John Gaventa,2 Alex Shankland3 and Rosie McGee4
Abstract In global debates on how to achieve a ‘just transition’ away from fossil fuels, the voices from the front lines of energy extraction and production are largely missing. Serving as the introduction to a special issue of the IDS Bulletin, this article examines how communities and workers across multiple sites in the global South and North perceive the ‘just transition’. These actors on the peripheries, whether their territories are affected by the phasing out of oil and coal exploitation or by large-scale renewable energy generation and critical mineral extraction, have local cultures and knowledges which should inform current debates. Far from experiencing contemporary dynamics of energy transition as ‘new’, they experience them as a continuation of long-term patterns of exclusion. At the same time, we find rich stories and strategies of resistance and action which frontline actors are using to strengthen their voices, alliances, and narratives to construct a more just future.
Resumen En los debates globales sobre cómo lograr una “transición justa” respecto de los combustibles fósiles, en gran medida están ausentes las voces de quienes participan activamente en la primera línea de extracción y producción de energía. Como introducción a una edición especial del IDS Bulletin, este artículo examina de qué manera las comunidades y los trabajadores en diversos territorios del Sur y del Norte globales perciben la “transición justa”. Estos actores que se encuentran en las periferias, ya sea porque sus territorios se ven afectados por la eliminación progresiva de la explotación de petróleo y carbón, o por la generación a gran escala de energías renovables y la extracción de minerales críticos, poseen culturas y saberes locales que deben incluirse en los debates actuales. Lejos de vivir las dinámicas contemporáneas de la transición energética como algo “nuevo”, son experimentadas como la continuación de patrones de exclusión de larga trayectoria. Al mismo tiempo, encontramos narrativas y estrategias ricas de resistencia y acción, mediante las cuales los actores principales buscan fortalecer sus voces, alianzas y relatos para construir un futuro más justo.
Resumo Nos debates globais sobre como alcançar uma ‘transição justa’ para além dos combustíveis fósseis, as vozes da linha da frente da extracção e produção de energia estão em grande medida ausentes. Servindo de introdução a uma edição especial do IDS Bulletin, este artigo analisa como as comunidades e trabalhadores em múltiplos locais no Sul e Norte globais percebem a ‘transição justa’. Estes actores nas periferias, quer os seus territórios sejam afectados pelo abandono progressivo da exploração de petróleo e carvão, quer pela produção em larga escala de energias renováveis e pela extracção de minerais críticos, possuem culturas e saberes locais que devem informar os debates actuais. Longe de vivenciarem as dinâmicas contemporâneas da transição energética como algo ‘novo’, percebem-nas como uma continuação de padrões de exclusão de longa duração. Ao mesmo tempo, encontramos narrativas e estratégias ricas de resistência e acção, através das quais os actores da linha da frente procuram reforçar as suas vozes, alianças e narrativas na construção de um futuro mais justo.
Keywords just transitions, periphery, colonial legacy, frontline voices, civic alliances, narrative building, extractivism, energy transition, critical minerals, territories.
We live in the midst of the ever-intensifying effects of climate change, and of ever more politically polarised debates on how countries should respond to the threat of climate breakdown. A critical issue of our time is how the world transitions from a development model based on the extraction and use of fossil fuels to one based on cleaner sources of energy, and how it does so in a just and inclusive way. Energy transition is set to be a major area of contention at the 30th Global Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC COP30), which Brazil is preparing to host as this issue of the IDS Bulletin goes to press in late 2025.
The UNFCCC was established at the Rio de Janeiro ‘Earth Summit’ in 1992, amidst a wave of optimism about the potential for multilateral action on global challenges. COP30 sees the UNFCCC discussions return to Brazil, but this time amidst a wave of rampant unilateralism on the global stage and ever-deeper political polarisation within countries across the global North and South. Much of this polarisation has centred on questions of energy production, access, and use, from ‘drill baby drill’ to fuel price protests to activist demands to Just Stop Oil. Brazil is not immune to this dynamic: having pushed to host COP30 in Amazonia in order to showcase the country’s achievements in protecting the rainforest, the government has found itself mired in controversy over a decision to promote oil and gas extraction in the Amazon River delta which borders the conference host city of Belém (Hanbury 2025).
In recent years, the term ‘just transitions’ has emerged from efforts to find consensus against this backdrop of growing polarisation and has rapidly become one of the trending phrases in development and climate policy. Having received just one mention in the 2015 Paris Agreement, by the time COP28 took place just eight years later, the phrase was virtually everywhere (Robins 2023). COP28 created a ‘Just Transition Work Programme’, with follow-up via annual high-level ministerial roundtables, but amidst deepening geopolitical divisions, its progress has been halting, and discussions at the Baku Climate Summit the following year led to a decision to remit the issue to COP30 (UNFCCC 2025).
The decision to establish the Just Transition Work Programme placed great emphasis on ‘just and equitable transitions’ and on ‘inclusive and participatory approaches to just transitions that leave no one behind’ (UNFCCC 2023: 30). All too often, however, the voices from the front lines of energy production, whether they be from the global North or South, are missing from the debates about just transitions (Newell, Price and Daley 2023, 2024). Arguing that there can be no ‘just and equitable transition’ unless these voices are heard, this IDS Bulletin aims to foreground the understandings of justice and the experiences and strategies of communities whose territories are being directly impacted by energy transition, whether through the phasing out of oil and coal exploitation, the extraction of critical minerals such as lithium, or the establishment of large-scale wind and solar energy generation facilities.
