Peter Newell2
Abstract How do the everyday politics of frontline struggles over energy relate to global debates about just transitions? This article reflects on how ‘local’ struggles can best be amplified and heard in ‘global’ policy debates, and the kind of alliances that might need to be formed for them to be heard. The state is the key intermediary between local struggles and global institutions and the designated entity and vehicle for representing citizens in global fora and enforcing rights, but is also frequently a rights violator and defender of the interests of private capital over collective welfare. There is a critical dissonance, therefore, between the roles that states are expected to perform in just transitions and the reality for many of them of limited capacity – or interest – in playing such roles. It is here that citizen action seeks to fill the gaps left by state inaction, negligence, and political and financial constraints.
Resumen ¿Cómo se relacionan las políticas cotidianas de las luchas locales por la energía con los debates globales sobre transiciones justas? Este artículo reflexiona sobre cómo las luchas “locales” pueden ser amplificadas y escuchadas en los debates de política “globales”, y qué tipo de alianzas deben formarse para que esto suceda. El Estado aparece como el intermediario clave entre las luchas locales y las instituciones globales, así como la entidad designada para representar a los ciudadanos en foros internacionales y hacer cumplir sus derechos.Sin embargo, a menudo incurre en violaciones de derechos y actúa como defensor de los intereses del capital privado por sobre el bienestar colectivo. Existe, por lo tanto, una disonancia crítica entre los roles que se espera que los Estados desempeñen en las transiciones justas y la realidad de muchos de ellos, caracterizada por capacidades limitadas, o falta de interés, en asumir tales funciones. Es en este vacío donde la acción ciudadana busca llenar los espacios que dejan la inacción estatal, la negligencia y las restricciones políticas y financieras.
Resumo De que forma se relacionam as políticas quotidianas das lutas na linha da frente sobre energia com os debates globais acerca das transições justas? Este artigo reflecte sobre como as lutas ‘locais’ podem ser melhor amplificadas e ouvidas nos debates de política ‘globais’, bem como sobre o tipo de alianças que podem ser necessárias formar para que essas vozes sejam escutadas. O Estado surge como o principal intermediário entre as lutas locais e as instituições globais, sendo a entidade designada e o veículo para representar os cidadãos em fóruns internacionais e para fazer cumprir direitos, mas é também frequentemente um violador desses mesmos direitos e um defensor dos interesses do capital privado em detrimento do bem-estar colectivo. Existe, portanto, uma dissonância crítica entre os papéis que se espera que os Estados desempenhem nas transições justas e a realidade de muitos deles, marcada por uma capacidade limitada – ou mesmo pela falta de interesse – em assumir tais papéis. É neste espaço que a acção cidadã procura colmatar as lacunas deixadas pela inacção, negligência e constrangimentos políticos e financeiros do Estado.
How do the everyday politics of frontline struggles over energy relate to global debates about just transitions? The focus of this article is how the struggles and perspectives presented in the cases in this IDS Bulletin can best be amplified and heard in global policy debates, and the kind of alliances that might need to be formed for them to be heard. The contradictory and complex role of the state is at the heart of this discussion (Newell 2025a). The state is the key intermediary between local struggles and global institutions and the designated entity and vehicle for representing citizens in global fora and enforcing rights, but also frequently a rights violator and defender of the interests of private capital over collective welfare. There is a critical dissonance, therefore, between the roles that states are expected to perform in planning and executing just transitions and the reality for many of them of limited capacity – or interest – in playing such roles. It is here that citizen action seeks to fill the gaps left by state inaction, negligence, and political and financial constraints.
A key challenge for global mobilisations is that energy transitions are intimately interconnected through uneven resource exchanges, labour flows, trade relations, and financing arrangements. This means the costs and benefits of different transition pathways are unevenly shared within and between societies, often also along racial, gendered, and class-based lines. So although there are critical inter-state dimensions to the pursuit of energy transitions, the power dynamics which shape winners and losers from competing energy trajectories cut across state boundaries, creating at once new challenges and the possibility of new solidarities.
