The research, led by Jonathan Davies and colleagues from institutions in the United Kingdom, India, Kenya and Germany, maps the renewable-energy and carbon-storage potential of the world’s rangelands and examines what happens when green investments arrive in pastoral territories. The findings are striking: more than 82 percent of global rangelands fall into a moderate to high range for solar electricity production, and around 60 percent are commercially viable for wind energy at a 100-meter hub height. These are not marginal landscapes—they are among the most promising sites on Earth for the renewable infrastructure the climate crisis demands.

The authors used global datasets for photovoltaic power potential and wind power density, overlaying them with a rangelands map developed by the International Livestock Research Institute. Solar potential was assessed using Practical Photovoltaic Power Potential (PVOUT), which measures realistic annual electricity generation per unit of installed capacity while accounting for system losses. Wind viability was evaluated using International Electrotechnical Commission classifications, with commercial viability typically beginning above 6.5 meters per second at 80 meters height. The analysis reveals that pastoral lands are not peripheral to the energy transition—they are central to it.

But the same characteristics that make rangelands attractive to investors also make them vulnerable. Rangelands are often sparsely populated, legally ambiguous in tenure, and perceived by outsiders as underused or degraded. The authors document how this perception has historically justified dispossession: colonial and post-colonial governments annexed pastoral land for irrigation schemes, protected areas, urban expansion and infrastructure, usually without recognizing existing rights or providing compensation. Now climate policy is driving a new wave of land acquisition, and the authors warn that without safeguards, the green transition risks repeating these injustices under a sustainable banner.

The paper draws on case studies from India, Kenya and Mongolia to illustrate both the dangers and the possibilities. In Kenya, the heavily criticized Lake Turkana Wind Power Project annexed large areas of pastoral land, blocked migration routes and denied access to culturally significant sites, while benefit sharing remained negligible and token employment favors certain ethnic groups over others. Geothermal projects in the country have occupied significant land, blocked water access and contributed to drinking-water pollution. Wind farms have driven up land values, triggering rushes to claim private titles and intensifying conflict within and between communities.

In India, large tracts of rangeland are legally designated as wasteland, allowing investors to disregard prior occupation and the economic value of established pastoral land use. Large-scale solar projects have removed land from pastoral production, created unfavorable microclimates around installations, and reduced livestock health and productivity. Yet pastoralists have fought back: protests in Gujarat led to the return of project land to community ownership and a 25-year lease agreement with the developer. In Ladakh, the state administration is now planning a pilot solar project designed to accommodate livestock grazing, signaling a shift toward more compatible land-use models.

Mongolia offers a different picture. Wind-farm projects such as the Sainshand Wind Park have compensated herders by identifying alternative seasonal residences, building animal shelters and wells, and helping them register new land. Herders typically retain grazing access to all land except the small footprints where turbines stand. Communities that temporarily lose pasture during construction receive replacement fodder. The Sermsang Khushig Khundii Solar Power Plant was even re-sited after communities raised concerns during consultations about access to important salt ponds. These examples demonstrate that co-existence between energy infrastructure and pastoral livelihoods is not only possible but can generate social acceptance and better economic returns.

Kenya’s Kipeto Wind Farm stands out as perhaps the most equitable model documented. The project leases land from the local community, hired a local lawyer to navigate complex negotiations, and established a community implementation committee. A community trust holds a 5 percent share in the wind farm, and landowners receive 1.4 percent of the gross revenue from each turbine on their land. Households that had to relocate were compensated with newly constructed homes equipped with solar power, and the project built a health center and other community facilities. The county government avoided reclassifying the land from grazing to industrial use, preventing a spike in land rates that would have burdened landowners.

Beyond renewable energy, the paper examines carbon sequestration in rangelands—a sector attracting growing investment as voluntary carbon markets expand. Grasslands store an estimated third of global terrestrial carbon stocks, and improved management could sequester between 240 and 2,000 million tonnes of atmospheric carbon per year. Grasslands have the highest carbon gap density of any land use at 138.3 grams of carbon per square meter annually, and they respond more rapidly to human intervention than forests. However, the authors caution that some carbon schemes in East Africa have been reported as coercive and non-consensual, prone to corruption and aggravating land conflicts. Afforestation projects on rangelands—frequently promoted as nature-based solutions—can actually reduce biodiversity, impair ecosystem function and, in some cases, cause a net loss of carbon from the system.

The authors conclude that a just green transition depends on upholding pastoralist rights, enabling effective participation and ensuring equitable benefit sharing. Projects that succeed do so because they recognize pastoralists’ land rights, engage communities in meaningful and ongoing consultation, and treat pastoralism as a legitimate and valuable land-use practice rather than an obstacle to progress. The green transition does not have to be another chapter in the long history of pastoral dispossession—but making it otherwise will require deliberate policy, strong governance and a fundamental shift in how investors and governments value the world’s rangelands and the people who have sustained them for millennia.

Subject of Research: The potential of pastoral rangelands for renewable energy and carbon sequestration and the risks of land alienation for pastoralist communities during the green transition

Article Title: Pastoral lands and the green transition: opportunities and challenges

Article References: Davies, J., Bhati, S. P. S., Wario, H., Rawat, M., & Waters-Bayer, A. (2026). Pastoral lands and the green transition: opportunities and challenges. Pastoralism: Research, Policy and Practice, 16, Article 16429. https://doi.org/10.3389/past.2026.16429

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/past.2026.16429

Keywords: pastoralism, rangelands, green transition, renewable energy, carbon sequestration, land rights, solar power, wind energy, just transition, pastoralist communities, land governance, climate mitigation

The evidence base is striking in its consistency. Ayompe and Pham reviewed academic and gray literature on community-driven energy projects across the United States, supplementing the U.S. focus with selective international examples to show that the relationship between local governance and project acceptance is a fundamental socio-technical dynamic rather than an American anomaly. Across solar arrays, wind farms, biomass facilities, and cooperative utilities, the pattern held: economic gains, social acceptance, and environmental improvements emerged not from the machines themselves but from institutional arrangements that supported local agency. Where communities could shape, own, and benefit from projects, transitions succeeded. Where they could not, even technically sound installations met resistance.

Ownership emerged as one of the strongest predictors of positive outcomes. Cooperative and municipal models reinvest revenue locally, generating broader economic spillovers than developer-led projects. Solar and biomass initiatives reduced household energy costs and strengthened energy security, while job creation followed a similar logic: employment grew when communities participated directly in governance, whereas externally controlled projects produced limited or short-term employment. When residents hold ownership stakes or voting rights, the authors found, they are more likely to support projects and reinvest benefits locally. Ownership, in this framing, functions as a governance tool that anchors transitions in local identity, giving communities authority over pricing, siting, and benefit distribution in ways that align with agricultural preservation and long-term planning.

Social acceptance, meanwhile, proved inseparable from process design. Initiatives that embedded participation through public meetings, cooperative membership, or advisory committees reported higher trust and long-term support, because these structures allowed residents to influence siting and negotiate benefits. Wind projects illustrate the consequences of weak governance: despite generating tax revenue, many face resistance rooted in landscape change and noise concerns. Utility-scale solar encounters similar tensions when farmland is displaced. The authors emphasize that conflict arises not from the technologies themselves but from governance arrangements that marginalize local voices, a problem deepened in regions with histories of environmental harm or extractive industry dominance, where skepticism toward outside developers runs high.

The concept of socio-technical fit adds a technical dimension to the argument. Technologies interact with rural economies and landscapes in distinct ways, and mismatches breed backlash. Solar’s modularity enables deployment in communities with limited technical capacity, though large-scale installations can trigger land-use conflict. Wind delivers strong environmental benefits but requires transmission infrastructure that many rural regions lack. Biomass aligns naturally with agricultural economies but depends on reliable feedstock supply chains and logistics. The clearest example of alignment is agrivoltaics, a dual-use model that integrates energy production with farming on the same land. Transitions falter, the authors argue, when technologies are deployed without regard for local capacity, resource conditions, or cultural values.

