Reading the room: developing a practical justice politics of regional energy transition

ABSTRACT

This study looks at the case of industrial energy transition campaigning by a traditional conservation group in a regional city that hosts coal- fired power and emissions-intensive industry. We ask, what tensions do metropolitan campaigners find when communicating the idea of just transition and building alliances in regional places? How do they deal with those tensions? What does this mean for the task of developing ‘useable useful theories of environmental justice’ ? Our results illustrate the need to navigate three principal tensions: inclusivity, recognition, and equity. The case of the Australian Conservation Foundation in Gladstone reveals that as these tensions get worked through, the campaign goal is reframed as something other than ‘just transition’ and more akin to a local environmental justice campaigning. Ultimately, the ENGO now wrestles with the local difficulties of building energy justice politics on the scale and time-frame that climate science implies.

KEYWORDS:

• Energy transition
• environmental justice
• environmental NGO
• framing
• Australia

Introduction

Environmental non-government organisations (ENGOs) campaigning on climate change and energy transition frequently need to travel to regional areas. The moments of contact between metropolitan environmentalists with regional people often elicit tensions. Global and national policy-oriented climate/energy campaigners frequently find friction with local people who have place-based identities and concerns about employment, industry, and the health of regional economies (Connor 2012, Della Bosca and Gillespie 2018, Colvin 2020, Kalt 2021). These tensions reflect the temporal and scalar dilemmas of the climate crisis (Rosewarne et al. 2014, Eriksen 2018). On the one hand, climate change is a global emergency that necessitates dramatic political and economic interventions into emission-intensive systems of production. On the other hand, metropolitan activists genuinely seek to act on their commitments to environmental justice, inclusivity, and equity when it comes to alliance-building across markers of social difference (Ciplet and Harrison 2019).

Over more than two decades of grassroots climate and energy transition campaigning, activists have learned to better ‘read the room’ of regional politics (see Hutton 2012, Pearse 2016). To read the room is to become aware of the values and opinions of the people you’re talking to, to work at kinds of communication which will build connections, and to learn about what ideas and issues don’t resonate or perhaps alienate. Straddling the tensions between local complexity and global urgency requires long-term relational work for ENGO campaigners taking messages about decarbonisation and energy transition to regional communities. Attention to these kinds of complexities are well documented in the broader environmental justice literature (Holifield et al. 2011, Schlosberg 2013). Negotiating tensions that are specific to expanding and contested meanings of ‘just transition’ in energy campaigns are an important contribution to this discussion (Stevis and Felli 2015, Ciplet and Harrison 2019). Our paper picks up on the complexity of ‘just transition’ as an idea regarding the practical challenges faced by an ENGO seeking to build a popular campaign in a regional area in which it has no history. Using a case study of the Australian Conservation Foundation’s (ACF) campaign in the regional city of Gladstone in Queensland, we explore the practical tensions involved in communicating and making popular the tenets of ‘just transition’.

Our analysis of ACF’s campaign inquired into the framing, identity work, and organisational positioning of the ENGO when undertaking to build a popular and authentic coalition. Our questions were as follows: What tensions do metropolitan campaigners work on when communicating the idea of a ‘just transition’ and building alliances in regional industrial towns? How do they deal with these tensions? How does this kind of campaign experience contribute to what Ciplet and Harrison (2019) call ‘useable theories of environmental justice’? The first section of this paper describes the turn to applying environmental justice theory to energy transition campaigning. The main sections of the paper provide a brief regional economic geography of Gladstone, before we tell the history of ACF’s just transition campaign and unpack dilemmas so far.

Green groups communicating just transition in regional areas

Climate change is the archetypal global problem. In one sense, the urgency of the climate crisis creates new incentives for change because the scale and pace of the emissions problem requires immediate and transformative industrial transformation (Goodman 2009). In another sense, the need to act on global-scale knowledge through local industries whilst also being respectful and inclusive of local values and identities is challenging for all energy and climate campaigns. With their public drive for renewable energy, ENGOs arriving from major cities are regarded as foreign and often unwelcome harbingers of this change in regional locales (Rosewarne et al. 2014, Eriksen 2018).

Metropolitan environmental activists campaigning on ‘just transition’ are part of the broader progressive left. In Australia, ENGOs and social justice groups alike are mostly populated by people in metropolitan centres, led by small organised networks of people who work in environmental advocacy as a career (Burgmann and Baer 2012). This professionalising of the environmental movement, and the symbiotic relationship ENGOs have established with the centre-left Australian Labor Party, has increasingly institutionalised advocacy into the state and distanced advocates from the communities they purport to serve (Gerdung 2004, Hutton 2012).

