Just Transitions: Social Justice in the Shift Towards a Low-Carbon World

by Edouard Morena, Dunja Krause, Dimitris Stevis

In the field of 'climate change', no terrain goes uncontested. The terminological tug of war between activists and corporations, scientists and governments, has seen radical notions of 'sustainability' emptied of urgency and subordinated to the interests of capital. 'Just Transition' is the latest such battleground, and the conceptual keystone of the post-COP21 climate policy world. But what does it really mean?

Just Transition emerged as a framework developed within the trade union movement to encompass a range of social interventions needed to secure workers' and frontline communities' jobs and livelihoods as economies shift to sustainable production. Just Transitions draws on a range of perspectives from the global North and South to interrogate the overlaps, synergies and tensions between various understandings of the Just Transition approach. As the concept is entering the mainstream, has it lost its radical edge, and if so, can it be recovered?

Written by academics and activists from around the globe, this unique edited collection is the first book entirely devoted to Just Transition.

272 pages, Hardcover

Published November 20, 2019

About the author

Edouard Morena is a lecturer in French politics and history at the University of London Institute in Paris. Over the past six years, he has been researching non-state actors’ involvement in international environmental and development processes—and in particular the role of philanthropic foundations. He is the author of The Price of Climate Action: Philanthropic Foundations in the International Climate Debate (Palgrave Pivot, 2016) and coeditor (with Stefan C. Aykut and Jean Foyer) of Globalising the Climate: COP21 and the Climatisation of Global Debates (Routledge, 2017).

Reviews

[Carson · Rating 2 out of 5]

I feel bad giving this book 2 stars, but it was a DNF (made it through about the first half) for me. The writing is dense and pretty academic across the chapters I read. I have a master's degree in public policy and work with a climate change related nonprofit, so it's not like I have no relevant background knowledge, but still, quite hard to penetrate. A lot of the early chapters were an alphabet soup of acronyms that I had a lot of difficulty keeping track of.

To be clear, the quality of the research is, as far as I can tell, excellent. I have no critiques about accuracy or bias. If you're looking for a detailed history of the concept of Just Transition to cite in an academic paper, this is definitely the right book. But if you're looking for a more journalistic approach for the lay reader, to answer basic questions like "what is the relationship between the labor movement and the environmental movement?" I don't think this book is for you. It wasn't for me.