By Professor Iain MacNeil, School of Law, University of Glasgow
A Scottish Council on Global Affairs Insight award enabled colleagues from the universities of Aberdeen, Dundee and Glasgow to map the evolving concept of Just Transition.
The Just Transition Research Cluster was established in the University of Glasgow’s School of Law in 2022 with the aim of building on various activities that were undertaken as part of COP 26 in Glasgow. The cluster members are: Iain MacNeil, Calum Stewart, Giedre Jokubauskaite, Vera Pavlou, Rebecca Williams, Katarzyna Chalaczkiewicz-Ladna and Mingzhe Zhu (all University of Glasgow), Daria Shapovalova (University of Aberdeen) and Sufyan Al Droubi (University of Dundee).
The award from SCGA was envisaged to build on that foundation by mapping the evolving concept of Just Transition to practice so as to elaborate the distinct features of Just Transition as a concept and to evaluate its application to transport as a case-study.
Just Transition has attracted considerable attention as a policy objective in the EU, Scotland, Canada and beyond in recent years and has influenced policymakers and businesses in their respective approaches to net zero transition and sustainability more generally.
However, it is unclear how Just Transition is linked with broader sustainability objectives and techniques that are often embedded in national and international legal instruments developed with expert scientific input, expressed through such initiatives as UN Sustainable Development Goals, EU Green Finance taxonomy, or carbon accounting and related net zero initiatives at the national level.
In our project we focused on three key dimensions of the concept of Just Transition: the timeframes for implementation; equity between social groups exposed to different impacts by the transition; and the process of formulating transitional measures towards net-zero economy.
Events
The SCGA award enabled us to take forward our research and to organise a series of events as outlined below.
The Just Transition Research Cluster organised a roundtable on the topic of ‘Unjust Transitions’ on 27 November 2023. The roundtable brought together an interdisciplinary group of speakers to present thoughts on the question: what lessons can we draw from the history of deindustrialisation in Scotland to inform a ‘just transition’ in the 2020s?
Ewan Gibbs (Lecturer in Global Inequalities at University of Glasgow) and Jim Phillips (Professor of Economic and Social History at the University of Glasgow) shared findings and perspectives from their research on the history of deindustrialisation in Scotland. They presented on their established work on mid 20th century deindustrialisation in Scotland, drawing out learnings for the Just Transition in the 2020s. Using a moral-economy framework, this research highlights the collective successes as well as failures in the management of deindustrialisation in Scotland.
On 22 January 2024, the Just Transition Research Cluster held a roundtable discussion on the Friends of the Earth (Scotland) report ‘Our Power: Offshore Workers’ Demands for a Just Energy Transition’ (the report can be found here). Rosie Hampton(Friends of the Earth (Scotland)) shared findings and perspectives from their report, followed by comments by Melanie Simms(Professor of Work and Employment, Adam Smith Business School, University of Glasgow),Eleanor Kirk(Lecturer in Human Resource Management, Adam Smith Business School, University of Glasgow) and Maha Rafi Atal(Lecturer in Global Economy, School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Glasgow).
On 23 January 2024, the Just Transition Research Cluster held an event on Legal Updates from COP28. Prof. Annalisa Savaresi (University of Stirling) joined us to help stocktake progress on UN climate negotiations following COP28 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates held from the 30th November to 12th December 2023. As the climate change worsens, each successive COP increases in importance in tackling the climate crisis. The event helped to provide insight into the negotiations and the most recent updates from Dubai, including loss and damage, climate finance (Prof. Iain MacNeil) and agricultural emissions (Dr Rebecca Williams). On 29 February, Dr Sufyan Al Droubi and Dr Daria Shapovalova joined us for an internal workshop at which we discussed our concept paper and mapped out a plan for completion.
The final and most significant event was a knowledge exchange workshop in June 2024 entitled ‘Enabling Just Transition through Law: Transforming an Idea into Practice?’ The aim of the workshop was to generate a debate about the prospects of the emerging concept of Just Transition in Scotland, focusing on the likely role of law in facilitating, but also slowing down the transition.
The first panel (Just Transition in practice: zooming in on the transport sector) featured speakers from the RMT Union, Get Glasgow Moving and Transport Scotland while the second panel (Towards a clearer concept of Just Transition) had contributions from representatives of Friends of the Earth Scotland, the Just Transition Partnership, the Environmental Rights Centre Scotland as well as prominent academics from the universities of Glasgow and Strathclyde. Prior to the event we circulated a draft of our concept paper to brief participants on our research ahead of the event and to allow us to draw on the workshop discussion to finalise our paper.
Papers and reports
While we had already published a summary report ‘Legal Challenges to Just Transitions’ based on our April 2023 workshop, the primary output linked to the SCGA award is the working paper ‘Situating Just Transition as a Distinct Legal Concept’. In this paper, co-authored by all members of the research cluster, we focus on the three normative dimensions of the concept of Just Transition: timeframes, equity, and the process of formulating transitional measures towards net-zero economy, and we also assess the need to strengthen the legal force of the concept, reflected in a cross-cutting dimension of legality. Both outputs are freely accessible on the website of the social sciences research network (SSRN). Another output which maps the conceptual analysis to practice in the transport sector in Scotland is currently underway and has received feedback from relevant stakeholders.
In overall terms we note the relatively slow and limited integration of Just Transition into legal instruments at the international and national levels. In that sense Just Transition seems to be a ‘lightweight’ legal principle as it lacks solid legal foundations and in the main is not linked to changes in the law. However, that approach may carry some benefits by allowing Just Transition to drive effective policy changes across a broad spectrum of issues without the constraints associated with law reform.
You can download both the Legal Challenges to Just Transitions and the Situating Just Transition as a Distinct Legal Concept by clicking on the buttons below.
Legal Challenges to Just Transitions (pdf) Situating Just Transition as a Distinct Legal Concept (pdf)