Just Transition and Impact Assessment

This volume reframes the narratives on just transition and explores the ways in which impact assessment modes can be deployed for just transition ends.

Traditionally, just transition focuses on local jobs and workers and its application within the climate change context retains this traditional focus. From its recognition in the Paris Agreement to its incorporation in domestic transition laws and policies, just transition is essentially interpreted as jobs transition. In this book, Adebayo Majekolagbe shows that the traditional focus of the just transition narrative on jobs, its emphasis on distributive and procedural justice, and the failure to embed just transition into planning and decision making have resulted in unjust ends for social and ecological systems both locally and globally. Using Amartya Sen's capability approach to justice, Majekolagbe proposes key characteristics of just transition, establishing that human and ecological wellbeing should be the primary objectives. Finally, the book demonstrates how impact assessment can be a useful tool for mainstreaming justice into transition planning, given its recognition in laws across the world as a primary planning and decision-making tool.

Innovative and impactful, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of climate change law and policy, just transition, and impact assessment.