Governing Mine Closures: Governance Interactions, Institutional Legacies, and Justice in Coal Transitions

As coal phase-out accelerates globally, mine closures have become a critical site of public policy intervention, yet existing just transition scholarship remains heavily oriented towards labour outcomes and distributive effects, offering limited insight into the governance processes through which justice is produced or undermined in specific local contexts. In particular, there is a persistent gap in policy process research on how interactions between state, corporate, and community actors shape justice outcomes during large-scale socio-economic transitions in resource-dependent regions. This paper addresses that gap by developing an integrated analytical framework that connects governance interactions, institutional arrangements, and justice outcomes in the context of mine closures. Drawing on interactive governance theory, justice scholarship, and historical institutionalism, the paper conceptualises justice not as an ex post evaluative metric but as a process co-produced through governance interactions that are embedded in path-dependent institutional legacies. It advances a multidimensional understanding of justice encompassing procedural, distributive, restorative, and capacity-oriented dimensions, and argues that different governance arrangements generate distinct justice trajectories during transition. These conceptual insights are operationalised through a comparative analysis of two coal-dependent regions: Saunda in Jharkhand, India, and the Latrobe Valley in Victoria, Australia. While both regions face the challenge of mine closure, they exhibit contrasting governance configurations shaped by divergent histories of state involvement, corporate dominance, and institutional capacity. Using qualitative evidence from interviews, policy documents, and field observations, the paper traces how governance interactions unfold across these cases, identifying four ideal-typical governance regimes: state-led, corporate-dominant, hybrid or negotiated, and fragmented. The comparison demonstrates that justice outcomes are not determined by policy intent alone, but by the quality, structure, and inclusiveness of governance interactions over time. By foregrounding interaction as the analytical core of governance, the paper contributes to policy process research by offering a framework capable of capturing how institutional legacies, actor configurations, and interactional dynamics jointly shape justice in complex transition contexts. The findings underscore the need for governance-sensitive approaches to just transition policy that move beyond institutional design to engage with the relational processes through which public policy is enacted in practice.