(00:01):
Well I'm in over my head. No one told me trying to keep my footprint small was harder than I thought it could be. I'm in over my head. What do I really need? Trying to save the planet over someone, please save me trying to save the planet over someone. Please save me.

(00:25):
Welcome to over my head. I'm Michael Bartz. My guest today is Dr. Tamara Krawchenko. Dr. Krawchenko is an assistant professor in the school of public administration in the University of Victoria. She's also a member of U of Vics Institute for integrated energy systems. Her scholarship examines, the unique needs of places and how public policies and institutions of governance shape live realities. Professor Chenko has conducted research in over a dozen countries and authored more than 60 articles. Books and reports has advised numerous governments around the world. Her recent projects, look at how we can manage a just energy transition and understand rural and small town, economic restructuring, and government policy responses. Welcome to in over my head, Tamara,

(01:09):
Thank you so much for having me.

(01:11):
So in talking about the just transition, I think a lot of people are concerned about what their jobs might look like in a low carbon future, whether they work directly in the fossil fuel-related industries or ones that support them. I think taking care of people more generally extends to many different areas aside from just jobs. So there's a lot to talk about here. Your recent review paper tackle is managing the, just transition at the regional and national level in 25 countries. And many of the findings relate to this topic. So I'm excited to explore this with you today. So to start, perhaps can you just give us a brief overview of your paper?

(01:42):
Yeah. Thanks, Michael. So I am a comparative. I look at policies in different countries and what I wanted to do with this piece of work was to put some meat around. What do we mean when we talk about a just transition? What are the actions that governments are actually implementing? And there are different ways you could go about this, but for me, I wanted to isolate those places that have experienced transitions in the last 20 years. And on the basis of that scale up and say, well, how is that managed by governments? What policy instruments did they use? What were the governance coalitions? What did it look like? And so I used data from the organization for economic cooperation and development at a subregional level isolated economies, where there had been a quarter share at least of employment and industry, which subsequently declined over 20 years. And on the basis of that dug around looking at all of their different policy instruments, strategies, how they work on a, just transition, what they're trying to achieve and do, and try and get a big picture overview of what does it actually mean to transition these economies in a way that's just and fair for communities and people?

(02:51):
Well, that sounds super interesting. And so generally, what were some of the findings?

(02:55):
So this is a very iterative type of research. You have a huge data set, you know, a big Excel table with all different types of initiatives, and then you have to bundle them to make sense of the thematic priorities. And what we found were really six major policy areas and then governance, which is so important because it's the glue that holds everything together. So just transition can be defined in different ways. It is a contested term, of course, and there are different actions associated with it. The most common that we have found, and the most common that has been implemented by governments are things related to labor, workforce development skills, upgrading labor, market supports and so on. And we know these, we know how to do them. Governments have a lot of experience doing them, but the nature of the challenge today is how do we amplify that the other area is use of the social security system in different countries.

(03:54):
We know that there are of course temporary financial supports that are needed employment insurance. In some cases, there have been early pensions have been really important to these transitions. So that's another big policy area. So workforce development and social security, the other ones that we saw that were most prominent were what we bundled, what we called the climate solutions. And these are all of these G HG reductions commitments and net zero commitments alongside all of the different strategies related to mitigation and adaptation and often investments in technological energy solutions. How these tend to work for just transitions is they will identify that there is a real challenge for low income households that needs to be addressed, or they'll think about the impacts of these policies on different types of people. There's also economic development initiatives and strategies. When we're talking about transitioning an economy, often we are transitioning an industry into something new or we're talking about diversifying economy.

