Send message to Author

Presentation short abstract

Just Transition frameworks exclude most workers. We explore precarity as a lens spanning formal-informal work, affecting all workers variably. UK-India analysis reveals Northern transitions depend on Southern injustice, requiring relational justice addressing global class dynamics.

Presentation long abstract

This paper develops a framework for analysing precarity in energy transitions that addresses limitations in existing Just Transition (JT) approaches. JT frameworks, when operationalised through national policy structures, privilege formal workers, treat labour insecurity as a technical problem, and obscure the global class relations through which energy systems operate. Drawing on Bernstein's 'classes of labour' and Hart's relational comparison, I analyse the interconnected trajectories of the UK and India as relationally dependent nodes within global fossil capitalism's transformation. I introduce three co-constitutive analytical dimensions – immanent, inherited and reconstituted precarity – capturing the structural insecurity inherent in the wage relation, the historically produced conditions through which it is differentially experienced, and the mechanisms through which energy transitions reorganise these relations. Tracing differential precarity from colonial extraction through successive postcolonial reconstitutions, the paper demonstrates how apparent justice in Northern transitions depends materially on intensified precarity in the global South, whilst internal fragmentations of race, gender, caste and citizenship within each geography prove equally significant. The paper argues for relational justice – an orientation extending JT's logic by centring global class relations, building institutional capacity across the formal-informal divide, and challenging the spatial divisions through which transitions reproduce global hierarchies.