Struggles for Justice in the Energy Transition: Views from the Front Lines

A critical issue of our time is how the world can transition from a development model based on the extraction and use of fossil fuels to one based on cleaner sources of energy, and how it does so in a just and inclusive way.

Central to this issue of the IDS Bulletin is the recognition that to be just, any transition must include consideration of the voices, knowledges, and realities of communities most affected. By bringing together authors from both the global South and the global North, covering a wide range of communities affected by different dimensions of the energy transition, we find long histories of action and resistance developed around encounters with earlier transitions.

The articles in this IDS Bulletin highlight cases of advocacy being used to strengthen community voices to make the processes of consultation more inclusive and empowering of marginalised perspectives. In doing so they also address a less well documented citizen-led pathway that focuses on bottom-up forms of action through grass-roots innovation and social movements.

Given the multiple historical forms of injustice which surround energy production, struggles for just transition must ultimately involve multiple forms of justice – be they distributive, recognitional, procedural, restorative, or reparative.

Democracy Contested

What has shifted us towards a more autocratic, rather than democratic, world?

While there is nothing new about a politically divided citizenry, the current state of democracy strongly calls for an analysis of the diverse motivations of citizens to vote for leaders and parties that have promised outright they would undo democratic institutions.

The articles in this issue of the IDS Bulletin look at how people engage with democracy – their basis for voting for certain leaders. The authors discuss the ideas and narratives that underlie the expectations citizens have of what these leaders would deliver in terms of redistribution to enhance the welfare and the recognition of their rights as the voting citizens, at the repudiation of the rights of others.

Democracy works where checks and balances through political, institutional, and social accountability institutions work. In liberal democracies, the judiciary is the first line of defence, but when autocrats come to power, they swiftly move to undermine an independent judiciary, concentrate powers in the hands of the executive, and constrain the media and other important freedoms.  The contributions in this IDS Bulletin highlight how this has unfolded in the US, India, the Philippines, Brazil, and across parts of Africa and Europe. In turn, they also provide insights into what can be done to halt and reverse these dynamics and address feelings of discontent by those who feel left behind by a lack of redistribution. How can left-wing and other political parties that aim to uphold inclusive democratic values reconnect with the constituencies they lost to parties with autocratic tendencies?

Environmental Change, Development Challenges – Revisited

The establishment of the IDS Environment Group in 1990 created a line of research linked to policy that has remained central to the Institute ever since. In highlighting a series of IDS Bulletin issues, led by IDS researchers, this archive issue tracks the development of this work over the last 35 years. It also tells a broader story of the contribution of IDS to key debates on environment and development evolving over this time. During these decades environmental challenges have become ever more acute, with environmental questions being absolutely central to Development and Development Studies in a world of multiple intersecting crises.

So, what then have been the core contributions of this body of work emerging from IDS and partners over the past decades? Some of the themes highlighted by the IDS Bulletins featured here include: key contributions tracking debates over the relationships between environment, development and policy in the early 1990s; the emerging emphases on social dimensions, communities, resources and livelihoods, including work linking environmental research with long-standing gender research at IDS; the politics of environmental knowledge, exploring local knowledges and perspectives and the ways these challenge mainstream science and policy; and uncertain knowledges and the development of the ‘pathways approach’ to sustainability, bringing together understandings of complex, dynamic systems.

Over the years all this has combined with analyses of power and political economy, highlighting of questions of justice, both around the causes and consequences of environmental change and the processes of transformation towards more sustainable futures. All of these themes remain relevant to critical policy-oriented research on environment and development emerging from IDS and beyond that we hope will continue to shape global debates on these most crucial issues of our time.