Sociologies of Just Transitions In the Global South

Transitions towards sustainability have been promoted as a global semantic framework for addressing climate change. At the international level, much of the discussion has focused on the technological and economic conditions necessary to achieve these changes. In recent years, however, significant attention has begun to be paid to the social dimensions, the policies and institutional supports involved, tracing the political and social nature of sustainable transitions alongside their technological character. This shift has led to an intensification of debates around the ethical dimensions, practical exercises and normative orientations of transition. These developments have brought together a range of fields and epistemic traditions concerned with just transitions, including the social studies and sociology of energy, the sociology of work, labour-environmental studies and sustainable transitions research, amongst others. This Open Session invites researchers who wish to discuss and analyse the multiple political, ethical, public, social, economic, technical and cultural forms through which these just transitions (in the plural) find expression in the Global South. In this sense, the session invites an understanding of the Global South not merely as a site that replicates debates from the centres, but as one that also adjusts them and is capable of developing its own justice projects within transitions. Building on this, the session also invites discussion of how a sociology of just transitions takes shape, engaging with its key dimensions, methodological and hermeneutical tools, as well as its limitations and future developments.