These territories the world over are often remote from centres of economic and political power and inhabited by politically marginalised groups – including the Indigenous Peoples and local communities whose participation Brazil has promised to champion via the unprecedented inclusion of a ‘Circle of Peoples’ in the COP30 deliberations (Fanzeres 2025). These are communities and territories that often have long histories of being subjected to colonial and postcolonial resource extraction regimes. In this IDS Bulletin, we pay particular attention to the way historical experiences have shaped both local responses to the energy transition and the kinds of justice claims that underpin these responses. We are concerned that this aspect has received limited attention in the energy transition literature, leading us to a deliberate decision to apply a ‘territorial’ lens in the selection of articles. Influenced by the ‘territorial turn’ in land struggles in the global South (Offen 2003), this approach situates the communities impacted by changing patterns of resource extraction and energy generation within the landscapes that they inhabit, as well as within the historical processes that have shaped communities and landscapes alike.
While there have been many studies on energy transition, these have tended to concentrate on understanding its impacts on broad sectors such as coal or steel (Mirzania et al. 2023; Stanley et al. 2018) and categories of people such as workers in energy-intensive industries (Stevis and Felli 2015). It remains important to understand better the specific communities and territories most directly affected by rapid changes in patterns of extraction and energy production. Much needs to be learned about what justice means to these communities, how the promises and realities of just transition differ – if at all – from previous promises and experiences of extraction and development, what their own visions for the future might be, and how they can mobilise their power to shape them.
The gap between current global policy debates and the lived realities of communities on the front lines of transition is not only an issue for those concerned with ensuring that energy transitions are just. It is also an issue for governments and corporate actors who are seeking to accelerate investment in green energy, as local resistance is increasingly leading to costly delays and even to the cancellation of projects that aim to ramp up the extraction of critical minerals and scale up the generation of renewable energy (Marín, this IDS Bulletin). Understanding transition from the front lines can have important policy and practice consequences.
In this IDS Bulletin, we bring together authors from both the global South – in particular Latin America and Africa – and the global North, covering a wide range of communities and territories that are affected by and engaging with different dimensions of the energy transition. In addition to this introduction and the concluding article by Peter Newell, we have eight articles from authors working across four continents. The authors themselves are diverse: some are academics from different disciplines, often engaged directly in these processes in their own countries, while some are practitioners who have long histories of working on energy issues.
Some of the cases, such as those from Colombia, Nigeria, the UK and the US, focus largely on the impacts of transitions away from fossil fuels, even as newer forms of extraction and enclosure linked to the energy transition are also emerging. Others look more deeply at these newer forms, especially in Brazil, Portugal, Argentina, and Chile, where the scramble to extract critical minerals for ‘green’ energy is in full swing. Some examine experiences across different modes of energy production, including those in Zimbabwe and Mozambique, which simultaneously experience the intensification of hydrocarbon-based energy extraction, and the rise of new extractive patterns linked to ‘clean’ energy, even as both old and new energy sources bypass large swathes of the population who lack access to any affordable and reliable sources of electricity at all.
Within these diverse settings, we are interested in how people experience this set of contemporary transitions, which build on long histories of colonial extraction and failed promises of development. We are also interested in how they understand and experience the different kinds of justice that the energy transition may seek to promote, including restorative, relational, and gender justice, as well as distributive and procedural forms of justice. Finally, we want also to understand people’s own agency in this process. We find in these communities long histories of action and resistance developed around encounters with earlier transitions – so how can the lessons, networks, and repertoires of resistance from the past be used to strengthen their voices and power in this current moment?
In the following sections of this article, we first examine the similarities and differences across these sites of extraction and energy production, suggesting that while usually positioned as peripheries within their own countries and regions, whether in the global North or South, they also have rich and relevant cultures and knowledges to bring to bear on issues of energy transition and climate justice (Section 2). We then turn, in Section 3, to the understandings of justice articulated by people within these ‘peripheral’ territories, and the extent to which these draw upon a perception of the new dynamics of the energy transition as actually a continuation of long-term patterns of exclusion. In Section 4, we turn to strategies and challenges of protection, resistance, and change across the sites. In Section 5, we home in on activist strategies based on critiquing the narratives of ‘green transition’ and formulating and promoting counter-narratives embodying the collective visions of frontline actors. Finally, in Section 6, we conclude with some brief lessons emerging across the cases for policymakers, donors, and civil society actors seeking to keep alive the hope that a just energy transition can be achieved.
Whether they are articulated in corporate boardrooms, national government departments, or the transnational deliberations of processes like the UNFCCC, visions of energy transition all too often ignore the complex and contested realities of the diverse territories and communities in which transition actually plays out (MacNeil and Beauman 2022). The solar farms, wind turbine arrays, and gigafactories that they demand are located in specific places and are built from minerals that are sourced from other specific places – which may be thousands of miles apart, but which generally share the common experience of being politically and socioculturally, as well as geographically, distant from the centres of decision-making power.
The people for whom these territories are home are all too often marginalised, racialised, and/or stigmatised. For many communities – particularly Indigenous Peoples – the places targeted for the extraction of critical minerals or large-scale renewable energy generation may be sites of ancestral memory, whose mountains and rivers are sacred. For other communities – particularly those descended from formerly enslaved people, like Brazil’s Quilombolas or Colombia’s Afro-descendants – they may have served as a refuge from processes of colonial violence and dispossession. The collective, reciprocity-based ways of life that tend to emerge in these ‘out of the way places’ (Tsing 1993) have a logic that works well for sustainable stewardship of natural resources but to which the individualised and profit-maximising ideologies that underpin top-down transition-planning are entirely alien.
