Place-based just transition: domains, components and costs

ABSTRACT

The transition from fossil fuels involves the closing down of fossil-fuel based plants and activities, such as coal mines and coal fired power stations. This article outlines the components of a place-based Just Transition in which the management of closures extends spatially, beyond the usual focus on affected workers, to deliver interventions across affected communities with a view to minimising adverse impacts, creating new local opportunities and kindling hope for the future. It positions these interventions as integral to the change process, and not simply a post-hoc compensation for the losers of change. The article identifies six domains for policy action: pre-planning, coordinating change, managing plant closures, redeploying the labour force, redeveloping the local economy, and maintaining social cohesion. For each, specifying goals, targets, indicators and measures helps to reveal the magnitude of the interventions that will be required to achieve a place-based Just Transition. After providing broad estimates of the associated costs, the article concludes that delivering a Just Transition is likely to require re-distributive funding.

KEYWORDS:

• Just transition; plant closures; regional development policy
• best practice

Despite increasing emphasis on Just Transition (JT) in public policy and academic literature, there has been very little discussion of what exactly needs to be done, who is responsible, and how much it will cost. This article examines the practical components of the delivery of a place based Just Transition in fossil fuel dependent regions as fossil fuel mines and power stations close down. It argues that delivering a Just Transition demands the active management of change to minimise adverse impacts across communities, as well as for affected workers, to create new local opportunities and kindle hope for the future. The account identifies six domains for policy action – pre-planning, coordinating change, managing the closure process, redeploying the labour force, redeveloping the local economy, and maintaining social cohesion. For each, the discussion explains the goal, and why it is important, then specifies targets, indicators and measures to provide a sense of the magnitude of the interventions required to achieve a just transition process. After providing broad estimates of the associated costs, the article concludes that a place-based Just Transition demands both significant redistributive funding and a high degree of local control.

The article’s repositioning of JT as place-based policy makes three contributions to the growing literatures on just transition, sustainability transition and their relationship. The first is to introduce the necessity of specifying the scope of interventions made in the name of just transition, and measuring their success, or otherwise, in achieving their goals. This is vital because, as the idea of JT becomes integrated into mainstream policy, the promises of politicians and policymakers might not be matched by effective action. Second, the proposed place-based approach to JT stretches the concept both spatially and temporally to answer emerging criticism that, because JT is overly focussed on employees, it simply protects an already-privileged group (of well-paid, male, unionised workers), and as such, reproduces existing inequalities. Spatially, focusing on affected places, and everybody who lives in those places, equips JT to tackle decarbonisation and inequality simultaneously. Temporally, a place-based version of JT positions action to prevent communities from being left behind as inherent to the transition process, unfolding in conjunction with other aspects of transition rather than as a post-hoc compensation for the losers of change. The approach aspires to designing a change process that does not produce losers. The third contribution is to consider the distributional implications. The existing literature on JT emphasises social dialogue and the need for local control over the transition process, to empower communities and provide them with a sense of agency. But there is less discussion of resources. If local control actually means local control within local resource constraints then the scope of JT will be narrow. By examining what needs to be done and how much it will cost, this article reaches the conclusion that redistributive funding will be necessary to deliver on JT promises.

The article comprises five sections. After this introduction, the next section outlines debates about the nature and content of a just transition. Section three, the empirical section, explains the domains of policy action contributing to an effective regional transformation and, for each, specifies goals, targets, indicators and measures. The penultimate section discusses the costs and the demarcation of responsibilities. The conclusion reiterates the main points.

Debating just transition

There is continuing debate about what a Just Transition (JT) actually means (Morena et al., 2020; Newell & Mulvaney, 2013). Like all politically contested ideas, its meaning has evolved over time and varied from place to place. As a mobile or ‘vehicular’ concept (Peck, 2012), the definition bends with changing political forces and the material realities of different contexts. This section trains a critical lens on three versions of Just Transition thinking.

In its original formulation, emanating from the union movement in the United States, JT focused on the workforces directly impacted by the shift from fossil fuels, and on union campaigns to convert obsolete fossil fuel jobs into the ‘green’ jobs of the new economy. This framing informs the International Labour Organisation’s (ILO, 2015, p. 6) practice-oriented description of JT as ‘anticipating impacts on employment, adequate and sustainable social protection for job losses and displacement, skills development and social dialogue, including the effective exercise of the right to organise and bargain collectively’. The ILO adopts this perspective to provide a broad set of ‘non-binding’ and ‘practical’ guiding principles for this worker-focused version of JT, outlining in broad terms the policy interventions and institutional arrangements available for use in the development, implementation and monitoring of JT policies. In this reading, the ends of JT are sustainable development, decent work and green jobs, but the means of achievement are open and flexible. Actual interventions attuned to the specific conditions in places – including their stage of development, economic sectors and types and sizes of enterprises (ILO, 2015, p. 6) – do better in maintaining the material standards of the affected workforces.

This version of JT has the political advantage of collapsing the destructive ‘jobs versus climate’ binary which has been mobilised to fuel resistance to change in fossil-fuel dependent locations and does so by promising workers that fossil fuel-based occupations can be repurposed to take up the ‘green’ jobs created in the shift to renewable energy sources (Evans & Phelan, 2016; Stevis & Felli, 2015; Vona, 2019). By concentrating on practical action in local places, rather than on definitional nuances, this pragmatic version of JT has enabled unions to lead and unite communities in demands for positive change (Snell, 2018).

