Decarbonising Deindustrial Places: Industrial Collective Memories in the Age of Green Economic Development

Just transition discourse has become one of - if not the major - framework for low-carbon equitable transitions both in the international political sphere and academic sphere alike. Yet among scholarly contributions within the realm of just energy transitions there remains a scarce interaction with time as a concept and the way in which temporarily has been historiographically theorised. Considering the inherent temporarily of transition and the continuous invitations extended to historians to contribute to the field, such a lack of interaction is surprising (Arapostathis & Pearson, 2019; Pearson, 2018; Gismondi, 2018; Fouqet & Pearson, 2012). Implicit in energy transition research are long term historical forces of change such as industrialisation and deindustrialisation, however their spatial and temporal relevance in the contemporary process of green industrialisation is critically understudied. Using Teesside as a case study, a former industrial region in the North East of the UK that experienced a swift transition to a largely deindustrialised economy in the late twentieth century but is now touted to become home to the UK’s first decarbonised industrial cluster, this paper argues that the ‘half-life’ of deindustrialisation (Linkon, 2018) ensures that place-based industrial collective memories continue to shape local experiences, visions, and expectations of green economic development. Historical unjust transitions do not just provide a framework through which normative assumptions can be gauged in retrospect but rather play an active role in governing the socio-economic and cultural context that decarbonisation projects are inevitably situated in. Using the method of oral history, findings suggest that industrial change on Teesside has fostered a collective industrial identity characterised by a sub-regional discourse of injustice. Such a legacy of perceived historical injustice has helped govern the context in which the region’s current sustainability pathways are perceived with uncertainty and even indignation amongst local community stakeholders.