(04:57):
So those are important. Also economies are regional and local. And so regional development is another big area of policy action. And this includes the types of investments that you need to transition an economy infrastructure, the innovation investments and so on. And then the final one would be industry 4.0, which I'm not sure if you know about that term, but it's really these innovation investments and strategies, including digital infrastructure that are important for a new type of economy. And again, the governance mechanisms are the glue because no one level of government is going to deliver on this. It has to be different levels of coordination. Sometimes when there are targeted transitions in a place like say one big industry is going to shift, and we know that that's a lot of employment. Then there are things like coordination, offices or hubs at the community level that can be really important. So this is the big picture view. There are a lot of other policies that are important to adjust transition. I mean, sectoral policies like agriculture. And yet we didn't see a lot of policies and actions that focus on that. So we also have as a feature of this research, not just what we're seeing, but all of the gaps, and that would be one land use planning is another big one that you don't often see addressed anywhere near enough in how we are gonna transition our economies and societies in a way that's just,

(06:24):
And so do you have some examples of perhaps regions or even countries that were doing well in these areas? As far as the just transition,

(06:33):
I'm always looking for the leaders I always am. And these transitions are so place-specific. When we talk about transition, I mean, what are we talking about? We're talking about really different transitions. Some places you're talking about a huge industry and the transition is to some kind of specialization that remains within that industrial area. One could think in Alberta, for instance, if you're going to transition the oil sands, you know, and Alberta is gonna remain probably a leader in energy and it'll just be green energy or there's cases where we have countries where they have made a commitment to actually end oil and gas exploration. And that's a very different type of transition. So some leaders, I guess, that I would point to are New Zealand because they had made a commitment to phase out all offshore oil and gas exploration permits in the Taranaki region, which is where most of those permits exist and what that means.

(07:33):
It's a big signal that that economy is gonna shift. That's a big employer in that region. They are important. And the signal is now that there's gonna be no more new oil and gas exploration doesn't mean all the workers are gonna end today. It means that there will be no more growth in that industry. And what they did to facilitate that is they immediately created a just transitions unit in government to support that process. And in that case, because it's a shift from an industry that requires a new vision of that region and what they're gonna be good at, they facilitated dialogues among all of the key actors, the Maori leadership, the local community leaders, the business leaders, civil society, everybody, you name it. And they came up with a framework called the Tai framework process with 12 action items on how they're gonna deliver on the vision of a new economy. And that's a really involved approach, deeply embedded in regional characteristics. It's pretty interesting to see, and it's robust because those people, those communities, those actors, those businesses, they're kind of all on board. Now they have a vision of where they need to go and they can be really strategic about the investments that they need to deliver on that. So I would highlight that process as a robust one and makes sense, given the type of transition they have.

(08:57):
Yeah. And like you said, it's not a one size fits all and how that government is the glue that holds everything together. I think having it come more from the top saying that this is what we're doing, we are transitioning away, and this is how we're going to support. You. Seems like a good way to go about that. And I believe Spain was also a country that was doing pretty well in that regard.

(09:16):
Yeah. Spain has these just transition agreements, which are agreements with the unions between the national government and the unions and communities and the purpose there is to really isolate the types of investments that they need for their particular place to be successful with transitions. And that's great because it creates a lot of certainty. It is geared to place and those investments are going to be very strategic about what they can achieve. So those are great examples. And actually in the European union, there is a new, $150 billion just transition mechanism that is delivering a whole bunch of different initiatives related to investment innovation, regional development, social development that is making governments and regions, you know, governments at the national and regional level really focus a on how they're gonna meet their decarbonization agendas in a way that doesn't harm people in communities. And they all have national strategies or will within the next couple of years to deliver on these goals. And that's a game changer. We haven't seen that before.

(10:21):
Good. That's great. And of course we are both in Canada. How is Canada doing in this regard?

(10:28):
Well, Canada has their new emissions reduction strategy, which is the first time we have something as robust as this is with dedicated actions to 2030. And they are quite comprehensive. Of course, in Canada, we are very decentralized and a really means that all levels of government have to be pushing in the same direction to achieve our goals. We have very different regional profiles and characteristics in Canada. And we know that we have very carbon intensive economies like Saskatchewan and Alberta, that per capita outstrip, any other economy by the nature of their profile of their, their energy in Quebec, you have hydro in BC, you have a lot of natural gas and so on. So we have really different regional economies. And I think that a key feature for how we can deliver on our commitments is to build on the strength of our Federation and the differences to actually take those differences and develop a coherent strategy to support one another to transition, because my point is, the transition is gonna be felt a lot, lot harder in some places than in others.

(11:37):
You talk about in your paper, how economic development strategies and industry initiatives tend to display an urban bias, especially in how technology innovations are viewed. Maybe tell me more about this.

