Gabe Schwartzman2 and Junior Walk3
Abstract In this article, Schwartzman and Walk reflect on the politics of economic transition programmes that have come to the southern West Virginia coalfields in the United States since 2015, following directly upon the scale-down of a direct action non-violent civil disobedience campaign protesting the environmental injustices of coal extraction. The article provides historical context for the shift between the contentious politics of protesting coal extraction to the largely uncontentious politics of economic transition efforts. The authors argue that while the protest movement maintained a clear analysis of power, many of the projects and programmes that aimed to diversify the economy or transition the economy into more prosperous terrain lacked an analysis of the power relations therein. The article blends a discussion of funding programmes with personal reflections to provide context for efforts to create a just transition in southern West Virginia.
Resumen En este artículo, Schwartzman y Walk estudian las políticas de los programas de transición económica promovidos en las regiones carboníferas del sur de West Virginia, Estados Unidos, desde 2015, luego de la conclusión de una campaña de acción directa y desobediencia civil no violenta que denunciaba las injusticias ambientales de la extracción de carbón. El artículo explora el contexto histórico para comprender el desplazamiento de las políticas conflictivas de protesta contra la extracción de carbón hacia políticas en gran medida no conflictivas basadas en los esfuerzos de transición económica. Los autores sostienen que, mientras el movimiento de protesta mantenía un análisis claro del poder, muchos de los proyectos y programas destinados a diversificar la economía o a impulsar una transición hacia un terreno más próspero carecían de un análisis de las relaciones de poder implicadas. El artículo combina una discusión sobre programas de financiamiento con reflexiones personales, ofreciendo un marco para comprender los esfuerzos de construir una transición justa en el sur de West Virginia.
Resumo Neste artigo, Schwartzman e Walk reflectem sobre a política dos programas de transição económica que chegaram aos campos de carvão do sul da Virgínia Ocidental, nos Estados Unidos, desde 2015, na sequência imediata de uma campanha de desobediência civil não violenta que protestava contra as injustiças ambientais da extracção de carvão. O artigo fornece um enquadramento histórico para a mudança entre a política contenciosa de protesto contra a extracção de carvão e a política, em grande medida não contenciosa, dos esforços de transição económica. Os autores argumentam que, enquanto o movimento de protesto mantinha uma análise clara das relações de poder, muitos dos projectos e programas destinados a diversificar a economia ou a reorientá-la para bases mais prósperas careciam de uma compreensão dessas mesmas relações de poder. O artigo combina uma análise dos programas de financiamento com reflexões pessoais, oferecendo contexto para os esforços de construção de uma transição justa no sul da Virgínia Ocidental.
Keywords just transition, Appalachia, coal, environmental justice, direct action, protest.
In the past decade, as coal mining steadily declined in the Appalachian Mountain region of the Eastern US, the idea of a ‘just transition’ away from fossil fuels became a central part of the discourse about the region’s future (Gaventa and Schwartzman 2026, forthcoming). In that same period, a militant protest movement against the environmental injustices of coal extraction scaled down. In this article, we reflect on the shift between what we term a ‘contentious politics of environmental justice’ and the efforts to support the region’s economic transition that followed.
In Appalachia, mining companies have continuously extracted coal since the 1880s. In the 2000s, coal extraction peaked in 2008, at over 500m US tonnes. From 2008 to 2023, ‘production fell by nearly 270 million short [US] tonnes, or a 62 percent drop’, largely due to increasingly cheap natural gas prices that outcompeted coal (Bowen, Christiadi and Lego 2023: 8). Appalachian coal employment followed closely behind, reaching a 20-year high in 2011 with 60,000 workers, and falling to 27,000 workers by 2023. Central Appalachia, the historic heartland of Appalachian coal production and the area most dependent on the coal economy, was hit hardest, including West Virginia, and parts of Kentucky and Virginia. There, coal employment fell over 62 per cent from 2011 to 2023, and the industry currently employs less than 15,000 individuals (Appalachian Regional Commission 2024).