Energy Democracy reframes rural energy projects as civic institutions rather than mere infrastructure. Ayompe and Pham contend that the pillars of participation and ownership operate as functional mechanisms, not just values: they reduce transaction costs in the form of conflict and increase economic retention. Public meetings and informational sessions alone rarely translate into meaningful influence; participation without authority does little to build trust or legitimacy. The framework addresses distrust by embedding accountability mechanisms into governance structures, ensuring communities shape rather than merely respond to energy development. Projects that embed community authority through cooperatives, municipal utilities, or structured participation achieve higher acceptance and more durable benefits, while developer-led models that limit local input often encounter resistance.

The authors also confront a common objection head-on: the assumption that community involvement slows climate action. Their evidence suggests the opposite. While engagement may lengthen early planning, it reduces long-term delays caused by litigation, siting disputes, and social resistance. Projects that invest early in democratic governance move more smoothly through permitting and face fewer appeals. In their memorable phrasing, “slow is smooth, and smooth becomes fast.” Democratic governance, they conclude, is not a barrier to speed but a prerequisite for avoiding the costly slowdowns associated with top-down development, a finding with significant implications for how policymakers weigh engagement costs against deployment timelines.

Current policy frameworks, however, are ill-suited to this vision. Federal and state programs typically reward megawatts installed through tax credits and procurement mandates, favoring large developers over community-led initiatives and doing little to support community ownership or participatory governance. The authors propose treating governance as infrastructure, arguing that participatory institutions and benefit-sharing mechanisms are as essential as transmission lines. Their policy roadmap includes “Smart Zoning” to mitigate land-use conflicts, reformed siting and permitting with early-stage consultation, rural siting councils, and binding benefit-sharing agreements, expanded loan guarantees and low-interest financing for cooperative ownership, long-term feedstock contracts for biomass supply chains, targeted grid modernization to address rural transmission and interconnection constraints, and simplified permitting pathways with technical assistance to level the playing field for small communities.

The authors are candid about implementation challenges. Limited administrative capacity and fiscal resources hinder effective project management in many rural areas. Local control does not guarantee equity: without well-designed participatory structures, initiatives risk capture by local elites and the reproduction of existing power asymmetries. Participatory processes can slow early planning, trading deployment speed for legitimacy and durable community support. Robust capacity building, they argue, is therefore essential to prevent exclusion and ensure that energy democracy delivers genuine empowerment rather than reinforcing structural inequities, a caution that distinguishes their analysis from uncritical advocacy for local control.

The Perspective closes with a call for empirical validation. Future research should prioritize longitudinal comparative studies measuring specific outcomes such as permitting duration, litigation rates, and local economic retention across different governance models, quantifying what the authors call “governance dividends” to move the field from conceptual framing to evidence-based policy design. The stakes extend well beyond academia: as the United States accelerates its clean energy transition, rural communities will play a decisive role, and the authors argue that rural revival will not emerge from hardware alone but from institutions that empower communities to direct their own transitions, negotiate trade-offs, and capture long-term value. The opportunity, they write, is unmistakable: a rural energy future defined not by extraction or imposition, but by agency, ownership, and collective possibility.

Subject of Research: Energy Democracy and Rural Energy Transitions

Article Title: Beyond technology: why energy democracy is the engine of rural revival

Article References: Ayompe, L. M., & Pham, L. (2026). Beyond technology: why energy democracy is the engine of rural revival. Frontiers in Sustainable Energy Policy, 5, Article 1788325. https://doi.org/10.3389/fsuep.2026.1788325

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fsuep.2026.1788325

Keywords: energy democracy, rural energy, community ownership, renewable energy policy, participatory governance, socio-technical systems, rural resilience, just transition, Beyond, technology, energy, democracy

The collection stems from a collaboration between the Joint Program Clean Energy Transition for a Sustainable Society (e3s) of the European Energy Research Alliance and Frontiers in Sustainable Energy Policy. It spans original research, reviews, and policy and practice analyses, drawing on disciplinary traditions as varied as behavioral economics, text mining, Indigenous studies and socio-technical transition theory. What emerges is not a single blueprint but a multidimensional framework: justice in decarbonization is treated not as a technical prerequisite for cutting emissions but as a normative and political objective in its own right—one with real consequences for how policies are experienced and whether they endure.

One cluster of studies focuses on participatory governance and democratic engagement. Kambo and colleagues demonstrate how a structured deliberative process can bridge the gap between citizens, policymakers and industry actors in shaping Australia’s future energy and fuel systems. Using the “diamond of participatory decision-making” framework, their analysis reveals that while considerable alignment exists across cohorts on the broad direction of a low-carbon future, divergences surface around the social and environmental justice dimensions of specific technology choices—including hydrogen and biogas. Navigating those divergences, the authors argue, requires innovative governance mechanisms rather than simple majority rule. In a complementary contribution, Kunlere and Shah challenge the simplistic binaries that dominate public debates on renewable energy. Their PARO framework categorizes public responses to energy injustice across a spectrum of positions that conventional “supporter versus opponent” dichotomies cannot capture, offering a more granular analytical lens for diagnosing and addressing public resistance. Both studies make one thing clear: how decisions are made matters as much as what is decided—a lesson that is easy to articulate and difficult to institutionalize.

A second cluster turns to sustainable energy systems and socio-technical transitions. Singh and Clough critically interrogate the global bioenergy system, challenging the widespread assumption that bioenergy is inherently carbon-neutral or renewable. Through causal loop analysis, they examine how current production regimes can shift negative social and ecological impacts—including threats to food security, land use change and biodiversity loss—from consumer to producer regions. Their work highlights the uneven distribution of burdens that can arise within particular configurations of globalized bioenergy production and trade. Oduro and Taylor, drawing on expert interviews from industry, academia and policy, map the challenges facing energy networks in Great Britain during decarbonization. Their findings reveal broad agreement on electrification and decentralization, yet deep uncertainty about the future role of gaseous fuels, particularly hydrogen. They also identify a regulatory gap: existing structures may be too rigid and slow-moving to enable networks to drive—rather than impede—the net-zero transition. Soloviy and colleagues expand the debate further by conceptualizing what they call the “triple transition,” linking green, digital and just transitions. Drawing on 28 real-world case examples and five distinct analytical perspectives, their interdisciplinary review argues that tensions between these three policy streams are not merely obstacles to be managed but productive sites of institutional learning if properly engaged.

A third cluster centers on Indigenous knowledge, justice and inclusion. Oliveira and colleagues provide a compelling examination of Sámi perspectives on reindeer herding and energy transition policies in Norway. Through semi-structured interviews with Sámi herders, the authors document how wind turbine development encroaches on grazing lands and disrupts the economic, social and cultural fabric of reindeer herding communities. Crucially, the article does not merely catalog grievances; it also explores the hesitance many Indigenous communities feel toward integrating their Traditional Ecological Knowledge into mainstream transition frameworks, given past experiences of co-optation and tokenism. This nuance—that recognition justice requires more than a formal invitation and demands genuine epistemic respect—is an important contribution. It reminds readers that just transitions cannot be reduced to technological substitution; they must also confront colonial legacies and create institutional space for diverse knowledge systems.

A fourth cluster addresses social vulnerability and climate equity through two complementary scales. Moleskis and colleagues tackle one of the most pressing social dimensions of Europe’s green transition: the unequal capacity of households to access decarbonization support. Framed around the EU Social Climate Fund and illustrated through the case of Cyprus, the authors draw on behavioral science to identify cognitive barriers—such as status quo bias, present bias and information overload—as well as structural barriers including digital exclusion and administrative complexity that prevent energy-poor households from claiming available support. Their policy recommendations move beyond standard subsidy design toward a more human-centered, trust-based approach. Working at the global level, Ayompe examines how distributive, procedural and recognition-based justice have been integrated—or neglected—in international climate governance. The article argues that colonial legacies continue to shape governance structures in ways that systematically exclude the communities most affected by climate change, and calls for interdisciplinary collaboration spanning public health, urban planning and environmental protection.

A fifth and final cluster highlights the cultural and urban dimensions of sustainability transitions. Costanzo and Alderuccio investigate how culture, heritage and the creative industries are being integrated into urban climate-neutrality strategies across European cities. Focusing on Climate City Contracts produced under the EU’s 100 Mission Cities program, the authors apply a text mining methodology to detect the presence—or absence—of New European Bauhaus principles in these planning documents. Their findings reveal that cultural participation is slowly being acknowledged as a driver of climate action, with potential contributions to social cohesion, behavioral change and community-led urban renewal. Methodologically, the article breaks new ground by developing a human-annotated corpus designed to train future AI models capable of analyzing cultural-climate linkages at scale, broadening the understanding of just transitions beyond infrastructure and economics.