The practical risks are, firstly, that JT will focus too narrowly on directly impacted workers, and thereby reinscribe existing inequalities (Velicu & Barca, 2020). By failing to consider adequately the flow-on impacts of economic change through local and regional economies, it may even exacerbate inequalities. There is also a risk that, as local unions align politically with progressive forces in demanding climate action, they exclude the most directly affected (i.e. fossil fuel) workers and their unions from the JT process (see Abraham, 2017). This narrow approach to JT has attracted criticism from climate-oriented and Sustainability Transition perspectives. Galgóczi (2020), for example, argues that JT’s delivery via established institutional frameworks is incapable of advancing the transformatory restructuring of the institutional fabric that will be a necessary precondition for transitioning to a zero carbon world. Similarly, Flanagan and Goods (2022, p. 479) contend that ‘industrial relations processes that were introduced to increase fairness and equality in a fossil capitalist context have the potential to contribute to different kinds of unfairness and inequality in an era of climate instability’. They accuse this narrow version of JT of being too reactive, too easily hijacked by firms, and too easily subverted into ‘do-nothing’ policy stalemates.

A second way of defining JT is as a meta-narrative with the principal purpose of advancing progress towards a zero carbon world by uniting disparate interests under its unifying banner. Here Just Transition signifies and represents a moral ‘good’ that carries – in parallel with other universal concepts like sustainability – an appeal compatible with a variety of political rationalities and programme delivery technologies. In this version, JT is an ideology in the Gramscian sense; an idea with the potential to hold together multiple disparate underlying positions and unite them in an alliance of support for global action on climate. In Gramsci’s (1971, p. 349) understanding, concepts like JT forge the ‘“cultural-social” unity’ at the heart of political mobilisation. Accordingly, this version of JT offers ‘a new space for developing an interdisciplinary transition approach’ incorporating the universal values of recognition and justice, a space imagined as one where everybody is valued, and everybody is included (McCauley & Heffron, 2018, p. 1). McCauley and Heffron define JT in terms of three dimensions of justice: procedural justice advanced by processes considered ‘fair’ by everybody, distributional justice secured via an equitable distribution of costs and benefits, and restorative justice in the form of reparation for harms done in the past. In this understanding, JT as meta-narrative works discursively, enabling the construction of niche localised actor-networks dedicated to a global, universal and inter-generational notion of a ‘just’ change process (Goddard & Farrelly, 2018). From this perspective, JT exists principally as compensation for the losers of change, a remedial action to the consequences of socio-technical transition (Kanger et al., 2020). Like the previous understanding, the focus is on assisting affected workers and affected communities to find ‘sustainable’ alternative livelihoods; but perhaps only as far as is necessary to overcome ‘jobs versus climate’ narratives and advance decarbonisation objectives politically. The risk with this understanding is that the planetary scale of concern works to diminish the relative importance of the challenges facing fossil-fuel dependent places in advanced economies. Defining sustainable alternative livelihoods in terms of the UN’s sustainable development goals (UN, 2015), can potentially legitimise the ‘levelling down’ of affected communities, and justifying their relegation to diminished standards of living. As demonstrated by events like Brexit, this position is associated with the disenfranchisement of ‘left behind ‘ places and as such it carries significant political risks (Weller, 2021).

A third approach to Just Transition concentrates on the social and emotional well-being of affected communities. In this version, JT prioritises community and contends that effective policy responses must focus on, understand, and influence localised emotional trajectories of change as they evolve at times of crisis. This approach provides a bridge between the practical and ideological versions of JT by insisting that emotions are what link discourses – such as the discourse of Just Transition – to the complex ‘realities of human (in)action’ in places (Duffy et al., 2021, p. 6). The spatial politics of emotion are what bind people to community, influence social identity, and shape social action (Ahmed, 2004). At the community scale, emotions are contagious; intense negative emotions sap a community’s capacity for effective agency. This suggests that a comprehensive JT must attend to what Berlant (1997, p. 4) calls the ‘intimate public sphere’, the place where the personal and the political interweave and where the sense of disenfranchisement observed in deindustrialising and ‘left behind’ places can fester (Bromley-Davenport et al., 2019).

In this register, a fourth notion of justice emerges: the notion of spatial justice understood as a collective rather than individual concern (Soja, 2013). Ideological JT’s three tenets of procedural, redistributive and reparative justice do not adequately address this dimension (Banerjee & Schuitem, 2023). Attending to the emotional impacts of localised change necessitates casting a wide net and emphasising the needs of the most vulnerable people in communities in crisis. This wider spatiality moves beyond the material interests of affected workforces. Spatial justice demands investment in projects that (re-)build the emotional capacities of communities, as well as their revive economies. From a spatial justice perspective, JT would create local ‘spaces of hope’ (Harvey, 2000), an ambition that exceeds the delivery of ‘social dialogue’ and ‘green jobs’ by a considerable degree. Acknowledging the existence of community-scale emotion enables the vital move of recognition (in Honneth’s, 2004 terms) of the negative feelings associated with depressed, deindustrialising, disenfranchised and ‘left behind’ locations. Viewing crises in such locations as an opportunity for accelerating innovation, change and economic redevelopment, as in the Sustainability Transition literature (e.g. Trippl et al., 2023), denies this dimension and leaves the fate of people in fossil-fuel dependent areas to the decidedly un-just discipline of market forces (Weller & Rainnie, 2022).

The next section proposes a place-based model for JT. It operationalises a spatial justice perspective concerned with both the emotional and material health of the community. It is based on established ‘Structural Adjustment’ policy models for managing the economic, social and political consequences of policy change (Beer, 2015; Smith, 2017). This approach delivers JT via existing regulatory and institutional frameworks, to make JT both manageable and achievable (Eisenberg, 2019; Kalt, 2021). The idea is to manage change without radical disruption to ordinary lives, and (at a minimum) without adding to extant inequalities. The principle underpinning these policies has been that no particular community should bear a disproportional share of the social costs of (national) policy change. The account stresses the identification of indicators and measures to monitor the achievements of JT interventions. Attention to standards and benchmarks for delivery addresses the risk that JT degenerates into a ‘do nothing’ status quo. The version of JT presented here does not aspire to create a hegemonic discourse, as in the ideological version of JT, but rather seeks to specify a framework that can simultaneously manage change, facilitate national-scale energy transitions, and preserve representative democracy.

