Politics, voice and just transition: who has a say in climate change decision making, and who does not

Abstract

The city of Bristol, UK, set out to pursue a just transition to climate change in 2020. This paper explores what happened next. We set out to study how just transition is unfolding politically on the ground, focusing on procedural justice. Over the course of a year, we conducted interviews and observations to study decision making at three levels – public sector, private sector and civil society. We found that not only is it difficult to define what just transition means, even for experts, but that the process of deciding how to pursue such a transition is highly exclusionary, especially to women and ethnic minorities. We therefore argue there is an urgency to revise decision-making procedures and ensure that there is ample opportunity to feed into decision-making processes by those who are typically excluded. Inclusive decision making must be embedded into the process of just transition from the beginning and throughout its implementation – it is not a step that can be ‘ticked off’ and then abandoned, but rather an ongoing process that must be consistently returned to. Finally, we conclude that cities have the unique opportunity to pilot bottom-up participatory approaches and to feed into the process of how a just transition might be pursued at the global level – for example, through their participation in the United Nations Framework for the Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of the Parties (COP) processes.

Involucrar a la gente para transiciones justas: Resumen ejecutivo

“…However, the main body of literature on energy justice fails to adequately consider these intersecting inequalities . Gender, in particular, has only tentatively been explored in just energy transitions literature, especially around gendered divisions in decision-making (Boss et al 2023;Nayak and Swain 2023;Walk et al 2021).…”

Why Gender-Responsive Agricultural Adaptation Is Underfunded

“…Comm. 2022d;Lanivière et al 2013;Boss et al 2023). Not only do more climate-vulnerable countries receive far less adaptation funding than higher-capacity countries (Pettinotti et al 2022), but few organizations receive funding, particularly at the local level where funding requirements are challenging to meet (Soanes et al 2017;Pers.…”