Just transition - how can theory become reality?

The climate transition is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to improve people’s lives: better jobs, housing, neighbourhoods are all possible. But poor transitions are driving a social backlash to climate action. 

The concept of ‘just transitions’ has never been so important. But are ‘just transitions’ doable? Where are they happening already? What advice is there for managers in business and government tasked with planning just transitions? 

In this episode, IHRB’s CEO, John Morrison, and colleague Haley St Dennis, discuss the state of just transitions in 2025, and the urgent need to tackle social, economic and environmental challenges as one, systemic challenge. John shares ideas for how to apply this thinking in practice. 

John has published a new book: The Just Transition: A Systems Thinking Approach to Managing Climate Action, in which he sets out a roadmap for managers to navigate the social and economic challenges of climate action.  

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Host: Deborah Sagoe, IHRB's Communications Coordinator
Producer & Editor: Helen Brown
Additional Contributors: Sam Simmons, IHRB's Head of Communications

Transcript

John Morrison: Never in human history have all of businesses and governments been required to transition at the same time in the same direction. And even people who don't believe in 2050 net zero target still believe in transition minerals. And the scrabble for security of supply and how that's playing out in countries like Ukraine or in Greenland, etc, that exists across the whole political spectrum. The systemic nature of what we're dealing with is self-evident to anybody that looks at it for more than a second.

Deborah Sagoe: Hi there and welcome to Voices from the Institute for Human Rights and Business, also known as IHRB. I am Deborah Sagoe, and in this podcast you'll hear from people working to make respect for human rights part of everyday business.

You've just heard from IHRB CEO John Morrison. John's released a book on just transitions, the idea that climate action can be a huge opportunity to improve people's lives and create a fairer future. But are just transitions really possible? And how can companies play their part?

John and my colleague, Haley St. Dennis discuss these questions, and they offer advice for people in companies who work on designing their just transition plans. Let's hear their conversation now.

Haley St. Dennis: So John, my first question to you really is, why are just transitions so important to solving the climate crisis?

John Morrison: Well, I think to demystify the title, just transition, we're talking primarily about transitions, right? And businesses and government are not unused to different types of economic social transition. And I think when you look at major industries, not just energy but agriculture, infrastructure, built environment, etc, it's clearly the case that over the next few decades there are going to be major transitions. So I think for those transitions to be just is really ensuring that the transitions have social licence, that the people most affected by the transitions have a voice in how the transition is organised.

Haley St. Dennis: You mentioned social licence, but what do you mean by that?

John Morrison: Social licence means that in addition to a legal licence or a political licence to run an activity of any kind, you also need a social licence. You need the people affected to agree or at least to feel that they have some equity in the project or the business plan, or whatever activity it might be. I understand social licences as part of a social contract that businesses need to have to sell their products or run their operations.

Haley St. Dennis: So John, can you talk me through maybe an example right now where we're not seeing these principles embedded, where it's looking to be an unjust transition or have the potential to be one unless this is better integrated?

John Morrison: Yeah, I'd give an example of my own country, the UK, and what the UK is going to do in terms of the future of steel.

So we have two major steel plants in the country. One is in Port Talbot in Wales, and that is closing, right? And there's the hope that it gets reopened or partly gets reopened to be an electrical steelworks focusing on recycling steel, but for most of the workers, there's not a transition plan that gives them any certainty.

And then you can contrast that with the more recent thing that was in the news, and actually brought all our MPs and parliamentarians together for a day on a Saturday of all things, so that they, within the space of six hours, passed an act of parliament to nationalise in effect the other steelworks we have in Scunthorpe, which is the old virgin steelworks smelting iron ore to make steel. And it has become clear to the country that we can't do without that.

And it was the workers themselves that blew the whistle on the fact that the current owners were going to create a stranded asset. In effect, we would've retained the ability to process in this country, but not to actually create steel; and many of them would've lost their jobs in a part of the country where there aren't many other jobs. And most of us were not in the know, right? It was the workers themselves that saw what was happening and going on in terms of the fact that the coke was being sold on and not reordered, and that gave clear evidence of the intentions of the managers.