Domains of policy action

This section identifies six domains for policy action that together generate a regionally focused, spatial approach to JT. As already mentioned, the six domains are regulatory pre-planning, coordinating the regional scale change process, managing major closure events, redeploying the labour force, redeveloping the local economy, and maintaining social cohesion. This adds two dimensions – pre-planning and managing closure events – to the four domains of intervention identified in Pai et al.’s (2020) systematic review of JT approaches. To preserve flexibility, broad guidelines (such as ILO, 2015) list the domains of policy, but they seldom delve into the details of action. This account provides more explanatory depth to explain why each domain is important and what an effective intervention might involve. For each domain, it explains issues, identifies the goals of action and specifies target outcomes. Each section includes indicators and measures to evaluate progress. Clarifying what actions might be required to achieve a ‘just’ outcome makes it possible to estimate the likely costs. The relative weight of effort among the six domains would depend on local circumstances, in particular pre-existing local socio-economic and political conditions.

The content presented here is based on a report prepared in 2020 for the Muswellbrook Shire Council in Australia’s Upper Hunter Valley, to assist its planning for the impending closure of the Muswellbrook coal mine and the associated Liddell coal-fired power station. The task – to identify the social and economic measures of success for a global best practice closure process – involved a systematic literature review of seven major closure events (Weller et al., 2020; 2021). These were the closure of Parkstad in Limberg, Netherlands (Loorbach & Rotmans, 2010); Rover in Birmingham, England (Bailey et al., 2008), Nokia in Tampere, Finland (Kurikka et al., 2018), earlier mining and steelworks closures in northern England (Fothergill & Guy, 1994; Pike, 2002) and two closures in Australia, the Hazelwood coal-fired power station and mine in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley (Weller, 2019), the closure of the Ford automotive plant in Geelong, Victoria (Barnes & Weller, 2020).

Pre-planning

The transition from fossil fuels is being advanced by national policies, so Just Transition is also a national, rather than local, policy issue. In a world of continuous crises, where rapid change is the norm rather than the exception, there needs to be somewhere in government where expertise, experience and resources can be stored and deployed when crises occur.

The capacity to respond to crises needs to sit somewhere within the apparatus of state, but where it sits will depend on national institutional frameworks and the degree of devolution of governmental systems. Ideally it would be located adjacent to, and work cooperatively with, longer-term economic development and regional planning agencies. In economies with well-developed industry policies, these organisational entities are likely to have instituted economic diversification strategies in vulnerable regions long before a local situation reaches a crisis point. The resources available, and the effectiveness of its interventions, are likely to reflect the relative power and influence of this institutional location.

The first role of a crisis coordination entity is to establish, and justify, the principles from which interventions follow. This requires mounting a convincing case for providing additional services – over the baseline of universal provisions – for job losers who lose their jobs in crisis circumstances. Such an agency will ensure that wider regulatory frameworks are designed to enable a timely response to crises. For example, this could include requiring firms to make provisions for plant closures, including redundancy and termination provisions in industrial agreements, requiring firms to provide advance notice of impending closures, and preventing firms from avoiding their obligations (e.g. via strong bankruptcy regulation). Often vulnerable firms seek government assistance, creating an opportunity for government to partner with firms, and their workforces, to plan for and manage restructuring.

The agency will craft policy advice to determine when and if local crises warrant funding and support from higher levels of government. If the trigger is a major plant closure, how big does the event have to be? What is the cut-off point? Do some sorts of events qualify but not others? In Australia, for example, the Federal government intervenes only when the event is linked to trade policy, thereby excluding commercial failures, events driven by technological change, and – at least up to the time of writing – events associated with decarbonisation. These decisions are inevitably political. Following the logic of never letting a crisis go to waste (Mirowski, 2014), intervention is more likely at times when and in places where there are already compelling arguments for regional redevelopment.

Fourth, the department or government-created entity overseeing interventions will resource local and regional action. It will act as the repository of knowledge about what has worked in other times and places, employ people who are passionate about delivering effective crisis intervention, and marshal sufficient experience to provide realistic estimates of how much local interventions are likely to cost given extant infrastructure. The body charged with this responsibility will need to work with other government departments to deliver a timely response. The approach (and costs) of delivering on the goal of retraining displaced workers, for example, will vary with the quality of pre-existing local training infrastructure and it might be necessary for governments to step in to augment basic services. Effective action is timely, spatially sensitive, and will involve all affected constituencies.

This new organisation will advise local organisers on the temporal and spatial scope of crisis interventions and on the composition of coordination bodies, tailoring them to the circumstances of the specific area. The governance arrangement must include higher levels of government to ensure that actions are compatible with the policy objectives of different tiers of government. Local coordination is crucial, but there is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ framework.

Coordinating the change process

At the local scale, coordinating the different aspects of the JT process is crucial. This requires a local steering group that is familiar with community needs and is able to maintain collaborative relationships, ensure that interventions respond to local needs, and ensure that different types of interventions cohere as a unified process. Coordination is important because the components of JT interventions have different spatial and temporal ranges and involve different sets of skills. The direct impacts of a plant closure are localised to the commuting range of the affected plant, but the economic repercussions will spread out through the regional economy. Economic development policies are likely to favour a wider focus, but too wide a lens risks fuelling local resentments if the most severely impacted communities or groups sense a neglect of their needs (Weller, 2019). The group would establish oversight, monitoring and evaluation mechanisms to ensure that the community sees decisions about the scope and duration of interventions as equitable.