Peripheries, as Calafate-Faria et al. (this IDS Bulletin) remind us in the case of Portugal and Brazil, are produced not by geography but by relational dynamics. Spatial and temporal fixes are often employed to pass on the costs of transition to others within and between societies, capitalising on inequalities and ‘entangled extractivisms’ (Artiga-Purcell 2024). We can observe these dynamics not only in the article on lithium mining in Brazil and Portugal but also, as Wainwright, Woodier and Proudfoot (this IDS Bulletin) show, within the same country as with North East England. Justice principles are applied for some and not others, leading to accusations of double standards. While many European countries have just transition plans in place, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine saw them move from persuading African countries of the need for moving away from fossil fuels to negotiating gas export deals to replace Europe’s lost access to Russian gas. Even while the delegations debated language on phasing down fossil fuels at the climate Conference of the Parties (COP)27 summit in Egypt in 2022, gas deals were being struck on the side (Levantesi and Cooke 2022).
Energy transitions should rightly be understood as struggles over power in a literal and figurative sense that take place at all scales and across political arenas, and need to be contested as such. Energy transitions are not disembodied from broader processes of social contestation and economic and environmental disruption, but rather embody, reflect, and potentially magnify existing inequalities and exclusions. What is contested is rarely just one energy source over another. Rather, projects of transition serve as lightning rods for broader forms of social discontent about exclusion, legitimacy, territorial claims, and the governance of shared resources which states seek to mediate. Here, vernacular understandings of justice interact and compete with global framings and different dimensions of justice – procedural, distributional, recognitional, intergenerational, restorative – and notions of justice for nature vie for attention and priority. Though discussions of just transition focus on questions of social (and occasionally environmental) justice, it is notable that, historically speaking, energy transitions have not been driven by concerns with either.
Energy is always high politics and does not lend itself easily to citizen engagement within and beyond the state. Because of what is at stake, atmospheres of violence always surround sources of energy. This can be the ‘slow’ and everyday violence which gets enacted through land grabs and dispossession (Nixon 2011), and that which is driven by environmental change, sometimes gradually but often suddenly and disruptively. Insurgency in Cabo Delgado, Mozambique (Pereira, Shankland and Gonçalves, this IDS Bulletin) and the legacy of civil war in Colombia (Peña Niño et al., this IDS Bulletin), which continues to cast a shadow over the country’s fraught energy transition, further point to connections between the energy base of the economy and projects of state-building war and militarism.
In so far as they can appropriately be considered transitions at all (as opposed to energy symbioses) (Fressoz 2024), previous shifts in the global energy mix have been driven by restless capital, waves of creative destruction, moves to discipline labour, and in response to shifting patterns of supply and demand (Perez 2002). Social contestation has been important (Mitchell 2011; Abramsky 2010) but is rarely the primary driver. There is a pressing need, therefore, to ensure that the accelerated, and potentially more transformational, multisectoral and system-wide transformations now required to address multiple crises (of which global heating is just one) are attentive to these issues. Without this, resistance and an absence of social acceptance will derail any such attempt to re-organise and re-imagine energy systems, and the idea of a ‘just transition’ will remain empty and vacuous, as Schwartzman and Walk (this IDS Bulletin) caution.
Rather than an isolated or episodic phenomenon, the case of resistance to mining in Argentina and Chile shows it is persistent, widespread, and increasingly shaping public debate and policy in both countries (Marín, this IDS Bulletin), while resistance to the East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) raises challenges about who benefits from energy transitions and how (Chiponda, this IDS Bulletin).
These discussions do not take place in a historical vacuum. The colonial dimension to transitions is apparent in many of the articles in this IDS Bulletin, reflected in the title of the DeCOALonize coal campaign in Kenya (Chiponda, this IDS Bulletin), demonstrating the cumulative and historical nature of injustices around land, labour, and access to resources (Lang, Manahan and Brengel 2024). Energy transitions cannot address all of these, but at minimum they can attempt to not make them worse. In the case of Zimbabwe, however, conflicts over hydro power have merely given way to a lithium rush (Chiponda, this IDS Bulletin). In Brazil, where gemstones were extracted, now it is lithium (Calafate-Faria et al., this IDS Bulletin).
Historical injustices have concrete impacts on contemporary transitions. Wainwright et al. (this IDS Bulletin) show how the UK’s coal transition was not driven by climate concerns, but rather as part of a project to repivot the UK economy away from industries with powerful trade unions and towards an accumulation strategy more favourable to finance capital (Da Costa Vieira 2024). The unemployment, social dislocation, and regional under-development it left in its wake continue to be a reference point in current discussions about licensing for oil and gas in the North Sea with union officials keen not to turn oil and gas workers into ‘the coal miners of this generation’ (Unite 2025). Given this, there are important lessons to be learned from the rich history of activism over resources about which strategies worked, when, why, and for whom (Newell, Price and Daley 2024).