In response, in the 2010s, many government agencies, non‑profit organisations, and grass-roots organising efforts began programmes to support a transition away from coal mining for Appalachian communities, often invoking the idea of a ‘just transition’ (Hess, McKane and Belletto 2021; Abraham 2017). These programmes, small in size and facing dire social and economic conditions, did not result in dramatic changes in the mountains (Shelton et al. 2022; Schwartzman 2021; Ray 2018). The rise in transition-related organising and activity did, however, correspond to a period that saw a decrease in contentious protests around environmental justice issues.
From the 1990s to the mid-2010s, many Central Appalachian communities had organised for equitable access to a clean and safe environment. Fights against strip mining4 (Barry 2014; Bell 2013; Shapiro 2010; Baller and Pantilat 2007), coal waste in drinking water (Nyden 2010; Halsema 2009), coal-dust air pollution (Burns 2007), and for children’s health and safety (Bell 2013) challenged the coal industry and their allies. We suggest that as coal mining declined, these contentious politics diminished, in some part because activists shifted their focus of work from anti-coal to pro-transition organising. In this article, rather than seeking to definitively detail why this shift occurred, we instead explore the context surrounding this shift, drawing largely on reflections from organisers and the authors’ own experiences as social movement participants.
The rest of this article is structured as follows. Section 2 provides a quick overview of our methodological approach. Section 3 outlines some of the theoretical concepts and arguments we put forward. Section 4 discusses the historical shift from contentious politics of environmental justice in the 1990s and 2000s, whereas Section 5 details the shift to uncontentious politics surrounding the rollout of ‘just transition’ solutions. Section 6 outlines some of the results of these just transition projects, while Section 7 concludes with reflections for what other politics could look like.
This article is written in dialogue between Junior Walk, a longtime West Virginia activist fighting for environmental justice in the coalfields, and Gabe Schwartzman, an academic who has been involved in Appalachian organising over the past 15 years. As a piece written between a career community organiser and an academic, we also blend personal reflection alongside analysis of grant programmes, pushing some boundaries of social science norms.
To augment our reflections, we bring together secondary sources on both environmental justice struggles in Appalachia and efforts for a just transition, offering a historical narrative through these that highlights the end of a direct action movement against strip mining and the beginning of economic transition efforts in the mid-2010s. We also use auto-ethnographic methods, analysing our own personal experiences as sites from which to consider this political landscape shift; because of this, we must be clear about who we are and how we have come to know and think about environmental justice movements in Appalachia.
Junior Walk comes from a working-class background, the first in many generations not to be a career coal worker, although he worked as a surface mine security guard before joining the anti-mountaintop removal (MTR) movement5 and in 2009 became a paid employee of an organisation working to stop coal mining. Gabe Schwartzman comes from a wealthy suburb of Washington DC and joined the anti-MTR movement in 2009 as a teenager on a gap semester before attending the University of California, Berkeley. Gabe has been involved in struggles for environmental justice in Appalachia since that time. He was a Fellow on the team that launched the first federal coal transition grant programme, the POWER (President’s (later Partnerships) for Opportunity and Workforce and Economic Revitalization) initiative.
Finally, we draw on semi-structured interviews that Gabe Schwartzman conducted across coalfield Appalachia between 2020 and 2025, as part of his ongoing research with activists and institutional actors involved in efforts surrounding a just transition in Appalachia. These interviews were conducted using snowball methodology, where activists and community economic development staff suggested others involved in just transition organising to be interviewed, and comprises 104 interviews in total.
In this article, we use the terms ‘power’, ‘politics’, and ‘neoliberalism’ at various points, and some basic definitions are useful. We use the term ‘politics’ to mean the process of contesting ideas, positions, and power relations within a society (for more on dissent and disagreement in politics, see Rancière 1995). In using the term ‘power’, we are building upon the work of scholars such as John Gaventa, Stephen Lukes, and Antonio Gramsci, who define power as a multidimensional process whereby elites control, direct, and dominate others in a society (Gaventa 1982; Lukes 2005; Gramsci, Nowell-Smith and Hoare 1971). Gaventa importantly notes that the relatively powerless have the ability to wield ‘power to’ author new ideas and forms of contestations, and draw upon ‘power within’, the seeds of change needed to author counter-hegemonic visions for the future (Gaventa 2019).
The environmental justice movement against MTR was an explicitly political movement in that it directly challenged status quo power relations: absentee landownership, coal companies, resource extraction, and inequality as the causes of exposure to the environmental hazards of MTR. Many of the programmes and projects that became associated with economic transition did not challenge inequality and resource extraction.