The goals of the leadership group are to oversee an inclusive, legitimate and democratic process. This should aim to provide a local sense of control and agency over and increasingly chaotic material world at the same time as it empowers the local community. The worker-oriented JT term ‘social dialogue’ does not necessarily deliver on this goal, nor does the ideological version of JT’s efforts to create a shared local vision of the future. When visioning activities disconnect from the realities of the present they can lead to the exclusion of minority voices and can make it harder to manage change in the present. In a democratic society, a preferable goal might be to involve people in ongoing debate (Mouffe, 2013).

The local coordinating group will oversee the administration of funds and programmes, and ensure that agencies implement agreed plans. These are summarised in Table 1. The effectiveness of any coordinating body will depend on the funding available and on its degree of authority over the deployment of funds.

Table 1. Coordinating the change process.

Goal: To maintain collaborative and inclusive governance dedicated to promoting community cohesion through the transformation process.
Target outcome	Indicators	Measures
Governance vehicles genuinely reflect community needs	Local satisfaction of wider community	Qualitative feedback. Surveys. Voting patterns
Stakeholders work collaboratively to manage the local change process.	Development of transition plan supported by all stakeholders.	Positive appraisal in survey of key stakeholders.
The different interventions cohere as a unified process.	Integration of temporal horizons and spatial interconnections.	Survey of key stakeholders.
Agencies implement agreed plans.	Agencies meet agreed targets in their area of responsibility.	Monitoring of implementation of targets and measures.

Each version of JT emphasises the need to establish robust multi-scalar governance mechanisms that involve key stakeholders in discussions about the future of localities and regions experiencing rapid change. Best practice governance in the labour-oriented approach follows a tripartite and multiscalar ‘task force’ model in which stakeholders are the regional decision-makers – firms, unions, training and skill organisations, and employment and industry specialists from each level of government – relevant to managing the employment crisis as it unfolds (Bailey et al., 2008; Pike, 2002). The niche network approach to JT, on the other hand, will aim to build a broad-based coalition of interests united by the idea of JT, including a wider range of stakeholders such as community and climate advocacy groups.

The composition of local governance is crucial to delivering on the inclusion aspects of justice (Hendriks, 2009). Whether the coordinating group has delegated authority to make planning and funding decisions, or whether it is an advisory group reporting to a governmental agency makes a difference to its local status.

Plant closure management

Plant closures, and the months leading up to plant closures, are a stressful time for affected workforces. A considerable body of knowledge has accumulated over the years to identify the best ways to manage plant closures to minimise fear, anxiety, and the sense of loss among affected workers. A successfully managed closure process begins a year or more before the planned final day and extends for a specified time (ideally, two years) beyond the date of closure. The goal in managing closures is to minimise adverse impacts for affected workers, dependent firms and the community. Table 2 summarises the target outcomes, indicators and measures for a well-managed plant closure.

Table 2. Plant closure management.

Goal: Actively manage plant closure to minimise adverse impacts for workers, firms and the community.
Target outcome	Indicators	Measures
Maintain collaborative relationships throughout the closure process.	Development of, and agreement on, closure plans and programmes.	Count of plans. Qualitative assessment of coordination mechanisms.
Honour existing regulations and industrial agreements and extend coverage if inequities identified.	Workers are satisfied that agreements have been honoured.	List of regulations. Coverage of agreements. Worker surveys.
Provide timely and consistent information throughout the closure process.	Regularly updated communications for workplace and community.	Count of the number, range and frequency of communications. Community satisfaction surveys.
Provide early notice of closure, ensuring that affected workers are the first to know.	Development of communication strategy prior to announcement.	Qualitative assessment of process.
Provide free, confidential, and on-demand personal and financial counselling services for affected workers and family members.	Availability from announcement to at least a year after closure.	Worker and family satisfaction with access to and quality of assistance (worker surveys).
Establish equitable criteria for selecting workers eligible for early redundancy.	Existence of agreed criteria. Ratification by relevant unions.	Documentary evidence.
Develop and promote a ‘closure story’ that enables workers to maintain dignity throughout the process.	Existence of a clear narrative. Consistency of narrative in external and internal forms.	Qualitative assessments. Discourse analysis of media coverage. Worker surveys.
Plan events for the last week and day to recognise and celebrate workers and plant.	Profile of events.	Worker feedback. Quality of media coverage.

Closure management requires coordination by a collaborative workplace committee involving management, unions, and HR experts. Its first task is ensuring the firm honours pre-existing regulations for the management of the closure process consistent with workplace and industrial agreements. These typically specify worker redundancy payments and the firms’ obligations to its workforce in terms of training and job search assistance. It may be prudent – from a procedural justice perspective – to extend coverage of these agreements to managers, contractors, office staff, and non-permanent workers. Coordinators will need to be alert to, and remedy, any regulatory anomalies that might disadvantage some workers (for example, if a lump sum payment has adverse implications for pension eligibility).

The workplace-level coordination will develop a comprehensive communication strategy providing timely information for the workforce and community and providing opportunities for feedback. Since adverse impacts are associated with abrupt and unexpected closures, early notice gives workers time to adjust both emotionally and materially. Counselling services, both personal and financial, provided before closures occur help workers to adjust to their new reality. Attention to issues of procedural justice during the closure process minimises adverse emotional consequences (e.g. Addison & Portugal, 1987). Working out what is ‘fair’ requires sustained communication throughout the process and a capacity to rework plans when difficulties emerge. Procedural justice would require the establishment of clear criteria for early exit and voluntary redundancies, and clear and agreed rules on misconduct. Successful management is likely to aspire to staggering the closure – perhaps discontinuing non-essential activities or offering early release to non-essential workers – to avoid releasing the entire workforce into the labour market at the same time. Poor employment outcomes are associated with flooding local labour markets with large numbers of workers with similar skill sets, forcing them to compete for small numbers of vacancies. A process perceived as fair will be attentive to the discursive construction of the event – crafting a ‘closure story’ that enables affected workers to maintain their dignity throughout the process.