In response to resistence from regional residents and workers, climate and energy campaigners in Australia have evolved to more deeply engage with the range of economic and social justice concerns present at different scales and temporalities (Pearse 2016). In Australia, this framing is shaped by efforts to foreground the needs and perspectives of workers and communities living in industrial regions (Snell and Fairbrother 2011, Goods 2013, Fairbrother 2017), as well as the geographically variegated impacts on rural residents, agricultural producers, and First Nations people (Norman 2016, Askland and Bunn 2018, Goodman et al. 2020).

Understanding the developing relationship between metropolitan ENGOs and regional industrial communities is important for movement learning and for understanding the choices being made in the push for social justice and rapid decarbonisation. Existing research on energy policy campaign strategies emphasises job creation framing and sustained local engagement as more likely to be effective (Diamond and Zhou 2022). Whilst acknowledging the multitude of considerations at play, Pacheco-Vega & Murdie found that local citizen participation was key for justice campaigns but at the same time, a global dynamic needs to be sustained Pacheco-Vega and Murdie (2021). In Australia, the holistic concern of ‘just transition’ regional campaigning in the Hunter Valley, a coal mining and power station hotspot in New South Wales (NSW), had been theorised as having significant potential as a framing tool for inclusive environmental justice (Evans and Phelan 2016).

However, recent research has shown that Hunter Valley energy sector workers and residents don’t resonate with the term ‘just transition’ itself due to perception that the language is disingenuous and may be used as a Trojan horse for policies that do not adequately address the needs of affected people (Macneil and Beauman 2022). In their interview study, MacNeil & Beauman found that many people in regional communities have no concrete understanding as to what a ‘just transition’ refers to and do not find it to be authentically their syntax. The distrust of city-based ENGOs is clear.

In his study of environmental engagement in Gladstone, Queensland, Eriksen (2018) observes that the distance between regional communities and ENGOs is a scale problem. Eriksen found that international ENGOs like Greenpeace operate at a systemic global scale that ‘clashes’ with local experiences and realities. Since Erikson’s study, a new round of just transition campaigning has begun.

While the perspectives of coal communities are increasingly well understood, we know less about how ENGOs and their allies are dealing with these familiar tensions and framing problems. When long-term local community organising strategy is taken up in the regions, what happens to the global sense of urgency about climate change that ENGOs are known for? What is gained, and what gets lost in the tensions between global and local, and urgent and long-term campaign frames?

We explore these tensions by documenting the methods of community campaign building an ENGO uses to deal with the social distance between its major city headquarters and life on the ground in an industrial regional town. In order to shed light on how national ENGOs seek to transcend the problems of temporality and scale in Gladstone, we draw upon Ciplet and Harrison’s (2019) typology of tensions that just transition campaigns elicit, and which campaigners and their allies must navigate. Ciplet and Harrison emphasise the tensions are an aid to inquiry, not a fixed typology. They offer the idea of tensions as a way to help social scientists craft ‘a useable theory of justice’ that can help give a grip on how movement organising and relationships with their (possible) constituents manifest in the real world. Drawing on the work of Iris Marian Young and David Schlosberg, Ciplet and Harrison define ‘useable theory’ as the development of insights through ‘observing the non ideal, imperfect world in which we live, with all of its tremendous inequalities, relations of oppression, and resource scarcity’ (p. 5). We add that such a theory helps unpack the political implications of choices being made in campaign framing and strategy.

We are drawn to their approach because climate and energy campaigning is unavoidably riddled with tensions and dilemmas. Ciplet and Harrison define three key tensions as ‘entry points’ to just transition campaign analysis (p. 2). The first of these they name ‘sustainability-inclusivity’ - the time-sensitive trade-offs between achieving bold policy and doing so in an inclusive fashion. The second tension they term ‘sustainability-recognition’, the conflict between the environmental goal and diverse values, interests, and rights. The third tension is ‘sustainability-equity’ which speaks to the distributive justice components of the energy transition. These three categorisations provide a framework for assessing the dynamics at play in just transition campaigns. Furthermore, Ciplet and Harrison emphasise that the trade-offs they present need not be understood as zero-sum relationships and that future scholarship can aid this by furthering our understanding of how these tensions play out in the development of real world policy and campaigning (Ciplet and Harrison 2019).

Drawing from fieldwork with the ACF and its emerging network in a regional industrial centre, this is precisely what we mean to do. Below we introduce the case of energy transition in Gladstone and the scales of change underway. Following Ciplet and Harrison (2019), we interpret the situation on the ground as an attempt to navigate these tensions, as well as the scalar and temporal conundrums of climate change. If the difficulties of climate action in heavy-industries are to be reckoned with, the practical methods of building power and popular claims on the ground in regional areas must be concrete and feasible.

