Format/Structure

Paper: We now have 8 abstracts

Long Abstract

This panel examines how the Just Transition agenda, originally emerging from labour movements to reconcile environmental and employment objectives, now faces critical challenges that demand fundamental reconceptualisation. Our papers address mounting political and practical obstacles confronting JT implementation across diverse global contexts, offering counter-narratives to dominant JT paradigms and revealing pathways towards more transformative futures.

We analyse how dominant JT interpretations perpetuate power imbalances and neocolonial dynamics, marginalising labour voices and excluding the Global South from policy frameworks. We demonstrate how current approaches isolate specific workers by sector and geography rather than understanding them relationally, overlooking the social dimensions of sustainability transitions. Through diverse analytical frameworks, we examine how these dynamics are embedded in particular power relations while identifying spaces of resistance.

Drawing on research from the UK, India, Latin America, Chile, Sweden and Nigeria, our presentations examine labour struggles within shifting capitalist frameworks and ecological crises. This panel brings together diverse workers—formal trade unionists, informal artisanal workers, extractive industry employees, and reproductive labourers—to identify solidarity-building opportunities across diverse but interconnected struggles.

Panel papers explore: how JT frameworks can incorporate voices and experiences of informal and precarious workers globally, challenging Western-centric approaches through grassroots movements like MST, SEWA and La Via Campesina; how evolving extractivist paradigms threaten workers' rights and potential for Inter-American human rights jurisprudence to strengthen JT protections during climate emergencies; the hidden reproductive labour powering green energy transitions in lithium and copper supply chains, exposing how Europe's net-zero ambitions depend on marginalised workers; and Nigerian oil workers' ambivalent relationship with the oil industry, identifying potential for climate solidarity rooted in shared health and survival interests beyond traditional 'jobs versus environment' framings.

These contributions advocate for expanded, diverse approaches to JT that recognise all forms of labour and address structural inequalities rather than perpetuating them through green transitions.