It is inevitable that some workers will find it difficult to manage the stress of job loss. Personal and financial counselling services should be available, and easily accessible to workers and their families, from the closure announcement to at least a year after the closure. Choreographing the last days of operation, and arranging celebratory events on the last day, helps the workforce to leave with dignity.

Redeploying the labour force

Targeted interventions are necessary to redeploy affected workforces because, contrary to the assumptions of neoclassical economics, local labour markets do not ‘clear’ naturally after major closure events. Without interventions, plant closures produce pockets of entrenched disadvantage. How best to approach this objective will vary depending on national employment and social security systems. For example, in Germany assistance is additional to baseline services available to all workers whereas, in Australia, interventions insulate displaced workers from the mainstream employment system. Table 3 lists the target outcomes, indicators and measures for a successful redeployment of the labour force.

Table 3. Redeploying the labour force.

Goal: Every displaced worker will find employment of at least similar quality to the job held before displacement
Target outcome	Indicators	Measures
Minimise the number of workers displaced by closure	Ratio of workers offered redeployment to other plants to those displaced to unemployment.	Rate of re-deployment (worker surveys).
Affected workers, their family members, and affected community will have access to, and take up, career advice and counselling programmes.	Utilisation of career advice and counselling services. Rate of utilisation by less skilled and disadvantaged jobseekers.	Rate of utilisation of services. Analysis of take-up by skill level, gender and ethnic background. Service records and worker surveys.
All affected workers have access to skills audits and secure accreditation for existing skills.	Utilisation of skill audit services	Percentage taking up skill audits and gaining accreditation. Take up by less skilled workers.
Affected workers, their family members, and affected community will have access to, and utilise, job search skill programmes.	Utilisation of job search skills services. Rate of utilisation by less skilled and disadvantaged jobseekers.	Rate of utilisation of services. Analysis of take-up by skill level, gender and ethnic background. Service records and worker surveys.
Training providers offer a coordinated suite of accredited training programmes.	Take-up of training courses and bridging courses.	New jobs are in skill areas of re-training (worker surveys).
Displaced workers will secure new jobs of similar quality to their pre-closure jobs.	Re-employment rate; quality of new jobs; time taken to find new jobs.	The quality of new jobs (worker survey).

The best option is to avoid displacement by planning the redeployment of workers to other positions in the same firm or in related firms requiring similar skill sets (see Snell, 2018). Large multi-plant firms have considerable scope for redeploying their workforces, either by repurposing the closing plant or distributing workers to sister plants. This option may not be available to small firms and firms in isolated locations. If displacement is unavoidable, the primary goal of redeploying a displaced labour force is to maximise the chances that every worker will find an equivalent or better quality job in terms of skill utilisation, wages and working conditions, compared to the job held before displacement. The secondary but complementary goals are to maximise skill utilisation across the regional economy and to build workforce skills to improve regional competitiveness.

When it is necessary to prepare workers for entry into the labour market, interventions should offer a suite of options and clear pathways to skill development. Interventions need to offer choice to accommodate the diverse capacities and preferences of the affected workers. Providing careers counselling and job vacancy information before closure gives workers a sound understanding of their options, builds awareness of their existing skills, and gives them a better grasp of the transferability of their skills to other, less familiar occupations and workplaces. Highlighting ‘soft’ skills like teamwork and collaborative problem solving broadens the range of options. For older workers, careers counsellors can support decisions about whether to continue to work or to opt for early retirement. These conversations are likely to involve spouses and partners.

Before plants close, comprehensive skill audits can identify workers’ existing skill competencies and deficits. This process is likely to discover practised on-the-job skills that are not formally accredited. Arranging for the accreditation of skills through ‘recognition of prior learning’ (RPL) arrangements improves the transferability of workers’ skills and in the process builds workers’ confidence. Skill audits can also identify training needs and potential job pathways. Holding formally recognised and transferable qualifications improves the likelihood of reemployment in jobs commensurate with skills.

The next step is to provide workers with the skills they need to negotiate the labour market. Workers who have been employed in one position for many years may have little knowledge of the sorts of jobs that exist beyond their familiar context, of the functioning of contemporary labour markets, or of contemporary recruitment processes. Arming workers with the tools to find new jobs includes help in assembling job applications, practicing job interview skills and mobilising personal networks, as well as information about the institutional structure of the labour market and the social security system. Delivering this information before the workplace closure – by an already trusted leader such as a workplace trainer, with information delivered in non-threatening ways, such as through site visits and guest talks – leads to better outcomes for workers.

In most broad descriptions of Just Transition, there is an emphasis on re-training displaced workers for new occupations including ‘green’ jobs. Making this a reality requires skill upgrading – either by adding to existing qualifications or embarking on training for new specialisations. Experience suggests that few mature-age workers are interested in depth retraining for a new occupation, at least not without the support of generous training allowances. This reflects a combination of a preference for work, domestic responsibilities, and doubts about whether future earnings gains would recoup the costs of retraining. Australia, for example, restricts subsidised displaced worker training to skill upgrade short courses of a week or less duration, for example by adding a forklift or heavy vehicle driving license. Attracting mature aged workers to longer duration re-training for new occupations would require generous incentives (such as fee waivers and adequate living allowances) and guaranteed placement on completion.

