Beyond redistribution: a framework for reparative just transitions
2025
Evan Bowness | Mateus Tremembé | Lauriane Tremembé | Adele Azevedo | Flávia Cavalcante Tavares | Anne Pasek | Cash Ahenakew | Will Valley | Sharon Stein
Prevailing just transition proposals often assume the continuity of colonial land relations and see ‘greener’ industrial development as a pathway to prosperity for all. Our paper aligns with and aims to contribute to emerging scholarship that questions these assumptions. Through a review of interdisciplinary just transition research, we map a distinction between mainstream, critical and reparative approaches to just transitions. Mainstream perspectives, largely rooted in the global north, focus on labour justice, while critical just transition scholarship addresses intersectional injustices and amplifies grassroots perspectives, particularly from the global south. Reparative approaches extend this critique by reckoning with the interconnected historical legacies of colonialism and industrial development, though empirical examples of this approach remain sparse. To differentiate these approaches, we introduce a 5R framework for just transitions—recognition, representation, redistribution, resurgence, and (settler) responsibility—foregrounding Indigenous resurgence as a crucial yet often overlooked element of repair. To illustrate this framework, we draw on a community-directed collaboration with the Tremembé da Barra do Mundaú Indigenous community in Ceará, Brazil. We conclude by inviting environmental and social scientists to consider more historically grounded and relationally reparative just transition approaches. Such approaches are essential, though not sufficient, for realizing the more transformative aims of just transitions.
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