Exploring ‘Just’ Transitions in Regional Aotearoa New Zealand: Cases of Taranaki and Southland

Abstract

The multi-scalar sustainability challenge of addressing climate change, biodiversity loss, and environmental degradation is well understood. Yet, often the way sustainability problems materialise and how solutions are identified and implemented fail to account for the particularities of place. The way global sustainability challenges interface with place-specific issues is context-dependent, complex, and multifaceted. These spatial complexities, however, are often overlooked in the development and implementation of sustainability transitions across space. This is particularly the case in the context of rural and peripheral regions, where assumed congruence between quality of life and sustainability aspirations at national and local scales, and across urban and rural places, is problematic. The regions of Taranaki and Southland in New Zealand provide good examples—both are regions dominated by economic sectors with uncertain futures that have necessitated central state intervention to support a just transition. In this chapter, particular attention is paid to national policy and then how transitions are playing out in these two regions, which the government has prioritised as lead regions in its sustainability drive. Both regions illustrate how the meaning and purpose of just transition is mediated by local and regional actors as they seek support and capacity to diversify their economies in a carbon-constrained context.