Editorial: Advancing the just transition: navigating towards a sustainable future

Decarbonization can be pursued through technological and industrial change, but the transition toward climate neutrality also bears social, political, cultural, and ethical implications. The contributions gathered in this Research Topic, “Advancing the just transition: navigating toward a sustainable future,” examine how considerations of equity, participation, governance, and cultural legitimacy shape the distributional consequences, social legitimacy, and governance of decarbonization. In this framing, justice is not treated as a technical prerequisite for reducing carbon emissions, but rather as a normative and political objective concerning how decarbonization is designed, implemented, and experienced, with potential implications for its social acceptability and political legitimacy. Across diverse geographic and thematic contexts, the nine articles offer concrete evidence and frameworks for how this navigation might work in practice—and where it is currently failing. Stemming from the collaboration between the Joint Program Clean Energy Transition for a Sustainable Society (e3s) of the European Energy Research Alliance and Frontiers in Sustainable Energy Policy, the Research Topic spans original research, reviews, policy, and practice reviews. Together, the articles cover a wide range of geographies—from Northern Europe and the UK to Australia, Cyprus, and the EU—and engage with a rich set of disciplinary traditions, from behavioral economics and text mining to Indigenous studies and socio-technical transition theory.

By content clustering the contributions, five categories emerge. The first concerns participatory governance and democratic engagement. Keywords such as “participation” and “decision-making” characterize this body of work. Kambo et al. demonstrate how a structured deliberative engagement process can bridge the gap between citizens, policymakers, and industry actors in shaping Australia's future energy and fuel systems. Using the “diamond of participatory decision-making” framework, their analysis reveals that while considerable alignment exists across cohorts on the broad direction of a low-carbon future, divergences surface around the social and environmental justice dimensions of specific technology choices—including hydrogen and biogas—that require innovative governance mechanisms to navigate. Similarly, Kunlere and Shah challenge the simplistic binaries that often dominate public debates on renewable energy. By introducing the PARO framework, which categorizes public responses to energy injustice across a spectrum of positions that conventional “supporter vs. opponent” dichotomies cannot capture, the authors provide a more granular analytical perspective for diagnosing and addressing public resistance to energy transitions. Both studies make clear that how decisions are made matters as much as what is decided—a lesson that is easy to articulate and difficult to institutionalize. They also draw attention to a persistent gap: the limited institutional capacity to convert participatory insights into actionable, binding policy commitments.

A second category revolves around sustainable energy systems and socio-technical transitions, captured by the keywords “decarbonization” and “infrastructure.” Singh and Clough critically interrogate the global bioenergy system, challenging the widespread assumption that bioenergy is inherently carbon-neutral or renewable. Through causal loop analysis, they examine how current production regimes can shift negative social and ecological impacts—including threats to food security, land use change, and biodiversity loss—from consumer to producer regions. Their analysis highlights the uneven distribution of social and ecological burdens that can arise within particular configurations of globalized bioenergy production and trade. Complementing this critical systems perspective, Oduro and Taylor draw on expert interviews from industry, academia, and policy to map the challenges facing energy networks in Great Britain during decarbonization. Their findings reveal broad agreement on electrification and decentralization, yet deep uncertainty about the future role of gaseous fuels, particularly hydrogen. The paper highlights a regulatory gap: existing structures may be too rigid and slow-moving to enable networks to drive—rather than impede—the net-zero transition. Soloviy et al. further expand the debate by conceptualizing what they call the “triple transition,” linking green, digital, and just transitions. Drawing on 28 real-world case examples and five distinct analytical perspectives—from constructing realities and governing transitions to reimagining them—their interdisciplinary review argues that the tensions between these three policy streams are not merely obstacles to be managed, but productive sites of institutional learning if properly engaged. Taken together, these three articles suggest that no single technology or regulatory fix will be sufficient: the energy system and the institutions governing it need to change together. A notable gap, however, remains: none of the articles addresses the political economy of incumbent industries and fossil fuel lobbying as a structural impediment to just transitions, an area deserving explicit attention in future research.

A third category centers on Indigenous knowledge, justice, and inclusion, with the keywords “Indigenous perspectives” and “Traditional Ecological Knowledge.” Oliveira et al. provide a compelling examination of Sámi perspectives on reindeer herding and energy transition policies in Norway. Through semi-structured interviews with Sámi herders, the authors document how wind turbine development encroaches on grazing lands and disrupts the economic, social, and cultural fabric of reindeer herding communities. Crucially, the article does not merely catalog grievances: it also explores the hesitance many Indigenous communities feel toward integrating their Traditional Ecological Knowledge into mainstream transition frameworks, given past experiences of co-optation and tokenism. This nuance—that recognition justice requires more than formal invitation but demands genuine epistemic respect—is an important contribution to the issue. It reminds readers that just transitions cannot be reduced to technological substitution; they must also confront colonial legacies and create institutional space for diverse knowledge systems. Taken at a broader level, this study raises a pressing question for the field: how can energy transition governance be redesigned to make Indigenous participation genuinely transformative rather than procedurally symbolic?