And I think that it wasn't planned as a just transition, but if you wanted an example of how workers can actually be central to a process and then get every single parliamentarian in the country to agree with them and get an act through parliament within six hours, and even the king signing it by tea time, to save the Scunthorpe steelworks, that is a great example. And I'd put that in contrast to the way that the workers in Port Talbot are left in a rather uncertain way now. But maybe they get some benefit from how the Scunthorpe workers have taken the stand they have.

Haley St. Dennis: And it feels like in many ways this lack of just transition thinking has plagued us for decades really in other seismic shifts. As you say, there have been many transitions over many generations. Are we learning the lessons of those past historic transitions where this thinking has been lacking?

John Morrison: Not really, I would say. It is interesting how we bifurcate and silo the economy from society, from the environment, from social factors, etc. And transitions often do not bring front of mind the social impacts they're going to have. Sometimes it's not been in the interest of governments and businesses to do that.

I have to say in the context of climate, sometimes it's environmentalists who've not wanted to talk about the social implications of climate action perhaps as early as they should have done. So I think we all carry a bit of the responsibility for slipping into siloed thinking.

But if we think about where the concept of just transition was first used in the US energy sector, particularly the transition out of some parts of nuclear energy that went on in the 1980s and early nineties, the concept came from workers in the US; and we're recording this on International Labour Day, which also came from the US as a concept; that actually it shouldn't be the workers or their families that bear the cost of transition. It shouldn't just be the employer actually. It's the whole of society response to a necessary change in the way that the economy is organised.

I think that is the essential ingredient of the transition out at least, and that remains the case now. And I would say there are more examples of where that hasn't been a key consideration than examples where it has.

Haley St. Dennis: So more examples of cautionary tales perhaps than examples of getting it right. I mean, are just transitions actually happening?

John Morrison: Yeah, it's much easier ... Obviously it's a bit like social licence. It's much easier to point to where the social licence has been destroyed. It is kind of invisible if it exists, right?

I have in the book pointed to a number of transitions out of coal in Europe and in my own country, the UK, etc, in the 1980s. Many of those were not handled well. And the legacies of that meant that whole communities were stranded and disenfranchised economically, and two or three generations later, that's still the case.

So you can understand when you look at the current concerns of workers around the world to the way that the economy is changing, why people are concerned and why people are worried about themselves and their families and their children, and the effects of losing good, well-paid, often unionised jobs to jobs that seem uncertain, perhaps less skilled, perhaps less well-paid, etc.

But I think you and I have been working together at IHRB on this for three years, and there are examples, like the Collie work in Western Australia, where huge efforts have been made to try and make the issue of transition out pre-competitive so that people aren't left behind and so that workers have a say.

But it's too early to tell, right? I mean, people will say Spain has done the process better than the UK did, Germany did it better than the UK in the 1980s. I cite some of the comparative studies that were done in my book. But I think in terms of current transitions; these are just the energy transitions. I mean, we haven't even started to talk about agriculture yet; it's too early to tell.

But there are some companies, there are some governments that are taking this seriously, and the book does try to pull out some of the factors that are more conducive to a just transition than those that are not. And maybe we'll come onto that in a minute.

Haley St. Dennis: Yeah. And I might add onto that what you describe almost as a spectrum of either unjust transitions, transitions where we're seeing sort of a reactive approach, attempting to make the best out of a bad situation, but seeing the value of that approach in terms of better securing economic and other forms of security and improving overall industrial policy where, in the case of Scunthorpe, that trick had just been missed for so long and it's become a crisis moment ...

At the final end of the spectrum then, I'll just highlight our story, which is coming out of Collie in Western Australia as part of the Just Transitions Project, which is a coal transition, but one where you're seeing it very smartly linked, both the closure of 130 year heritage of coal mining and coal production, to how to use that really highly skilled workforce and industrial infrastructure for a new green industry hub centred around steel.

