Just Transitions conference
In early March 2020, just before COVID-19 lockdowns, I had the privilege of attending the Just Transitions Interdisciplinary Postgraduate Conference at UNSW. The conference was organised by Ushana Jayasuriya who said:
This conference has been organised in the hope of bringing together a range of postgraduate students from across Australia who are working on topics related to the just transition. The conference aims to help make connections across a range of aspects relevant to the transition.
Conference speakers, disciplines and topics were varied, as can be seen from the list below. This purposeful interdisciplinary approach freed us to think across disciplinary lines and see connections where they might not have been apparent before.
- Naomi Stringer: Just Transitions: Decentralisation of the electricity system
- David Wilson: Are Autonomous Vehicles Sustainable?
- Gail Broadbent: The role of the media in the uptake of electric vehicles in New Zealand: hindrance or help?
- Suzanne Dunford: The governance of climate commons in Waverley LGA
- Gemma Viney: Anti-Extraction Community Movements: A pluralist exploration of Australian Environmental Justice
- Belinda Xie: The socio-psychological predictors of Australians’ willingness to mitigate climate change
- Juan Garzon: Transmodern transitions towards pluriversal futures
- Ushana Jayasuriya: Putting the “just” in just transitions (with a New Zealand focus)
- Ewelina Przybyszewski was unable to attend and was to deliver the paper: Supporting economic diversification and social well-being for prosperous futures in Australia’s regional production communities.
Concepts
The concepts and insights from across the presentations which are of interest and relevance to my research.
One-World World
Juan Garzon introduced the concept of the One-World World which, according to Escobar “signals the predominant idea in the West that we all live within a single world, made up of one underlying reality (one nature) and many cultures. This imperialistic notion supposes the West’s ability to arrogate for itself the right to be ‘the world,’ and to subject all other worlds to its rules, to diminish them to secondary status or to nonexistence, often figuratively and materially. It is a very seductive notion […]” (Escobar 2018).
Related concepts included Coloniality of power, knowledge, and being (Grosfoguel 2006); and also Counter Storytelling “a method of telling the stories of those people whose experiences are not often told” (Solórzano and Yosso 2002).
Maintaining the status quo during transitions
Ushana Jurasuriya is investigating New Zealand approaches to ‘just transitions’ (JT) and has found that it is often economic and worker focused. She proposes that his is because the concept of JT comes from the International Labor Organization. This situates transitions within existing socio-economic paradigms rather than aiming for wider societal transformation.
I wonder, if we do not aim for complete transformation of existing socio-technical structures, are we just locking ourselves into future disruptions? When going through the immense efforts of transition, should we not take a moment to question the status quo?
Escobar (2018) says that many transition discourses share “the contention that we need to step outside existing institutional and epistemic boundaries if we truly want to strive for worlds and practices capable of bringing about the significant transformations seen as needed”.
Authentic participation from diverse communities
There were many discussions on how research can be truly community-led, inclusive, diverse and authentic. All of this within the framework of current understanding and accepted practice of research. For example, that ethics processes within universities can make approval of community-led research difficult.
Methods to increase authentic participation included minimising (if possible) the researcher’s influence and allowing the communities themselves to shape the approach (rather than leading with a particular theoretical perspective); and using emergent themes to build the framework for action.