Section 2 provides some general context on the global debate on energy transitions and the challenges they pose for meaningful citizen engagement. Section 3 then explores key lessons that emerge from the cases presented in this IDS Bulletin that relate to global discussions of just transitions. Finally, Section 4 identifies new entry points to tackling long-standing challenges of exclusion and under-representation of marginalised actors in transition debates.
Global discussions about just transitions are occurring in a variety of spaces. There has been a recent wave of just energy transition partnerships (JET-Ps) in Asia and Africa largely focused on coal transitions. Beyond that, there are multiple sites of informal and private governance relevant to just transitions in the form of partnerships and alliances ranging from the Beyond Oil & Gas Alliance (BOGA) and the Powering Past Coal Alliance (PPCA) to the newly announced Global Clean Power Alliance (GCPA). International bodies advancing this agenda are each working with and enacting their own vision of what a just transition looks like.
Traditionally, the International Labour Organization (ILO) has played a key role in advancing guidelines and centring a labour-centred view of just transitions. For the most part, there has been a drive to support ‘neoliberal’ transitions often centred on technology support, power sector reform, and derisking private finance. But wider concerns with economic justice, including debt, taxation, and the regulation of multinational companies mean other bodies such as UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD), the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank have come to be involved (Newell et al. 2023).
Concerns remain that the parameters of the discussions about just transitions have been drawn too narrowly around issues such as the retraining and compensation of largely unionised, often principally male workers in coal-dependent regions in Europe and North America (see Schwartzman and Walk, this IDS Bulletin). Though critically important, these issues form just one part of a more complex set of issues raised by what might more appropriately be thought of less as energy transitions and more as processes of economic transition and diversification in terms of their scale and impacts.
Yet global governance institutions are generally not spaces that communities or even, with some exceptions, trade unions or indigenous and environmental organisations can access to make their voices heard. Technocratic, legalistic, economistic, and physically far removed from the lived realities of most people on the front lines of energy transitions, a huge challenge is how to close the gap between those making policies about visions, strategies, and financing for just transitions and those whose lives are impacted by such decisions. Though states would traditionally be considered the right actors to project and represent the concerns of their citizens in global fora, states are often in conflict with marginalised groups in their own countries over access to resources and contested territories (e.g. in Brazil, Colombia, and Mozambique; see Calafate-Faria et al., Peña Niño et al., and Pereira et al., this IDS Bulletin) and are often rights violators when it comes to environmental defenders and are therefore weakly placed to adequately represent the perspectives and interests of frontline communities. The economic reality of their dependence on revenues from state‑owned enterprises or foreign capital makes such states unlikely candidates to challenge the extractive energy pathways pursued by these economic actors even when charged with overseeing ‘just transitions’.
While states are the principal, but not the exclusive, mediators between subnational resource struggles and international politics, they are also the brokers and enforcers of explicit and implicit social contracts around energy citizenship and the right to energy, which makes them critical targets for social demands (Hossain et al. 2021). States are not homogenous actors of course, and scope exists to ally with ministries responsible for labour, health, and the environment, even though their power is often dwarfed by ministries of energy, finance, and trade. These tensions are reflected in contradictory transition plans as the case of Nigeria shows (Ibezim-Ohaeri, this IDS Bulletin), with an energy transition plan aiming to phase out fossil fuels sitting alongside a petroleum law seeking to expand production.
Within the state, critical to the prospects of energy transitions are other neglected sites of state power such as foreign and industrial policy, and the welfare, entrepreneurial, and military state (Newell 2025b). Even when bottom-up struggles result in national change, state enforcement is still required, such as with Ecuador’s referendum vote on whether to drill for oil in the Yasuni National Park where the state remains reluctant to respect the popular vote. States often set the rules of engagement and there are uneven spaces of citizen engagement nationally, subnationally, and beyond, and between urban and rural spaces amid a context of closing and fragmented civil space.