Reading across the nine articles, four cross-cutting themes stand out. First, participation matters, but depth counts: whether through deliberative citizen panels, Indigenous consultation processes or community-based climate planning, the legitimacy of sustainability transitions depends on whose voices are genuinely heard and whose knowledge is meaningfully incorporated. Several studies show that participatory processes can remain superficial if institutional follow-through is absent. Second, transitions are inherently systemic and produce feedback effects that extend across sectors, scales and geographies; technological shifts in energy systems interact with regulatory structures, supply chains, cultural identities and global inequalities in ways that can produce new injustices even as they address old ones. Third, justice must be understood in both procedural and distributive terms, and the two cannot be traded off against each other—policies that achieve technically equitable outcomes through opaque or exclusionary processes will struggle to secure the social license they require. Fourth, different kinds of knowledge—scientific, local, Indigenous and experiential—are not competing claims to be arbitrated but complementary resources that policy needs to learn to use together.

Importantly, the collection also demonstrates that tensions within sustainability transitions should not be viewed solely as obstacles. Divergences between stakeholders, conflicts over land use, disagreements regarding technology pathways and competing policy priorities all reveal the complexity of transforming societies. Yet these tensions can also become productive spaces for democratic negotiation, innovation and institutional learning. The challenge for policymakers, researchers and practitioners is therefore not to eliminate disagreement but to create governance structures that can handle complexity while maintaining fairness and legitimacy. The editors also identify a set of research gaps that future work should prioritize: most contributions focus on Europe, North America and Australia, leaving the just transition experiences of communities in the Global South—where climate vulnerability is highest and adaptive capacity often lowest—underrepresented. The role of gender in shaping both exposure to transition risks and access to transition benefits is raised but remains undertheorized. The political economy of transition, including the influence of fossil fuel incumbents, financial flows and trade regimes on the pace and direction of change, is notably absent. Methodologically, the field would benefit from longitudinal studies able to track whether participatory processes translate into durable policy change over time, and from closer examination of implementation fidelity—whether well-designed interventions are actually delivered equitably on the ground. Naming these gaps, the editors stress, is not a criticism of the contributions collected here but an invitation for the next wave of just transition research to take them on.

At a time when there is serious concern that climate targets and their implementation remain insufficient relative to the pace and scale of emissions reductions required, just transition research faces the challenge of demonstrating how greater attention to fairness can contribute to the social acceptability and political legitimacy of decarbonization pathways. The nine studies collected here range from Norwegian reindeer pastures and Australian deliberative panels to EU urban climate contracts and global bioenergy supply chains. They provide critical and diverse guidance for governments, industries, communities and scholars seeking to align decarbonization with social inclusion and democratic accountability. Viewed through this lens, the Research Topic shows that a just transition cannot be assessed on technical performance alone: the question of who bears the costs and who shares the benefits is political and deserves explicit attention. Just transition scholars therefore face a continuing task—to demonstrate how attention to distribution, participation, recognition and legitimacy can contribute to rapid and effective decarbonization while addressing its social consequences, at a moment when the gap between policy ambition and lived social reality remains substantial.

Subject of Research: Just transition research on equity, participation, governance and legitimacy in decarbonization

Article Title: Editorial: Advancing the just transition: navigating towards a sustainable future

Article References: Paier, M., Sari, R., Pellegrini-Masini, G., Sciullo, A., Menon, M., & Carley, S. (2026). Editorial: Advancing the just transition: navigating towards a sustainable future. Frontiers in Sustainable Energy Policy, 5, Article 1936488. https://doi.org/10.3389/fsuep.2026.1936488

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fsuep.2026.1936488

Keywords: just transition, energy justice, decarbonization, participatory governance, Indigenous knowledge, energy poverty, socio-technical transitions, climate equity, bioenergy, urban climate policy, Editorial, Advancing

The study, led by Vitaliy Soloviy and colleagues at AIT’s Center for Innovation Systems and Policy, is unusual in its method. Rather than championing a single discipline, the authors deliberately assembled a team spanning innovation studies, sociology, economics, political science, engineering, cognitive science and the arts, then asked how each tradition would diagnose the same problem: the frictions that arise when green, digital and just transition priorities collide in real energy systems. Their answer is a map of five distinct research perspectives, each with its own vocabulary, assumptions and blind spots.

The first perspective, which the authors call constructing realities, draws on political ecology, critical geography and ontological politics. From this vantage point, tensions emerge at the most basic level of what counts as reality and whose realities matter. The case studies are stark. In northern Norway, Sámi reindeer herders resisted wind farms because the state’s division of land into cultivated and outlying categories simply did not match the Sámi concept of meahcci—a living landscape of humans, animals and tasks unfolding in place and time. In California, the Colorado River Indian Tribes watched a 250-megawatt solar project on their traditional lands deliver rushed procedures, performative consultations and intertribal conflict instead of the promised jobs and infrastructure. In Portugal, lithium mining for batteries has been advanced, researchers found, through social engineering, deception and counterinsurgency tactics—a clash, in the authors’ words, between ecologies of commoning and an extractivism that drives depletion and exclusion.

The second perspective, governing transitions, comes from sustainability transitions scholarship and institutional theory. Here, tensions are not ontological clashes but problems of steering: how new technologies such as smart grids force established institutions and emerging actors to renegotiate rules, roles and beliefs. The cases show how this plays out. In Antwerp, Belgium, researchers embedded for eighteen months in a living lab of shared solar projects found a paradox at the heart of energy justice governance: the pursuit of inclusivity was paired with the deliberate exclusion of some groups to avoid overwhelming them with participation demands. Studies of smart city initiatives in Singapore, Finland, Spain and Colombia revealed how digital platforms can expand formal participation while concentrating data flows and decision-making power in the hands of incumbents—utilities, grid operators and platform providers already well positioned in energy markets.

The third perspective, negotiating meanings, treats transition itself as a contested word. Concepts like green, digital and just can function as floating signifiers whose meanings shift with context, and actors compete to fix or deliberately keep open what they mean. In Germany’s coal exit, one study traced how labor unions deployed the language of a slow and responsible just transition to reinforce the status quo, while climate movements invoked urgency—leaving the transition stalled between competing justice claims. In Spain’s coal regions, media analysis showed the meaning of justice shifting from justice is coal to justice is time to justice is money as unions lost bargaining power and the pace of renewables expansion accelerated. And in Ireland, peat workers who lived through the closure of two major power plants experienced just transition as political rhetoric: retraining programs that rarely met their needs, and new renewable-energy jobs in their region to which they had no access.

The fourth perspective, reasoning by numbers, is the one most familiar to science-policy interfaces: quantitative modeling, optimization and statistical analysis. The review shows that models are never neutral. In Australia, a modeling framework built on six equity factors found that pacing fossil-fuel plant closures to benefit vulnerable communities produced a different sequence of shutdowns than a standard cost-curve approach—and that adding equity parameters shifted preferred options in some locations from solar to wind. In Uganda, a multi-objective optimization of the national power system showed that the cheapest path would leave some areas behind and worsen existing disparities, while improving equality would raise costs by only about 3 percent and diversify the technology mix. In the United States, coupling a national power-sector model with community-level air pollution data revealed that Black communities face higher pollution exposures, and that resolving this requires variables beyond cost optimization. Even pay-as-you-go energy access in sub-Saharan Africa, the review notes, turns quantification into a mechanism that moderates who gets electricity: credit-scoring algorithms can leave the poorest households trapped in cycles of intermittent service.

The fifth perspective, reimagining transitions, is the most unconventional: art-based research, speculative design and storytelling. The authors argue that grief, pride and loss—the emotional textures of transition—are rarely given space in policy debates, even though they matter deeply to those affected. In Oakland, California, artistic activism within the anti-coal movement—from singing and poetry to clothes design—gave the movement an identity, increased engagement, and brought less-represented groups into decision-making. In Latin America, artistic storytelling projects advanced energy sovereignty and territorial autonomy, framing energy as a relational phenomenon rather than a mere commodity. And drone imagery combined with computer visualizations, one study found, can give Indigenous communities in Native America and Australia a visceral way to counter corporate narratives about renewable development on their lands.

