Just Transition: A historiographical fallacy or a productive paradigm for historians?

This paper will evaluate the utility of the just transition concept for historians particularly in relation to economic change, deindustrialisation and green industrialisation. The just transition has emerged both in political discourse and energic social science research as the dominant framework to ensure a fair and equitable transition to a green economy, yet its value to the historian is critically understudied. It will be argued that the paradigm is productive insofar as it can provide a historiographical centring of injustice in studies of deindustrialisation. Furthermore, historical unjust transitions not only provide case studies through which normative assumptions about current and future transitions can be gauged, but also play an active role in the contemporary green transition through persistent spatial inequalities, lingering industrial identities, and deindustrial ‘half-lives’ more generally.

Keywords: Just Transition, Historiography, Deindustrialisation, Half-Life, Green Industrialisation