Even where those spaces exist, as the case of Mozambique illustrates (Pereira et al., this IDS Bulletin), civil society capacity to participate effectively in them is often very limited. This is a dangerous time for environmental defenders the world over amid steep sentences and restrictive policing laws in countries that like to hold themselves up as beacons of liberal democracy (like the UK and US), and the brutal policing of ecocide in many of the cases explored in this IDS Bulletin (see also Menton and Le Billon 2021). Rising authoritarianism and populism represent the antithesis of just transitions as procedural and (re)distributional projects.
This raises the question of where the frontlines of the transition are. Many of the articles in this IDS Bulletin assume them to be contested resource frontiers, often in rural areas of global peripheries. These are indeed critical physical, political, and symbolic sites where control over territory and competing worldviews collide. But boardrooms, government ministries, stock exchanges, and municipalities are also sites where energy futures are imagined and contested and brought into being or sidelined. This implies the need for a multi-cited and multidimensional understanding of power in energy transitions (Gaventa and Schwartzman 2026, forthcoming). In this regard, a key challenge for global mobilisations is to target campaigns and interventions in ways tailored to the actors and contexts they are wanting to shape, while grounding them in shared experiences and solidarities informed by more universal commitments to rights and justice.
Indeed, there are many different models of just transition at play, reflecting uneven state capacity and scope for participation and engagement by labour and civil society organisations. For frontline communities and their allies, the imperative is to move from investor-led to citizen-led transition plans, with a focus on what is wanted and needed rather than the markets which business want access to. This will be key to social acceptance, respect of democratic process, and aligning energy investment with energy needs, but it requires strategic partnerships and capacity building as the Mozambique case shows (Pereira et al., this IDS Bulletin). Wainwright et al. (this IDS Bulletin) reflect on the Lucas Plan as an interesting example of a factory and worker‑led plan to save jobs at an armaments factory through a vision of socially useful production. Similar proposals for re-skilling have occurred at the Rolls Royce company with workers proposing the manufacture of wind turbines instead of turbines for aircraft. Such initiatives and interventions link workplace politics to broader struggles and visions for a just transition.
Key questions remain about whose voices are represented in global debates about which transitions are to be pursued, and how and who gets to define what is just. This partly reflects the fact that there are very different notions of justice at play and dimensions which are in tension with one another, and for which international institutions are certainly no better placed to reconcile or enforce than the state. Global standards and legal provisions such as the ILO 169 Convention (ILO 1989) regarding the rights of Indigenous Peoples, or provisions on prior and informed consent provide a procedural architecture but remain hard to enforce on the ground. As the Argentina and Chile cases show (Marín, this IDS Bulletin), defending the right to say no rather than to participate in others’ spaces on their terms is extremely challenging where only incremental changes to predetermined projects and investments are permissible.
Given access, resource, and procedural constraints, a key issue is who speaks for whom in global fora dealing with just transitions. Global energy governance is generally weak and under-developed (Florini and Sovacool 2009), meaning there are numerous potentially relevant spaces and institutions with a stake in these discussions, but few centralised bodies with a clear mandate. This potentially disperses effective civil society engagement. Within key sectors, there are also representational dilemmas. Who speaks for which workers, for example? Trade unions have played a leading role in just transition debates and have good representation in bodies such as the ILO and a record of articulating demands for good quality, safe, and secure jobs in low-carbon energy sectors, but they do not have a monopoly in representing the voices of poor people. They are unable to represent non-unionised and informal workers who often operate at the front lines of energy transitions (see Chiponda, this IDS Bulletin) and mainly focus on the labour aspects of just transition and not environmental dimensions, which are often far less of a priority, reflected in their ongoing support for polluting industries.
Issues of local hiring practices and working conditions or concerns with resettling communities (e.g. by coal companies in Tete Province in Mozambique see Pereira et al., this IDS Bulletin) normally have to be handled at national or subnational levels. But local communities are also often overlooked in national energy transition plans. The case of Nigeria (Ibezim-Ohaeri, this IDS Bulletin) highlights the silencing of communities in the design and discussion of the country’s energy transition plan, as well as the neglect of specific aspects of the transition such as restoration. Similar challenges of accountability and representation also apply to environmental non-governmental organisations that have been central to discussions of just transitions. Often funded overseas, based in capital cities, and with tenuous connections to communities on the front line, there is a need for them to be held accountable.