Some of the places most directly impacted by energy transition are being exposed to processes of extraction and expropriation that – while they may contain echoes of past extractive cycles – are new, in that they include the extraction of newly valuable minerals (such as lithium) or new forms of land use (such as enclosure for large-scale solar energy generation) and may also be driven by new political and financial alliances. Other places, by contrast, have developed a set of identities and memories that are deeply tied to energy extraction – and they may have their own traditional structures of social solidarity (often centred on the role of organised labour) that have grown up around these extractive industries and which are threatened with dissolution when mines are closed or power plants decommissioned. What the articles in this IDS Bulletin show us is that both sets of communities are all too often politically marginalised – and therefore easily ignored by transition planners. Even when they are the focus of policy interventions – whether to establish compensation programmes for communities impacted by extraction of critical minerals or to generate jobs for people left unemployed by decommissioning – these interventions frequently take the form of top-down initiatives that pay scant attention to local understandings, priorities, knowledges, or cultures (Schwartzman and Walk, this IDS Bulletin).
The cases from Argentina, Chile, Portugal, and Brazil illustrate how ‘transition’ investments may drive conflict within communities, as different local and regional elites compete for control of resources, different community leaders are threatened or co‑opted, and different family members are offered jobs or denied access to the natural resources on which their livelihoods depend. Understanding local responses to energy transition initiatives therefore requires us not only to think about power and political economy, i.e. which forms of power help to restrict who can get access to what, or to broaden the scope for challenging existing hierarchies and exclusions, but also to consider intersectionality, i.e. which forms of marginalisation along lines such as class, race, or gender combine to deepen exclusion, or to give rise to new forms of solidarity (Sovacool et al. 2023).
The cases from Argentina, Chile, Portugal, and Brazil illustrate how ‘transition’ investments may drive conflict within communities, as different local and regional elites compete for control of resources, different community leaders are threatened or co‑opted, and different family members are offered jobs or denied access to the natural resources on which their livelihoods depend. Understanding local responses to energy transition initiatives therefore requires us not only to think about power and political economy, i.e. which forms of power help to restrict who can get access to what, or to broaden the scope for challenging existing hierarchies and exclusions, but also to consider intersectionality, i.e. which forms of marginalisation along lines such as class, race, or gender combine to deepen exclusion, or to give rise to new forms of solidarity (Sovacool et al. 2023).
In these peripheralised territories, promises of a ‘just transition’ – particularly if framed as simply a technical process of moving from one energy source to another, or as another neoliberal development project – are met with scepticism. Regions and territories like these are marked by communities’ memories of extractive economies over which they have little control, and of being targeted by a series of externally imposed development programmes that mobilise narratives promising improvement of community circumstances, usually formulated without their inputs.
For instance, the case from Brazil (Calafate-Faria et al., this IDS Bulletin) points to previous ideological justifications for extraction, be it of the gemstones that fed previous mining cycles, or the iron ore whose exports burgeoned during the ‘commodities boom’ of the early 2000s. Under what Bringel and Svampa (2024) call the new global ‘decarbonisation consensus’, these regions find themselves up against an ideology again touting the promise of development – this time through lithium mining – while still reinforcing a model of dependency. The Colombia case (Peña Niño et al., this IDS Bulletin) outlines in detail elements of the dominant fossil-fuel narrative, including that ‘There is no future without oil’ (p284), and that ‘Hydrocarbons are essential for Colombia’s self-sufficiency’ (p285).
In the UK, promises of the revival of former mining towns rest on securing foreign investment for renewable energy technologies, replicating old patterns (Wainwright et al., this IDS Bulletin). Similar patterns are found in the case of Appalachia (Schwartzman and Walk, this IDS Bulletin), a long-standing recipient of US federal government-promoted regional development models which take a neoliberal approach to transition, ignoring or even weakening local struggles which seek to challenge underlying structures of corporate control and damaging mining practices. The dominant narratives tend to construct these regions as ‘empty’, ‘abandoned’, or ‘deprived’ (a terra nullius or ‘Valley of Misery’, as described in the article on Brazil and Portugal by Calafate-Faria et al., this IDS Bulletin), negating the rich social and biological diversity that flourishes within them.
Energy extraction and the associated consumption of land and resources are deeply enmeshed with the livelihoods, identities, and power relations of those on the front lines. Across these settings, promises of just transition thus far have been seen as extensions of centuries-long colonialism, extractivism, and exclusionary, unequal development. As Chiponda (this IDS Bulletin) points out, Zimbabwe’s energy system was built by colonial officers not to serve local needs but to aid the extractive process. Recounting the experience of lithium extraction in both Brazil and Portugal, Calafate-Faria et al. (this IDS Bulletin) examine ‘how the expansion of “green” extractivist frontiers, under the guise of energy transition, reproduces colonial patterns of territorial dispossession and ecological degradation’ (p25). These grounded local accounts give experiential depth to the more academically framed argument that the contemporary energy transition is simply ‘green colonialism’, with elements familiar from earlier phases of colonialism, extraction, and resource control (Bringel and Svampa 2024; Fairhead, Leach and Scoones 2012; Hamouchene 2023).
This experience is not confined to the global South. The articles on peripheral regions of the global North – be it rural Appalachia in the US, the industrial and former mining areas of northern England, or the mountainous north of Portugal – show how technocratic, top-down visions of energy transition ride roughshod over the uneven terrains of development and inequality bequeathed by previous transitions. Recent work by European scholars on coal-producing regions of Europe documents the ‘legacy injustices that have emerged from the historical carbon-intensive industry [which are] frequently reproduced within transitions’ (Hermwille et al. 2025: 1), a point also made in the forthcoming book on power and just transitions in Appalachia (Gaventa and Schwartzman 2026, forthcoming).
They and others in the field untangle these intertwined legacy injustices, revealing distributional inequalities (shaping who will benefit economically), recognitional inequalities (determining whose knowledge and identity will count), and procedural injustices (influencing whose voices will be heard) (Heffron and McCauley 2017; Williams and Doyon 2019). For those who have experienced long histories of injustice due to prior episodes of energy extraction, understandings of restorative or reparatory justice are also important (Sovacool et al. 2023). The unevenness of the playing field on which today’s transitions occur must at least be recognised – and should ideally be redressed – in any strategies for achieving ‘just’ transitions.
