Responsibilities for just transition to low-carbon societies: a role-based framework

ABSTRACT

Low-carbon transitions in industrialised societies will have significant social, economic and environmental impacts, raising concerns of justice. Calls for urgent transitions evoke a question about the roles of different actors in advancing transitions and ensuring they are just. While the responsibilities for emission mitigation have been long discussed, responsibilities for making a just transition have not. The question about responsibilities is particularly pressing because of the diverse constellation of actors involved in climate action, including diverse forms of non-state actors from city-level and business alliances to grassroots activists. We examine the responsibilities of state and non-state actors in the decarbonisation process, asking: what role do different actors play regarding the justice impacts of climate action? We combine sustainability transition studies and political philosophy on roles and responsibilities to create a role-based framework for just transition-related responsibilities of different actors at different spatial scales.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate justice
• climate actors
• moral responsibilities
• just transition
• roles
• sustainability transitions

Acknowledgments

We wish to thank Säde Hormio and reviewers for valuable comments on this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Just transition can be criticised as a narrow approach if it is considered to occupy the main stage of climate and environment-related justice discussions, which sometimes appears to be the case in public debates. Just transition should not derail attention from the crucial importance of climate action and sustainability transition itself, because failing in that task is likely the greatest injustice. Regarding the existing (pre-transition) injustices, just transition pays attention to them insofar as they create systematic risks for particular groups to face disproportionate burdens or harms due to the transition policies. However, the purpose of just transition is not to address or fix all existing injustices: making the transition so overly complex would likely paralyse action.

2. Moral responsibility typically focuses on individual moral agents and their liability: is a person liable for causing a certain wrong, and if yes, what should the person do about it? Political responsibility focuses on remedying the wrongs: who should do something about the existing problem an why? Political responsibility for action can exist without liability. Political responsibility does not mean neglecting the questions of liability, however: sometimes there is a clear culprit who has a consequent responsibility to correct the injustices. (Young 2011, pp. 78–80; 95–122.)

3. In Young’s version of the model, the responsibility for justice is borne only by individuals but this does not exclude the possibility to attribute responsibilities to collective actors.

4. Young’s response to these challenges remained unfinished because of her death in 2006.

5. Social sciences have generated numerous typologies of power, the usefulness of which depends on the application. Our chosen distinction aligns well with different roles. Notably, many forms of power overlap or are closely related. For example, in the private sphere economic power often equates with power to influence; however, economic power does not guarantee political power in the public sphere. Epistemic power, in turn, may sometimes be socio-culturally very influential (by mainstreaming particular ideas and framings) while lacking political and economic power.

6. The privilege attribute does not make our approach backward-looking because privilege can arise due to numerous factors, be unintentional (being the citizen of a wealthy country), and cannot be directly associated with liability.

7. Collective ability in Young’s terminology.

8. Epistemic power and epistemic abilities are, in our view, two distinct attributes that often are not possessed by the same person. The term ‘epistemic power’ was used by Archer et al. 2020, whose use we follow here, although it could also be called discursive power.

9. We consider voting in elections as insufficient for discharging one’s responsibility.

10. The role of local communities is also noted in’A Blueprint for Europe’s Just Transition’, a report by the EU-level GNDE campaign (by the Democracy in Europe Movement) that calls for increased engagement of local actors for the EU Green New Deal.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Strategic Research Council of the Academy of Finland under Grant number 327284.