Reconciling Diverging Meanings of Just Transitions in a Fragmented World

Just transition, an integral part of climate action, has become increasingly popular in both academic discussions and global climate negotiations. In 2022, the Just Transition Work Programme (JTWP) was established with the aim of discussing pathways to just transition in a climate-constrained world. However, the negotiations at JTWP have been slow due to fundamental disagreements in the interpretation of just transition between the Global North and Global South countries. The just transition (JT) scholarship has paid limited attention to explain the reasons for the starkly different understandings of JT across countries. In this paper, we first review academic literature on JT frameworks to understand whether and how they discuss the tensions that emerge when applying JT theories in practice. As we find limited academic literature on this topic, we develop a conceptual framework that focuses on highlighting and understanding the tensions that emerge in operationalizing academic JT frameworks in the real world. In particular, we focus on explaining tensions across different types of justice, geographical scales, and time. We then apply this framework to analyze JTWP negotiation proceedings. Our findings suggest that the existing justice frameworks do not consider the interactions between different types of justice, geographies, and time scales. This often leads them to ignore the tensions that could arise and the trade-offs that are involved in achieving a comprehensive vision of justice for all parts of the world at the same time. Through our framework, we are able to explore these tensions and explain the slow progress on JTWP negotiations. In the end, we provide examples to illustrate strategies that could be used to highlight and potentially resolve these tensions and, in turn, contribute to globally just low-carbon energy transitions.