Comparing across the five perspectives, the authors identify recurring contestation axes that cut through all of them. There is reinforcement versus reconfiguration: every actor wants to preserve something, whether traditional livelihoods, nuclear power or gas dependence. There is spatio-temporal contestation: politicians think in electoral cycles, investors in payback periods, residents in the texture of everyday life, and ecosystems in recovery timescales that dwarf all of them. There is the tension between center and periphery, where centralized actors impose standardized solutions—wind farms, reskilling programs—that may overlook local knowledge and vulnerabilities. And there is the generic versus the specific: tensions acquire particular meaning only in the contexts where they unfold, embedded in distinct social relations and institutions.

The review also catalogs strategies for navigating tensions, grouped into four orientations: defensive, offensive, flexible and collaborative. The same strategy can serve opposite ends. Participatory monitoring can mitigate emerging tensions or manufacture an illusion of participation. Delaying transitions can protect land, ecosystems and culture—or protect capital and incumbent power structures. Transparent modeling can build trust, while opaque modeling can mislead. Even pluriversal and transdisciplinary approaches designed to include multiple worldviews can be captured and manipulated by incumbents. The authors’ point is not that any strategy is inherently good or bad, but that context determines whether resistance comes from communities resisting injustice or from incumbents resisting change—and that effective navigation requires a flexible, modular repertoire rather than a single playbook.

The deeper message of the study is about how knowledge itself is legitimized. Each perspective tends toward certain forms of legitimation—expert judgment for modelers, emotional resonance for artists, argumentation for discourse analysts—and each brings certain tensions to the surface while obscuring others. The authors argue that science-policy interfaces, which tend to prioritize a narrow set of methods and vocabularies, should instead treat tensions as constitutive features of transformation rather than failures of policy design. Shifting between perspectives, recombining and sequencing them, they suggest, can be used proactively to achieve more just and collectively desirable outcomes. For researchers, the invitation is to expand their theoretical and methodological apparatus; for policymakers, it is to engage productively with multiple types of knowledge when comparing strategic options. The energy transition, on this reading, is not a problem to be solved with either-or choices, but a landscape of competing realities, meanings and futures—one that demands reflexive, inclusive and imaginative navigation.

Subject of Research: Energy transitions research reveals five distinct disciplinary perspectives on the tensions within the triple transition agenda

Article Title: Leveraging tensions of the triple transition for future-fit energy pathways: Interdisciplinary analysis and response strategies

Article References: Soloviy, V., Haindlmaier, G., Kubeczko, K., Knöbel, S., Bernstein, M. J., & Dinges, M. (2026). Leveraging tensions of the triple transition for future-fit energy pathways: Interdisciplinary analysis and response strategies. Frontiers in Sustainable Energy Policy, 5, Article 1686783. https://doi.org/10.3389/fsuep.2026.1686783

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fsuep.2026.1686783

Keywords: energy transition, triple transition, just transition, digitalization, interdisciplinary research, energy policy, sustainability science, Leveraging, tensions, triple, transition, future-fit

The study, conducted by Daniel Delatin Rodrigues and Marco Grasso of the University of Milan-Bicocca and Giuseppe Calignano of the University of Bologna, examines Enel’s power plants in Civitavecchia, a long-standing fossil energy hub near Rome. The authors introduce what they term the deactivation network approach, a framework that treats conflicts over fossil infrastructure as relational struggles between two antagonistic logics of action. On one side stand practices of continuity and legitimation, through which a fossil network works to keep infrastructure running. On the other stand practices of destabilisation and disruption, through which a heterogeneous coalition attempts to shut it down.

The empirical heart of the research is a natural experiment of sorts. Civitavecchia experienced two contested fossil-to-fossil conversion cycles with opposite outcomes. Between 2000 and 2010, Enel pursued an oil-to-coal conversion that succeeded despite local opposition. Between 2018 and 2023, the company proposed a coal-to-gas conversion that was halted, with the plants slated for closure in 2025, although that closure has since been postponed under pressure from the energy-security concerns raised by the Russia-Ukraine war and a broader European rollback on climate ambition. Comparing these two episodes allowed the researchers to ask what structurally distinguished failure from success.

Methodologically, the team took an intentionally asymmetrical approach. They mapped only the deactivation network, treating the fossil-support network as a structuring context that shapes political opportunity rather than reconstructing it as a second network. Using event-based social network analysis, they defined ties between actors by co-participation in deactivation events such as meetings, demonstrations, strikes, and joint communiqués. They then triangulated these structural patterns with eight interviews, documentary sources, archival materials, and digital ethnography of online spaces. Enel itself declined to be interviewed or otherwise collaborate with the research.

The structural results are initially puzzling. The deactivation network remained almost unchanged across the two periods: 220 ties in 2000-2010 and 216 ties in 2018-2023, with nearly identical average degree, very low density, and 95 percent of possible connections absent. The two networks are, in structural terms, essentially equivalent. Yet the outcomes diverged dramatically. The key difference lay not in how dense the network was but in who belonged to it and how intensely they collaborated.

In the first period, the network was dominated by activists, who accounted for more than half of all components and occupied the top positions in degree centrality. Institutions, political parties, scientific and health organizations, and trade associations played marginal roles. Crucially, trade unions were entirely absent. Interpreted through the framework, this configuration produced destabilisation without disruption: activists effectively denaturalized fossil fuel use, mobilized moral and scientific arguments, and challenged the legitimacy of the oil-to-coal conversion in public discourse. But these efforts remained disconnected from the institutional and organizational arenas where continuity practices were actually enacted. Destabilisation was never translated into disruption, and the conversion went ahead.

The second period tells a different story. While activists remained central, the network expanded and diversified with the entry of trade unions, with seven participating components, alongside political parties, institutions, trade associations, a technical group, and a media company. The density-by-groups analysis reveals a dramatic reconfiguration: ties within the activist group collapsed from 96 to 18, while ties between activists and unions rose by 20. Unions occupied a bridging position with high inter-group connectivity. The analysis of tie intensity, measured by the number of joint event participations, showed that groups established markedly stronger relationships in the second period, and that certain actors with few direct ties achieved high eigenvector centrality by connecting to well-connected parts of the network, exerting indirect influence.

The qualitative evidence explains why the union entry mattered so much. Unions have historically defended jobs against environmental closure, embodying the classic jobs-versus-environment dilemma. In Civitavecchia, however, the interviews and documents show that unions did not merely join an existing coalition. They rearticulated health, labour, and territorial futures as a single just-transition problem and co-produced, with technicians and ecological committees, a concrete industrial alternative to the gas conversion, notably offshore wind tied to local shipyard and port employment. This discursive and projectual work dissolved the very opposition on which the fossil network’s legitimation rested, converting relational proximity into disruptive capacity. As the authors put it, the network analysis locates the hinge; the qualitative analysis explains why it held.

The study also clarifies what network measures can and cannot do. Metrics such as density, centrality, and fragmentation describe relational configurations but do not register the meaning or strategic intent of practices traveling through ties, nor asymmetries of power. Tie frequency is not equivalent to influence. The deactivation network approach therefore treats social network analysis as one of two complementary operations: mapping how the network was configured and how it changed, while qualitative materials interpret what circulated through those ties and how relational proximity became political and administrative effect. It is this combination, the authors argue, that moves beyond a simple protest-event count or a stand-alone ethnography.

The broader implications reach into debates on supply-side climate politics and infrastructural power. Fossil fuel infrastructures, the authors emphasize, are never merely material objects; they exist through the relations they support and actively organize asymmetrical conditions of visibility, access, and intervention. They concentrate power while dispersing responsibility, normalizing continuity as a taken-for-granted background condition. Deactivation networks, by contrast, remain relationally exposed and politically contingent. The Civitavecchia case demonstrates that deactivation becomes plausible not when destabilisation intensifies in isolation but when it is relationally articulated with disruptive capacities, lawsuits, policy provisions, strikes, blockades, and alternative investments, capable of interfering with an infrastructure’s operational and institutional viability. For climate movements everywhere, the lesson is sobering and empowering at once: large demonstrations do not necessarily translate into substantial change, but broad alliances that reach into the arenas where permits and decisions are made can.

