Unjust energy transition: vignettes from the COPs, climate finance, and a coal hotspot

Nikita Sud (Professor of the Politics of Development, University of Oxford)

As we move from fossil fuels towards renewables, the promise of just transition is to leave no one behind. This paper aims to interrogate ideas of justice underpinning just transition. Then it explores unfolding just transition measures in the climate vulnerable Global South. To pursue the first objective, a historical and political approach is adopted. I demonstrate the contested nature of environmental and climate justice claims that preceded the just transition agenda. Typically led by communities dependent on land, water, and the environmental commons for livelihoods and life, place-based struggles pushed against dispossession by developmental, modernist states and capital. From the 1990s, with the growing imprint of the climate crisis, states and businesses have increasingly entered the climate solutions arena. At multilateral climate fora like the UN COPs, states, along with businesses, finance, and technology firms, hold the mantle of just transition today. In this upscaled context, justice concerns play out around the distribution of climate finance, especially from the traditionally polluting Global North to the South.

Pursuant of the second objective of the research, and drawing on ethnographic and interview-based data, the paper traces the single largest climate finance partnership between North and South: Indonesia’s Just Energy Transition Partnership. In the shaping of Indonesia’s JETP, justice has become a tagline. The focus is on energy as investment opportunity—for the scheme’s international funders, and the recipient country. The trajectory of justice from ground-up, environmental and climate justice struggles, to multilateral climate fora, and high-profile North-South just transition programmes—shows elitisation and depoliticization. It is no surprise that a South-based Just Energy Transition Partnership is far from taking everybody along.

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