Our case studies give vivid examples of these intertwining inequalities. Distributional injustice is perhaps best exemplified by the well-documented impact of job losses in historic mining communities when mines close, seen here in the cases of Appalachia and North East England, and in Nigeria, where oil revenues provide funding for government services. Less attention has been paid to the impact of these losses on women, who often depend on the informal economies surrounding male-dominated extractive industries, as Chiponda’s (this IDS Bulletin) narrative on gender and just transition so powerfully reminds us. Economic alternatives offered in the name of ‘just transitions’ in many such areas have so far failed to offer comparable benefits.
Recognitional injustices and inequalities stand out in several articles in relation to indigenous knowledge and local world views on land, water, and natural resources, which are invaluable in preserving cultures and co-constructing alternative visions of development, as highlighted in the Colombia case (Peña Niño et al., this IDS Bulletin). The study of lithium mining in peripheries within Brazil and Portugal shows how ‘technocratic narratives of sustainability overshadow local knowledge and ecosocial diversity’ (Calafate-Faria et al., this IDS Bulletin, p25). On the ‘battlefields’ (Long and Long 1992) of these clashing knowledges and cultural understandings of the problem at hand, the mining companies’ ‘discourse of compensation’ fails to address ‘irreversible cultural and ecological losses’ suffered by local communities (Calafate-Faria et al., this IDS Bulletin). As Marín writes with reference to Chile and Argentina, ‘At the heart of many of these strategies lies a struggle over territorial knowledge politics: not just a dispute over land or water, or over who captures the benefits, but over whose visions of development and sustainability are legitimised in public policy’ (this IDS Bulletin, p131).
Reinforcing these distributional and recognitional injustices are procedural exclusions that constrain voice and representation in key sites and processes where decisions about transition are made. As Newell points out in the concluding article, key decisions are made in national and often global fora, where multiple forms of exclusion – geographic, linguistic, bureaucratic, and more – limit the participation of local actors. These exclusions characterise the politics of COPs, as certain groups are allowed in, others hold alternative processes outside of the formal process, and many whose voices are important are not included at all. This is exemplified by the experience of the ‘Traditional Peoples’ from Latin America and Africa. They had to mobilise to demand inclusion in the UNFCCC deliberations in Bonn in 2025 after being blocked from occupying the space that had already been formally created for ‘local communities’ to participate alongside Indigenous Peoples but which had hitherto remained empty (Fanzeres 2025).
Even at national and local level, the case studies in this IDS Bulletin reveal a striking absence of meaningful engagement of frontline-affected communities in consultative spaces on energy transition. Ibezim-Ohaeri’s article evinces the absence of these voices from Nigeria’s national Energy Transition Plan (ETP), where ‘The exclusion of local participation in the national transition agenda finds its most significant expression in the ETP’s silence on communities’ (Ibezim-Ohaeri, this IDS Bulletin, p104). In parallel, the ‘uniform silence of businesses on environmental restoration, clean‑up, and remediation’ – a critical concern of local communities – ‘is deafening’ (ibid., p104). Elsewhere, even where consultations are mandatory, national-level spaces and processes for policy engagement are often dominated by powerful economic actors, as in Colombia, and ignore local knowledge and voices, for example in consultations on lithium mining in Brazil and Portugal. In her extensive review of participatory processes on mining in Argentina and Chile, Marín points to several common shortcomings, including late-stage symbolic participation and fragmented or exclusive engagement with select actors, amid ‘disregard for local knowledge, values, and priorities’ (this IDS Bulletin, p137).
Less often mentioned among the historical legacies of extraction suffered by frontline communities are the environmental injustices left behind by extractive industries as they rush to divest in line with the energy transition. The polluters are not paying for the environmental destruction left by unchecked oil extraction in the Niger Delta, as we see in the article from Nigeria (Ibezim‑Ohaeri, this IDS Bulletin), or the ‘mountain top removal’ that has denuded Appalachian coalfields (Schwartzman and Walk, this IDS Bulletin). Communities are seeking restorative justice, such as the legal action brought by Niger Delta communities against Shell to prevent it from selling off its drilling sites without first covering clean-up costs (Gaughran 2024). Some are also arguing for ‘reparative justice’, inspired by debates on the legacies of slavery, colonisation, and indigenous genocide (Fitz-Henry and Klein 2024; Sovacool et al. 2023). From this perspective, a transition which does not account for and remediate environmentally and socially destructive legacies of past extraction is not a just transition.
Given the multiple historical forms of injustice which surround energy production, struggles for just transition therefore must involve struggles for multiple forms of justice – be they distributive, recognitional, procedural, restorative, or reparative. These are highly interrelated, both in one place and across geographies, which means that struggles for a just transition must be waged on multiple fronts. As Chiponda reminds us, referring to compensating workers who lose their jobs as a result of coal mine closures in South Africa as part of a process that is also seeing the opening of new mines for lithium which threaten traditional livelihoods in Zimbabwe,
You are not supposed to do injustice so that you can fund justice elsewhere [...] We cannot do harm in Bikita, closing the coal mines and expanding lithium mining, so that they can have a just transition in South Africa. It is not supposed to work like that, right? There is supposed to be a just transition at the point where the critical minerals are being extracted, and there is supposed to be justice where the mines are closing. (Chiponda, this IDS Bulletin, p93)
Some writers argue against using this ‘polyvalent’ concept of justice at all, holding that it eclipses the overall need to transform structures of energy production shaped by ‘historical relations of power and inequality’ (Stevis 2023: 44). Indeed, as the cases in this IDS Bulletin illustrate, different groups on the front line are differently affected by these intertwined injustices, and the struggles for transition can all too easily become segmented around particular groups and identities. Framing and advocating for these as many different ‘justices’ may complicate the task of building alliances across the multiple fronts of struggle, and highlights the advantages of adopting a bigger, cross-cutting narrative to hold all of these efforts together. In Section 4, we ask what strategies may be used to transform power, build alliances, and develop new, more inclusive visions of change.
