Just transition

Working Definition

A just transition is the principle that the socioeconomic costs of phasing out fossil-fuel-intensive industries must not be dumped onto the workers and local communities that depended on them for their livelihoods, and that the shift must be negotiated with those workers rather than imposed upon them. In its technical policy version, codified in the International Labour Organization’s 2015 Guidelines, it designates a concrete policy package: employment-impact assessment, social protection and early-retirement bridges, retraining, collective bargaining, and targeted regional investment in replacement jobs. In loose political and media usage, it often serves as a label for any fiscal handout accompanying mine or power-plant closures—or even as a rhetorical pretext for delaying decarbonization altogether. Keeping the two apart is essential: the ILO framework governs how a phaseout is executed, not how to postpone it.

Genesis and Global Lineage

The concept was born in the North American labor movement, not in academia. In the early 1990s, Tony Mazzocchi of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers International Union (OCAW) campaigned for a “Superfund for Workers” modeled on the federal toxic-waste cleanup fund—arguing in 1993 that if there is a Superfund for dirt, there ought to be one for workers displaced by environmental rules. Because “Superfund” carried toxic associations for communities, labor and environmental-justice organizers rebranded the demand around 1995 as a just transition; the Just Transition Alliance formed in 1997, and Canadian unions and international labor federations carried the phrase into global diplomacy. The International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) made it the centerpiece of its climate platform in 2010, leading to a double institutional breakthrough in late 2015: in October an ILO tripartite meeting of experts in Geneva adopted the Guidelines for a Just Transition, and in December the preamble of the Paris Agreement wrote “the imperatives of a just transition of the workforce and the creation of decent work” into international climate law. From there the concept expanded into two new arenas: climate-justice movements broadened it beyond unionized industrial workers to indigenous peoples and the Global South, while the European Union turned it in 2020 into a dedicated structural-funds instrument—transforming a labor-rights demand into a regional budget allocation key.

Central European Lineage

Central Europe’s link to the concept lies not in coining the phrase, but in serving as its primary European testing ground—and living with the memory of what happens when industrial transitions are botched. In Poland, the word transformacja carries the heavy ambivalence of the post-1989 market shock: in the Lower Silesian basin of Wałbrzych, rapid pit closures in the early 1990s without an adequate territorial program left generational unemployment and urban decay. By contrast, under the November 1998 Coal Restructuring Act negotiated by the post-Solidarity government with mining unions, Upper Silesia—the European Union’s largest hard-coal basin—implemented the Mining Social Package (Górniczy Pakiet Socjalny), combining generous severance payouts, bridging benefits, and up to five years of paid pre-retirement “miners’ leave.” As energy economist Wojciech Suwała documented for the IISD (2010) and Warsaw’s Institute for Structural Research (IBS) analyzed in 2019, more than 53,000 workers left Polish coal mining between 1998 and 2002 (33,000 via the social package, which consumed 60% of program spending), making it a benchmark case study for international transition planners. A second regional milestone came in December 2018 at COP24 in Katowice, the capital of Upper Silesia, where the Polish presidency sponsored the Solidarity and Just Transition Silesia Declaration, endorsed by heads of state and government. Third, under the EU’s Just Transition Fund (€17.5 billion agreed in December 2020 under Regulation 2021/1056), Poland’s five designated coal regions—Upper Silesia, Bełchatów (home to Europe’s largest lignite power plant), Eastern Greater Poland, Wałbrzych, and Western Lesser Poland—became the largest national recipient; a May 2026 IBS evaluation estimates that contracted Polish JTF projects cover roughly 97,500 people and create around 4,800 jobs.

Why Now

Between 2018 and 2026, just transition moved from diplomatic preambles into multi-billion-euro budgets and geopolitical friction. After the 2018 Katowice summit, the European Green Deal (2019) and Just Transition Mechanism (2020) required every coal region to draft a Territorial Just Transition Plan with a credible phaseout horizon to unlock EU funds. At COP26 in Glasgow (2021), donor nations launched the first Just Energy Transition Partnership (JETP) with South Africa (later extended to Indonesia, Vietnam, and Senegal), exporting the model into North–South climate finance. Simultaneously, domestic tensions sharpened: in May 2021 the Polish government and Silesian mining unions signed a “social contract” stretching hard-coal mining out to 2049, only for Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine and the European energy crisis to collide with phaseout schedules. The concept is central today because governments have learned that decarbonization without a territorial compact triggers electoral backlash that stalls climate policy itself.

Explanatory Power

The concept explains why resistance to climate policy is often a rational reaction to the distribution of adjustment costs rather than climate denialism. First, it clarifies electoral geography: in monostructural coal or auto-manufacturing towns, residents may agree that global warming is real while voting against green parties because the losses from a plant closure are immediate, concentrated, and certain, whereas the promised green jobs are diffuse, distant, and uncertain. Second, comparing Poland’s two 1990s coal trajectories—unbuffered shock closure in Wałbrzych versus the negotiated 1998 social package in Upper Silesia—demonstrates the difference between passive deindustrialization and managed transition, explaining why Wałbrzych still required inclusion in EU transition funds thirty years later. Third, the framework exposes the crucial gap between compensation and economic conversion: as the 2019 and 2026 IBS reports show, paying a miner a lump-sum severance check buys short-term social peace, but unless industrial policy builds new tradable sectors in the same county, the next generation simply emigrates.

Axes of Debate

Underappreciated Angle

The least examined assumption built into the concept of just transition is that an organized labor partner actually exists on the other side of the table. The classic toolkit of just transition—tripartite commissions, sectoral collective agreements, pre-retirement bridging leaves—was forged in heavily unionized, state-owned or oligopolistic industries like underground coal mining and utility power generation. Yet in contemporary economies, the majority of jobs tied to high-carbon value chains—subcontracted maintenance crews, trucking fleets, local catering, small automotive parts suppliers, agricultural laborers—have little or no union representation. When a government signs a high-profile “social contract” with flagship mineworkers, it protects the best-organized core while leaving the unorganized periphery of the regional economy to absorb the shock on the open market. Upper Silesia illustrates this asymmetry starkly: both the 1998 Mining Social Package and the 2021 social contract covered miners on the payroll of state coal companies, while researchers at IBS had to build separate input-output models just to count the tens of thousands of indirect workers outside the deal. Far from being too radical, existing just-transition institutions are often too narrow in a direction their critics rarely notice.