Conversations on the covid-climate-care crisis
The Just Transition Care (JTC) initiative is jointly promoted by the Zennström Professor of Climate Change Leadership at Uppsala University, UNRISD’s Just Transition Research Collaborative and Latinamerikagrupperna. It aims to establish a discussion space about the relationship between care and the politics of Just Transition.
Just Transition (JT) is a policy framework promoted by labour and environmental justice organisations to design climate policies from the perspective of those most affected by both environmental and economic inequalities. The framework indicates how to compensate for the necessary phasing-out of carbon-intensive industries while also responding to the most urgent and vital needs of front-line communities, by creating decent, stable and community-driven jobs in clean energy and infrastructures. The Just Transition concept has been incorporated in International Labour Organisation (ILO), the European Union, and other governmental strategies for decarbonisation.
The Covid-19 pandemic, however, has called attention towards the multiple forms of care work (paid and unpaid) that are needed to re/produce healthy bodies, societies and ecosystems, and that otherwise go unrecognised, under-valued and undermined in many countries. Further, the pandemic has shown that care for people and for the planet are crucially interconnected through the production of food, calling attention towards the need for supporting food sovereignty and agroecology. Yet, a full recognition of the role of social and environmental care work to the Just Transition agenda is still largely missing.
As a crucial platform for demanding socially just climate policies, Just Transition can benefit from the production of new knowledge and policy recommendations for care-centred strategies. The Just Transition Care Initiative intends to make these first steps.
The JTC Initiative
The JTC initiative will develop through interactions between academic researchers and stakeholders (including workers’ representatives, activists, and community-economy actors), over the course of five webinars from June 2021 and April 2022. Each webinar will address a different aspect of the covid-climate-care nexus through the experiences and perspectives of different stakeholders, with academics playing the role of facilitators and active listeners.
Where agreed upon by speakers, the webinars may be recorded and made accessible to other interested parties. Language interpretation will be provided as needed.
Based on the knowledge co-created through the webinar series, academics will formulate a public statement or policy recommendation document that will be shared with stakeholders at the end of the process. All participants will be invited to discuss the document at a final meeting to be held – possibly in person, pending the conditions of the pandemic- in May of 2022.
Coordination Team
Stefania Barca, Uppsala University
Laila Mendy, Uppsala University
Isabel Baudish, Uppsala University
Oscar Barajas, Latinamerikagrupperna
Dunja Krause, United Nations Research Institute for Social Development
Edouard Morena, University of London Institute in Paris
Dimitris Stevis, Colorado State University
Advisory Group
Seema Arora-Jonsson, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
Elena Baglioni, Queen Mary University of London
Keri Facer, University of Bristol
Sherilyn MacGregor, The University of Manchester
Naomi Millner, University of Bristol
Nora Räthzel, Umeå University
David Uzzell, University of Surrey
Bregje van Veelen, Uppsala University
Network members and invited speakers (under construction)
Selma James, Global Women Strike
Leddy Mozombite, Domestic Workers’ Federation of Peru
Roberto Sciarelli, Italy’s Commons Network
Katherine Isaac, Debs-Jones-Douglass Institute