We argue that these programmes did not challenge inequality because they were largely informed by neoliberal ideology, the belief that governments should foremost work to support a free and unrestricted market (Hayek and Caldwell 2007). Within that ideological framework, inequality is seen as a natural process that could be alleviated through economic growth for all. Thus, these programmes generally aimed to create jobs by stimulating private industry, rather than directly providing services or benefits to people in the region. Neoliberalism as both ideology and policy framework, what Peck and Theodore define as ‘state enforced market rule’ (Peck and Theodore 2019: 247), emerged out of the crises of social welfare states in the late 1970s (Peck and Tickell 2002; Peck, Brenner and Theodore 2018). In that period, coalitions of neo-conservatives and free market liberals took power across much of the globe, dismantling and privatising basic public services, such as water, electricity, education, health care, guaranteed income, and aid to the poor, at the same time as deregulating capital and industry (MacLean 2017; Cooper 2017). While scholars argue that neoliberal ideology has entered a period of potentially terminal crisis (Bello 2022; Davies and Gane 2021; Brown 2019; Fraser 2019), much social policy in the US remains firmly within the neoliberal playbook, as economic transition efforts in Appalachia illustrate.
Environmental justice movements in Appalachia have, since the 1960s, focused on banning strip mining for coal, a dangerous and environmentally degrading practice that increases risks of flooding, landslides, and water contamination across coalfield communities (Montrie 2003). This organising, including widespread protests and civil disobedience, resulted in the passage of the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act (SMCRA) (passed in 1977),6 which regulated but did not ban surface mining. In the 1990s, a new movement arose to once again seek a ban on strip mining but now confronted mines with greatly increased scale and environmental devastation – MTR (Baller and Pantilat 2007; Barry 2014).
The anti-MTR movement began with community members in the coalfields protesting mudslides, water contamination, and fly-rock falling through homes (resulting in the killing of a child, Jeremy Davidson, in 2005) (Burns 2007), with locals leading civil disobedience and direct action to slow the expansion of mines. Thousands of activists were arrested between the late 1990s and 2015 (Shapiro 2010; Barry 2014; Bell 2013). Activists in various communities, such as Rawl and Prenter, West Virginia, successively and very publicly sued coal companies for poisoning their drinking water with coal slurry - cancer-causing coal waste (Halsema 2009). Concerned citizens in places like Martin County, Kentucky, and Charleston, West Virginia, took up years-long campaigns to restore safe drinking water after slurry and coal-related chemicals spilled into water intakes (Cromer and Draper 2019).
It is important to note that the anti-MTR movement was part of a long lineage of community organising in Appalachia. Coal communities had long resisted exploitation from coal-mining companies and organised for an end to poverty in Appalachia. From the 1880s to the 1990s, coal communities launched successive rounds of militant labour organising, including various armed insurrections, the largest being the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921 (Savage 1990; Green 2015). In the 1960s, communities mobilised for greater control over and access to federal funding associated with the War on Poverty, a set of federal reforms launched by President Lyndon B. Johnson intended to lift the masses out of poverty (Perry 2011). In the 1980s and 1990s, the United Mine Workers of America, the coal miner’s union, mobilised mass civil disobedience to resist ‘right to work’ laws that enabled coal companies to break union contracts (Brisbin 2010). As strip mines exploded in scale in the 1990s, coal communities began concerted protest campaigns.
Southern West Virginia was a centre of the anti-MTR movement, and the Coal River Valley was a nexus of this struggle. There, community organisers became outspoken opponents of MTR, such as Judy Bonds, the Executive Director of Coal River Mountain Watch from 2001 until her untimely death in 2010. Mountain Justice, initially a student activist organisation opposing MTR, launched in 2005, organised some of its initial actions in the Coal River Valley, using direct action tactics, including non-violent civil disobedience, to temporarily halt mining operations (Shapiro 2010; Pfleger et al. 2012). In 2009, an offshoot of EarthFirst!, the anarchist environmental action network, launched Climate Ground Zero in the Coal River Valley, a non-violent civil disobedience campaign against MTR. Between 2009 and 2012, hundreds of activists, both locals and people mobilised from around the US, were arrested protesting MTR in southern West Virginia (Shapiro 2010; Pfleger et al. 2012).
