When justice enters the energy transition debate, and what still remains unsaid

The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) has recently released Fostering a Just Energy Transition: A Framework for Policy Design, a report that marks an important moment in global energy debates. At a time when renewable energy deployment is accelerating worldwide, IRENA explicitly recognizes that the transition will not be just by default. Without deliberate political choices, it risks reproducing (and in some cases deepening) existing inequalities across countries, territories, and communities.

This acknowledgment matters. For years, dominant transition narratives have prioritized technological solutions, investment flows, and infrastructure expansion, while treating justice as a secondary or corrective concern. By contrast, IRENA’s framework places distributional justice, participation, and inclusion closer to the center of policy design. From a Global South perspective, this represents a meaningful, though incomplete, step forward.

What IRENA gets right

IRENA’s report correctly identifies that energy transitions generate both benefits and burdens, and that these are unevenly distributed. It highlights the need to address social and economic impacts across the entire energy value chain, from mineral extraction to infrastructure development and financing mechanisms. The framework also emphasizes the importance of inclusive processes, social dialogue, and policies that recognize differentiated impacts based on income, geography, and gender.

These elements resonate strongly with concerns long raised by civil society and community-based actors in the Global South. In particular, IRENA’s emphasis on proactive policy design, rather than ex post mitigation, aligns with the growing recognition that justice cannot be retrofitted once harm has already occurred. In this sense, the report reflects a welcome shift away from purely technocratic approaches to the energy transition.

KALLIED’s grounded perspective from the Global South

While IRENA’s framework operates at a global policy level, the Knowledge Alliance for Environmental Defenders (KALLIED) approaches just energy transitions from the ground up. Through two side events held within the T20 process, in Brazil (2024) and South Africa (2025), KALLIED brought together experiences from environmental and land defenders, Indigenous peoples, researchers, and civil society organizations across Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia.

Rather than starting from abstract principles, these discussions were rooted in lived realities. They revealed a consistent pattern: many projects branded as “green” or “sustainable” reproduce extractive logics, concentrate power, and intensify pressures on territories already affected by inequality and environmental degradation. In this context, justice failures do not stem from a lack of frameworks, but from political choices that privilege speed, scale, and investment certainty over rights, participation, and accountability.

Where the perspectives converge

There are clear points of convergence between IRENA’s framework and KALLIED’s work. Both recognize that a just energy transition must address more than emissions reductions. Both emphasize participation, inclusion, and the need to consider social impacts across the transition process. Both acknowledge that communities cannot be treated as passive beneficiaries, but must be meaningfully engaged.

These shared concerns suggest an emerging consensus: justice is not an optional add-on, but a core condition for the legitimacy and sustainability of energy transitions. However, convergence at the level of principles does not resolve deeper tensions about power, agency, and political economy.

What is missing from IRENA’s framework

From the perspective of KALLIED and its Global South partners, several critical dimensions remain underdeveloped in IRENA’s report.

First, the framework pays limited attention to the protection of environmental and land defenders. Across regions, defenders opposing harmful energy and extractive projects face criminalization, surveillance, harassment, and violence. Shrinking civic space is not a peripheral issue: it fundamentally shapes who can participate, whose knowledge counts, and whether consent can be freely given. A just transition cannot exist where defending land, water, and rights entails personal risk.

Second, IRENA’s approach underplays the political economy of the transition. While it acknowledges unequal impacts, it largely avoids confronting how global demand for critical minerals, donor-driven development models, and North-South power asymmetries structure those impacts. Without addressing green extractivism and energy colonialism, justice risks being reduced to better compensation within fundamentally unjust systems.

Third, participation in IRENA’s framework remains largely procedural. KALLIED’s work shows that consultation mechanisms, including Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC), are frequently weak, rushed, or transactional. Communities are often invited to react to decisions already made, rather than to co-design projects or exercise real veto power. Moving from participation to co-governance is not a semantic shift, but a redistribution of authority.

Finally, the framework insufficiently addresses epistemic justice. Local and Indigenous knowledge systems are still treated as inputs to be considered, rather than as sources of authority capable of shaping policy and governance. From KALLIED’s perspective, a just transition requires recognizing communities as political subjects and knowledge holders, not merely stakeholders.

Justice as a political choice

Reading IRENA’s report alongside KALLIED’s T20 contributions makes one conclusion clear: justice in the energy transition is not primarily a technical challenge, but a political one. Frameworks, guidelines, and indicators matter, but they cannot substitute for confronting power relations, protecting those who resist harm, and enabling communities to exercise real control over their territories and futures.

IRENA’s report opens an important door by acknowledging that justice must be deliberately designed into energy policy. The work emerging from KALLIED insists that justice must also be defended, enforced, and reclaimed, especially in contexts where civic space is shrinking and extractive pressures are intensifying.

As energy transitions accelerate, the risk is not only that they fail to deliver justice, but that they do so while claiming its language. Bridging the gap between global frameworks and grounded realities requires listening to those on the frontlines of the transition, and being willing to rethink dominant models of development, governance, and power.

A just energy transition will not emerge from consensus alone. It will be built through struggle, accountability, and the collective insistence that decarbonization without democracy is neither just nor sustainable.