For many activists and communities at the front line whose history, identities, livelihoods, and politics are entwined with energy production and use, energy transition is not a technical process of switching from one form of energy to another. Rather, a just transition needs to be a profound transformation of social, political, and economic structures, which inevitably involves challenging and re-configuring power relations to generate new models of development which transcend historic patterns of extractivism and natural resource exploitation. On this, frontline actors concur with many scholars writing more recently about just transition (Avelino et al. 2024; Newell 2021). As the article about worker-led change in the UK puts it, ‘Ultimately, overcoming the climate crisis requires a fundamental shift in the balance of power, both within production and in relation to the state’ (Wainwright et al., this IDS Bulletin, p250). As pointed out in the Nigeria case study, ‘[P]olicies alone are not enough to force the shifts in power dynamics, attitudes, practices, relationships, and governance’ which will be needed (Ibezim-Ohaeri, this IDS Bulletin, p114). For Chiponda (this IDS Bulletin), ‘[W]e want to transition, but we do not want to reproduce extractivism’ (p91). For this, she calls on women to build ‘women-driven, women-informed, women-centred, decentralised renewable energy systems’ (p93) rooted in local knowledge and community power, in line with the ‘feminist energy systems’ advocated by Bell, Daggett and Labuski (2020).
But what strategies are available to frontline communities to strengthen their voices and build power from below to influence energy transitions? In their book The Politics of Green Transformations, Scoones, Leach and Newell (2015) neatly summarise four narratives of how change will occur. On the one hand, there is a technology-based approach, according to which the challenge is simply the replacement of one form of energy technology with another, for example, substituting renewable sources of energy for fossil-fuel-based ones. A second approach involves commodifying and marketising nature, leading to ‘nature-based’ solutions, often private-sector-led – for instance, the sale of carbon credits or for‑profit conservation as solutions to planetary protection. A third approach emphasises state‑led solutions, for instance, through stronger state regulation, investment in new technologies, and support for workers and communities adversely affected. Finally, there is a citizen-led pathway, with a focus on bottom-up forms of action through grass-roots innovation and social movements.
The articles in this IDS Bulletin speak to this fourth pathway. Yet they also remind us that each of these strategies interacts with and shapes the context for the others. A dominant focus on technology negates local knowledges and experiences, as the authors of the article on Brazil and Portugal argue (Calafate‑Faria et al., this IDS Bulletin). A narrative involving commodifying and marketising nature gives rise to new narratives based on society and state defending nature and territories, as we see in the case of Colombia (Peña Niño et al., this IDS Bulletin). And state-led narratives have produced empty spaces for citizen consultation, which must be challenged, as in the cases of Argentina and Chile (Marín, this IDS Bulletin).
In the large body of work on just transitions, the fourth pathway has received less scholarly attention than the others. What studies do exist, Newell et al. (2023, 2024) argue, are based on countries of the global North and certain associated assumptions about the nature of the state, the presence of well-organised unions and civil society organisations (CSOs), and the democratic space for engaging without reprisals. What strategies, they ask, ‘are available to citizens where the state may be weak or have limited authority or legitimacy, where trade unions are marginalised, and where civic space is limited’? (Newell et al. 2024: 3). The articles in this IDS Bulletin give us some clues.
They remind us, for instance, that on this question, we do not start with a blank slate. Just as the power dynamics and exploitation of contemporary top-down transition models are not new, neither are the forms of resistance, organising, participating, visioning, and struggle which animate these debates. These too have left their legacies, not only of distrust and scepticism of promises from above, but also of leadership, networks, movement-building, organising, and civic skills which can drive change from below. While these legacies of action are assets to build upon when facing the future, they should not be romanticised. Many past movements have been short-lived, or met with violence and other repercussions, leaving legacies of fear as well as lessons for survival and success. These histories of action vary in nature and degree: contrast the long years of civic mobilisation underpinning the protests that secured local legal changes in Chile and Argentina as documented by Marín (this IDS Bulletin), with the scant grass-roots engagement on energy transition in Mozambique’s civil society landscape described by Pereira et al. (this IDS Bulletin).
The Newell et al. (2024) review is organised around three important approaches to driving citizen-led change: amplifying voices, creating spaces, and building alliances. Insights into each of these emerge strongly from these articles.
4.1 Amplifying voices
The cases here illustrate the multiplicity of voices speaking out. In Argentina, Chile, and Brazil, as reflected in the articles by Marín and by Calafate-Faria et al. (this IDS Bulletin), the struggles are grass roots and territorially anchored, whereas in some aid‑recipient global South regions, environmental and human rights advocacy is dominated by the voices of international non‑governmental organisations (NGOs) or capital city policy thinktanks, as in Mozambique (Pereira et al., this IDS Bulletin). While the latter two sets of voices bring the benefits of connections to international advocacy platforms such as the Extractives Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) or Publish What You Pay (PWYP), they often lack strong links to local affected communities.
Inevitably, when the voices are many, various identities, histories, and contexts can differentiate, divide, and even polarise them. Collectives representing certain stakeholders affected by energy reforms can marginalise others: trades unions are crucial voices in the clamours for justice in the cases from the UK (Wainwright et al., this IDS Bulletin) and South Africa (Chiponda, this IDS Bulletin), yet Chiponda shows how their focus on formally employed male labour marginalises the voices of southern African women, equally but differently affected.