The ACF in Gladstone

Gladstone is an industrial city on the coast of Queensland, Australia. It was built on land traditionally owned and used by the Gooreng Gooreng, Toolooa, Meerooni, and Baiali Aboriginal people as a meeting and trading place. It now hosts a major coal export port, an aluminium smelter, a chemical manufacturing complex, and power station, making the city and surrounding region one of the most carbon-intensive in the country. The assortment of emissions-intensive industries (EII) provides both an economic base and a sense of identity to the town (Eriksen 2018).

In total, EII in Gladstone employs 18% of the 65’000 people living in the region (Remplan, 2022). Rio Tinto alone employs approximately 8,000 workers in Gladstone (Rio Tinto, 2019). However, Gladstone’s relationship with EII is uneasy in other respects as it is also responsible for a series of ‘boom & bust’ economic cycles which have caused significant social harm (Grudnoff, 2012). EII has been so culturally hegemonic that no environmental organisation had any presence in Gladstone until 2012, when four locals established a branch of the Queensland Conservation Council (Eriksen 2018).

With Gladstone’s alumina refinery representing 28% of Rio Tinto’s global emissions and 16% of Queensland’s emissions, and the long-term prospects for coal transportation looking increasingly unsteady, the town now finds itself faced with needing to transition its economy or risk an almost certain decline (Rio Tinto, 2021; Morton, 2022).

In an effort to support Gladstone through this challenge, the Queensland government has marked Gladstone as one of three ‘Renewable Energy Zones’ and is providing funding to support ‘green’ developments within the city and adjacent areas (Queensland Government 2023a). The first beneficiary of this funding is Fortescue Future Industries. Fortescue is currently constructing a Green Hydrogen plant on the Western side of Gladstone with the intention of producing electrolysers in late-2023 (Beavan, 2022). This development will provide new employment opportunities but also highlights the pace of the change taking place. Meanwhile, there are 26 wind and solar power plants proposed in the regional areas surrounding Gladstone, partly driven by Rio Tinto’s announced shift to renewable electricity supply for its aluminium smelter (Rae 2022, Queensland Government undated).

To help navigate these changes, the Gladstone local council enlisted the services of The Next Economy (TNE), an economic transition consultancy group, to undertake community engagement sessions and to develop a ten-year transition plan with the council (TNE, 2022). The engagement TNE undertook involved a narrower demographic of the Gladstone community than the ACF’s project with the intent of producing policy recommendations. These recommendations have been presented to the Gladstone council and accepted as the basis for ‘The Gladstone Region Economic Transition Roadmap’ (The Next Economy 2022).

Separate to this work, multiple outside bodies have advocated for both regional and federal transition authorities to be established to help coordinate the coming changes (CSIRO, 2019; Whittlesea, 2021; Edwards et al., 2022; Hope-Tilley, 2022). As of mid-2023 a Federal Net-Zero Authority with aims focusing on support and opportunities to regional communities is being developed with the intention of being operational by mid-2024 (Bryce & Schapova, 2023). The political landscape of energy transition is thus increasingly busy, and it is into this discussion that the ACF is attempting to insert itself.

This institutional landscape, is co-produced by shifting organisational logics and priorities of the Australian environmental movement. The ACF has historically been positioned towards the centre-right of environmentalism. Hall and Taplin (2007) classify it succinctly as ‘well funded, high profile, professional’. The ACF achieves its aims via a top-down approach to advocacy through elite level lobbying, petitioning, and taking legal action (Gulliver et al., 2020).

The ACF’s campaign in Gladstone represents a departure from its past. A grassroots engagement campaign to understand the needs and concerns of one community is a novel approach for the organisation (ACF 2023), but not the broader environment movement. Since the early 2010s, the Lock The Gate Alliance and The Sunrise Project have coordinated local campaigns against coal and gas mine expansions in regional areas (Pearse 2016, Ollis 2020, Ransan-Cooper et al. 2020). The ACF’s previous engagement on energy in regional Queensland was their participation in the ‘Stop Adani’ movement, a campaign notable for its divisive and lasting impact on how communities in Central Queensland perceive environmentalists (Colvin 2020). The Gladstone transition campaign we document began in 2021 and is evidence of the ACF’s learning process and ongoing experimentation in local campaigning.

Method

The core of this research was a series of semi-structured interviews conducted with 18 people in Gladstone in 2022. We also conducted participant observation of a campaign ‘Conversation’. Interview participants were contacted through a snowballing model of identifying key personnel who then enabled contact with a series of other relevant individuals (total n = 18). Interviewees were identified based on their relationship to the program and included the entire team of ACF staff involved in this project (n = 3), representatives of all the social and community groups involved at the time (n = 5), and half of the projects participants to date (n = 10). The decision to draw conclusions from this early stage of the project was driven by the fact that we are studying only a single organisation in an intensive learning process.

