Mixed Methods Synthesis to Evaluate Coordination of Community and Climate Actor Just Transition Priorities

Large scale, complex problems like climate change require inter-institutional coordination and partnership to produce holistic, comprehensive solutions. As climate actors agree upon the need to ensure that sustainability transitions take place as “Just Transitions” they must reckon with how to operationalize subjective concepts like “justice” in their sustainability plans. The globalized nature of these transitions, however, often produces impacts in other countries and continents. Battery storage systems constructed to support renewable energy development California, for instance, may increase environmental impacts on Latin American mineral mining communities. It is necessary that climate policy actors understand and are aligned with affected communities’ individual conceptualizations of justice. This presentation discusses a qualitative synthesis method that supports operationalization and coordination of these subjective concepts and quantitative transformation of findings to evaluate policy plans and frameworks.
The methodology is applied to a regional analysis of non-academic Just Transition framework priorities from 75 global actors comprising of NGOs, governments, multilateral institutions, development banks, think tanks, and private enterprises. Organizations are categorized into two regions (Anglo-European and non-Anglo-European) to permit analysis of regional coordination between the groups’ conceptualizations. An emergent thematic coding approach distills each organization’s Just Transition conceptualization into individual Just Transition Concepts. A composite scoring method measures the presence of each concept among the frameworks in the two regions and is sorted to identify each region’s highest and lowest priorities. To illustrate regional framework coordination with community priorities, qualitative data from frontline communities in La Guajira, Colombia is transformed to match the language of the Just Transition Concepts. Comparison of community and framework priorities identifies areas of (mis)alignment between policy actors and communities. Just Transition frameworks from all regions are found to largely overlook community priorities of addressing local corruption, mitigation of community conflict, and support for community interconnection to promote a Just transition.