In 2012, activists associated with Mountain Justice launched Radical Action for Mountains’ and People’s Survival (RAMPS) in the Coal River Valley, a continuation of the civil disobedience campaign (RAMPS Campaign 2015). That year, RAMPS mobilised a large action on the Hobet surface mine, known as the Mountain Mobilization, where several dozen young people and college students walked onto the mine and shut mining operations down. A right-wing, pro-coal movement had been mobilising, largely online, in the previous few years (Ryerson 2020; Bell and York 2010). The pro-coal movement successfully raised several hundred counter-protestors, many of them miners and miners’ families, to protest at Hobet and across the West Virginia coalfields in 2012. Media coverage largely portrayed the conflict between pro-coal and anti-MTR protestors as one of insiders (coal miners) versus outsiders (environmentalists) (Mountain Mobilization 2012).
Facing an increasingly polarising media and dangerous and costly protest environment, many of the MTR campaigns stopped using civil disobedience tactics. While little is written documenting that decision, both authors took part in conversations debating these choices. In addition, national protests around fossil fuels and climate change began to shift from opposition to coal towards opposition to pipelines, as did national environmental funding, with the Keystone XL pipeline7 protests beginning in 2011 and subsequent Tar Sands Blockade,8 in 2012, and the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL)9 protests launching in 2015 (Estes 2019; Bosworth 2019). Furthermore, coal production in Central Appalachia has steadily fallen since 2011 (Appalachian Voices 2024). In many ways, the decline of coal ushered in a moment when many institutions and activists across Appalachia implicitly offered a narrative that MTR would end on its own.
MTR has not, however, ended. In fact, in West Virginia, some counties have seen an increase in coal production between 2012 and 2025, including Logan County and Raleigh County (home, in part, to the Coal River Valley). In addition, across southern West Virginia, while many MTR sites have closed, several, notably on Coal River Mountain, continue to expand operations (Bowen et al. 2023; Bowen et al. 2018).
The end of the contentious civil disobedience anti-MTR campaign in southern West Virginia coincided with an overall decline in coal employment and production. As the numbers of laid-off miners grew and signs that the coal economy was not coming back multiplied, non-profit organisations, philanthropy, and state and federal agencies turned their attention to supporting mining communities. This largely came in the form of programmes that used the language of economic transition, just transition, and economic diversification, seeking to create new employment opportunities and enable new economies. These new efforts and institutions included the Just Transition Fund, the POWER initiative, and the Appalachian Regional Initiative for Stronger Economies (ARISE), among various other initiatives that we turn to in Section 5.
Much of the regional political energy, and at times the individuals involved in what became dubbed the ‘war on coal’, became a part of the efforts to create a just and sustainable transition for coal communities. In that shift, contentious politics transformed into largely uncontentious politics.
A poignant example of the shift in politics occurred with an economic transition programme in 2015 in Whitesville, a town of less than 5,000 people in the heart of southern West Virginia’s coalfields, where Junior Walk lives and works.
Figure 1 The mural on the wall of the former Coal River Mountain Watch office
Note: The mural on the side of Coal River Mountain Watch’s former office in Whitesville, after being vandalised with spray-painted stencils of bulldozers in 2008 (above). In response, anti-mountaintop removal activists painted themselves locked to the bulldozers with signs reading, ‘Stop Mountaintop Removal’ and ‘Toxic Air Kills – Save the Children’ (below). In 2015, the mural was painted over with eggshell white using funds from an economic transition programme. Photographer: Vernon Haltrom, Executive Director of Coal River Mountain Watch.
In response to the dire economic conditions associated with coal’s decades-long decline, including joblessness, businesses and services closing, high rates of drug addiction and poverty, Whitesville was selected as an awardee of the ‘Turn This Town Around’ technical assistance programme, which came with US$10,000. This was an initiative from the West Virginia Focus Magazine and the West Virginia Community Development Hub that sought to ‘inspire public leadership and engagement in struggling communities’ (Ray 2015), particularly areas that had witnessed the collapse of the coal industry since the 1980s (WV Living 2014).