Transparency around revenue flows and investment agreements is vital to determining and shaping who benefits from energy transitions. Given the ability of elites to capture benefits, clientelism, and murky political economies around contracting, it is critical to strengthen those initiatives which do exist at the international level such as the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) and Publish What You Pay (PWYP). This needs to be combined with improved monitoring and accountability, including not just at the stage of negotiating contracts between states and investors but also for toxic legacies, remediation, and the after-life of energy investments and infrastructures. Many of the struggles in Nigeria’s Niger Delta are precisely about compensation for lost livelihoods and damage to air and waterways from spills and gas flaring (Okonta and Douglas 2001) amid lack of transparency about whether these liabilities are adequately addressed in the divestment agreement with the government and failure to implement court orders (Ibezim-Ohaeri, this IDS Bulletin). This is where restorative justice is key.
For such moves to gain traction, there would need to be a greater acceptance of the idea that contestation can be productive and improve justice outcomes. Conflict management rather than resolution is the priority, or as Marín puts it, ‘symbolic inclusion or transactional solutions’ (p137, this IDS Bulletin) – keeping people in meetings rather than protesting as Schwartzman and Walk (this IDS Bulletin) show. Linked to this should be an awareness that there are costs to non-engagement and that a failure to engage with social discontent can entrench more reactionary forms of politics. In contexts of poverty, industrial decline, and neglect, the seeds of backlash are being sown. This underscores the importance of centring working-class communities in struggles for a just transition (Obach 2004). Red–green alliances can articulate key demands around stable and fair jobs and community wealth building (Lacey-Barnacle, Smith and Foxon 2023).
Politics is often said to be about the art of the possible, but there is also a politics of what counts and who gets to decide on which pathways are ‘realistic’. Indeed, an important source of power for incumbent actors is the ability to control narratives about which energy pathways are viable. The article on Colombia highlights the need for new metanarratives built from below, grounded in alternative visions for a just transition that challenge ‘gaslighting’ around the role of gas as a ‘transition fuel’ or the role of ‘green hydrogen’ (Peña Niño et al., this IDS Bulletin). Narratives can provide an opportunity to articulate new values and enhance the capacity of other actors to engage in debates about energy transitions. As Marín (this IDS Bulletin) shows, they can mobilise alternative cosmologies or ‘alternative territorial imaginaries – development visions grounded in care for ecosystems, autonomy, and intergenerational rights’ (p137). As Marín's article on Argentina and Chile shows, what start as sites of civil society resistance can produce waves of regulatory reform and provincial and municipal bans on open-pit mining and cyanide use (ibid.).
Hence, this work of building alternatives does not just need to focus on different models and pathways but also on the underpinning values that should guide them, including territorial justice and democratic participation such as the Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) protocol ‘Salt Tracks’ developed by indigenous communities in Jujuy, Argentina, which reasserts indigenous authority over territorial governance and offers a norm-setting alternative to extractivist approaches (ibid.).
Institutional innovations such as this could be shared, socialised, and internationalised through activist communities of practice. Here, there is a potentially key role for international trade union confederations to amalgamate and articulate such demands as a set of international demands with global institutions, collectivising experiences, voices, and narratives. This is vital to embedding and protecting gains in the face of pushback where progressive moves have been rowed back and communities are being played off against one another. Place-based struggles grounded in international solidarities which bring together development, indigenous, human rights, gender, health, and trade groups around different aspects of energy transition are critical.
In activist communities, lessons from these frontline struggles are fed into global alliance building in spaces like the Global Gas & Oil Network or shared platforms for the pooling of knowledge and resources that link activists and researchers such as the Fossil Fuel Reduction Network for Latin America and the Caribbean (CFAL 2025). Given that energy is central to all these movements, openings exist to build these cross-sectoral horizontal alliances as has been done by the global campaign for a Fossil Fuel Non‑Proliferation Treaty3 involving faith-based groups, cities, human rights and indigenous groups, women’s movements, and health coalitions, as well as trade unions and environmentalists to build cross movement ‘anti-fossil fuel norms’ (Green 2018: 103). Alliances such as these 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.
