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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.