Local Governments in Just Transitions: A Human Rights Framework

This paper contributes to literatures on local governments and just transitions, as well as to discussions about how climate justice should be put into practice. It presents a human rights framework and use that to interpret the normative requirements of a just transition in the context of local governments. According to this human rights framework, the transformation of energy systems and other aspects of the decarbonisation agenda ought to be planned for and implemented in respect of the human rights of all affected parties, as well as being evaluated from and acceptable to the most vulnerable members of societies. This normative framework provides guidance to decisions about transitional support and associated justice aspects of local climate transformations and leads to a more specific and useful concept of just transition. Local governments are then argued to have the following four main responsibilities in ensuring a just transition to a fossil free future: (1) to identify important interests at risk by or in transition efforts, (2) to critically assess justice claims, (3) to address transitional injustices over which they have authority and (4) if the necessary political reforms are beyond their authority, put pressure on external reforms. This task is both wider and deeper than climate policymaking and, in many contexts, go beyond or extend existing legal obligations. It presupposes a critical scrutiny of justice claims seeking to understand their moral grounds and significance. To concretise and illustrate, the framework is used to evaluate how a medium-size Swedish municipality, Falköping (in which the authors have recently done field work), deals with justice aspects in the implementation of their ambitious climate strategy. Falköping displays common features and potential transition grievances like medium-size country-side municipalities in Sweden and in similar countries. This makes Falköping an interesting testing ground for the suggested human rights framework. While the framework is applied only on the level of local government, it can potentially be generalised and applied also in national and international politics, although this is not explored in the present paper.