Scaling just transitions: Legitimation strategies in coal phase-out commissions in Canada and Germany

Climate change mitigation triggers both spatial and moral complexities, as demonstrated by the contentious issue of phasing out coal power. The success of the Paris Agreement depends on, among other things, the acceptability of climate policy measures and thus, from a moral perspective, on the ability to organize transition processes in ways that do not damage the livelihoods of workers, communities, and entire regions. Spatially, the unequal distributions of burdens and advantages of both climate change and respective mitigation measures provoke struggles over their legitimacy in contexts ranging from local to global. Phasing out coal mining and the respective power generation capacity thus triggers processes of structural transformation that cut across geographic scales, vertical levels of policy and politics, as well as sectoral boundaries.In light of the urgency of the climate crisis, countries such as Canada and Germany have established stakeholder-driven commissions to develop proposals for just transition pathways for phasing out coal production and consumption. We argue that these commissions are arenas in which spatial, moral, and sectoral (re-)negotiations materialize. Comparing the Canadian and German stakeholder commissions through expert interviews with their members, the article traces how governments use commissions to legitimize their transition policies. Expectations at different levels and from different actors in turn place commission members under pressure to justify their involvement and the outputs of the commissions. We find that the Canadian task force showed greater commitment to collecting and reflecting the needs of communities in its coal regions, and to communicating these to the federal government. In the German coal commission, legitimation strategies focused mainly on a broad representation of interests, and on government spending for affected regions, workers, and industries. In that case, a compromise was reached that satisfied most, but not all, of the diverse requirements.     

Bearing Witness: Hope for the Unseen

Beginning with an identification of the ethical and political ambivalence surrounding hope, this essay considers whether an analysis of the activity of bearing witness to truth could offer a theoretical framework for thinking about hope differently. Specifically it argues that hope can be taken as a discipline, or practice, one which is both required for, and enacted in, the act of bearing witness. Through a consideration of the process of bearing witness in Truth and Reconciliation Commissions responding to national and intergenerational trauma, the essay explores the way in which bearing witness is a fundamentally hopeful action in so far as it ceaselessly seeks to speak to the truth of an event while acknowledging the inability to ever fully capture that event in words.     

In praise of the International Geographical Union

This viewpoint is a highly personal account of what the International Geographical Union (IGU) has meant for a 50‐year career in Canadian geography and is a consideration of the importance of the IGU to geographers world‐wide. The author's earliest experiences of the IGU, the IGU's Commissions, its disciplinary perspective, some political problems experienced by IGU scholars, and the IGU as a global geographical community are the main topics considered.