And actually Cully has used that as a differentiating point to attract significant sums of investment in its transition in to these new greener forms that are securing work livelihoods, but also energy and economic security for the region for decades to come.

John Morrison: Absolutely. And if I'm allowed to add another reflection onto the back of that, it's the Scunthorpe transition ... Well, it isn't a transition yet, right? Because its blast furnaces are still requiring coal and coke. So there will need to be carbon capture, there will need to be better climate policies integrated.

But if we go back to the original idea of just transition from the energy sector in the US in the 1980s and nineties, that for major transitions, the whole of society has to bear some of the cost and the pain of the transition, Scunthorpe is a great example of that original sense of just transition, right? That in effect the whole of the British nation has carried or is carrying the cost of transition on steel in the UK through nationalisation.

And it doesn't mean that every asset has to be nationalised. That's not the point I'm making. But I'm making the point that for major transitions, whether it be farmers and agriculture or steelmakers in Scunthorpe, you need government. You need every parliamentarian behind the worker and the communities. And in the case of Scunthorpe and steel, that's exactly what we have now.

Haley St. Dennis: Exactly, really on those factors. It'd be great to get an understanding of what you think are the key ingredients of solid, robust just transitions, particularly from that managerial perspective.

John Morrison: Yeah. Be wary of the consultants that go around saying that, "We're going to sell you the just transition process" as the latest new thing, right? We are essentially just talking about well-managed transitions that have people at the centre of the consideration.

And that then means that these transitions have to be ... The analysis has to be place-based and time-bound. As those of us who've worked on this for a while, including good friends of ours, agree, to be meaningful to groups of stakeholders, whether they be workers or communities, there has to be a before and there has to be an after, and you have to be clear about what you're talking about. Whether it's a watershed or whether it's a town or a village or a supply chain or whatever, there has to be a geographic focus to it.

And then within that, there are four key elements that IHRB has identified in our work, Haley, and I think these hold up not just in energy, but hold up in other transitions around the world, that without one of these four key elements, you have to ask yourself, "Is this on course to be a just transition?"

The first is risk mitigation. The social risks of vulnerable groups are understood and mitigated through due diligence and other processes, including remedy; the second is that you have due process and procedures and free prior and informed consent for indigenous peoples, collective bargaining for workers, etc.

But the other two are also really important. The third is there's beneficial outcomes; that the groups concerned have some firm belief that they will get something out of the transition, that there will be some form of equity for them in terms of ownership, in terms of jobs, etc, for them and their families at the end of the process.

And then the fourth, which is the one that is most important in the global south and most often forgotten in the global north, is that there's a transformative element here. And I was yesterday in a room with agronomists from Africa, again making this point that if we're transitioning to value chains which leave poor countries at the bottom or are upstream, we're not being able to extract the true value of the commodities that are being dug out of their soil or grown in their soil, then poorer countries are going to be left as poorer countries at the end of the transition. Even if we've moved to transition minerals and we've moved away from coal, the same problems will remain.

And as you know, Nigeria still doesn't even refine all of its own oil. To be telling Nigeria that it now needs to subsist on wind farms and solar farms, and by the way, those are going to be made in China and the commodities are dug out of the ground in Latin America or something, it doesn't sound like a just transition to them. So transformation is really important elements of transition, particularly if you are vulnerable and disadvantaged.

Haley St. Dennis: And just on that point on transformation, because I think it's very difficult to argue with the theory that decarbonization and this big industrial disruption has the opportunity, the potential to deliver a different society than came before; but thinking about the manager listening right now, that especially sounds very relevant at the macroeconomic level, right? We're trying to redesign entire systems. So when thinking about that manager, what do you say in terms of how to start within their individual office company? What can they do tomorrow to get started on this journey and how do they play into such big issues?

John Morrison: In my book, I work with three managerial archetypes: the strategic manager, the delivery manager, and the accountability manager. Now those can sit in government as well as in business, or they could even sit in communities or civil society. So it depends on what kind of manager we're talking about. Some managers do have that strategic overview role.

