Presentation short abstract

Decarbonization creates winners and losers everywhere. A political economy framework, grounded in just transition, explains these spatial injustices across the North-South divide, challenging climate justice orthodoxy.

Presentation long abstract

Global greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, making extreme climate impacts unavoidable and reinforcing the need to integrate mitigation and adaptation. Yet climate actions often produce trade-offs rather than synergies: mitigation initiatives can displace vulnerable communities or divert resources from resilience efforts, while adaptation measures may increase energy demand and undermine mitigation goals. Although governance is frequently cited as crucial for managing these tensions, its role in shaping the mitigation–adaptation nexus remains under-theorized. This study develops a conceptual framework—grounded in just transition scholarship and interpreted through a political economy lens—to explain how governance arrangements influence interactions between mitigation and adaptation in decarbonization processes. The framework demonstrates how governance generates adaptation-related trade-offs through the uneven distribution of decarbonization costs and benefits across social groups and regions, challenging conventional framings of climate justice that focus on a simple Global North–Global South divide. Through a comparative examination of Ireland and Ethiopia, the study shows how distinct political–economic regimes—market-oriented or state-led—can produce parallel forms of spatial injustice during the green transition. The analysis argues that effective governance of the global green transition requires addressing structural drivers of injustice that cut across the North–South divide. A comparative North–South lens thus offers a richer understanding of how equitable governance can foster genuine synergies between mitigation and adaptation.