17 - Industrial Landscapes: From the Geographies of Production to Everyday Life

Summary

Introduction

Transitioning contemporary industrial landscapes towards a lower-carbon future is a challenging proposition. Workforces in carbon-intensive sectors and regions are vulnerable as energy transitions accelerate rapidly. Globally, the concept of just transitions is gaining traction among policy makers, academics and organizations such as the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the UN Environment Programme (UNEP). The meaning and scope of a just transition is now formalized in the ILO's Guidelines for a Just Transition (2015) and was adopted in the preamble to the Paris Climate Agreement. A focus on just transitions recognizes that the effects of climate change mitigation will be felt unevenly across societies, and that governments have a responsibility to ensure people adversely affected by decarbonizing economies are supported (ILO, 2015). Geography is an important factor in this debate (Tonts, 2010; Fleming and Measham, 2015), since the economic and social cost of failing to adequately plan for such transitions will be borne unevenly.

In Australia, the current outlook for well-planned and socially just transitions away from carbon-intensive energy generation and industrial production is not positive. As the world's largest net exporter of coal wrestles with the move to a post-carbon economy, a national debate that pits concern for the environment against industrial and resource sector jobs is becoming increasingly intractable. Studies of industrial transformation show successive governments have shown limited capacity to anticipate and plan for change (Rainnie et al, 2004; Beer, 2018; Weller, 2019). Empirical work on industrial transitions in Australia has predominantly taken a political-economic lens, contributing valuable insights into the negative effects of reactive, top-down and disjointed policy making on regional workers and communities (Sheldon et al, 2018; Snell, 2018; Weller, 2019). In a compelling account of the failure of a multilevel approach to engage with very material fears of ‘poverty, disempowerment and disenfranchisement’ in a thermal coal region, Weller (2019: 313) argues for a much deeper engagement with place and people, particularly in regional communities dependent on a single industry. Recently, Edwards et al (2022) have advocated for an approach to transition that looks beyond workers in specific industries to the broader community, since decarbonizing heavy industrial and resource-based regions will affect not only the whole supply chain, but adjacent service industries. The implication is that the scale and pace of decarbonizing industrial regions will resonate far beyond those whose paid work is directly affected.