Informants were asked to give their perspectves on the campaign and the issues it’s traversing. They were asked about their sense of what an energy transition means for Gladstone, and to comment on the progress of the ACF’s campaign. Interviews ranged in duration from 30 to 75 minutes, with roughly two-thirds of them conducted in person in Gladstone, and the remaining third conducted as video calls on Zoom. Each interviewee was provided with a detailed information sheet prior to the discussion and time was allowed time before and after the interviews for questions about the research project. The resulting interviews were transcribed using the Sonix web platform. These transcriptions were then examined using a thematic analysis approach in which key points of discussion pertaining to the primary research questions were identified and collated into a summary document. A separate summary was prepared for each interview.

Building a coalition in Gladstone

This section outlines how the ACF came to the decision to build a campaign in Gladstone.

The ACF was previously a leading organisation in the aforementioned ‘Stop Adani’ campaign, notable for the division it revealed, and arguably contributed to, between communities in Central Queensland and environmentalists (Colvin 2020). As mentioned above, the move to develop a Gladstone based campaign alliance in 2021 is a tactical shift for the ACF in the wake of the Adani campaign the surprise loss for the centre-left Labor Party in the 2019 Australian Federal Election which followed. The ACF had previously commissioned economic modelling on potential employment to be derived from a transition to renewable energy (ACF, 2010), but no grassroots campaign followed.

Gavan McFadzean, the ACF’s Program Manager for Climate & Energy, felt that a grassroots campaign was important for the ACF to establish a new rapport with regional communities and move beyond its arguably limiting metropolitan demography. He reflected on how the ACF’s involvement with the Stop Adani campaign had contributed to the ‘valid criticism that the environment movement often just talks to the converted’. He went on to elaborate how the challenges in Central Queensland are different to those in other locales across Australia, noting that residents in resource-rich regions like the Hunter Valley (New South Wales) and La Trobe Valley (Victoria) also had legitimate concern ‘about the prospect of having this low carbon future imposed on them’.

Gavan’s second line of reasoning is as important as his first. Energy transition creates two types of concerning change to regional centres. Firstly, it can involve the decline of fossil fuel industries currently concentrated in an industrial cities, and secondly, it can involve major social, economic and environmental disruptions associated with new clean energy industries in adjacent regions (Cass et al. 2022).

Jason Lyddieth, Climate & Energy Campaigner for the ACF in Queensland, could see both sides of the energy transition in Gladstone. He described how, when looking for avenues to engage Queensland on climate change, the question of managing an energy transition came to the fore:

I started looking at Gladstone and started going, oh wow, all the issues are here … an area that is so heavily dependent on heavy emitting industries but also [has] so much potential to transition and be, to be a renewable leader. And the chance to do this properly; to, you know, campaign in an area in a constructive way.

This involved collaborating with a regional constituency the ACF had only previously alienated, so there was some internal trepidation about how the program would be received. Jason described this risk as organisational risk in that, you know, the organisation is seen to be coming into town and telling locals what to do and it backfiring and making ACF look really bad … but I think there’s also that broader political risk in pulling back … further amplifying the culture war that exists. The answer to these risks lay in building an inclusive campaign from the bottom up with a paid staff member who grew up in Gladstone.

Jaclyn McCosker is currently the only ACF employee in Gladstone, and consequently she is central to the outcome of this project. Jaclyn is a Gladstone local in her 20s, who returned to the city after finishing her degree and who has family members and a partner working in local EII. She was previously involved with the Australian Youth Climate Coalition whilst studying, but this employment with the ACF is her first professional role in the environmental movement.

The purpose of local campaigning led by someone with community ties is to build trust with the community and prove that the ACF was making a substantial commitment to the place. Gavan explained that they needed someone who ‘understands the heartbeat of that community, what it cares about, what its needs are, what future it sees.’ The outcomes we discussed with ACF were about changing minds and action in both Gladstone and the ACF itself. Jaclyn views her position within the ACF as being to advocate within the organisation for the values of regional communities by ‘trying to encourage [the ACF] to show more empathy for people that have always been framed as the villains … because it’s not really the fault of ordinary citizens that this is happening. We didn’t construct the climate wars.’

Conscious of this turbulent history in Central Queensland, Jaclyn sees the Gladstone project as a means to ‘de-politicise the climate conversation’ as much as possible. What depoliticising means in practice is alliance building between organisations and activating citizens to define their vision and goals. The work to build an inclusive and diverse campaign based on local leadership signals that in fact ‘de-politicising’ climate change involves standard political work of negotiating alliances between formal organisations and recruiting new members through relationship building and experimentation with communication frames (Benford and Snow 2000).