Just Transition typically includes the demand to redeploy displaced workers into ‘green’ jobs in emerging renewable energy sectors, but in practice this is feasible only when ‘green’ jobs exist locally and only when the nature of green jobs fit with displaced workers’ pre-existing skill sets. Automotive electricians can easily redeploy to work in the solar industry, but for coal miners the switch to renewable sectors is more difficult. Detailed analysis of the practicalities of skill transferability in specific labour markets are rare. Often retraining efforts focus on filling skills shortages and encouraging workers into ‘skills-in-demand’ occupations. This approach is flawed, first because it treats workers as disembodied human capital that can be reallocated to any slot, regardless of cultural, social and personal attributes, and second because it conceives of labour market processes as determined solely by demand trends. Taking a broad view of labour markets as inter-relational skill ecosystems (Buchanan et al., 2010), and of work as always embodied (McDowell et al., 2007) recommends encouraging workers to occupations consistent with their personal career trajectories (Stroud et al., 2014).

Despite the goal that displaced workers will find new jobs of at least similar quality, quality jobs are scarce in contemporary labour markets. Regardless of workers’ skills and motivation, employment outcomes depend on the profile of available jobs; that is, on the local economy’s ‘absorptive capacity’ (Bluestone, 1984), and, crucially, on the preferences of employers (Rubery & Wilkinson, 1994). Mobilising displaced workers, by encouraging them to relocate in search of work, is a solution for younger workers but it is no panacea for mature-aged workers with housing, family and social responsibilities. In deindustrialising places and during recessions, job scarcity increases the competition for work, a process that without intervention inevitably produces winners and losers. Interventions are unlikely to eradicate the market’s employer-driven sorting process, but a genuine effort, where affected communities agree that everything that could be done to help was done, sustains positive community-scale emotions.

Strengthening the local economy

Put simply, the likelihood that displaced workers will find new jobs is a direct function of the number of accessible jobs. Strengthening the long-term viability of the local economy through diversification that increases the quantity and quality of local jobs improves overall outcomes across the community. The risk, with a too worker-focused version of JT, is that in the absence of new job creation, policies promoting the reemployment of displaced workers will merely reshuffle the queue for jobs in favour of displaced workers, and in the process shift the social costs of plant closure to less competitive workers. Such an outcome creates ‘left behind’ ghettos and invites adverse political repercussions (Massey, 1978). Even successful regional diversification efforts can leave people in the least competitive neighbourhoods worse off (Tierney et al., 2023), feeding the view that JT increases inequalities. To ensure that this is not happening requires careful monitoring of the labour market.

The goal in this domain is to create at least as many good quality new jobs as the number of jobs lost in fossil fuel plant closures. Table 4 lists the associated outcomes.

Table 4. Strengthening the regional economy.

Goal: Strengthen the long-term sustainability of the regional economy.
Target outcome	Indicators	Measures
Interventions will create as many or more quality jobs as are lost through closures.	Monitoring of labour market change.	Count of jobs lost, and of jobs created. Comparison of job quality.
Affected firms in the supply-chain are assisted to reorient their activities.	Supply chain businesses will survive and flourish.	Monitoring of supply chain businesses.
Economic activity in the wider local economy will be maintained.	Aggregate demand is maintained.	Spending data, retail occupancy.
Existing firms grow and diversify	New job creation	Employment data
New firms relocate into the area	Number of new firms, type of specialisation of new firms, number of jobs attracted	Business entry data, investment rates; employment data.
Interventions will not adversely impact disadvantaged job seekers.	Patterns of labour force participation and unemployment.	Maintained or improved participation rate and unemployment rate. Monitor vulnerable subgroups.
Repurposing of closed sites	The physical sites are repurposed for viable new uses.	Council planning approvals.

The first task is to limit the flow-on effects of major closures. Plant closures impact the closed firm’s suppliers and local businesses that relied on the spending of former employees. Reduced local government revenues might lead to further job losses in community services industries. A just transition requires that interventions cauterise these flow-on losses, for example, by providing subsidies to vulnerable firms, by helping them to secure new product markets and craft new business plans, and coinvesting or facilitating investment in their viability. Redundancy payments, living allowances paid to workers in retraining, and welfare transfers all help to maintain aggregate demand in the affected neighbourhoods, to prevent the loss of retail and services firms. In the short term, higher levels of government might need to step in to replace revenue lost by local government.

Market forces are unlikely to create enough new jobs in affected areas to absorb large numbers of displaced workers. Governments can support the creation of new jobs, for example by ‘mission-oriented’ interventions that endeavour to attract new firms working in new or related areas of specialisation. Governments can also attract job-creating activity by setting aside land for industrial use, investing in infrastructure, co-investing in start-up enterprises, providing location-based incentives such as tax breaks, relocating government agencies into the area, and by setting up ‘soft’ infrastructure support for emerging specialisations. Projects to repurpose closed sites are one way of advancing these objectives. The direction of change matters. Building specialisations related to the historical specialisation of the area can leverage existing skills but might lead to ‘lock-in’ in declining sectors, while attempting to diversify to ‘unrelated’ industries carries higher competitive risks and requires more extensive skill upgrading or skill attraction strategies.

Maintaining social cohesion

The goal of maintaining social cohesion and community spirit throughout the change process addresses the struggles and political ruptures experienced in places where people sense they have been ‘left behind’ by contemporary capitalism. At moments of accelerated change, major events induce a range of emotional responses in the community. Maintaining social cohesion demands policy responses sensitive to the emotional registers of local perceptions of change, whether a sense of loss, mourning, anger or disillusionment (Eng & Kazanjian, 2003). The goal here is to manage the collective emotions associated with major disruptive change and to infuse communities with a sense of hope for the future.