Subject of Research: Network dynamics of activist coalitions contesting fossil fuel infrastructure conversion in Civitavecchia, Italy

Article Title: From destabilisation to disruption: deactivation network dynamics in an Italian fossil infrastructure conflict

Article References: Delatin Rodrigues, D., Calignano, G., & Grasso, M. (2026). From destabilisation to disruption: deactivation network dynamics in an Italian fossil infrastructure conflict. Geographica Helvetica, 81(2), 347-360. https://doi.org/10.5194/gh-81-347-2026

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.5194/gh-81-347-2026

Keywords: fossil fuel infrastructure, deactivation network, social network analysis, climate activism, energy transition, trade unions, just transition, Civitavecchia, Enel, coal-to-gas conversion, political opportunity, phase-out

The backdrop is Germany’s coal phase-out. In 2019, the federal government decided that lignite, the dirty brown coal mined in three German districts and burned for electricity and heat, would be phased out by 2038. To soften the blow, it pledged 40 billion euros to the affected mining regions, framing them as living laboratories of the wider socio-ecological transformation that policymakers insist modern societies must undergo to become sustainable, innovative, and resilient. The Central German mining district, where Zeitz lies, is one of these three regions. The political narrative was confident: if these post-industrial areas can reinvent themselves as green economies, anyone can. A few years on, that confidence has soured. Publicly funded transition projects increasingly meet suspicion, hostility, and, most intriguingly, resistance from the very city councils meant to implement them.

The puzzle the researchers set out to solve is deceptively simple: why would a municipality refuse large sums of federal money? The intuitive answer, often heard in German public debate, is transformation fatigue, a weariness with endless ecological modernization, or an attitudinal deficit that better communication could fix. Pampus and her colleagues argue that this framing misses the point. Drawing on ethnographic engagement with municipalities across the Central German district since 2020, and on council meeting recordings, minutes, and local media from Zeitz, they found that resistance rarely announces itself as ideology. It arrives dressed as administrative prudence: concerns about maintenance obligations, staffing capacity, legal competencies, and budgetary constraints. These are legitimate worries, often rooted in real experiences of marginality and underfunded local government. But their political force depends on when and where they are voiced.

The concept of anti-transformation borrows from two theoretical traditions. From debates on post-politics, it takes the observation that environmental governance often wraps political choices in technocratic, consensus-oriented language. From James Ferguson’s classic notion of the anti-politics machine, it takes the mechanism: political disagreements get translated into technical-administrative questions, shifting the very terms on which a project can be contested. Yet the authors depart from both traditions in a crucial way. Where post-political readings see administrative reasoning as depoliticizing conflict, the Zeitz material shows administration becoming a medium through which political contestation is actively enacted. Bureaucratic arguments do not suspend politics; they are politics, wielded at decisive institutional moments by actors who understand exactly how procedural timing works.

Zeitz itself is a textbook post-industrial town. Located in southern Saxony-Anhalt at the heart of the lignite district, it has suffered decades of population loss, plant closures, fiscal strain, and decaying infrastructure since the early 1990s. Since 2020 it has attracted a series of federal and EU-funded projects tied to just-transition agendas, including the federal programme Kommunale Modellvorhaben zur Umsetzung der ökologischen Nachhaltigkeitsziele in Strukturwandelregionen, or KoMoNa, financed by the federal environment ministry and administered through the project agency ZUG. The programme supports local sustainability projects but requires municipal co-financing, typically ten percent of the total, and long-term maintenance after funding ends. Zeitz’s first funding round produced small but symbolically charged interventions: tiny forests, orchard meadows, a health-themed walking trail. Many residents embraced them. Others saw red.

The political atmosphere matters. Support for the far-right Alternative for Germany has surged across Saxony-Anhalt: nearly 39 percent at state level in the 2025 federal election, more than 44 percent in the southern county of Burgenlandkreis, and almost 46 percent in Zeitz itself. Established parties, weakened by long-term membership decline in East Germany, operate under organizational strain. Against this backdrop, the authors read the sustainability disputes not as isolated administrative quarrels but as expressions of deeper conflicts over participation, recognition, and the perceived legitimacy of transformation in post-industrial regions. Transformation, in this mood, is experienced not as opportunity but as burden, a dynamic that scholars such as Steffen Mau and Ingolfur Blühdorn have described as the erosion of sustainability’s persuasive power in late-modern societies.

The June 2024 meeting of Zeitz’s Hauptausschuss, the main executive committee of the city council, is the study’s central vignette. The sustainability strategy had already passed through consultation rounds and committee discussions, and the funding agency had approved it. Around the table sat elected councillors, administrators, and project staff, but their roles were asymmetric: councillors debated and decided, while project staff could answer questions only when invited. The tone was sceptical, at times hostile. One councillor demanded to know where greenery would go, asking whether buildings would be torn down. Another pointed to dilapidated paths and asked why new ones should be built. The refrain that recurred throughout the debate was maintenance: the trees would need care long after the project ended, and the city would be left holding the bill. It is not about whether it is a nice idea, one member concluded; the town simply does not have the money.

The debate also exposed a spatial politics. A representative of a peripheral district complained that the presented measures were almost entirely focused on the city centre, leaving out surrounding neighbourhoods and villages home to roughly a fifth of Zeitz’s population. The claim was factually inaccurate, as several measures did target outer districts, but it resonated because it mobilized an established narrative of spatial injustice, recasting transformation as a zero-sum choice between urban greening and rural neglect. Project staff attempted to explain that projects in villages like Theißen had been included where viable ideas and local caretakers existed, but scepticism persisted. Another councillor summed up the mood: plenty of talk, plenty of concepts, nothing happening in practice. Individually, each objection appeared reasonable. Collectively, they transformed the terms of the debate, translating normative disagreements about socio-ecological futures into apparently technical questions of upkeep, responsibility, and institutional capacity.

The procedural conditions were decisive. The objections were raised in a formal council setting governed by speaking rules, where administrative actors and project staff who had already addressed these very concerns in earlier planning stages were not granted the right to respond on equal terms. Arguments that had been settled re-entered the debate with renewed force precisely because rebuttal was impossible. The strategy ultimately passed narrowly, but the story did not end there: months later, the administration failed to provide the required co-financing and had to return one million euros, cancelling the entire project with the approval of the main committee. The political effect of anti-transformation, the authors conclude, lies less in what is said than in when and where it is said. Legitimate concerns acquire destructive force through institutional timing.

The study’s broader argument is that the fate of socio-ecological transformation may be decided not in national parliaments but in committee rooms, budget negotiations, and planning documents. Local administrations occupy an ambivalent position: tasked with delivering transformative policies designed and funded elsewhere, while blamed both for overreach and for inaction, all under austerity conditions and fragmented competencies. This ambivalence, the authors suggest, is not a bug but a feature of contemporary multi-level governance. They propose anti-transformation as both an empirical phenomenon and a research agenda for political geography, calling for close attention to the micro-politics of decision-making: its terminology, institutional framing, and procedural conditions. Transformation, on this view, is never simply implemented or resisted. It is negotiated, redirected, delayed, and sometimes undone through the ordinary practices of local governance, one carefully timed question about who will take care of the trees at a time.

Subject of Research: Local political resistance to socio-ecological transformation projects in East German municipal governance

Article Title: Anti-transformation: the political geography of local resistance to transformation projects in East Germany

Article References: Pampus, M., Naumann, M., & Everts, J. (2026). Anti-transformation: the political geography of local resistance to transformation projects in East Germany. Geographica Helvetica, 81(3), 427-433. https://doi.org/10.5194/gh-81-427-2026

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.5194/gh-81-427-2026

Keywords: anti-transformation, socio-ecological transformation, East Germany, Zeitz, coal phase-out, local governance, municipal politics, political geography, sustainability policy, just transition, post-industrial regions, AfD

The study, led by Muhammad Chaeroel Ansar and A. Hasyim Asyari Amir Husni, goes beyond the usual counting exercises of bibliometrics. Rather than passively charting publication growth curves and keyword frequencies, the authors set out to interrogate the sociology of knowledge production itself: who leads the field, whose theories anchor it, and whether the Global South appears in the literature primarily as a source of theoretical authority or merely as an empirical setting, a place where data is collected and policies are applied. Using the Scopus database, the Bibliometrix package in R, and a PRISMA-guided screening process that narrowed 5,729 initial records down to a final corpus of 201 studies, the team combined performance analysis, co-citation mapping, keyword co-occurrence networks, and thematic evolution tracking.