Whitesville was also the home of Coal River Mountain Watch (CRMW), the grass-roots environmental justice organisation that had mobilised residents and international activists to stop MTR coal mining since 1998. Whitesville used the Turn This Town Around cash for beautification and clean-up. One of these beautification projects resulted in painting over the mural on the former CRMW office, a mountain landscape with bulldozers on it and protestors locked to the bulldozers, replacing it with an eggshell white wall (see Figure 1). Afterwards, local activists in Whitesville jokingly termed the programme ‘Burn this Town to the Ground’. The story of CRMW’s mural and the programmes that sought to support coal communities in a moment of transition is an illustrative vignette about how transition efforts were a departure from contentious politics. Local town leaders used their transition funding to erase a history of protest and challenge to the coal companies that perhaps some elites found embarrassing or unsettling.
Here, Junior Walk reflects on witnessing this shift, and the personal feeling of seeing people leave the movement:
There was a time, not too long ago when the energy, time, and effort of the majority of young progressives in West Virginia was spent on ushering in an end to the extractive coal industry. The question of why that is no longer the case is a sticky question, there are a few valid answers, and I don’t have all the answers. I can, however, speak to a few of the key factors that played a part in the dissolution of the anti-surface mining movement as we knew it. One of which being the rise in the language around a ‘just transition’ away from fossil fuels.
For over 15 years, I’ve worked for or with Coal River Mountain Watch, the only community organisation in West Virginia still dedicated to an end of the coal industry. Our staff and board is mainly made up of people from southern West Virginia, and we still do everything we can to be a thorn in the side of the coal industry. Our mission statement reads that we are ‘dedicated to ending mountaintop removal and helping to rebuild healthy, sustainable communities’. Ever since our inception as an organisation, we’ve been working on the firs part of that statement. Anything else would be putting the cart in front of the horse, so to speak.
The coal industry has amassed far too much political will, clout, power, however you want to put it. They would never allow any project to flourish in West Virginia that might stand a chance to usurp any of that power. That is why the coal industry must cease to exist entirely as an entity in West Virginia before any future for the economy of this place can be plotted and decided. This fact has been well known amongst the locals of the hills and hollers10 of West Virginia, much as a natural fact of life. Nothing new can grow until what is poisoning and impoverishing this place is razed to the ground.
Why then, did the notion take like kudzu11 amongst the progressive young organisers that were the backbone of the anti-MTR movement that it was time for a ‘just transition’ in Appalachia, whether the coal industry existed or not? I think the answer boils down to money. Funding economic diversification projects is an awful lot more safe than funding actual resistance to extractive industries.
In response here, Gabe Schwartzman reflects on his perception of a shift from contentious to uncontentious politics of transition.
I was one of those progressive young people tied into the anti-coal movement that became enamoured of the idea of ‘just transition’ in the mid-2000s. In 2009, I took part in the non-violent civil disobedience campaign and was arrested in protests twice that year. I continued to be involved over the subsequent three years. In 2014, after graduating college, I took a fellowship with USDA [US Department of Agriculture] Rural Development and found my way to be on the inter-agency working group launching the POWER initiative in 2015, which was directed as funding diversification and transition projects in the coalfields. The POWER initiative promised to bring unprecedented funding to coalfield communities to transform their economic conditions, and I was excited that there was a way to use state resources to support environmental justice in coalfield communities. In hindsight, very little of those resources reached the communities that needed them, and a lot of energy was spent that did not accomplish very much material benefit .
In the next sections, we examine some of these statements and ask why those resources did not reach many environmental justice-impacted communities, and why organisers in the coalfields chose to organise for a just transition. Our reflections are not definitive but instead point to a need to ask more questions about why this shift occurred and what the implications have been.
In the 2010s, neoliberal ideology structured the state-led and philanthropically funded programmes for Appalachia’s economic transition, where supporting coal communities frequently became narrowly defined as attempting to create jobs and small businesses through training and education programmes (Schwartzman 2021). Many former environmental justice organisers found themselves enrolled in developing these programmes or seeking funding from them.