Table 5 summarises actions associated with this objective. Building positive community emotions requires planning processes led and defined by communities. The Just Transition literature calls for social dialogue, a process that values ‘transparency, good communication, partnership and respect for local knowledge, skills and priorities’ (Thornley et al., 2015, p. 29), but this goal requires deeper engagement to identify ‘location-specific, group-specific and time-specific coping pathways and structures within a vulnerable environment’ (Cradock-Henry et al., 2018, p. 6; as cited in Duffy et al., 2021). Because politics is ever-present in an empowered community, the target outcome is participation, voice and empowerment rather than settling on any particular blueprint or roadmap for the future.

Table 5. Maintaining community cohesion.

Goal: Maintain social cohesion and community spirit throughout the change process.
Target outcome	Indicators	Measures
Encourage community dialogue and debate.	Respectful debate that defuses social divisions.	Participation in planning activities.
All interventions acknowledge perceptions of loss, fear and disruption.	Regard for community wellbeing infuses all aspects of the transformation process.	Community surveys. Monitoring media storylines. Local health statistics.
Vulnerable segments of the community are protected throughout the change process.	Impacts of the closures are not displaced onto vulnerable segments of the community.	Labour market and welfare statistics.
Life opportunities of local children are expanded and not diminished.	Children considering a broader range of high skill career options.	Improved school retention rates. Higher participation in education and training.
Projects improve the capacity of the area to adapt to climate change.	Projects reduce climate vulnerabilities.	Job creation in climate projects.
The community commemorates and celebrates the contribution of displaced workers and families.	Commemorative symbols and events.	Surveys of displaced workers. Media coverage
Industrial heritage sites and stories are preserved.	Heritage sites and histories are identified and protected.	Counts of heritage preservations.
Community groups are resourced to promote social interaction and support networks.	Community participation and volunteering.	Community participation surveys.
Site rehabilitation to protect community health.	Remediation of degraded sites promotes healthy outcomes.	100% of abandoned land is rehabilitated or repurposed.

Acknowledging and managing the anxiety, fear, loss and dislocation associated with rapid change necessitates creating an inclusive set of processes that involve the entire community including its vulnerable segments. This means extending the remit of intervention beyond the concerns of the established and directly impacted tripartite industrial stakeholders (firms, unions, government) to include the people in the community who experience the impacts of change indirectly, including a purposeful incorporation of the interests of women and the industries that employ women.

Enhancing the life opportunities of local children is a crucial consideration. Effective interventions – such as upgrading early childhood and educational services – can reassure displaced workers and their families that their present misfortune will not have adverse intergenerational repercussions. The daughters and sons of coal miners need access to the types of training that will equip them to take up green jobs. Projects to improve the local area’s capacity to adapt to climate change – such as retrofitting housing for energy efficiency – create jobs and stimulate demand in the local economy.

Sensitive treatment of the material sites left vacant by the change process – rehabilitating them to restore ecological values and preserving key commemorative heritage sites – helps to create a respectful commemoration of the loss of an industry and its accompanying social arrangements. Done well – by preserving the history of workers’ achievements as well as the material buildings and machines – these interventions help to ease collective emotions. Providing funding to encourage grassroots community groups, including religious and sporting groups, to provide opportunities for zero-cost social interaction, can also contribute to managing the emotional toll of change.

From the long-term economic point of view, these types of interventions build a positive community, create new jobs, build the amenity of the local area, attract residential housing, reinforce the deep informal institutions associated with economic prosperity, and nurture the growth of a literate and skilled workforce.

Costs and responsibilities

Specifying the detail for each domain of action reveals that realising the goal of a Just Transition that leaves no-one and no-where behind is going to be expensive. Every domain has significant associated costs. Preplanning activities assume the existence of a policy team, local coordination and a locally focused secretariat to oversee, coordinate and administer interventions. Plant closure costs – which will in the main accrue to firms – include redundancy payments to workers, a team of people to manage the logistical and financial aspects of closure, additional human resource staff to coordinate pre-closure worker assistance, and people for planning the decommissioning of the plant. Delivering on redeployment requires setting up careers and counselling services within firms prior to closure and in the community after closure, engaging experts to conduct skill audits and recognition of prior learning assessments, funding retraining provision and expanding job placement services. Delivering this is likely to require regional skill infrastructure upgrades. The redevelopment of the economy will need funds for infrastructure projects, teams working to identify and assess opportunities, specialist advisors to support diversifying firms, people to administer grants, to build the local brand, and to manage investment attraction. Community programmes all have associated costs. Whilst firms are responsible for site rehabilitation, a rehabilitation effort that produces a job-creating community asset is likely to require government support. Building capacity ‘on the ground’ is essential, because to be effective, Just Transition interventions require both a multi-dimensional response and local coordination. Whilst this article has focused on place-targeted interventions in affected communities, a Just Transition would also moderate the effects of decarbonisation among communities not directly impacted by fossil fuel plant closures, for example by capping energy prices and providing job search and retraining support for all job losers regardless of their industry and location. The balance between place-targeted and universal interventions will require constant adjustment to the evolving political zeitgeist.

The existing JT literature does not often venture into the nitty-gritty of costs, but in the end, cost is the central issue in determining how much justice will be available in affected communities. The cost of delivering the suite of interventions described above is likely to far exceed the amount that local government agencies can afford. Weller et al. (2021) estimated, in the Australian context, that – in addition to existing baseline welfare eligibilities, redundancy payments, and infrastructure projects – the cost of a comprehensive local intervention would be about AU$250,000 (∼125,000 Euro) per displaced worker or AU$4,000 (∼2,000 Euro) per head of population, assuming interventions spanning from one year before to two years after a major plant closure. This estimate is not unrealistic considering that it is about half of Suedekum’s (2023) costing of pro-active place-based regional development policies.