Deep contentions over the future of fossil-fuel extraction and the feasibility of alternative livelihoods also pit voices against each other, illustrated starkly here in the cases of Appalachia (Schwartzman and Walk, this IDS Bulletin), Colombia (Peña Niño et al., this IDS Bulletin), and Brazil where even families are split (Calafate-Faria et al., this IDS Bulletin). Several articles reveal progressive voices fissured along issue lines, with different voices calling for gender justice, environmental, economic, or climate justice, neatly demonstrated by Chiponda’s (this IDS Bulletin) account of how initially human rights or gender rights activists questioned the relevance of mining to their cause.
The narrative-building initiative described in Colombia (Peña Niño et al., this IDS Bulletin), on the other hand, was conceived to respond to these challenges of amplifying diverse voices. Despite embracing very diverse actors in a highly complex civil society and polarised political moment, the initiative afforded a safe space for deliberation and generated a shared metanarrative, demonstrating that a carefully designed process can deliver co‑constructed mobilising frameworks that bridge multiple positions.
4.2 Spaces of contestation
Voices are expressed through actions and engagement in multiple spaces, be they as ‘invited’ participation in formal, official spaces, or spaces ‘claimed’ and created through grass‑roots resistance and alternative, more informal action (Cornwall and Coelho 2006; Gaventa 2006). Many contributions to this IDS Bulletin describe a lack of spaces for meaningful consultation or participation (e.g. in Nigeria and Mozambique), echoing findings from an earlier study by several article authors included in this issue (British Academy 2022). This is often against a global backdrop, well documented elsewhere, of narrowing or closing civic space, particularly acute in energy-extracting countries and regions and associated especially – although no longer exclusively – with authoritarian regimes with long histories of excluding people’s voices and suppressing civic movements (Dutta et al. 2022). Where formal spaces for consultation or engagement are available or even mandatory, they are frequently commandeered by powerful corporate actors (Colombia), or ignore local knowledge and voices (Brazil, Portugal, Colombia). Opening up policy spaces or data to civil society does not equate to functional accessibility or accountability, as other studies have shown (Fox 2007; McGee and Edwards 2016).
But the absence of meaningful voices in formal consultative processes does not signify an absence of action. Articles in this IDS Bulletin document cases of advocacy to make the rules and processes of consultation more inclusive and empowering of marginalised perspectives as well as more strategically timed to permit real influence (Marín, this IDS Bulletin); the creation of civic-led consultation and deliberation processes to shape new narratives for energy futures (Peña Niño et al., this IDS Bulletin); accountability claims directed at corporate actors rather than at exclusionary, unresponsive state actors (Pereira et al., this IDS Bulletin); and down-scaling scenarios of action from national or company level to build interfaces and collaboration at the subnational or shop-floor level instead (Wainwright et al. and Ibezim-Ohaeri, this IDS Bulletin). Other groups may focus on creating their own spaces for action, for example, through promoting parallel, indigenous mechanisms for survival in the face of climate change, as we see in the case of Brazil (Calafate-Faria et al., this IDS Bulletin).
Many such strategies form part of a general resistance to dominant approaches to energy transition. Yet rather than blocking projects and initiatives outright, they potentially act as the ‘catalyst[s] for institutional and policy transformation’ needed to achieve more inclusive and just transitions, as argued by Marín (this IDS Bulletin, p124) for the Chilean and Argentinian cases. As such, they are creative responses to the barriers commonly faced by just transitions advocates: either closed policy spaces, or formal policy spaces where presence does not guarantee voice, and voice does not guarantee influence (Rocha Menocal and Sharma 2008).
4.3 Alliances
While amplifying voice and creating or re-shaping invited spaces are important strategies, the sites where power can be shifted are often disconnected from one another. The disconnects may be ‘horizontal’ across different issues or sectors, as seen in Colombia where world views and positions vary by ethnic and territorial identities. Or they may be ‘vertical’ across local, national, and global scales, as in Mozambique where Pereira et al. (this IDS Bulletin, p179) refer to ‘two distinct groups of CSOs’, one Maputo-based, the other in the provinces; or in Chiponda’s account (this IDS Bulletin) of bringing stories from Zimbabwe and Africa to Washington DC.
Activists commonly face attempts by media and corporate actors to divide them, exploiting differences in priorities between workers and communities, environmentalists and social entrepreneurs, and urban consumers and frontline residents in rural areas. Divisive tactics described in the articles in this IDS Bulletin include the ‘insider vs outsider’ framing in media coverage of the mountain mobilisation in Appalachia referred to by Schwartzman and Walk, and the mining companies’ efforts to buy off Jequitinhonha Valley frontline communities described by Calafate-Faria et al.
Alliance-building is critical to counter these divisive tactics and bridge the disconnections between spaces, priorities, and actors who may not have collaborated before (Ciplet 2022; Ciplet and Harrison 2020; Cock 2019). Several strategies of horizontal alliance-building can be seen in the articles. In some of the stories of worker visioning in the UK, reaching out of the workplace to build labour–community alliances was critical, and doing so strengthened the power of both groups (Wainwright et al., this IDS Bulletin). We are reminded too of the importance as well as the challenges of ‘vertical’ alliance-building between local, national, and global spaces and actors. Newell’s concluding article points to ‘the gap between those making policies about visions, strategies, and financing for just transitions and those whose lives are impacted by such decisions’ (p338), especially given ‘technocratic, legalistic, economistic’ (ibid.) and geographic barriers. A number of regional and global alliances addressing just energy transition are emerging which, he argues, ‘can forge these vertical alliances between the local and the global: amplifying local struggles, exposing violence, sharing resources, supporting legal activism, and pressuring states and international institutions through coordinated campaigns and mobilising key publics and activist communities’ (p342).