One organiser in southern West Virginia reflected on the shift from environmental justice organising to economic transition work: ‘We played into their hand – it was all about jobs, jobs, jobs. And we lost that we were saying, stop poisoning people, and we started talking about jobs.’12
An economic development professional interviewed in 2022 put the shift in different terms:
What I was doing before I was at the [economic development entity] was environmental work… in West Virginia, during the War on Coal… Now we need to ask how we diversify or grow the economy and grow new businesses and industries and that kind of thing.13
The resulting projects and investments have not, however, overall, created widespread prosperity or significantly helped coal communities diversify their economies. Even within neoliberal metrics of jobs and small businesses, which mostly overlook the question of job quality, social services, or infrastructure, these programmes largely have not achieved success (Shelton et al. 2022; Morita 2021; Schwartzman 2021). This is in part because the investments are relatively small, and because of the technical inability of training programmes to manifest jobs that do not exist.
Key examples are programmes at the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC), a federal agency dedicated to economic development in the region that has regionally invested US$6bn since its founding in 1965 (Appalachian Regional Commission n.d.). Federal funding for transition first came to the region through ARC’s POWER initiative beginning in 2015. POWER ‘targets federal resources to help communities and regions that have been affected by job losses in coal mining, coal power plant operations, and coal-related supply chain industries due to the changing economics of America’s energy production’ (Appalachian Regional Commission 2018). Of the 126 awards made in West Virginia from 2015 to 2025, only 21 were targeted directly at these southwestern coalfield counties, totalling only US$16m of the US$500m invested in the southwestern coalfield counties. The rest of the funding went to less coal‑dependent locations in the state.
Those 21 grants were mainly focused on creating small businesses and jobs through training opportunities. Many of these were experimental, underfunded, and insincere, such as several week‑long training programmes for lavender farming on strip mines, in which participants had been led to believe they could access land to farm, but at the end of which they were left with only soft skills (Todd 2018). Elsewhere, programmes such as training coal miners to code for computing in Pennsylvania left participants without promised jobs and without adequate coding skills to secure employment (Robertson 2019).
Other POWER grants did provide funding for critical social services, but they were often couched within neoliberal logics of job training. One project, for instance, received US$500,000 to build ‘a strong local [addiction] recovery ecosystem by linking existing medical treatment with job training and assistance for entering the workforce’ (Appalachian Regional Commission 2024: 171). These programmes also injected needed funding into health care and infrastructure, yet relied on the logic that good infrastructure was needed for business and industry growth.
Federal funding for the coalfields increased dramatically with the election of Joe Biden in 2020, bringing historic public funding directed at a clean energy transition. An early executive order, known as the Justice40 Initiative, mandated all federal funding to take environmental justice into account and allocated 40 per cent of the benefits of funding to ‘disadvantaged communities’, putting Appalachian coal-mining communities among the highest priorities for investment (The White House 2022). Yet while the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL), passed in 2021,14 and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), passed in 2023,15 together provided several trillion dollars in infrastructure spending, Justice40 did not immediately direct these funds to environmental justice communities. Rather, the investments were largely distributed to the private sector, much of the funding going to large energy and fossil-fuel corporations, to implement infrastructure projects, while communities were supposed to benefit through non-binding community benefit plans (Cohen and Riofrancos 2025).
In Appalachia, the Biden administration launched the ARISE programme, with up to US$1bn of funding to allocate from the BIL. Although much more flexible in scope than the POWER initiative, ARISE continued to rely on the stimulation of the private sector, an approach that overlooked the dire need for public sector investment in public goods, such as hospitals, schools, libraries, addiction treatment, and so forth, once again reproducing a neoliberal logic that the government should stimulate market activity, rather than invest in public goods.
Overall, Biden-era investments in energy and transition largely operated along the logic of publicly funded and privately implemented, meaning the federal funds went to private companies, not public services or direct benefits to residents (Gaventa and Schwartzman 2026, forthcoming). One example was the Department of Energy’s Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations programmes to put clean energy on former mined lands. In southern West Virginia, that brought a US$129m investment to a subsidiary of the Royal Dutch Shell corporation to build solar panels on former surface mines in Nicholas County (Tate 2024). In return for federal funding, the recipients needed to develop a community benefits plan, which involved a coal worker retraining centre operated by Coalfield Development, a well-funded southern West Virginia transition non-profit organisation based in Huntington. These plans, however, did not state how job training would result in permanent jobs or that the skills would be a match for job needs in the community. Activists that Gabe Schwartzman interviewed about the project in 2024 critiqued the investment for creating another job training programme without a plan for getting people work after the training.