But if we're talking about delivery, and I think your question was trying to nudge me toward the delivery manager, they're working within time constraints, they're working within budgets. And I think I'd just reiterate the fact that we are just talking about transition. Do not create a bespoke just transition process that sits outside of the main decision-making of your company around the allocation of resources, capital allocation, the risk management functions. We're talking about something that has to be integral to all of those things.

Companies need to have transition plans, and a lot of companies are developing those. They might want to develop them for climate reasons, but as I said, companies are likely to have transition plans for a whole host of reasons. Those often are entity level. And the Transition Plan Task Force that I was part of in the UK, again focuses on the entity level transition manager.

And I just said earlier that to be just or have a chance of being just, transition planning has to be place-based and time bound. So what is often a requirement is if you're working in a large company, that you might have your corporate transition plan, but you need to draw down from that into planning processes that are much more localised and have starts and finishes.

So I think correctly understood transition planning then often has to be two tiered. The entity level piece is maybe what shareholders are asking for and what boards are requiring, but you need to draw down from that to create planning processes that are more meaningful, more tangible to work in communities.

Haley St. Dennis: Yeah, that's really interesting. And I want to pick up on a point you mentioned earlier, which was around within the four essential elements framework, that element of beneficial outcomes.

A lot of the work at IHRB, as you know, seeks to really integrate business and human rights as a core standard within the just transitions agenda, which is newer, younger, and not necessarily taking some of those pre-existing rights based approaches as the starting point.

So I think, again, for a company manager, it can be tricky to think about how best to link your pre-existing risk-based approaches, your human rights due diligence, your quite well matured systems on sort of preventing impact with beneficial outcomes; and whether you have any tips for companies on how to more strategically link those two and get beyond the historic approach of sort of ad hoc CSR and philanthropic benefits here and there.

John Morrison: Yeah. And as you know, the business and human rights movement has really gone down the rabbit hole of prevention and mitigation and due diligence. And for good reasons, right? You want to stop the bad things happening or lower the risk of those things happening.

But that's one side of the equation. The other side of the equation is actual positive outcomes for people, real people. And of course when you talk to workers and communities, that's the thing they're often more concerned about, right? "Yeah, yeah, minimise risk, but also deliver some real value to me." It's certainly the thing that investors and CEOs of companies are most interested in. You don't make money through doing good due diligence. You might avoid costs, but to deliver value, you have to also create value, economic and social.

And I think companies have split those two things right down the middle. Often you have commercial teams working on value delivery, which might be purely economic or might be also social, and then you have legal teams or CSR teams or others doing the risk mitigation and due diligence. And only in a minority of companies are those two things strategically linked in the way they need to be; and for transitions and just transitions, you really do have to link those two things.

And human rights people should not be trying to co-op just transition and say that the UN guiding principles is the uber framework through which you can understand just transition. It helps you with two of the legs of the chair, the due diligence and the procedural stuff, but it doesn't help you with the beneficial outcomes and the transformational elements, which is largely around innovation, right? And other parts of the business have to come into play.

So successful transitions require systemic approach, not just by the company into society, but a systemic approach within the company itself. And some of the best companies who are taking the transition processes really seriously are having those very difficult and interesting internal conversations that bring in business development teams, marketing teams, product procurement teams, etc, as well as the more usual suspects. And that is absolutely essential, I would say. Yeah.

Haley St. Dennis: Yeah, and there's a lot of really interesting thinking in your book around the need for, as you say, systems thinking; both unpacking what that means, but then also how to kind of put it in practise. And I guess I want to challenge you a little here, because your book published at the end of 2024; we're now a couple of months into 2025 and it feels like the world has turned on its head a little bit, at least at the geopolitical level and in sort of climate itself becoming, again, a battleground for legitimacy and whether it's even worth doing.

So is your book even relevant now in this new world? I'd love your thinking on exactly why this is more important than ever.