The raw numbers tell a story of explosive growth. Annual output in the field fluctuated between just 1 and 8 publications from 2015 to 2019, then climbed to 15 in 2020, 19 in 2021, 23 in 2022, and 22 in 2023, before surging to 43 publications in 2024 and 52 in 2025. Nearly 80 percent of the entire corpus appeared in the last five years, and the field is growing at an annual rate of 24.1 percent. Yet the expansion is strikingly dispersed: the 201 documents are spread across 169 different journals, with the leading outlet, Sustainability, publishing only six articles. This is not a field consolidated around a handful of flagship venues; it is a conversation happening simultaneously across sustainability science, energy policy, political geography, and law.

When the researchers examined who actually leads this conversation, the results were nuanced rather than uniform. The most influential authors by citation metrics are Carrington K and Sozzo M, while the most productive affiliations include not only the University of California and the University of the Basque Country but also the University of Cape Town, which tops the list with eight articles, and Stellenbosch University, both based in South Africa. Citation totals, however, remain concentrated in a small number of countries: Austria leads with 1,060 total citations, followed by the United Kingdom, Germany, Chile, and Switzerland, though the authors caution that some of these figures reflect single highly cited papers rather than sustained national research programs. The geography of productivity and the geography of citation authority, in other words, do not neatly overlap.

The collaboration network analysis adds further texture. Across 174 distinct country pairs and 227 collaboration instances, North-South ties form the largest category by number of pairs, while South-South ties remain comparatively few at 31 pairs. But South Africa emerges as one of the most connected nodes in the entire network, with 17 distinct collaboration partners, matching Germany and trailing only the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, and the Netherlands. Roughly half of South Africa’s ties are with other Global South countries, including Malawi, Mozambique, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, Ethiopia, and Brazil, indicating a genuine African and South-South sub-network rather than collaboration mediated exclusively through Northern gatekeepers. The single most frequent tie in the network, notably, links the United Kingdom and South Africa, showing that deep North-South and South-South engagement can coexist within the same national research system.

Perhaps the most revealing analysis concerns the field’s intellectual foundations. The co-citation network resolved into four distinct but interconnected clusters, and contrary to the expectation of a single dominant Western tradition, the theoretical core is strikingly plural. The largest cluster centers on Sovacool and Geels, representing socio-technical transition theory and energy poverty scholarship. A second cluster is anchored by David Harvey, whose betweenness centrality is the highest in the network, making him its most important structural bridge; it connects critical urban theory with environmental justice frameworks. A third cluster, anchored by Escobar and Gudynas, brings together decolonial political ecology and Latin American degrowth scholarship, including Quijano, Shiva, Svampa, and Hickel. A fourth links Amartya Sen’s capability approach to Southern theory and gender-and-development scholarship. Crucially, the decolonial cluster carries structural importance comparable to the network’s most prominent Global North traditions, with Gudynas recording the third-highest PageRank despite anchoring the smallest cluster.

The keyword analysis delivers the study’s most headline-worthy finding: global south is the single largest node in the entire co-occurrence network, larger than energy transition, energy justice, or any other term. Specific Global South countries, including Africa, China, Brazil, India, South Africa, and Colombia, recur across three of the five thematic clusters. The field’s vocabulary, in other words, is substantially oriented toward Global South contexts even as its institutional and citation leadership remains concentrated elsewhere. Thematic evolution analysis, splitting the corpus into 2015-2020 and 2021-2025 periods, shows global south rising from a modest position to become the dominant keyword of the recent period, while energy policy vocabulary has reframed toward broader transition language. A trend-topics robustness check confirmed this shift is not an artifact of the chosen period boundaries.

This matters because of what the patterns imply about the field’s own politics. Energy justice scholarship is built on the triumvirate of distributional, procedural, and recognition justice, a framework rooted in Western philosophical traditions. The study argues that when this vocabulary is applied as the primary lens across radically different contexts, it risks hardening into a standardized template that travels more easily than the conditions it was built to explain. Empirical cases illustrate the limits: offshore wind conflicts in South Korea where fishing communities’ claims exceed distributional categories, Norway’s Fosen wind case where renewable expansion collided with Sámi indigenous rights, and Indonesia’s nickel boom, where land dispossession and labor precarity in battery supply chains are only partially captured by procedural or distributive frameworks. Post-colonial agrarian conflicts, informal energy economies, and systemic extractive violence sit uneasily within the established three-tenets model.

On the question of whether justice concerns have been displaced by technocratic governance agendas, the study’s answer is bifurcation rather than displacement. Justice-oriented keywords and policy-material keywords both persist and both grow across the decade. One research trajectory consolidates around energy justice, just transition, participation, and Global South perspectives, treating transition as a contested political process; another organizes around decarbonization, efficiency, security, and an emerging focus on critical minerals and geopolitics. The state, the authors suggest, sits where these orientations most often meet, asked simultaneously to guarantee justice and accelerate decarbonization, a tension that may favor the second demand in practice. The authors also acknowledge limitations: the search strategy required records to reference both global south and global north, trading recall for geopolitical specificity, and bibliometric mapping can identify structural patterns but not the mechanisms behind them.

The implications reach beyond academia. As long as theoretical authority in energy justice remains concentrated in a limited set of Global North institutions, the field’s frameworks will continue to travel more easily than the political and material conditions they are meant to explain, and the intellectual architecture risks reproducing, at the level of knowledge production, some of the very asymmetries the field seeks to critique. The authors call for treating the Global South as a source of theoretical insight rather than only an empirical setting, for closer analysis of the state as a contradictory actor in transition, and for sustained attention to the emerging nexus of critical minerals, geopolitics, and justice. The energy transition, this mapping makes clear, is not merely a technical project of swapping carbon for electrons; it is a political struggle over who controls resources, who sets agendas, and whose harms count, and the scholarship meant to illuminate that struggle is itself an uneven terrain of power.

Subject of Research: Bibliometric mapping of justice and governance in global energy transition research, 2015-2025

Article Title: A bibliometric review on justice and governance in energy transitions

Article References: Ansar, M. C., & Husni, A. H. A. A. (2026). A bibliometric review on justice and governance in energy transitions. Environmental Challenges, 25, Article 101678. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envc.2026.101678

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.envc.2026.101678

Keywords: energy justice, energy transition, Global South, bibliometrics, just transition, decolonial theory, energy governance, critical minerals, green colonialism, science mapping, energy democracy, knowledge production

The numbers behind the study’s setting are stark. Colombia extracted roughly 69.3 million tons of coal in 2023, declining to 59.3 million tons in 2024, and La Jagua de Ibirico sits at the heart of that story. The municipality’s population surged by 138 percent between 2005 and 2020 as open-pit operations expanded, even as production in the municipality itself fell from 15.9 million tons in 2012 to 10.9 million tons in 2020. The paradox the researchers set out to examine is precisely this: how can a region plan an energy transition while its economy, institutions, and identities remain welded to the export of a fuel the world is supposed to abandon?

The team’s environmental forensics are unambiguous. Using official forest and hydrographic data from Colombia’s IDEAM and IGAC institutes, delineated against high-resolution Planet satellite imagery in a GIS environment, they found that approximately 315 hectares of forest cover disappeared within the La Jagua mining area between 1990 and 2022, with another 138 hectares lost around the Calenturitas mine. The losses concentrated along riparian corridors, including the Tucuy River, where vegetation once buffered waterways and regulated seasonal flows. Farmers interviewed for the study reported that creeks which once ran year-round now flow only in the rainy season, and that freshwater turtles, native fish, and amphibians have largely vanished from waters they remember as abundant.

Air quality data tell a parallel story of slow-motion harm. Historical records of total suspended particles from the La Palmita station between 2001 and 2010 hovered just below Colombia’s national annual limit of 100 micrograms per cubic meter, while the Boquerón station exceeded that threshold in 2008 and 2009. In 2007, the Ministry of Environment classified sections of the Cesar Mining Corridor as environmental pollution zones, and in 2010 Boquerón was formally declared uninhabitable. Yet as of 2024, a significant proportion of households remained in place, caught in a resettlement process stalled by administrative procedures, budget constraints, and regulatory negotiations. Residents described what researchers call double exposure: simultaneous contact with particulate contamination and institutional neglect. One community leader put it bluntly: We are stuck in the middle, contaminated, forgotten, and silenced.