(11:49):
Yes. So this bias shows up in a whole bunch of different ways, but I guess why I raise this as a important issue is it matters for territorial cohesion and competitiveness. If we define innovation and only really focus on it in urban areas, we're leaving out a large part of the country that is very important and that can lead to a geography of discontent. We need to invest in all places and we need to have competitiveness and cohesion across our territories. It's like politically just super important to do this. And innovation bias can come in with programs. For instance, that might be structured really towards commercialization, where if you study rural innovation, those processes can look quite different. They are still innovation, but they are often borrowed innovation. And a lot of the times innovations that actually come from rural areas, aren't recognized as such because it's the lawyers in cities who file those patents or so on.

(12:47):
We also understand innovation a lot in terms of the glomeration effects. That is proximity innovation that happens in proximity to certain institutions. You can think of tech hubs or other investments that are often made in cities and not in rural areas. And yet investments in technical colleges and other institutions, community colleges, like the, in Newfoundland, the college of the north Atlantic have been so critical to rural innovation. And so when we think about types of investments that are made just to think of all places and not just the big cities, because all the brains are not sitting in the big cities, they're everywhere.

(13:24):
Yeah. And I think that also ties into, like, you talked about how it's so specific to a certain place and people in a certain area might have certain solutions that work for them that wouldn't someone in a city wouldn't think of. Right. Or there may be some examples of, again, other countries who have done that. Well.

(13:40):
Yeah. I think that there are pretty great regional development approaches under the instruments of the European commission. So what's really interesting is that the countries in the U are all really different, but they have these common instruments like regional development funds or for rural areas. What's really important is that they don't just have common agricultural policy. They also have rural development policies, which are focused on diversification, focused on how you can do value added with products and rural innovation. And we don't typically have the same types of in instruments in Canada. So I do look at that and I think, wow, like what could Canada do if we had some of these instruments, we'd think about rural development in a really different way. I recently conducted a Penn Canadian study of rural policy actually. And what it demonstrates is that rural policy in Canada for the most part remains really extractive or not thinking of places. In fact, we have a lot of ministries where rural development is entirely sectoral it's in the forestry industry or mining and extraction, natural resources and communities and the economy of communities and what people want from those industries are absent in those strategies. And I think that's a really important consideration.

(14:54):
So how do we bring those people in from those communities to have those conversations?

(14:59):
Yeah. And you often need support to do that. So capacity doesn't come from some places have capacity and have a really robust civil society and a key leadership that can convene those conversations and work with industry very effectively. And they might even do that on their own. Other places, absolutely need support. And the places that need support, especially are those that have industries that are shifting and in decline. So I would just stress among all of the different policy approaches and the way we can manage transitions, really robustly thinking about community development is important. So it's not enough just to think about labor because people are part of communities. And so if we just focus on the workforce development skills for training, you're leaving aside a really big, broader conversation about that local economy and the impacts on that community. And that brings me back to that Taranaki framework process that I mentioned in New Zealand, where they facilitated a big visioning about their assets, strengths, opportunities, capabilities, and where they wanna go for their economy of the future.

(16:00):
Yeah. And I think that goes back to that community development. And when people at the community level have buy-in and they get to make decisions about their community and what the future of jobs and to just transition looks like they're more likely to support it and be on board.

(16:15):
It is so important to have a vision of what are we transitioning to, because if you don't know what you're transitioning to, then that's really risky and scary. And so having a kind of concrete vision of the strengths is so important to reduce these risks.

(16:32):
How do we decide on the goal? Is that coming from the government level or is that coming from the community or both?

(16:38):
Yeah. I mean, I tend to work from a regional development lens. I do territorial analyses. And what that is, is it's scoping all of the assets and opportunities and the risks and talking with all of the key actors in the community at the regional level, local level, different levels of government to scope and understand what do they understand as their strengths and weaknesses. And then what could the key investments be to help them flourish? And no one is going to steer this boat really, it's going to be a collective and decentralized effort. And yet you have to be clear on the investments that are needed to be quite strategic. And so this might be that you are missing key assets that make this place attractive for businesses to invest in. I'll give you a really small scale example. I did a study in Mary's town, Newfoundland.