John Morrison: Yeah, and of course I'll say that it's more important than ever, but I need to try and convince you and the listener that it is.

Haley St. Dennis: Yeah.

John Morrison: I think the systems thinking approach, and Haley, you and me were talking about this, I remember, a year ago, just made sense even then.

For the reasons I've just said, but we could go on and on, you can't look at climate in a silo. Many business sectors would need to be transitioning even if the net zero 2050 requirement didn't exist, because of biodiversity, because of depletion of soils and water, because of changes in the workforce, because of automation. You know, we could go on and on and on as to why transformation is going to be a permanent requirement for successful companies around the world.

I think a systems approach is absolutely critical now for many issues in sustainability. And one of the problems with ESG; and I wrote about this in the book, a whole chapter on ESG and the problems with ESG; now ESG is being politically attacked, but it was possible to see the problems even before then. The overextension of the concept; the siloing of the E from the S from the G, as if each had each existed in a vacuum from each other.

Just transition is a great illustration that actually some of the most important challenges companies are facing are the connective tissue issues, the issues that sit between the environmental and the social, between the social and the good governance and the anti-corruption, that sit between financial success and doing well for communities and workers. Businesses should no longer silo these things off. A systems thinking approach forces you to look at the interconnectedness of things, and actually to place most of your energy and time at the interconnections and not in the silos themselves. And I just think that's so true.

A lot of the people around the world now who are questioning the speed of transition in climate terms, including the former prime minister of the UK, Tony Blair even yesterday, you know, they're not wrong in their analysis that the social implications of the transition have to be considered; I think they're wrong in their diagnosis of treatment. You know, "Well, what we should do as a result of that."

So if somebody like Tony Blair says, "Well, we can't do net zero at 2050 because of how this will affect the poorer countries in the world and their development, et cetera," that's a true observation, right? But it's not a zero sum game. When people in the British parliament argue that we can't put solar panels into fields because of the forced labour in Xinjiang and elsewhere, I would answer, "Well, you need to do both. There's a contingency between the two issues." Do not play the zero sum game arguments that we can only do this if we don't do that.

What I think my book tries to do is show how interdependent a lot of these issues are. You have to work on the intersections between them. That's what you should be working on more than the specialisms within them, I would argue. And companies who are doing a good job already on human rights due diligence, et cetera, often say, "Well, what is different about a systems approach? What do I do differently that I'm not doing already by being a responsible company?" And it is that cumulative and aggregate effect of everybody transitioning at the same time.

Never in human history have all of businesses and governments been required to transition at the same time in the same direction. And as you know, even people who don't believe in 2050 net zero target still believe in transition minerals. And the scrabble for security of supply and how that's playing out in countries like Ukraine or in Greenland, et cetera, that exists across the whole political spectrum.

So I think the systemic nature of what we're dealing with is self-evident to anybody that looks at it for more than a second.

Haley St. Dennis: So much to unpack there, John, that I want to pick up on, and we'll try to frame that in a kind of final question to you, which is picking up on the importance you put around the interconnections, that kind of connective tissue, as you put it, being where managers across government, business, civil society engaged on these transitions, these shifts should focus; and particularly thinking about companies ...

You mentioned earlier the backlash against ESG; DEI right now. Five years ago, there was an absolute flurry of deep commitments to DEI, of appointing new heads at DEI. And only five years later we're seeing a real retreat from that, which is just one example of how quickly narratives shift.

And yet that really, I think, contrasts with the need for sustained and long view leadership, particularly from managers fighting that fight internally and making the case for that to be done at the highest levels of leadership of companies. And we know companies especially tend to move in packs. That's why we saw that increase I mentioned and the decrease recently.

So I guess my question to you is just what's your prognosis looking ahead, say to the next five years? What do you think will be those crunch points that see, I think, that short-term pressure come up against the long-term imperatives? And how should different managers try to navigate that?