What distinguishes this study is its refusal to stop at environmental measurement. The researchers deployed a framework known as the plural valuation of nature, aligned with the IPBES Values Assessment, which holds that ecosystems carry economic, social, ecological, cultural, and spiritual meanings simultaneously, and that reducing them to monetary terms erases the very values that make transition pathways legitimate. They surveyed 101 residents, conducted 21 semi-structured interviews across institutional, labor, and community groups, and asked participants to score five economic sectors, mining, agriculture, livestock, tourism, and commerce, across four dimensions: economic contribution, social well-being, ecological sustainability, and cultural compatibility.

The resulting valuation heatmap exposes a contradiction that conventional cost-benefit analysis would miss entirely. Mining scored highest in the economic dimension, with a mean of 3.57 on a five-point scale, reflecting real dependence on jobs, transport, and services. But it scored lowest in the ecological dimension at 2.31, and a paired Wilcoxon signed-rank test across 101 complete pairs confirmed the gap was statistically robust, with a mean difference of 1.27 points and a p-value of 1.79 times ten to the minus nine. Residents associated mining with respiratory illness, unequal benefit distribution, and weakened social trust. Agriculture, by contrast, earned its highest score in the cultural dimension at 4.07, tied to ancestral farming knowledge and food sovereignty, while tourism scored highest on ecological and cultural grounds despite weak current income potential.

Perceptions of decline were strikingly convergent. Soil degradation was cited by 81 percent of respondents, biodiversity loss by 73 percent, water deterioration by 67 percent, food insecurity by 61 percent, and cultural or emotional rupture by 47 percent. Farmers described soil that no longer breathes, where composting and crop rotation have lost their effectiveness and fallow land fails to recover. Women in Boquerón and La Palmita reported heavier domestic burdens hauling water from distant sources. Older residents, particularly women, described the painful erosion of ecological knowledge transmission, from identifying medicinal plants to reading seasonal cues, as planting cycles grew unpredictable and younger generations drifted from the land.

The study’s authors are careful not to romanticize the alternatives. Agriculture in La Jagua de Ibirico is a constrained pathway, limited by the very degradation mining caused: compacted soils, water scarcity, and diminished productivity that will require sustained technical and institutional support to reverse. Tourism is aspirational rather than immediately viable, dependent on air-quality improvement, riparian restoration, infrastructure, and security. The analytical point is subtler and more consequential: plural valuation reveals the direction communities want to travel, even when the road has not yet been built. Ignoring those non-economic values, the researchers argue, reproduces extractivist logic under a green banner, a critique increasingly aimed at transition policies across the Global South where corporate actors have appropriated transition narratives while extraction continues.

Gender emerged as a quietly powerful thread in the findings. Among the 101 respondents, 56 women and 45 men, exploratory chi-square tests found statistically significant associations between sex and both the economic and social valuation of mining. Qualitatively, women were especially vocal on health impacts, water quality, and caregiving burdens, articulating relational and care-based values that shaped deliberation. The authors suggest that future plural valuation exercises in extractive territories adopt gender-sensitive designs to capture these differentiated experiences systematically, rather than leaving them as anecdotal color in participatory workshops.

The deeper lesson radiating from this Colombian coal town is procedural, not merely technical. The Boquerón resettlement saga shows that legal recognition of harm means little without community power over timelines, criteria, and compensation, a textbook case of what environmental justice scholars call procedural justice failure. Residents have responded with community-led air monitoring, participatory mapping of lost territories, and youth-driven documentaries and podcasts documenting environmental injustice. Their articulated demands, compensation for health harms, investment in agroecology and community tourism, legal recognition of territorial practices, and youth training, sketch a transition measured in healing rather than megawatts. As one interviewee told the researchers: The land is wounded, and so are we. Transition means healing both. If the global energy transition is to be just anywhere, this study suggests, it must begin by listening to places like La Jagua de Ibirico, where the invoice for coal was paid long before anyone asked who would collect it.

Subject of Research: Plural valuation of nature and environmental justice in post-extractive transition pathways in a coal-dependent Colombian municipality

Article Title: Plural valuation of nature and environmental justice in post-extractive transitions: The case of La Jagua de Ibirico, Colombia

Article References: Regino Vergara, J., Rincón Ruíz, A., Mejía Brito, A., & Banda Pérez, A. (2026). Plural valuation of nature and environmental justice in post-extractive transitions: The case of La Jagua de Ibirico, Colombia. Heliyon, 12(15), Article e45538. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2026.e45538

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2026.e45538

Keywords: energy transition, coal mining, Colombia, environmental justice, plural valuation, post-extractivism, air quality, forest loss, participatory research, IPBES, just transition, La Jagua de Ibirico

The central argument of the book, as framed by the review, is that climate policy and social policy cannot be treated as separate domains. When governments phase out internal combustion engines, retrofit homes for energy efficiency, or restructure energy systems around renewables, the costs and benefits of those changes are distributed unevenly across society. Low-income households, older people, renters, and communities dependent on carbon-intensive industries often face the steepest barriers to participating in the new low-carbon economy. Snell and Middlemiss, both established researchers on energy and poverty, argue that a transition which ignores these distributional questions risks being both unjust and politically fragile.

This concern sits within a broader intellectual tradition known as the just transition. The concept originated in the labour movement as a demand that workers displaced by environmental regulation should not be abandoned, and it has since been widened considerably. Scholars such as Newell and Mulvaney, whose work on the political economy of just transition is cited in the review, have traced how the term has travelled from union bargaining tables into national climate plans and international governance frameworks. More recent analyses, including a 2023 study by Newell and colleagues on the global governance of just transitions, have highlighted persistent gaps between the rhetoric of justice and the institutional machinery needed to deliver it.

Parallel to this, the field of energy justice has developed a conceptual vocabulary for evaluating energy systems. Jenkins and colleagues, in a widely cited 2016 conceptual review, distinguished between distributive justice, which concerns who bears costs and receives benefits; procedural justice, which concerns who participates in decision-making; and recognition justice, which concerns whose needs and identities are acknowledged by policy. Healy and Barry extended this framework by politicising energy transitions, arguing that questions of who owns and controls energy infrastructure are inseparable from questions of fairness. Schlosberg and Collins similarly traced the evolution from environmental justice to climate justice, showing how the discourse has broadened from the siting of polluting facilities to the global inequities of climate impacts and responses.

What distinguishes Snell and Middlemiss’s contribution, according to the review, is its explicit integration of social inclusion research into this justice-oriented landscape. Social exclusion, as conceptualised in the influential multi-dimensional analysis by Levitas and colleagues, is not simply a lack of income but a compound condition involving restricted access to resources, services, social relations, and political voice. By bringing this framework into conversation with climate policy, the authors are able to show that the populations most at risk of exclusion from mainstream society are frequently the same populations most burdened by decarbonisation measures. A household in fuel poverty, for instance, may be unable to afford the upfront costs of a heat pump, may rent a property where efficiency upgrades require landlord consent, and may lack the political leverage to influence local energy planning.

The review situates the book within what Wibeck and colleagues describe in 2026 as the widening scope of just transitions research. What began as a concern with coal miners and oil workers has expanded to encompass consumers, communities, and entire regions, and increasingly to questions of global equity between the Global North and South. Wang and Lo’s 2021 conceptual review documented this proliferation of meanings, noting that the term just transition is now invoked by actors with sharply different interests, from trade unions to corporations to multilateral institutions. In this crowded conceptual space, a book that grounds the discussion in the concrete, measurable realities of social exclusion performs a valuable clarifying function.

Technical detail matters here, because the mechanisms of exclusion in the net zero transition are often embedded in the design of policy instruments themselves. Grant-based retrofit schemes typically require homeowners to pay upfront costs and reclaim money later, a structure that systematically excludes households without savings or access to credit. Electric vehicle subsidies disproportionately benefit higher-income buyers who can afford new cars, while the used-car market, second-hand market, and public transport alternatives receive less support. Carbon pricing, the economist’s favoured tool, is frequently regressive in its incidence, taking a larger share of income from poorer households unless revenues are recycled progressively. Snell and Middlemiss’s analysis, as reflected in the review, pushes policymakers to examine these design features rather than treating injustice as an unfortunate side effect to be remedied after the fact.