A fourth category focuses on social vulnerability and climate equity, represented by the keywords “energy poverty” and “climate justice.” Two articles address this cluster from complementary scales. Moleskis et al. tackle one of the most pressing social dimensions of Europe's green transition: the unequal capacity of households to access decarbonization support. Framed around the EU Social Climate Fund and illustrated through the case of Cyprus, the authors draw on behavioral science to identify cognitive barriers (such as status quo bias, present bias, and information overload) as well as structural barriers (including digital exclusion and administrative complexity) that prevent energy-poor households from claiming available support. Their policy recommendations move beyond standard subsidy design toward a more human-centered, trust-based approach. Ayompe, working at the global level, draws on a wide body of evidence to examine how distributive, procedural, and recognition-based justice have been integrated—or neglected—in international climate governance. The article argues that colonial legacies continue to shape governance structures in ways that systematically exclude the communities most affected by climate change, and calls for interdisciplinary collaboration spanning public health, urban planning, and environmental protection. Together, these contributions reinforce the principle that climate action lacking distributive justice risks undermining not only social equity but also public trust and political legitimacy. Both also identify a shared gap: the need for feedback mechanisms that allow marginalized communities to evaluate and reshape the policies designed for them.

A fifth and final category highlights the cultural and urban dimensions of sustainability transitions, associated with the keywords “heritage” and “urban transformation.” Costanzo and Alderuccio investigate how culture, heritage, and the creative industries are being integrated into urban climate-neutrality strategies across European cities. Focusing on Climate City Contracts produced under the EU's 100 Mission Cities program, the authors apply a text mining methodology to detect the presence—or absence—of New European Bauhaus principles in these planning documents. Their findings reveal that cultural participation is slowly being acknowledged as a driver of climate action, with potential contributions to social cohesion, behavioral change, and community-led urban renewal. Methodologically, the article breaks new ground by developing a human-annotated corpus designed to train future AI models capable of analyzing cultural-climate linkages at scale. This dual contribution—substantive and methodological—broadens the understanding of just transitions beyond infrastructure and economics.

The articles in this Research Topic demonstrate that the concept of a “just transition” has evolved into a multidimensional framework that cuts across governance, infrastructure, culture, social equity, and epistemology. Four cross-cutting themes stand out. First, participation matters, but depth counts. Whether through deliberative citizen panels, Indigenous consultation processes, or community-based climate planning, the legitimacy of sustainability transitions depends on whose voices are genuinely heard and whose knowledge is meaningfully incorporated. Several articles in this Research Topic show that participatory processes can remain superficial if institutional follow-through is absent. Second, transitions are inherently systemic and produce feedback effects that extend across sectors, scales, and geographies. Technological shifts in energy systems interact with regulatory structures, supply chains, cultural identities, and global inequalities in ways that can produce new injustices even as they address old ones, with the bioenergy case illustrating how such tensions may emerge. Third, justice must be understood in both procedural and distributive terms, and the two cannot be traded off against each other. Policies that achieve technically equitable outcomes through opaque or exclusionary processes will struggle to secure the social license they require. Fourth, different kinds of knowledge (—scientific, local, Indigenous, and experiential) are not competing claims to be arbitrated, but complementary resources that policy needs to learn to use together.

Importantly, the Research Topic also demonstrates that tensions within sustainability transitions should not be viewed solely as obstacles. Divergences between stakeholders, conflicts over land use, disagreements regarding technology pathways, and competing policy priorities all reveal the complexity of transforming societies. Yet these tensions can also become productive spaces for democratic negotiation, innovation, and institutional learning. The challenge for policymakers, researchers, and practitioners is therefore not to eliminate disagreement, but to create governance structures that can handle complexity while maintaining fairness and legitimacy.

Reading across the nine articles also reveals a set of research gaps that future work in this field should prioritize. Most contributions focus on Europe, North America, and Australia; the just transition experiences of communities in the Global South—where climate vulnerability is highest and adaptive capacity often lowest—are underrepresented. The role of gender in shaping both exposure to transition risks and access to transition benefits is raised by Ayompe but remains undertheorized across the Research Topic as a whole. The political economy of transition—including the influence of fossil fuel incumbents, financial flows, and trade regimes on the pace and direction of change—is notably absent. Methodologically, the Research Topic would benefit from longitudinal studies able to track whether participatory processes translate into durable policy change over time. Finally, while several papers address the design of just transition policies, fewer examine implementation fidelity: whether well-designed interventions are actually delivered equitably on the ground remains an open empirical question. Naming these gaps is not a criticism of the contributions collected here; it is an invitation for the next wave of research on just transition to take them on.

At a time when there is serious concern that climate targets and their implementation remain insufficient relative to the pace and scale of emissions reductions required, just transition research faces the challenge of demonstrating how greater attention to fairness can contribute to the social acceptability and political legitimacy of decarbonization pathways. The nine studies collected here range from Norwegian reindeer pastures and Australian deliberative panels to EU urban climate contracts and global bioenergy supply chains. They provide critical and diverse guidance for governments, industries, communities, and scholars seeking to align decarbonization with social inclusion and democratic accountability. The articles cover a wide enough range of methods, contexts, and questions that readers from policy, research, and practice should all find something to work with. They do so at a moment when the gap between policy ambition and lived social reality remains substantial. Just transition scholars therefore face a continuing task: to demonstrate how attention to distribution, participation, recognition, and legitimacy can contribute to rapid and effective decarbonization while addressing its social consequences. Viewed through this lens, the Research Topic shows that a just transition cannot be assessed on technical performance alone: the question of who bears the costs and who shares the benefits is political and deserves explicit attention. The editors are grateful to all the contributing authors, reviewers, and the editorial team at Frontiers in Sustainable Energy Policy for making this Research Topic possible. A special acknowledgment to the Joint Program Clean Energy Transition for a Sustainable Society for the support in collecting the contributions and managing the whole process.

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Footnotes

Edited and reviewed by: Eric O'Shaughnessy, Berkeley Lab (DOE), United States