As an organisation, the ACF is working on both sides of the ‘sustainability-inclusivity’ tension Ciplet and Harrison (2019) identify between ‘rapid and bold policy action in time-sensitive contexts and inclusive governance processes’ (p. 436). In the sphere of national parliamentary politics, the ACF has led campaigns to reform the national emissions trading scheme. In these negotiations, the ACF has worked alongside, and sometimes in tension with, Greens Party members in parliament pushing for stronger limits on coal and gas mining in the new 2023 cap and trade laws (Greber 2023). By comparison, the ACF’s Gladstone campaign is more local, focussing on making a contribution to local democratic legitimacy for the energy transition.

Interview findings: inclusion, equity, and recognition tensions

The work of inclusion: launching an alliance

When campaigners deal with the sustainability-inclusivity tension, they are trading off between large-scale concerns about temporal urgency at a global scale against time-consuming local commitments to procedural justice (Ciplet and Harrison 2019). During nearly twenty years of grassroots climate and energy campaigning in Australia, ENGOs and activists of various identities have faced challenges building broad local coalitions with enough power and focus to ‘keep fossil fuels in the ground’.

To address issues of inclusion, the structure of the ACF campaign in Gladstone aims to foster broad community collaboration, with a goal of speaking to 1% of the population of the local area (approximately 650 people). To encourage diverse community engagement, the ACF funded a community organiser from the Queensland Community Alliance (QCA) to coordinate the project. This led to the campaign being publicly branded as a project under the auspices of the QCA when introduced to the community and various local groups. The resulting coalition of organisations which have made commitments to be involved in the project (by running ‘conversations’ of their own) includes the Queensland Teachers Union, the Rail, Tram, and Bus Union, the Electrical Trades Union, as well as an assortment of smaller local organisations and a local church group. Notable by its absence is the Mining and Energy Union (MEU), the primary representative for the industries most directly affected by energy transition.

The campaign builds through ‘Conversations’ with group members and the general public (undertaken both individually and in group settings). These conversations consist of three questions relating to connection to place, concerns about life in Gladstone, and concerns about economic transition in Gladstone. We asked participants in the alliance and in the conversations about the process of these conversations and what they were learning. The most common response was that progress is slow, but that such a pace is necessary given the outsider status of the ACF, especially when attempting to expand representation within the project beyond previously addressed demographics. Of the 650 ‘Conversations’ the campaign is hoping to have, less than twenty had been conducted at the time of the interviews. This was over a period of approximately six months from January 2022 to July 2022. Jaclyn explained that ‘the challenges have just been the typical challenges of trying to organise a lot of people.’

Amongst people who had participated in ‘Conversations’, multiple interviewees echoed Jaclyn’s comment, Natasha (a local councillor and participant) insisted:

‘you need to go and talk to people. You have to have a bit of a relationship. And that doesn’t just happen from one day to the next … it takes a bit of time … to get them to trust you’.

Ultimately, the aim of the campaign is to reach a ‘tipping point’ that will result in ‘a community led movement’.

Building towards this tipping points exposes two issues connected to inclusion. The first relates to the capacity and resources people need to engage in civil society projects like this. As John, a union representative, put it.

not everyone has the skills or necessarily the desire to want to be that conduit to engage through. And that’s fair. Not everyone wants or has to be. But yeah, it’s about finding those people … that have the capacity.

The second issue relates to how a more inclusive campaign might be built beyond existing community organising networks. The profile of people associated with environmental movements presents a challenge for the project goal of diverse representation. In Disability Advocate Kate’s words:

the people that historically have never been included in the conversation don’t volunteer themselves, because they don’t see it as ‘for them’ … before you even get to give the pitch of why, they do that ‘no this isn’t for me’, but, like, it is for you, it’s very specifically for you … we don’t want to talk to the same goddam people every time.”

Diversifying that engagement looks like reaching out to ‘the culturally and linguistically diverse community, the Indigenous community … people that are fighting to get jobs’.

We found that the ACF’s own resources were a constraint on the possibility for broad, meaningful inclusion. Working through Gladstone’s social networks to expand the reach of the project to those diverse elements of the community dominated the majority of Jaclyn’s workload.

The efforts to build a diverse constituency shifts the temporality and the scalar objectives of the campaign. The ACF understands the necessity of this shift in order to build collective power and agency in the face of major economic restructuring and threats to equity. They also recognise the inevitability of that transition operating on a timeframe beyond their control. As Jason Lyddieth summarised ‘building community consensus takes a long time, but the issue is moving so fast’.

Organising for equity: distributive justice and Gladstone’s employment questions

The tension between equity and industrial decarbonisation in just transition campaigning aligns to classical distributive justice. EJ scholars focus on the ‘allocation of goods and harms, including those related to health and wellbeing’ (Ciplet and Harrison 2019).

