Just Transitions - Swedish Research School on Governance for Just Urban and Regional Climate Transitions

Research Project, 2023 – 2027

The aim of the Just Transitions graduate school is to build knowledge and competence about how a just climate transition can be implemented in a local context.

The graduate school is based on two building blocks:

- Seven doctoral projects that are integrated into the activities of the public parties, with supervisors coming from both academia and practitioners.

- The establishment of a Swedish platform for just climate transitions, which is run by Urban Futures, and is also available to doctoral students and professionals outside the graduate school.

The PhD project at Chalmers will investigate the fact that a just climate transition sets high standards for the capability of municipalities to act in complex and cross-sectoral problems. The Gothenburg Executive City Office has as its role to coordinate the city’s work, taking all sustainability dimensions into account, a role which epitomizes the challenges involved in the necessary transformation. There is an urgent need to explore the contradictions and synergies between existing plans and programmes adressing social and ecological sustainability, as well as to explore the room for manouvre within existing governance structures. The project will take the city’s work towards ‘Equal Gothenburg’ and an ´Environmentally sustainable city´as a starting-points. It aims to provide tools and methods to visualize conflicts and synergies between goals and approaches, and how interventions affect people differently in different parts of the city. It furthermore aims to provide greater socio-spatial awareness in early phases of the city’s coordination work, in order to better facilitate the city’s work towards a just climate transition.