Uneasy Allies: Narrating Energy-Extractive Private Companies in Czech Just Transition Fund Governance

The EU's just transition policy increasingly relies on partnerships with large private firms embedded in carbon-intensive regional economies. This article examines how energy-extractive incumbents are narratively constructed as legitimate (or illegitimate) actors in Czech coal regions under the EU Just Transition Fund (JTF). We analyze EU, national, and regional policy documents, as well as interviews with regional policymakers and institutional actors. Institutional narratives cast incumbents as conditional partners, legitimised via procedural filters, state-aid compliance, job-stabilisation rationales, and flagship ‘beyond duty’ modernisation projects. Regional narratives emphasise embedded employer identities and ‘our firm’ moral economies, pragmatic capacity claims (who else can deliver?), and contested responsibility shifts from polluter to caretaker-investor. Across narratives, justice is translated from accountability for harm towards deliverability, absorption, and managed redistribution. We discuss implications for just transition governance when private power is stabilised through narrative work, not rules alone.