At the Heart of the Transition? Making Sense of Agency, Policy, and Post-Politics within Just Transition in Scotland

Abstract: Since the establishment of Scotland’s Climate Change Act, principles of just transition have been statutory and guiding the implementation of several policies on the area. Such policies have laid the foundation for collaborative governance efforts, that invites state and non-state partners to engage on the political arena. Critiques towards such collective governance approaches argue that it promotes a post-political condition, guided by values of consensus and cohesion, that moves democratic issues to the periphery of political inquiry. By analysing key just transition policies within Scotland, and conducting interviews with non-state actors with different relations to the Scottish policy process, I seek to gain greater understanding of how the discursive positioning of agents of change could be understood through post-politics. Thus, this thesis explores how agents of change, and their agency, is made sense of, and how this sense-making reflects contradictory and challenging dynamics such as power struggles, conflicts of interest, and collective action problems, within just transition. I identify four key agents of change – workers, communities, industries, and the government – and discover that the policy material and my interviewees position these agents differently in relation to the problems of just transition. Further, I also identify challenging dynamics within sense-making of agents of change, such as contradictory transition narratives, tensions regarding how the relationship between labour and nature is made sense of, as well context-bound relationships between the change agents. I conclude that the strive for social consensus within the collaborative sphere neglects these challenging and contradictory dynamics, and fails to reflect the democratic pluralism of how agents of change are made sense of in the Scottish context.