John Morrison: Yeah, I think there is a short term and a long term, right? And my last chapter of the book tries to deal with this. And if I was writing it now six months later, surely I would make that last chapter a bit longer than it was in the book, right? Because history has done so already.

But you can't externalise sustainability issues. The planet has boundaries. The 8 billion people on the planet; will it be 10 or 11 billion? But we live within a finite system. And so we can stop thinking about these things for a while, but they're going to come back and bite us. And that's undeniable also.

So when you say DEI, is companies rolling back? Some companies are. Some are, some aren't. But the underpinning issues around diversity and inclusion, regardless of the acronym ... It's like ESG, right? I mean, there's all these acronyms around. I didn't cry when CSR was put in the bin 10, 15 years ago. I don't cry when acronyms are put in the bin now. What I worry about, but I don't really worry about is the underpinning issues of justice and equity and fairness. These are deeply ingrained into the human condition. These have motivated human behaviour for thousands of years. It doesn't matter what language you're talking or what acronym you use.

So human rights are not going to go anywhere. The more people try and deny them, the more important they become. So that doesn't worry me. The issue then is how long will it take us to get back on course to solve some of the big challenges that we are facing this century, including climate change? And I think whether that's one year, two year, three year, as I said, the system will come into tension and they will force a correction mechanism.

Now, will that be around trade? Will that be around finance? Will it be around technology? I think we can predict that automative AI ... I wish I'd done a chapter on technology. Data will become a public good at some point. Companies themselves won't control over ... The knowledge people have over business behaviour will become a third party issue. That might happen in the next two or three years.

I think the current effects of climate change are undeniable. You can blame them on different people, but if your towns are burning down or your forests are burning or crops are failing, the question of resilience, the question of assets becoming uninsurable, these are real issues that are going to play out in the next two or three years regardless of your politics, right? These are going to force a correction.

I also think for those people who believe in climate change and believe in net zero by 2050, and there's international law around that, and we're in deep trouble if we don't get back down under 1.5 global warming by the end of the century and if we don't get net neutrality by 2050, we've got to reach those things at some point. And there are huge risks by running over these targets.

And the final word then is keep the people affected most at the centre of the equation. I don't think we've been very good at conferences and other places by having people with lived experience at the centre of discussions. Don't have a discussion around just transition and agriculture and not have at least half the audience being farmers themselves, talking about the real pinch points, the real challenges they face in running farms in Europe or India or wherever it might be. Have those people.

Those people are worried about the transition. They are the people who politically might disrupt the speed of the transition. They need to have a very strong voice in determining how the transitions are arranged and organised. And I think we've made a huge mistake in many parts of the world by somehow not incorporating them in the process, and now creating environments in which they feel that they need to oppose the transitional because it's being imposed on them by urban elites. That's their perception anyway.

So it would've been wonderful if just transition had been on the table at the COP meetings 10 or 15 years ago. It kind of was. It is there now. Let's make sure that we don't leave it any longer.

Haley St. Dennis: Thanks, John. So many, I think, yeah, just points of caution in there for different managers and practitioners to think about in terms of centering those affected, because that will lead to the most successful design. Failing to do so will result in opposition that actually hinders the very thing you're trying to do in the first place.

And also just the importance of getting on with this work, because otherwise those forced corrections will come anyway, and so the smart business, the smart government or industry is going to be getting ahead of those curves and be ready for them when they come, to be smart about it, to be agile about it. And the only way to do that is by bringing those along.

Well, thank you, John. So much good learning for people to get from this new book. I have my copy here. Pick it up at various sellers. It's John Morrison's The Just Transition: A Systems Thinking Approach to Managing Climate Action.

Deborah Sagoe: Many thanks to my colleagues, John Morrison and Haley St. Dennis for this insightful conversation. And thank you for listening to this episode of Voices, which is brought to you from the Institute for Human Rights and Business.

Until next time, be sure to share and follow this podcast. That way you will never miss an episode. And if you would like to find out more about the work that we do at IHRB, then head to IHRB.org.