Detailing the magnitude of possible interventions suggests that the just-ness of Just Transition is going to be a function of its redistributive vigour. Governments in most advanced economies already require firms to set aside funds for redundancies and site rehabilitation. But a place-based Just Transition goes beyond these firm-based obligations, extending interventions over time and broadening their spatial scope to encompass entire affected communities. Interventions on this scale exceed what local level governments could provide from their own resources. Delivering at this scale requires targeted redistributive funds sourced from regional, national or transnational governments. It will also require the development of governance arrangements that allow a high degree of local control over funds allocated by higher levels of government. It is crucial that Just Transition does not repeat the failings of devolution policies, where governments gave local communities responsibility for social outcomes but did not provide them with the resources to tackle growing inequalities (Morelli & Seaman, 2007). Since fossil fuel dependent places are often already disadvantaged socio-economically, and may have relatively weak local institutional capacities, the degree of government support for local transitions should not depend on the local capacity for lobbying and grant-writing.

At the jurisdictional scale, the political appetite for intervention will constrain or enable the delivery of a just transition. This is likely to reflect the distribution of political power, in both the extent to which institutional arrangements encourage governments to value local communities, and the extent to which public concern for the plight of vulnerable places is able to shape political fortunes. Globally, this varies hugely across jurisdictions depending on multiple factors including the nature of the political system and its constitutional constraints, the degree of devolution of policy planning and implementation, the political sensitivity of fossil-fuel dominated locations for the ruling political parties and government, and the timing of plant closure events in the electoral cycle. The extent of influence of trade unions, the quality of social security arrangements, the local standard of living, literacy levels, and access to media, among others, also contribute to the likelihood of redistributive transfers.

Taking a long-term view, interventions are investments in the future, rather than added costs, and may represent the ‘least cost’ transitional path if the alternative pathway leads to entrenched regional decline and incurs the costs of large scale, long term unemployment (Celli et al., 2023). A comprehensive suite of place-based interventions might also reduce the overall cost of the Transition from fossil fuels by neutralising political opposition to change. If communities feel supported through the change process, and trust that their wellbeing and social status will be protected, they are less likely to support populist political groups or those who profit from fossil fuels. Without political support, the fossil fuel industry will find it harder to delay action. In the long term, these investments could reduce the total cost of the zero-carbon economic transformation, revitalise affected regions and build future prosperity. Conversely, sanctioning a ‘least cost’ transition that leaves the regional effects of change to market forces, through the recalibration of prices for labour and land, is likely to increase costs in the long-term by generating depressed places and fractious politics.

Conclusion

The overall goal of investment in a place-based Just Transition is to enable technological innovations to decarbonise economies without increasing inequality or undermining democracy. A place-based understanding of Just Transition expands both the ‘who’ of the target populations and the ‘what’ of interventions. The redistributive effort it advocates then spans the affected communities, including all their residents. This version of Just Transition is attentive to procedural, distributive and reparative justice but stresses the re-distributional aspect and its role in maintaining social cohesion and creating spaces of hope. Its spatially extensive, place based approach goes some way to overcoming the criticism that when Just Transition focuses narrowly on affected workers, it simply reproduces existing inequities associated with access to waged work.

The article has developed a framework of Just Transition interventions structured around the six interdependent goals of pre-planning, coordinating change, managing closure events, redeploying labour, rebuilding the economy, and maintaining social cohesion. It has discussed the goals of each domain, the objectives of interventions, and standards for assessing outcomes. The goal-based approach has aimed to ensure that short-term actions contribute to long term goals, recognising the path dependent nature of socio-economic change and the intractability of structural conditions. Thinking about the magnitude of the interventions required to secure JT might afford some protection from the risk that JT will disintegrate into a discursive trope accompanied by a few symbolic but ultimately ineffectual actions.

A place-based Just Transition positions the protection and transformation of communities as integral to, and contemporaneous with, the socio-technical side of the decarbonisation process. It does not view JT simply as compensation for the losers of change. It rejects positioning coal communities as allies of the moribund hydrocarbon complex, and as an obstacle to be overcome in the coming socio-technical transition. The end does not justify the means, and the urgency of the need to decarbonise does not justify jettisoning a duty of care to vulnerable communities.

In a place-based version of Just Transition, the change process endeavours to ensure that no community, social group or individual bears an unequal share of the costs of change and no-one is left behind. In this regionally oriented understanding, a ‘social dialogue’ about the change process is necessary but not sufficient. Rather, a Just Transition demands a commitment to redistributive justice that takes seriously the long-term social, political and economic consequences of ‘leaving behind’ formerly coal dependent places as the world moves to new energy sources and industries. It calls for governments to acknowledge and comprehend the extent of the challenge, and take timely action to intervene with redistributive investments before the process has turned communities into losers.

Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge input of the members of the committee coordinating the Muswellbrook mine closure in the Upper Hunter New South Wales. This work on which this paper is based won the New South Wales peak Planning Award in 2020.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Muswellbrook Shire Council and the Australian Research Council under Grant SR200200446.

Notes on contributors

Sally Weller

Sally Weller is an economic geographer at the University of South Australia. Her interests focus on labour markets, regional development and Australian political economy.

Andrew Beer

Andrew Beer is the Dean of the Business School at the University of South Australia. His research interests focus on the drivers of regional growth, leadership, structural adjustment, economic change processes, and the functioning of housing markets.

Jessica Porter

Jessica Porter is a regionally based strategic land use planner, currently working for the South Australian state government. She has recently completed a PhD at the University of South Australia.