In regional industrial towns like Gladstone, equity tensions involve both sectoral employment and the broader regional economy. The possible constriction of emissions-intensive industry in Gladstone will have major employment effects that concern EII unions and local civil society participants alike. We found the Gladstone campaign focusing on a ‘just transition’ at the regional scale, where a transition away from EII challenges the prevailing pattern of regional development and growth strategies.

The concept of ‘just transition’ in the ACF’s campaigning has rightly included focus on the impacted workers facing retrenchment as EII go into decline. There is a lot to lose in the transition for this segment of the region’s industrial workforce. John, a railway shunter and representative of the Rail Tram and Bus Union, was unequivocal on the importance of discussing employment saying ‘a lot of people wouldn’t be in the town if it wasn’t for the jobs. So for us, it’s about how do we … maintain the employment we have now’.

The importance of communicating employment opportunities was echoed by all participants in the study. Kahn Goodluck, the deputy Mayor of Gladstone with whom the ACF has collaborated, explained that part of the reason for pushing an economic narrative was to ease the community’s concerns over the potential repeat of economic ‘boom and bust’ cycles. One of the things Kahn is looking for in planning an economic transition is ‘initiatives that we could do that might help with social services … within the community and housing, and mitigate those sort of impacts because there [were] … winners and losers through the LNG construction period’. To do this in a manner which resonates with Gladstone, Kahn believes communication ‘has to be through that economic lens’.

This orientation of the campaign raises questions about what social good renewable energy can provide. Renewable energy in regional Australia is a capital-intensive development with limited ongoing jobs in operation and maintenance (Pearse and Bryant 2021, Cass et al. 2022). When looking to the renewable energy developments taking place, another participant, Jade, elaborated that ‘people are worried that the new technology will sort of run itself’.

Developing labour-intensive low-carbon industries is essential for the equity concerns in Gladstone society to be addressed. But to date, the Mining and Energy Union (MEU) is not engaged with the ACF and remains focused on core labour rights and workplace-level bargaining issues. In the broader national climate policy debate, the MEU has supported green hydrogen plants (Bukarica 2023) while maintaining support for existing carbon-intensive facilities.

By emphasising economic and employment opportunity, we can likely foresee what Ciplet and Harrison called ‘unsustainable equity’ – where delayed sustainability action comes with equitable distribution of burdens and harms (p. 15). For this to occur at the scale of the regional economy, opportunities and support would not only target privileged workers, but also marginalised actors like contractors and tertiary sector businesses and employees in Gladstone (p. 15).

The next section explores ACF’s role in framing ‘just transition’ with a distributive framing and recognition politics focused on regional identity and more traditional environmental justice issues.

Recognition beyond the coal face: transitioning a regional identity

The tension between industrial decarbonisation and the implications that has for the regional identity of Gladstone is a notable development out of the ACF’s campaign. Ciplet and Harrison define the recognition tension as ‘characterised by conflicts between sustainability performance and recognition of diverse value systems and rights’ (p. 9). In this context, we found that the ACF is attempting to participate in a broadening politics of recognition. In addition to focusing on directly impacted workers, a campaign aimed at understanding the evolving needs and identity of the region as a whole is in the making.

Similar to findings in the Hunter Valley (Macneil and Beauman 2022), those engaged by the ACF so far tended to reflect on the wider workforce. Andrew, a now retired mechanical engineer who had spent his life working in the coal fired power station, emphasised how it’s got to be jobs in the entire community because the community is not just the few who have the process jobs. For every one of those there is probably ten or twenty jobs that fan out of it.

Kate, the aforementioned disability activist, viewed an economic transition as a possible pathway to bringing more people into employment. The frustration she has felt with previous campaigns was that ‘there doesn’t seem to be as much interest in those that are fighting to get the job’.

When asked to reflect on how the economic transition would affect Gladstone’s interest more broadly, the most common response related to chronic health issues, which quickly led to frustration with regional public services. Catherine, a retired project officer for disability services and long-time resident of Gladstone, reflected that when she moved to Gladstone ‘the air quality was something I was conscious of … there was these stories about asthma, people who’d never had asthma before when they came to Gladstone they got asthma’.

The weave of conflicts over public health and economic development is paralleled in other local environmental justice movements (Mohai et al. 2009, Higginbotham et al. 2010). Jaclyn identified these concerns as a possible leading issue in the next phase of the campaign. She characterised the scepticism the community feels as ‘why are all these industries here profiting off of us, destroying our environment, and we’re getting absolutely nothing in return?’

Building from this, Andrew identified that, collectively, the region feels existentially threatened by the disappearance of an industry that has, nevertheless, given it economic stability and a sense of identity for half a century. To address that, he suggested that ‘what will get the most attention is the immediate issues and a path forward to people who see themselves in peril’.