The book also speaks to a growing mobility justice critique of technology-centred transition strategies. Henderson’s 2020 argument that electric vehicles are not the answer exemplifies this line of thought: replacing every internal combustion car with an electric equivalent would do little to address congestion, road danger, sedentary lifestyles, or the exclusion of those who cannot drive at all. A genuinely just climate future, on this view, requires rethinking systems of provision rather than swapping the energy source that powers them. This systems perspective aligns with the book’s emphasis on inclusion, since questions about who benefits from transport, housing, and energy systems are inherently questions about social structure, not merely about technology.

Zhao’s review, published on 2 October 2026, presents the book as a synthesis that will be useful to researchers, students, and policymakers alike, drawing together literatures that too often run in parallel. The reviewer, who conceived and wrote the review independently and declares no competing interests and no specific funding, frames the book’s core achievement as demonstrating that social inclusion is not an optional add-on to climate policy but a precondition for its success. Transitions that leave large groups behind generate resistance, erode public consent, and can stall precisely the decarbonisation they were meant to advance. The political turbulence that has accompanied fuel taxes, low-emission zones, and boiler replacement schemes in several countries illustrates the practical stakes of this argument.

As net zero deadlines draw closer, the questions raised by Just Climate Futures are likely to become only more pressing. Who decides which communities are transformed first, and who sits at the table when those decisions are made? How are the costs of grid upgrades, home retrofits, and industrial restructuring shared between taxpayers, energy users, and shareholders? And how can policy be designed so that the households with the least capacity to adapt are protected rather than penalised? Snell and Middlemiss do not claim that these tensions can be resolved by technical fixes alone. Their contribution, as the review makes clear, is to insist that a credible climate strategy must be measured not only in tonnes of carbon avoided but in the fairness of the society it builds, ensuring that the path to a low-carbon future is one that people from all walks of life can walk together.

Subject of Research: Social inclusion and justice in the net zero climate transition

Article Title: Carolyn Snell and Lucie Middlemiss. Just climate futures: integrating social inclusion into the net zero transition

Article References: Zhao, S. (2026). Carolyn Snell and Lucie Middlemiss. Just climate futures: integrating social inclusion into the net zero transition. Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13412-026-01150-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s13412-026-01150-8

Keywords: just transition, net zero, energy justice, social inclusion, climate policy, fuel poverty, social exclusion, decarbonisation, environmental justice, climate equity, energy transition, book review

The volume under review, published by Springer Nature in 2026, comprises fifteen chapters drawn primarily from researchers at Waseda University. Its central claim is ambitious: the transition to carbon neutrality is not merely a technological substitution problem but a cultural, ethical, and institutional transformation. That framing places the book squarely in conversation with a growing body of scholarship on climate justice, just transition, the political economy of climate change, and decarbonization in Asia, and the review explicitly evaluates the book’s claims against these established literatures and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

What makes the collection unusual is its breadth of intellectual terrain. Among the chapters catalogued in the review’s bibliography are analyses of intergenerational altruism and intergenerational equity as a source of the emissions gap; an account of new sustainability disclosure requirements for listed companies in Japan; a study of historical institutionalism as a way of explaining and overcoming barriers to urban carbon neutrality through transport-land use coordination; case studies of how policies affect traditional resource management in the Subak system of Bali, Indonesia; an assessment of green logistics and its effects on carbon neutrality; a case study in Cambodia on the impact of climate change on vulnerable families in Southeast Asia; and a philosophical reassessment of individual moral responsibility within collective climate harm. There is even a chapter on environmental and cultural history and the history of imagination, described through the striking imagery of dandelion and white chrysanthemum drops.

This range is precisely the point of the review’s most positive verdict. Ulum acknowledges the book’s original contribution to the culture-climate relationship, a dimension often treated as a soft afterthought in climate policy debates dominated by economic modeling and technology roadmaps. By insisting that cultural values, ethical commitments, and institutional arrangements shape what decarbonization is politically possible, the volume pushes back against the assumption that better technology alone will deliver net zero. The chapter on shared responsibility, for instance, engages a question that has long troubled moral philosophers: how to apportion individual responsibility for a harm, like climate change, that is produced collectively by billions of small contributions.

The chapter on intergenerational equity carries similar weight. Climate change is, at its core, an intergenerational transfer problem: present emitters enjoy the benefits of fossil energy while future generations absorb the climate damages. Framing the emissions gap as a question of intergenerational altruism connects formal economics to ethics, asking whether and how the welfare of people not yet born should be counted in today’s policy choices. That question sits behind every discount rate used in cost-benefit analyses of climate policy, and the fact that a social science volume makes it a central theme rather than a footnote is notable.

Other chapters ground these abstract concerns in concrete governance challenges. The analysis of sustainability disclosure requirements for Japanese listed companies addresses one of the fastest-moving arenas of climate regulation, in which corporations are increasingly required to report climate-related risks and transition plans. The historical institutionalism chapter explains why cities, despite their technical potential for carbon neutrality, remain locked into car-dependent, land-use patterns that resist change. And the Bali case study shows how top-down climate and conservation policies can collide with traditional resource management systems, a cautionary tale about decarbonization policies that ignore local institutions.

The volume is not without problems, and the review is unusually candid about them. The first is the narrow institutional and geographic scope of the author base. Because the contributors come primarily from a single university, the collection risks presenting a particular national and disciplinary perspective as if it were a general account of the transition to carbon neutrality. Reviews of edited volumes routinely flag unevenness, but the concern here is subtler: a book about the cultural and institutional dimensions of climate action, written almost entirely by researchers embedded in one institutional culture, inevitably limits the range of cultures and institutions it can genuinely illuminate.

The second problem concerns the book’s claim to speak for Asia. The review notes that the Asian context claimed by the volume excludes major economies such as China and India, the two most populous countries on Earth and two of the world’s largest emitters. Any framework that aspires to describe decarbonization in Asia while omitting these economies faces an obvious applicability problem. Climate policy in China and India involves distinctive political economies, energy systems, and development trajectories, and a transition methodology developed without reference to them will have limited transferability across the region.

Related to this is the review’s criticism of the transition methodology itself. The volume’s framework for moving to a carbon neutral society, the reviewer argues, falls short in terms of applicability: the analysis of how societies actually change is thinner than the analysis of why they should. And the collection, for all its attention to ethics and institutions, neglects issues of power, inequality, financing, and conflicts among stakeholders. These omissions matter. Political economy scholarship on climate change has documented in detail how fossil fuel interests, labor movements, and communities dependent on carbon-intensive industries shape transition outcomes, while climate justice research has shown that decarbonization policies can redistribute burdens in ways that harm the least advantaged. A roadmap that does not specify who pays, who decides, and who loses is vulnerable to the same critiques it might level at purely technological accounts.

The broader lesson of the review extends well beyond one book. As governments codify net zero targets into law and investors scrutinize corporate transition plans, the social sciences are being asked not just to interpret decarbonization but to design it. That task requires integration across disciplines that have historically worked apart: economics, political science, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, and history. The volume edited by Akao and Washizu demonstrates how much such integration can reveal, from the moral status of future generations to the institutional lock-in of urban form and the fate of centuries-old irrigation systems under modern environmental policy. The review’s critique demonstrates how far the field still has to go, particularly in accounting for power and finance, and in testing its frameworks against the diverse realities of the Asian continent. The path to carbon neutrality, on this evidence, will be decided as much in institutions, cultures, and distributional politics as in laboratories and power plants, and the scholars best equipped to trace that path must be as numerous and varied as the societies the transition is meant to transform.

Subject of Research: A book review assessing social science perspectives on achieving a carbon neutral society

Article Title: Ken-Ichi Akao and Ayu Washizu. Climate change issues and social sciences towards a carbon neutral society

Article References: Ulum, Ö. G. (2026). Ken-Ichi Akao and Ayu Washizu. Climate change issues and social sciences towards a carbon neutral society. Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13412-026-01146-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s13412-026-01146-4

Keywords: carbon neutrality, climate change, social sciences, climate justice, just transition, intergenerational equity, decarbonization, sustainability disclosure, Asia, Waseda University, political economy, SDGs