Philanthropic funding also supported a transition in Appalachia yet frequently reproduced much of the same patterns as federal funds. A key example, the Just Transition Fund, a philanthropic consortium started in 2015 in part by the Appalachian Funders Network, touted that their investments provided communities a ‘prosperous future after the transition away from coal’ (Just Transition Fund 2025). Yet much of the Just Transition Fund’s funding in recent years has been to match or enable federal funding for POWER, ARISE, or other funding programmes, largely using narrow metrics, once again, of jobs created and businesses started to allocate funding and to quantify their impact.
With the election of Donald Trump as the US president in 2024, virtually all of the infrastructure investments and economic transition programmes were cancelled or halted. The Biden agenda of clean energy transition was largely struck down, with executive orders that halted all work on projects prioritising environmental justice. Much of the funding from both the BIL and IRA infrastructure bills was frozen (Johnson 2025). While ARC programmes continue to operate, no new grants have been made and current legislation seeks to defund ARC by 98 per cent (Lengyel 2025). While the Biden agenda had been constrained by neoliberal notions of how to achieve economic development, the Trump administration has cut the flow of funds entirely.
Some activists in the coalfields, as the interviewee above and Junior Walk note, are frustrated that after a decade of concerted efforts, few of the resources dedicated for economic transition seem to have made significant impact. In many ways, it seems to some, such as Junior, that there were little gains from organising for a just transition but many losses in a reduction of organising against extraction.
In 2015, an organiser affiliated with RAMPS poignantly asked, discussing the idea of a just transition in Appalachia, ‘A transition to what?’.16 This question is at the heart of the conundrum around transition in Appalachia.
The concept of a just transition comes from the labour movement. Tony Mazzocchi, of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers International Union, articulated that ‘We need to provide workers with a guarantee that they will not have to pay for clean air and water with their jobs, their living standards or their future’ (Mazzocchi 1993: 40), calling for transition programmes that would guarantee pay, benefits, and future employment for workers laid off due to environmental considerations. The difference between a just transition for workers and for coal communities is that workers need a transition to good jobs, whereas the outcome for communities is less clear. Is the goal a transition to a similar kind of economy as resource extraction or other kinds of resource extraction? For many environmental justice activists, ending conditions of extraction and the socio-ecological devastation associated with it is a goal in and of itself (Hermwille et al. 2025).
The way that institutions and actors have deployed the concept of transition in coalfield communities has been ill-defined, vague, and, as we have been stressing here, largely lacking power analysis. The idea of economic transition has become part of an increasingly wide consensus that the coal economy is in decline and that communities need support. Yet this consensus, which local elites, economic development agencies, state regulators, as well as progressive non-profit organisations take part in, does not challenge status quo power relations. In southern West Virginia, transition projects largely support elite-led economies, such as tourism or the chemical industry (as is the case of the Biden-era billion‑dollar investment in ‘hydrogen hubs’) (Frazier 2024). These are not projects that seek to create more equitable or evenly distributed political economies.
The lack of politics behind the idea of transition in Appalachia has driven some activists in the region to consider ‘transformation not transition’, as the Highlander Research and Education Center argued in Beyond Transition (Highlander Center 2021). The report was produced through a year-long process of interviewing activists in the region and compiling their reflections on just transition as a concept. It finds that a ‘true transformation, not just a transition, is needed for Central Appalachia and its people’ (2021: 10), one that must be beyond capitalism, white supremacy, and the harms of extractive economies.
Activists across the region, as illustrated in the Highlander Center report, are demanding transformations and at times using the concept of just transition to demand these changes. These visions include transforming how land ownership is distributed (Appalachian Land Study n.d.), abolishing prisons and the carceral state (Schept 2022), transforming the provision of health care and addiction treatment (Ray 2021), ending racialised outcomes of poverty and toxic exposure (Black Appalachian Coalition 2022), and reconfiguring gendered social formations (Foote, Scott and McNeill 2024). While it is beyond the scope of this article to delineate a politics of a just transition that transforms power relations, these conclusions point to the idea that any such transition would require challenging the ways that gendered, racialised capitalism reproduces inequality.
