Climate policies trigger energy transition processes involving local economic and societal reorientations. In the resulting structural change processes, notions of how the transition should go about are frequently expressed as justice concerns. The intensifying and nuanced debate on just transitions (Healy & Barry, 2017; McCauley & Heffron, 2018) is evidence of this. While there is wide agreement that transitions should be just, the elusiveness of the concept leads to a range of interpretations. Actors may disagree about the substance of justice (what is it that should be just) as well as about the scale at which justice should be ensured. Regarding the substance of justice, the three-tenet framework of considering distribution, recognition, and procedures has proven to be helpful for analytically disentangling the dimensions of justice, despite the inherent interaction between these categories (Fraser, 1998). What is less prominent to date is a thorough understanding of the scales that justice demands refer to, particularly in a spatial perspective (Bouzarovski & Simcock, 2017; Fraser, 2008; Stevis & Felli, 2020; Walker, 2009). These scalar dimensions shape socio-environmental justice discourses: while climate justice claims tend to focus on a global scale, the concept of just transition is more frequently invoked in local social justice contexts.
The article aims to develop a framework for analyzing intersecting justice discourses and their spatial implications. It therefore includes a review of scalar considerations in environment-related justice literature (cf. Bouzarovski and Simcock, 2017; Gough, 2010). Furthermore, conceptual elements from the fields of political geography (cf. Soja, 2010) and political theory (cf. Fraser, 2009) are introduced. The aim is to create a framework that is suited to analyze claims on the scale as well as on the substance of justice conjointly. The framework is formulated against the background of novel governance arrangements in coal transition regions. Stakeholder commissions, bottom-up networks of mayors and citizens, or novel finance instruments are examples to study in this regard. These emerging institutions are the venues for deliberation and conflict about notions of justice in transitions. In the evolving public debates, spatially differentiating justice concerns are brought into interaction. The interactions are marked by power and knowledge inequalities and mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, but also by new alliances and modes of negotiation. The contribution is informed by empirical work on coal transition in subnational regions in the Global North (Gürtler et al., 2021a, 2021b), while the focus lies with the development of a framework for future research.