There is significant latent power yet to be articulated around new visions and strategies for the pursuit of globally just transitions. This needs to address multiple sites simultaneously to close the loopholes that allow duties to remain unfulfilled, costs to be passed on to poorer groups, and communities left contaminated. In the end, it is power that needs to shift, not just energy systems that need to be transitioned. Shifts of power between states and citizens, capital and labour, and North and South are required to challenge the concentration and uneven allocation of power and to enable more transformative change towards a regenerative economy. Without this, a ‘plug and play’ approach will prevail where the technology shifts, modes of delivery might change, finance may be reallocated, and energy sources switched, but patterns of elite power and wealth concentration, and dependency and disenfranchisement of local communities will continue (Newell 2021). As Calafate-Faria et al. (this IDS Bulletin) show, ‘geology is not always destiny’ (p43). Future paths are made by walking and are always shaped by struggle.
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 Peter Newell, Professor of International Relations, University of Sussex, UK.
3 See Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Abramsky, K. (2010) Sparking a Worldwide Energy Revolution: Social Struggles in the Transition to a Post-Petrol World, Oakland CA: AK Press
Artiga-Purcell, J.A. (2024) ‘Relational Resources: Moving from Plural to Entangled Extractivisms’, Political Geography 110: 103076 CFAL (2025) (accessed 21 July 2025
Da Costa Vieira, T. (2024) ‘Beneath the Insuperable Barrier: Accumulation, State Managers and Climate Policy in Britain, Environmental Politics 34.2: 205–25 Florini, A. and
Sovacool, B.K. (2009) ‘Who Governs Energy? The Challenges Facing Global Energy Governance’, Energy Policy 37.12: 5239–48
Fressoz, J-P. (2024) More and More and More: The All-Consuming History of Energy, London: Allen Lane
Gaventa, J. and Schwartzman, G. (2026, forthcoming) Power and Just Transitions: Struggles for a Post-Coal Future in an Appalachian Valley, Chicago IL: University of Illinois Press
Green, F. (2018) ‘Anti-Fossil Fuel Norms’, Climatic Change 150.1–2: 103–16
Hossain, N. et al. (2021) Demanding Power: Do Protests Empower Citizens to Hold Governments Accountable Over Energy?, IDS Working Paper 555, Brighton: Institute of Development Studies, DOI: 10.19088/IDS.2021.056 (accessed 13 August 2025)
ILO (1989) Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention (No. 169), Geneva: International Labour Organization
Lacey-Barnacle, M.; Smith, A. and Foxon, T.J. (2023) ‘Community Wealth Building in an Age of Just Transitions: Exploring Civil Society Approaches to Net Zero and Future Research Synergies’, Energy Policy 172: 113277
Lang, M.; Manahan, M.A. and Brengel, B. (2024) (eds) The Geopolitics of Green Colonialism, London: Pluto Press
Levantesi, S. and Cooke, P. (2022) ‘ “Back off”: African Climate Groups Decry Europe’s Dash for Gas at COP27’, DeSmog, 15 November (accessed 21 July 2025)
Menton, M. and Le Billon, P. (eds) (2021) Environmental Defenders: Deadly Struggles for Life and Territory, Abingdon: Routledge
Mitchell, T. (2011) Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil, London: Verso Books
Newell, P. (2025a) ‘States of Transition: A Political Economy Approach’, New Political Economy 1–17, DOI: 10.1080/13563467.2025.2524629 (accessed 21 July 2025)
Newell, P. (2025b) States of Transition: From Governing the Environment to Social Transformation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Newell, P. (2021) Power Shift: The Global Political Economy of Energy Transitions, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Newell, P.; Price, R. and Daley, F. (2024) ‘Landscapes of (In)Justice: Reflecting on Voices, Spaces and Alliances for Just Transitions’, Energy Research and Social Science 116: 103701
Newell, P.; Daley, F.; Mikheeva, O. and Pesa, I. (2023) ‘Mind the Gap: The Global Governance of Just Transitions’, Global Policy 14.3: 425–37
Nixon, R. (2011) Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press
Obach, B.K. (2004) Labor and the Environmental Movement: The Quest for Common Ground, Cambridge MA: MIT Press
Okonta, I. and Douglas, O. (2001) Where Vultures Feast: Shell, Human Rights, and Oil in the Niger Delta, San Francisco CA: Sierra Club Books
Perez, C. (2002) Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing
Unite (2025) Oil and Gas: No Ban Without a Plan, London: Unite (accessed 21 July 2025)
© 2025 The Author. IDS Bulletin © Institute of Development Studies | DOI: 10.19088/1968-2025.148 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.