In our critique of economic transition programmes in Central Appalachia, we do not intend to overlook the many ways activists in the region have used and continue to use the idea of just transition. Climate activists, union organisers, and much of the movement for a post-fossil-fuel economy are actively demanding a just transition (The Alliance for Appalachia 2020). The idea of a just transition, not simply a transition, must be clearly defined and the concept of justice clearly delineated, as many scholars have detailed at length (Ciplet 2022; Otlhogile and Shirley 2023; Avelino et al. 2024; Cha 2024). Our point is not to critique calls for a just transition, or conceptions of just transitions that carefully detail what justice will entail. Our intent is to point to the ways that the idea of transition became actualised in West Virginia in ways that did not achieve justice or advance the political transformations that we believe are necessary to create widespread prosperity in the coalfields.
To conclude, Junior Walk offers these final reflections from their time as an organiser:
I’ve been asked to lay out on the table what I think folks should be working on here in Appalachia outside of ‘economic transition’ work. I don’t feel like I have all of those answers, that’s totally up to the folks doing the work as to what work needs to be done. I can, however, speak on my work and how we at Coal River Mountain Watch have held true to our original mission throughout our storied history.
CRMW has been able to keep to our original mission and task because all of us involved hold some level of personal animosity toward the coal industry for the way they have treated the people and the land here in West Virginia. I think at the end of the day you have to believe with your whole heart that the work you’re doing is the right thing to do, and the true path forward for our people here. I don’t want to put words in anyone’s mouths, but if I had to wager a guess, I don’t figure any of those people applying for federal grants to install short‑lived pig farms or lavender-growing projects on strip mines never once believed that they were doing anything to secure a brighter future for the people of West Virginia.
Through the peaks and valleys of support, we at CRMW have always been a steadfast opponent of the coal-mining industry, even if we’re one of the only voices left on the front lines of the fight saying that they need to be shut down. I just wish we hadn’t wasted so much time listening to the opinions of people who a short time later would be playing friendly with the coal industry in an ineffective attempt to ‘diversify the economy’ here in southern West Virginia. Those same folks loved to keep us in all-day meetings, which kept us from furthering our goals of costing these coal companies some money.
Now I’m being asked what these same ‘well-meaning’ folks should spend their energy and time on? I’ll say the same thing I’ve always said. They need to work on shutting down the coal industry. Even if some mines are shutting down, there’s plenty that are still open and more mining permits being issued.
That’s just my two cents though, and if anything has been made clear to me during my tenure as an anti-coal-mining activist, it is this: those folks do not care what I think or have to say because I do not have money to give them. So if they take my advice then great, I’ll work shoulder to shoulder with them until there is an end to the exploitation our people face here. If they don’t take my advice, then great, but stay out of our way as we usher in a new future for West Virginia free from the shackles of extractive industries.
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 Gabe Schwartzman, Assistant Professor, University of Tennessee, USA.
3 Junior Walk, anti-coal-mining activist, southern West Virginia, USA.
4 Strip mining or surface mining involves removing vegetation, soil, and rock (known as overburden) to access coal close to the earth’s surface.
5 Mountaintop removal mining involves removing large amounts of rock and soil from mountain peaks to access coal underneath, leaving vast areas of denuded landscape. This controversial mining method is used extensively in the Appalachian region of the US.
6 See National Park Service.
7 The Keystone XL was a pipeline proposed to transport crude oil from Alberta, Canada, to refineries in the US.
8 Tar Sands Blockade was a grass-roots coalition of Texas and Oklahoma citizens impacted by the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, and climate justice activists who used civil disobedience to protest the pipeline.
9 The DAPL is a 1,886km underground pipeline that transports crude oil from the Bakken oil fields in North Dakota to Patoka, Illinois. Construction was completed in 2017.
10 Hills and hollers refers to the landscape and culture of the Appalachian region. Hollers or hollows are valleys.
11 Kudzu is a fast-growing vine native to East Asia that rapidly spreads when allowed to do so, choking other plants.
12 Interview with coal community organiser, April 2025.
13 Interview with development professional, May 2022.
14 See Library of Congress.
15 See IRS.
16 Gabe Schwartzman, field notes, March 2015.
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© 2025 The Authors. IDS Bulletin © Institute of Development Studies | DOI: 10.19088/1968-2025.145 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