The Just Transition: Making it Work

April 2026

Featuring: David Powell(Local Storytelling Exchange), Grace Millman(Regen) and Jordan Fletcher(Future Impact Ventures)
Venue: Octopus Energy & EV offices, London.

The “Just Transition” has become a central idea in climate, but also an increasingly contested one.

At April’s Earth Set, we brought together perspectives from storytelling, policy and investment to move beyond the slogan and examine how the transition is actually being experienced in the UK today.

What emerged was not a single definition, but a set of tensions - already visible across energy bills, infrastructure, jobs and investment - and a shared recognition that whether the transition succeeds will depend less on technology than on how those tensions are managed in practice.

The “Just Transition” as lived experience

A recurring theme throughout the discussion was the gap between how the transition is described in policy, and how it is experienced in everyday life.

Much of the formal discourse around net zero operates at a system level, for example targets, technologies, pathways. But for most people, the transition shows up in much more immediate ways: the cost of heating their home, whether infrastructure is imposed on their area, or whether their economic prospects are improving or deteriorating.

David Powell described the “Just Transition” as a kind of boundary object, a phrase that allows broad agreement, while masking very different underlying interpretations. From the perspective of Local Storytelling Exchange’s work, people rarely talk about “transition” at all. Instead, they talk about pride, dignity, fairness, and whether life is getting better.

So fairness is not an abstract concept but something instinctive, often felt before it is articulated. In political terms, perceptions of unfairness tend to drive resistance far more powerfully than technical arguments.

Visible trade-offs in the UK system

The UK provides a particularly clear view of the trade-offs embedded in the transition.

On one hand, the power system has decarbonised rapidly. On the other, most households still experience the system primarily through their energy bills, which have not improved in line with that progress. Similarly, infrastructure is being accelerated to meet net zero timelines, particularly grid expansion. But in many cases, communities do not feel they have meaningful agency in those decisions, creating tension between speed and legitimacy.

The same pattern appears in market-building policies. Subsidising early adopters is a rational way to drive cost reduction and scale. But in practice, it can look like support flowing towards those already able to act, reinforcing perceptions of inequality.

Repeating — or reshaping — existing inequalities

Grace Millman’s contribution focused on a deeper question: whether the transition is simply layering onto existing inequalities, or actively reshaping them. Many of the dynamics now playing out, around infrastructure siting, environmental impact and economic benefit, follow long-standing historical patterns. Industrialisation concentrated pollution and economic activity unevenly, often along lines of class and geography (for example, historically, poorer portions of society lived in the East of cities, downwind of extraction and manufacturing emissions, while the richer classes resided in Western areas)

There is a risk that new forms of infrastructure, from grid expansion to data centres, replicate those same distributions of cost and benefit.

A “Just Transition”, in this framing, is not just about avoiding further harm. It requires actively addressing these underlying patterns — shifting who has influence, who benefits, and who participates.

Energy bills as the front line

For most people, the transition is not experienced through emissions reductions but through energy costs. This makes the structure of energy bills one of the most tangible expressions of fairness in the system.The discussion touched on whether future policy needs to move beyond universal approaches and towards more differentiated models, for example, tariffs that better reflect ability to pay, or more targeted forms of support.

But this raises a more fundamental challenge: understanding clearly who the system is currently working for, and who it is not. Without that clarity, policy risks remaining blunt, and inadvertently reinforcing the inequalities it is trying to address.

Fairness as a condition for scale

From an investment perspective, Jordan Fletcher reframed the relationship between fairness and speed. Rather than treating fairness as a constraint, he argued that it is often a condition for scale because if people benefit directly from new systems, through lower costs, better services or economic opportunity, for example, adoption becomes more durable and self-reinforcing. If they do not, progress becomes fragile and politically contested.

This has implications for how businesses are built. Models that incorporate community participation, local value creation and trust are not simply “nice to have” ,they can be central to achieving widespread adoption. The discussion highlighted examples where local trust networks and peer-to-peer influence have been more effective drivers of uptake than top-down messaging.

Trust, visibility and local connection

A striking theme across all three perspectives was the importance of trust. People are far more likely to engage with new technologies and systems through trusted intermediaries, neighbours, local actors, community organisations, than through distant institutions.

This has practical implications. as much of the transition currently lacks visibility at a local level. Industrial change is happening, but often in ways that are not easily seen or understood within communities.Where benefits are visible - jobs, local investment, improved services - support tends to follow, but where they are not, narratives of unfairness and exclusion can take hold.

This connects directly to the political risk surrounding the transition. As several participants noted, there is a growing attempt to frame net zero as something imposed by distant elites, rather than something delivering tangible local benefit. Countering that narrative depends less on abstract arguments, and more on whether people can see and feel the benefits in their own lives.

Jobs, industry and economic participation

One area that was forcefully raised from the audience was the role of jobs and industrial strategy. While much of the public conversation focuses on costs and constraints, significant investment is already flowing into clean energy infrastructure, manufacturing and supply chains across the UK. These developments have the potential to reshape regional economies, particularly in areas affected by past deindustrialisation.

However, the panel acknowledged that this story is often under-communicated. The connection between net zero and economic opportunity is not always visible or clearly articulated, leaving space for competing narratives to dominate. Ensuring that the transition delivers - and is seen to deliver - real economic participation will be critical to maintaining political support.

Beyond abstraction

Across the discussion, a consistent thread emerged: the “Just Transition” cannot be delivered at the level of rhetoric alone. It is defined not by how it is described, but by how it is experienced, in bills, in jobs, in infrastructure, and in whether people feel they have a stake in the system. This makes it inherently complex. Trade-offs cannot be eliminated. Not everyone will benefit equally, and not all tensions can be resolved. But the way those trade-offs are managed and whether they are seen as legitimate, will determine whether the transition can sustain the pace required.

The challenge, ultimately, is not just to decarbonise the system, but to do so in a way that people recognise as fair, tangible and worth supporting.

🎧 The full conversation is available now as Episode 9 of Series 2 of the Earth Set Podcast:
The Just Transition: Making it Work