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Green transitions create major challenges to union power in carbon-intensive economies as well as opportunities for the renewal of union power. This research asks why sometimes unions oppose or delay green transitions while other times unions are more open to green transitions and may even become strong transition supporters. In drawing on the Power Resource Approach, I argue that unions are neither natural opponents nor supporters of green transitions but instead engage strategically with green transitions. Unions’ strategic choices to pursue oppositional, reactive, affirmative or transformative transition strategies is guided by an imperative to maintain or expand their power resources. The strategic choices unions make are influenced by several contextual conditions. In a comparative case study on coal transitions in South Africa and Germany, I identify the following contextual conditions: sectoral interests, organisational identity, internal structure, coalitions, political- and socio-economic environment, governance context and public discourse. Regarding each of these, I show how unions make strategic choices to protect or expand different power resources and become agents of transition or defenders of the status quo. This paper contributes to empirical research on drivers behind union transition strategies and offers an analytical framework to explain unions’ strategic choices in green transitions.

Reaktion auf vier Beiträge in GAIA zum Thema Rohstoffe für die Energiewende

The global hydrogen transition promises a triple-win scenario of climate, economic and developmental benefits. However, whether the global hydrogen transition will indeed be a just transition is far from certain. The aim of this paper is to develop the concept of hydrogen justice as an analytical toolkit to help examining the multidimensional justice challenges of the global hydrogen transition. Hydrogen justice is rooted in debates on environmental, energy, climate and water justice and incorporates crucial insights from political ecology and decolonial studies. This leads us to a multidimensional conceptualisation of hydrogen justice that includes procedural, distributive, restorative, relational, recognitional and epistemological justice. For a preliminary empirical analysis of hydrogen injustices, we conduct an exploratory mapping of socio-ecological, political and economic conditions in hydrogen target countries and examine emerging hydrogen projects and partnerships. This indicates that justice challenges of export-oriented energy-, water- and land-intensive hydrogen projects are at stake. Hydrogen injustices manifest around issues of energy access in countries with high rates of energy poverty, water access in arid regions, as well as forced displacements, impairments of Indigenous livelihoods and the strengthening of authoritarian rule. We conclude that hydrogen injustices result from the interplay of global hydrogen governance and local conditions in producing countries. Thus, hydrogen injustices are more likely to appear if export-oriented hydrogen strategies target countries with high socio-ecological and political risk profiles. In contrast, a just hydrogen transition would put domestic energy needs first and incorporate justice principles at all scales of hydrogen governance.

Large amounts of low-carbon hydrogen imports from the Global South are needed for the hydrogen transition in Germany and the EU. In an unequal global system, it is far from certain that the promised financial, technological and socio-economic benefits will materialise and outweigh the costs for the Global South countries who supply the precious energy resource to northern economies. To strengthen social science perspectives in hydrogen research, we sketch the contours of a critical research agenda on the global hydrogen transition.