What has been revealed is the tension between the identity the region has had to date as an industrial centre and the as yet unclarified identity it will develop in the future. Deputy Mayor Kahn Goodluck views this as taking his community ‘on a journey’ through the transition. By expanding the conversation beyond EII workers, the ACF is attempting to articulate this evolving vision in a manner that is authentic to the whole region. Achieving this in timely manner is the challenging recognition work present in this study.

We reflect on these temporal and scalar dilemmas further below.

Interview lessons: temporal avoidance, rescaling and managing transition

Three key lessons were reported by participants that illustrate the scalar and temporal choices being made in the process of managing tensions. In this section we note that the re-framing of the campaign addresses tensions over equity, inclusion and recognition in ways that rescale a just transition. This approach necessarily avoids the temporal challenge of climate change and need for urgent transition, but finds hope in meaningful relationships. Climate change and traditional environmental concerns remain bracketed out, but tentative pathways can be seen by local participants.

Incremental connecting paths, not urgent interventions

The campaign choice to focus on building community relationships involves abandoning a sense of urgency around the climate. The method for creating meaningful political connections in Gladstone was summarised by multiple interviewees as taking an ‘incremental’ approach to messaging. Jason explained this as the idea that you ‘take many little steps to go a long way’ and that therefore you cannot plan for a specific trajectory to your campaign. Gavan echoed this saying that communities ‘just want you to meet them where they are’ and that any campaign should incorporate that fact into how they approach community engagement.

Kahn Goodluck, in his role as Deputy Mayor, understood this process as needing ‘to get them [the community] to come on the journey … give, firstly, hope to those people and, secondly, a clear pathway.’ What is consequently occurring is a contextually significant, incremental shift in the language and ideas around an economic transition for Gladstone. By deeply collaborating with the community in this campaign, the ACF is making itself attuned to that localised thinking.

Within the ACF there is an awareness of the time commitment required to develop relationships and momentum. Building ‘community consensus takes time’, reflected Jason, who confirmed the ACF has committed resources to the project through to 2024.

Managing transition, not ‘just transition’

The process of listening has sparked a reframing away from ‘just transition’ to syntax referencing the ‘next economy’ and ‘managing transition’. The concept of ‘just transition’ has been met with suspicion in Gladstone as it has in other areas documented in the environmental politics literature (Colvin and Przybyszewski 2022, Macneil and Beauman 2022). Jaclyn and the ACF were aware of potential sensitivities around using the language of ‘just transition’, saying:

‘we have some unions [that] like never, ever, ever say just transition … basically the gist was it was, like, was an empty phrase … we’ve got lots of examples around the world of, like, catastrophic transitions like LaTrobe. So they were basically like “yeah, yeah, you say Just Transition but no one actually means it” and now in certain union organising that word is polluted.’

John, the RTBU representative, concurred. When the concept was presented to him his response was ‘Well, I can’t say we use it at all. I mean, we do talk about, like, what would be an equitable transition for everyone’.

Angela Heck, from The Next Economy (TNE), noted that the language and understanding of economic transition in Gladstone had already shifted from when TNE undertook its first consultation in 2021, saying ‘now everyone understands, for example, that … the region’s changing and that we’re shifting from fossil fuels to renewable energy’ and so the conversation that needs to take place now is ‘what does it mean for us? … the whole sentiment has shifted.’ TNE talks about ‘managing transition … in the face of changes in the energy sector, instead of a just transition.’

In 2023, the ACF has been working with the Sydney Policy Lab’s ‘Real Deal’ initiative. It framed the adapted Australian version of a ‘green new deal’ for Gladstone in terms of access to healthcare, housing affordability and liveability (Ganley et al. 2023). The ACF and partners have deliberately used language that reflects terminology employed by the target demographic.

Talking about local social needs, not climate and science

The choice to focus on social needs has involved moving away from environmental frames like carbon targets and science. In responding to the specific needs and values expressed by the Gladstone community, the language used in this project constitutes a notable departure from the ACF’s other campaigns and, to an extent, their own values. Whilst the core of the economic transition issue is driven by environmental concerns, there is no reference to either ecological sustainability or the cultural value of nature in this campaign – both of which are values commonly expressed by the ACF.

Jaclyn sees this approach as a pragmatic decision, saying ‘you don’t need to believe in climate change to be like, hey, 80% of our trade partners have decarbonisation targets. If we want to survive we need to decarbonise. That’s it. That’s the argument.’

Jason elaborated on this, explaining that the discussion of employment is viewed as essential not because ‘people in Central Queensland care any less about nature than we do’ but because ‘it actually costs them a lot more to care about it’, whereas traditional ACF demographics are ‘not being challenged by that choice’.