From these accounts, several points about strategies for change are clear. First, with so many diverse voices from the margins that need to be heard, concertation across the various activist agendas and kinds of social actors associated with the energy transition helps to avoid cacophony or ineffective expenditure of civic energy. Second, the spaces in which activists engage are a matter for careful and strategic choices: securing access to closed spaces can be all-consuming yet result in negligible scope for influence; invited spaces, for all their limitations, at least provide some access to distant ‘advocacy targets’; and while claimed spaces belong to the activists, no powerful policy actor is bound by what goes on in them. Third, whether it is to access the formal energy policy spaces and be listened to there or convincingly to expose these spaces as co-opted and lacking broad-based legitimacy, the many and diverse actors asking questions about dominant transition models are stronger when they cohere around a critique and a vision for change. It is this last point that perhaps affords most new learning: how building narratives to challenge state- or corporate-led narratives can empower just transition advocates.
The activists in these articles face various barriers to presence, voice, and influence. Many contend with unresponsive, undemocratic states; unaccountably powerful extractive companies and ‘green transition’ enterprises; and/or the deteriorating quality and safety of civic space. Some face the challenges of unifying diverse voices, overcoming the biases of policy spaces that privilege some voices over others, or making the lived experience of marginalised communities intelligible and admissible as evidence in the eyes of national and international decision makers.
Contributions to this IDS Bulletin lay bare the narratives that dominate contemporary energy transition debates, unmasking the ‘green transition’ unfolding in their contexts as neoliberal, unjust, exclusionary, and perpetuating the status quo rather than transformative. Wielded by financially and politically powerful actors with vested interests in fossil fuels pursuing ‘plug and play’ strategies (Newell 2021), the dominant narratives are framed to leave little space for debating or proposing alternative visions or development models to the extractivist one. Nonetheless, all of the experiences recounted in this IDS Bulletin involve the collective development and articulation of a narrative or vision for change, some more centrally and explicitly than others – most notably the process led by the Natural Resource Governance Institute (NRGI) in Colombia (Peña Niño et al., this IDS Bulletin). These visions and narratives share two central characteristics.
First, they are decidedly distinct from and counterposed to prevailing dominant narratives of energy transition. Second, they are based on the knowledge of those most affected, which inheres in their livelihoods (e.g. workers in the UK, rural smallholders in Portugal and Nigeria, male miners and informal women workers in Zimbabwe and South Africa), indigenous identity (e.g. in Brazil, Colombia, Chile, and Argentina), and territorial rootedness (e.g. in Brazil, Portugal, Colombia, Chile, and Mozambique).
In every article, building counter-narratives and alternative visions starts from recognising and affirming different knowledges and historical traditions – ones which are often excluded from the technical and dominant knowledges in which narratives of energy transition are often cast (Hermwille et al. 2023). We see examples of how indigenous, Afro-descendant, and socio-ecological world views in Brazil, Colombia, and Portugal are channelled into mainstream media and policy debates; how neglected narratives and knowledges of women in Zimbabwe can offer different views of the impacts of transition; and how the knowledge of shop-floor workers in the UK can be harnessed to envisage and enact alternative forms of production. Narratives and visions co-developed between sometimes unlikely allies give visibility to their collective subaltern knowledge. The strength of numbers and the connections these allies find in the narrative-building process enable them to position themselves more confidently in the spaces that matter and operate more effectively there – to ‘open a crack in the “world of knowledge”’ (Calafate‑Faria et al., (this IDS Bulletin, p47).
These alternative narratives and visions, while still propositional and struggling for profile and popularity, are significant. Their justice-oriented re-framings of energy transition juxtapose the ‘complexity of… interrelationships’ with the prevailing ‘reductionism of decarbonisation’ (ibid.). In certain cases, these processes can be argued to raise the bar for quality, legitimacy, and democratic outcomes of state-led consultations and energy policy reforms, for instance in Colombia, and even to transform institutions and policy processes more broadly towards more environmentally and socially sustainable development, as argued by Marín (this IDS Bulletin) in the cases of Chile and Argentina.
In the processes of building these narratives and visions, people representing marginalised frontline communities and organisations have entered new spaces and forged new alliances. The processes described bring urban-based, policy-literate, technically competent NGOs, CSOs, and researchers together with grass-roots communities (Colombia, Mozambique, and Appalachia); actors whose starting positions on emotive issues such as labour rights or critical mineral extraction seemed irreconcilable (e.g. in the UK and Zimbabwe-focused articles); and local government officials dependent on mining revenues for funding services with environmental defenders (e.g. in Argentina and Chile). Deliberation and compromise feature centrally in many of the scenarios described. Some of these encounters show all the signs of becoming lasting alliances: one of the most important outcomes of the Colombia initiative is reported to be ‘a strengthened social fabric’ (Peña Niño et al., this IDS Bulletin, p296); and the communities of Barroso, Portugal, and Jequitinhonha, Brazil (Calafate-Faria et al., this IDS Bulletin) cite the ‘community sociability, inter-family and inter-community solidarity networks’ strengthened by the struggles as one of the foundations of ‘sustainable society–nature relations’ (p47). The initiatives described are themselves processes of defending civic space and strengthening civil society, often in the times and places where these are under most stress.
The social movement organising entity Movement Generation has written that ‘An economy based on extracting from a finite system faster than the capacity of the system to regenerate will eventually come to an end – either through collapse or through our intentional re-organisation. Transition is inevitable. Justice is not’ (Movement Generation Justice and Ecology Project 2021: 3, emphasis in the original). For those donors and policymakers seeking to strengthen the odds for justice in energy transition, a number of strategic implications emerge from the articles in this IDS Bulletin.
