained significant traction as a central policy response to the climate crisis. Institutionalised through international agreements such as the Paris Agreement, JT has increasingly been framed around decarbonisation, energy transition, and carbon-intensive industries. However, does it meaningfully serve vulnerable communities, particularly informal workers and rural populations who are not part of energy- and carbon-intensive industries? Yet these groups are also heavily affected by climate change.
Drawing on Rob Nixon’s concept of slow violence and a political ecology lens, this paper argues that volcanic sand mining on the slopes of Mount Merapi in Magelang, Indonesia, constitutes a form of cumulative environmental harm that remains politically normalised and largely invisible within dominant JT frameworks. While JT policies prioritise carbon-intensive sectors such as coal, where declining economic value enables formal transition pathways, sand extraction remains central to development, rendering its environmental and labour harms structurally indispensable rather than transitional. This aligns with market-driven and technocratic transition logics, which reproduce epistemic and economic hierarchies that exclude informal extractive workers whose livelihoods are environmentally destructive yet essential to state-led development.
Through a qualitative analysis of policy documents and discourses, as well as secondary sources, the paper demonstrates how the implementation of the existing JT framework minimises, if not closes, transition pathways for rural populations and informal workers who face increasing climate risk without access to institutional support. This paper therefore calls for a pluralised, locally grounded understanding of just transition.