The empathy of this framing decision is a direct result of the collaborative structure of the campaign. This approach helps to mitigate the impact of challenging deeply held community identities associated with EII, as well as granting the ACF social licence to make its presence in the community longer lasting.

The risk here is that, by failing to incorporate an awareness of ecological sustainability in the limited bandwidth afforded to serious community discussions of economic transition, questions of the environmental qualifications of ‘Green’ industrial developments may be overlooked. This is a point that Jaclyn views as a necessary strategy:

I strongly agree with the criticism … but this is where we’re starting from. Maintain the status quo by decarbonising … a very wild thing to say, depending on who you’re talking to.

The participants of the ACF’s campaign we spoke to believe there’s a way to talk about the environment. Speaking to the idea of how the language can shift, conversations participation Malcom believes ‘there’s scope to include those traditional environmental aspects’. For Jade, this combination is necessary: ‘if you don’t address socio-political stuff in the same breath as environmentalism, then that’s just causing a divide where there is none’.

That the ACF is deliberately not pushing urgent decarbonization in favour of the regional transition management framing in Gladstone reveals the ongoing temporal and scalar clashes involved in environmental engagement at this and other carbon hotspots (Rosewarne et al. 2014, Eriksen 2018).

With regard to Ciplet and Harrison’s reflections on the types of outcomes that can arise from these tensions, the findings presented here marry best with ‘inclusive inertia’ and ‘unsustainable equity and recognition’ (p. 7, 11).

Conclusion

In this paper we outlined key insights about framing social movement campaigns and relationship-building for energy transition in regional industrial centres. In doing so, we have been in pursuit of Ciplet and Harrison’s ‘useful theory of justice’ that can give us a grip on the messy real-world situations environmental campaigners operate in, and the emerging implications of choices they make as they manage difficult tensions across a range of distributive, procedural and identity issues.

Our observations of campaign development and interviews reveals that ENGO techniques for managing tensions in regional industrial towns are responsive and sensitive to local socio-political dynamics. However, the pressures of the climate crisis undermine the necessarily slow work of building relationships and developing broad communication strategies required to develop collective power and capacity for environmental justice in regional industrial centres.

Our research explored the three tensions in energy transition movements identified by Ciplet and Harrison (2019). We found that these tensions are interwoven throughout ENGO practice. In navigating issues of equity, inclusion, and recognition the campaign choices we documented combine to contribute to the re-scaling and reframing of ‘just transition’ as a task of managing regional economic transition.

We draw three primary conclusions about Ciplet and Harrison’s call for a ‘useful theory of environmental justice’. First, a useful theory begins with responding to the inevitable tensions and strategic dilemmas facing ENGO campaigners in the messy realities of the specific places they seek to build power. Our study shows the practical justice politics of ACF’s campaign is a learning process and series of campaign choices.

Secondly, our study shows that as ENGOs work on tensions over inclusion, equity, and recognition the campaign’s frame and focus evolves as the issues becomes rescaled as a regional matter. In Gladstone, the campaign is developing by prioritising a wide set of organisations beyond the EII unions such as place-based affective ties, place-focused environmental issues, and local economic security. However, the broad coalition and rescaled regional approach to climate politics is producing a drift away from traditional environmentalism and towards a more general social justice campaign.

Finally, the management of tensions in regional centres like Gladstone clearly doesn’t eliminate the stubborn urgency of the climate crisis. There is a universal temporal pressure from climate science to pursue urgent decarbonisation, and all decisions around practical action in energy transition campaigns face this stressor. In seeking to ‘meet people where they are at’ the ACF is necessarily having to bracket this temporal and environmental pressure out of their campaign in this local region.

Is a scaling and speeding up of this relational work feasible? What kinds of ENGO activity and resource investment in a region like Gladstone would be needed to make more urgent structural change possible? Perhaps if the ACF manages to build local social capital it will be able to work in coalition to drive a greater sense of urgency and climate-change concern during the transition. But, at present, the necessary community listening work being done means that discussion of urgent industrial transformation must be framed economically. With their limited resources, ENGOs and their campaigners embedding themselves in towns like Gladstone appear to face a choice. Embrace the strategic and structural shifts required to engage regional communities or reprioritise the cities as a site of protest and policy agitation.

Ethics

Ethical approval for this study was obtained from the Research Ethics Office of the Australian National University (protocol number 2022/437). Informed written consent was obtained from the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) and all individual research participants. This consent included participants nominating preferences for full name attribution or a pseudonym. Sean Marshall previously held a volunteer fellowship position with the ACF.

Acknowledgment

Many thanks to Frank Jotzo and Rebecca Colvin for their guidance of this research, and to Jenniffer and Ian Prosser for their support.

Disclosure statement

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

Supplementary Material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2024.2347164

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian National University [Prosser Scholarship].