First, and central to the purpose of this IDS Bulletin, is the recognition that to be just, a transition must include consideration of the voices, knowledges, and realities of communities most affected, both for intrinsic reasons of justice as well as for instrumental reasons of building the social acceptance and political sustainability of new visions for energy futures. While attention often focuses on the polarised positions in these change processes – for example, those who are resisting transition versus those who promote it – Marín’s work (this IDS Bulletin) reminds us that engagement and even confrontation between differing positions can be an important element for driving innovation and building more inclusive governance.
Second, while the language of ‘just transition’ is relatively new in policy circles, for many of these communities directly affected, it is just another chapter in a long history of failed promises of development from above, a new language which seeks to justify old patterns of extraction without changing underlying relations of power and control. However, this case of ‘old wine in new bottles’ has a positive flipside: the long and rich history of organising, resisting, researching, and speaking out on energy-related issues in many of these communities, which has created strong capacities and networks. Recognising and building on such historic agency is an important starting point for those seeking to offer support from the outside. At the same time, these experiences and capacities are uneven. In some communities, ong histories of authoritarianism or patriarchy have limited the scope for building agency, while in other places, quite robust capacities are already in place. The adage about development support applies: one size does not fit all.
Third, a more just process that includes the perspectives of those on the front lines means recognising that from their vantage point, energy transition is not merely a technical process of moving from one form of energy to another. Rather, frontline actors experience it as a process laden with power relations, where legacies of past systemic injustices drive present and future demands for multiple and sometimes competing forms of justice. While this point, already made by many other scholars and practitioners and argued throughout this article, may appear simple, its implications are far from it. Strategies of change may start with issues of energy access and production and move on to questions of reparation and of non-repetition of old patterns of destruction in the newer quest for critical minerals, but they inevitably will also need to address more fundamental social, economic, and political transformations. With this comes a perspective on the many sites of ‘just transition’ that, while rooted in myriad local realities, is more systemic, holistic, and interconnected. It is crucial, then, that the actors in these different contexts can learn not only from their local historical experience but also from each other, so that the future does not replicate the past.
Fourth, those seeking to support change often use entry points such as resourcing advocacy for more inclusive policy processes, pressing for mandatory high-level spaces for consultation, and participation, or securing compensation for affected communities. These are all important, but in many of these settings – including Nigeria, Chile, Argentina, Colombia, and Mozambique – policies which purport to promote a just transition already exist, and many include precisely these sorts of provisions. As suggested by the cases in this IDS Bulletin, top-down policy initiatives, while sometimes helpful, can easily be co-opted by powerful forces or ignored altogether. The article by Schwartzman and Walk (this IDS Bulletin), for instance, suggests that ‘just transition’ interventions by donors have resulted in ostensibly apolitical narratives of change, which in the eyes of many people on the ground fail to deal with underlying and systemic inequalities. Thus, a more immediate and important priority than policy reform is to build the organisations and alliances that can help to shift power and ensure implementation and accountability of existing policies.
Fifth, just as the local movements and advocacy approaches described in these articles tend to be fragmented by issue, sector, or geography, so too is the infrastructure of support. Donors and policymakers often see transitions through their own specific lens – climate, energy, natural resource governance, gender, or livelihoods – but they are experienced on the ground as highly interconnected, intersectional processes. Support is needed for building alliances across, as well as within, communities, spaces, issues, and sectors. Building support for inclusive processes of developing counter-narratives of energy futures, as modelled here by the Colombia example (Peña Niño et al., this IDS Bulletin), is one important approach, but more are needed. And narratives alone are not enough: they need to be backed by well‑connected organisations and actors who can mobilise effectively to bring about change. Particularly critical, as we are reminded in the final article by Newell (this IDS Bulletin), are the vertical alliances that can link frontline struggles to global campaigns and to transnational decision-making processes like COP30.
Finally, for researchers and academics who work in the rapidly growing field of ‘energy transition’ or ‘just transitions’, we need to ‘check our knowledge’ and ensure that the multiple voices and knowledges of those communities at the front lines of change are not lost or obscured in our research. Knowledge helps to create narratives, and case after case in this IDS Bulletin reminds us that at the heart of just transition debates are questions of whose knowledges and whose narratives count. Vast as the literature on energy transition now is, many of the voices and experiences which we have tried to include here have hitherto been missing from it. We hope that this collection of a small sample of perspectives from the front lines of struggles will inspire others to use a lens ‘from below’ to examine the impacts and possibilities of the global search for just energy transitions.
1 This issue of the IDS Bulletin was supported in part by a Ford Foundation grant entitled ‘Learning at the Intersections of Just Transitions: Spaces for Engagement, Voices from the Margins and Cross-Sectoral Alliances in Resource-Rich Countries of the Global South’. The British Academy also provided earlier support for the project ‘Making Space for Dialogue on Just Transitions in Africa’s Oil and Gas Producing Regions’ (2022) which helped to lay the foundation for much of this work. The opinions expressed are the authors’ own and do not reflect the views of the funders.
2 John Gaventa, Fellow, Institute of Development Studies, UK.
3 Alex Shankland, Fellow, Institute of Development Studies, UK.
4 Rosie McGee, Fellow, Institute of Development Studies, UK.
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© 2025 The Authors. IDS Bulletin © Institute of Development Studies | DOI: 10.19088/1968-2025.135 This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original authors and source are credited and any modifications or adaptations are indicated.
The IDS Bulletin is published by Institute of Development Studies, Library Road, Brighton, BN1 9RE, UK. This article is part of IDS Bulletin Vol. 56 No. 2 November 2025 ‘Struggles for Justice in the Energy Transition: Voices from the Front Lines’; the Introduction is also recommended reading.