Place-based just transitions: exploring the links between policies and practices in Southern Europe

Abstract

This special issue explores the concept of “place-based just transitions” and its implications for both research and practice. Energy and environmental transitions are understood as complex and multi-dimensional processes, embedded in material, social, spatial, and political factors. It is crucial to consider how transition processes affect cities and regions differently, including distribution of costs and benefits, acknowledging the diversity of actors and interests at play, and the relations with environmental, spatial, and social justice. A place-based perspective is particularly relevant, as initial conditions vary greatly across territories and the mechanisms triggered by transition policies can differ significantly can lead to different outcomes. Given this context, several questions arise: what approaches enable just transitions in policies and practices? How can social and energy justice be operationalised? And how it can be spatialised and adapted to existing systems and infrastructures? And crucially, to what extent do local dynamics shape the social and political outcomes of transitions? This special issue of the European Journal of Spatial Development addresses these questions by shedding light on the spatial and socio-political dimensions of transitions in Southern Europe (including Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain, among others), namely a region that remains underexplored in international research, despite its wealth of socially rooted practices, hybrid governance models, and complex institutional geographies.