ILPC 2027

Within the emerging field of environmental labour studies, the idea of Just Transition is recognised as the most distinctive framing of ‘labour-environmentalism’.  Winning appeal from a wide range of trade unionists, environmentalists and academics, it has been adopted by many official trade union organisations worldwide because of its well-defined policy program.  Having attracted empirical attention and critical evaluation, advocate laud its successes; while critical voices question its effectiveness and the extent to which is breaks with capitalist market relations.   This contribution seeks to avoid a partisan contribution in this vein, or to echo previous empirical research which examines the Just transitions policy program.  A more valuable contribution is to broaden the debate by reimagining Just Transition as a form of political thinking, within the context labour-environmentalism.  Approached in this way, what Just Transition lacks is a robust theoretical investigation and normative unpacking of its central principles within the wider context of labour-environmentalism. 

In this vein, I argue that as a form of political thinking it is possible to construct a stylised account of the internal structure of Just Transition.  Borrowing both from Hyman’s stylised approach to trade union ideology (2001), and Freeden’s conceptual approach to ideology (1996), I seek to reconstruct the conceptual morphology of Just Transition.  This examines in the first instance it’s contested political strategy, which I conclude represents a Gramscian ‘war of position’ par excellence.  Secondly, I also examine the contested environmental discourses of Just Transition, which appear restricted within that of ecological modernisation, caught in a tension between its ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ variants.  I therefore not only contribute to the discussion on Just Transition, but also offer a novel analytical approach to the politics of labour-environmentalism.