As established by the Just Transition Alliance (formed in 1997), a Just Transition is formally defined as “a principle, a process and a practice”:
- The Principle: Asserts that a healthy economy and a clean environment can and should co-exist.
- The Process: Requires that the transition to a sustainable economy must be fair, ensuring it does not cost workers or community residents their health, environment, jobs, or economic assets, and that any losses are fairly compensated.
- The Practice: Mandates that those most affected by pollution—frontline workers and fenceline communities—must be in the leadership of crafting policy solutions.
From the site:
“Just Transition is a vision-led, unifying and place-based set of principles, processes, and practices that build economic and political power to shift from an extractive economy to a regenerative economy. This means approaching production and consumption cycles holistically and waste-free. The transition itself must be just and equitable; redressing past harms and creating new relationships of power for the future through reparations. If the process of transition is not just, the outcome will never be. Just Transition describes both where we are going and how we get there.”
The Six Principles
The Just Transition Alliance relies on six core principles to guide systemic, economic, and political restructuring:
- Right to Clean Resources: Workers, community residents, and Indigenous Peoples around the world have a fundamental human right to clean air, water, land, and food in their workplaces, homes, and environments.
- No Contradiction: There is no contradiction between simultaneously creating sustainable development, maintaining a healthy economy, and keeping a clean, safe environment.
- Global Solidarity: Because corporate globalization and the liberalization of labor, health, and environmental laws know no borders, solutions must be rooted in local, regional, national, and global solidarity.
- Frontline Inclusion: The development of fair economic, trade, health and safety, and environmental policies must directly include both the frontline workers and fenceline communities most affected by pollution, ecological damage, and economic restructuring.
- Fair Cost Distribution: The costs of achieving sustainable development, a healthy economy, and a clean environment must not be borne by current or future victims of environmental and economic injustices or unfair trade policies.
- Right to Challenge: Workers and community residents have the explicit right to challenge any entity—including governments, the military, corporations, and international bodies—that commits economic or environmental injustices.
Mindset
Just Transition Mindset represents a fundamental shift in how organizations, advocates, and funders view power, expertise, and relationships. According to the sources, this mindset is defined by five key shifts:
1. Rejecting the Corporate “Jobs vs. Environment” Blackmail
Historically, polluting industries have forced a false choice: choose jobs or choose your health. The Just Transition mindset completely rejects this binary. It asserts that workers and fenceline neighbors are on the same side. This was evident in the Just Transition Northwest Indiana (JTNWI) door-to-door canvass, where organizers intentionally designed their scripts to connect labor rights directly with community health and safety.
2. Shifting from Transactional to Transformational Relationships
The standard political mindset is transactional—treating people as numbers, signatures, or temporary votes to win a single campaign. A Just Transition mindset is transformational, focusing on building long-term trust, mutual support, and leadership capacity within the community. Organizations like the National Wildlife Federation (NWF) emphasize that engaging with Native and Indigenous Communities must be approached with the “mindset of ongoing relationship” rather than treating consent as a one-time project checklist.
3. Centering Lived Experience on Equal Footing with “Technical Expertise”
Traditional planning and philanthropy often rely on rigid, top-down frameworks and definitions of “objectivity” that exclude community voices. A Just Transition mindset flips this, recognizing that residents of “sacrifice zones” and Indigenous peoples are the true experts on their own environments.
- In Philanthropy: This means abandoning rigid funder terms like “climate change mitigation” to embrace communities’ holistic definitions, such as centering “traditional and/or local ecological knowledge and connection with Mother Earth”.
- In Grassroots Organizing: JTNWI canvassers didn’t just lecture residents on the chemistry of carbon capture; they met people with curiosity, listening first, and connecting technical carbon pipelines to residents’ personal experiences with refinery flaring, local safety, and asthma.
4. Humility, Power-Sharing, and Self-Correction
Embodying this mindset requires organizations with institutional power to actively cede control and correct imbalances. For the NWF, this meant auditing their own historical partnerships, compensating Indigenous representatives for their intellectual labor, and accepting a community’s “no” as final. In participatory grantmaking, it meant actively shifting administrative risks and burdens away from grassroots groups, and ceding funding decisions to community participants.
5. Rejecting “False Solutions” in Favor of Systemic Justice
A transition is not “just” if it merely swaps out energy technologies while leaving polluting systems and power structures intact. The JTNWI campaign director, Lisa Vallee, lived in the shadow of the BP Whiting Refinery and recognized that corporate-driven plans like blue hydrogen and carbon capture pipelines were “false solutions” that allowed fossil fuel companies to continue polluting vulnerable Latino and working-class neighborhoods. The mindset demands focusing on structural, healthy alternatives rather than technological band-aids.
🌱 We could look at how this mindset is put into action. For example, we could explore the specific “dos and don’ts” JTNWI used to train canvassers on the ground, or examine how the National Wildlife Federation guides its staff on compensating Indigenous partners for their time. Which would you like to explore?
Framework
