Winners and losers in societal transformations to mitigate climate change

SEJIN LEE, BJÖRN-OLA LINNÉR, AND VICTORIA WIBECK

Transformative changes that pave the way for achieving a low-carbon future and sustainable society could entail different consequences for peoples’ lives and livelihoods. To be effective, decarbonization policies need to accommodate just transformations.

To reach the goals of the Paris Agreement and the 2030 Agenda, we need comprehensive and enduring changes in the ways that we live our lives and run society. Such societal transformations involve governance towards systemic cultural, social, economic, and political changes that induce an end to fossil fuel dependency and unsustainable resource use. The transformation concept signals not only a change from one technology to another, but also the creation of a new form of society. All societal transformations create winners and losers. This poses two challenges for aspirations towards transformative sustainability. First, the UN Sustainable Development Goals, including the climate objectives, depart from the slogan to “leave no one behind”. Thus, a successful transformative agenda needs to include considerations of its potential unintended negative social consequences. Second, to avoid counter reactions or obstructions, efforts towards sustainability transformations need to be perceived as legitimate and desirable. The yellow vest movement (Mouvement des gilets jaunes) in France is a recent reminder of this.

Socio-economic advantages for all For our Mistra Carbon Exit project on just transformations, we have reviewed 133 scholarly papers. This body of literature reveals that for a just transformation, four pillars of social justice should be considered: 1) Distributional justice – allocating equitably the socio-economic advantages and costs of structural changes towards a low-carbon society to all social groups; 2) Recognitional justice – decision-making has to depart from an understanding of the prevalent cultural and historical knowledge and governance of different places, including race, class and gender aspects; 3) Procedural justice – the voices and interests of different stakeholders need to be incorporated into the decision-making processes; 4) Restorative justice – rectifying damages to social groups that are caused during the transformations. Job training, education and differentiation When scrutinizing the Swedish efforts to achieve just transformations, in line with the Just Transition Mechanism of the European Green Deal, our MCE studies showed that they largely emphasize distributional dimensions. The draft transition plans for the Norrbotten and Gotland regions, with their respective steel and cement industries, highlight the need for job training, new higher education programs with relevance to the development of fossil-free industries, and the differentiation of the business sectors in the targeted regions.

Just decarbonization must include many dimensions In our review of earlier studies of just transformations, we identified distributional priorities similar to those encountered in previous efforts to mitigate the socio-economic repercussions of transformations in regions that were heavily dependent upon carbon-intensive industries, such as the Ruhr region in Germany, where hard-coal mines were closed after stakeholder consultations. However, since just transformations cover a wide palette of justice aspects, we conclude that future efforts toward just decarbonization transformations need not only to handle the distributional aspects, but must also clearly include the recognitional, procedural and restorative dimensions.

Literature

Lee, S., Linnér, B.-O. & Wibeck, V. (forthc.). From just transitions to just transformations: a review of scholarly literature. Linnér, B.-O. & Wibeck, V. (2019). Sustainability Transformations: Agents and Drivers across Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.