(17:34):
This is a small town on the coast. They've had a lot of boom and bust. They did a post industrial audit to really understand at the end of one of these booms, how they could be more strategic about managing this and what that post industrial audit found was a couple things. One is that they shouldn't have work camps. They should have people living in the community that there would be much greater economic benefit. And that one of the key things that made their community less attractive for people to bring their families and to stay there was a lack of a recreation center. So that's some really concrete things actually that came out of that. And what kind of investments we need to be successful.

(18:12):
What are the, the role of social insurance programs in this,

(18:16):
In terms of the social security system, we have a robust social security system in Canada, of course, which is great, but it can do more. And these supports, as we saw under the pandemic can be quite targeted. They can be leveraged, they can be scaled up. And when we are facing some major transitions, we should probably use those tools. And the other thing is the use of the pension system and early retirement. This is really important. And it has been used in some places, for instance, in the United States, they have a pension for coworkers that is specific and Poland did the same thing. We can have something like that here, if we're serious about supporting people to transition. And those instruments are just one among many set of tools that are important.

(19:02):
And so you, in your paper, you highlight, we've talked about it a bit, but several policy measures that are often missing in many just transition plans. So let's talk a bit about that.

(19:11):
Yeah. What's missing well in this analysis, we found that while we have all these climate solutions, these strategies about how we're gonna meet our climate targets, equity considerations are really absent. And a lot of the time, the exception is that we often see that there are funds to mitigate energy consumption costs of low income households. And that's great to see, but the broader equity considerations are again, often absent and in Canada, it's really important to that. The climate solutions address, not just stakeholders, but rights holders, so indigenous rights holders. And I did check the national government's new 2030 plan just to see how this was addressed. And I think it's the first time we really see indigenous knowledge and decision decision making really highlighted as a priority. And there's 300 mentions just as a word count of the document. So it's in there. It'll be very interesting to see how they work on this and operationalize it in terms of workforce development.

(20:11):
Again, this is the most common just transition strategy and they target workers, not communities. And so what I've found is that they're not often combined with other initiatives, which is a bit of a missing, it's a bit of a gap that they'd be way more effective if they thought about workforce development labor market skills and so on and employment development alongside other initiatives, like community development with economic development, there's a lot of steering and not rowing, which is expected, but when you have a rapid transformation, I think that we might need to see much more interventionist policies and even public sector ownership. And this has been raised in a lot of different countries, for instance, in Scotland. They really point out that they have this offshore oil and gas industry that has benefited Scotland far less than it has in countries where that has been nationalized like Denmark.

(21:08):
And the other issue with economic development is how do we deal with stranded assets? Now that's not just an economic issue. That's a land use issue as well, but it's one that absolutely has to be addressed because for instance, Alberta, you have what over 3000 orphan Wells giant environmental liability. This can actually pull down your economic potential and let alone the environmental consequences. So those are a huge risk in terms of regional development policies. A lot of them are being branded just transition. But I really question to what extent they perhaps are delivering on that. We're seeing a new green industrial policy lens, but the equity dimensions are often absent in that. And the EU is gonna be a big test case on this because they are really trying to deliver regional development funding to propel, adjust transition. It's a tight funding period actually, because they go from, I think it's 20, 21 to 2027.

(22:05):
So they're going to really see quick movement on this. And I think we're all watching to see how they manage this process. And I also noticed that the community level is often absent in a lot of these instruments and thinking about what they can deliver on in social security. I mentioned this, but it's often just underused for society wide transformation. So not just thinking about industrial related employment shifts, but broader society wide shifts. We're really gonna have to think about how this can be leveraged and the role of pension system as well. Some countries do this. There're only a handful, a lot more could be using it. And then for industry 4.0, these policies and investments are really envisioning an economy of the future. And they are often, again, brand just transition. I don't really see the links to equity in a lot of these strategies or programs.

(22:56):
And so in a lot of cases, there's work to be done on how we put meat around what the justice part of the transition means, how we track it, implement it, define outcomes. And it's really interesting again, in the New Zealand process, the Tai regional framework, one of their action plans was entirely focused on measuring outcomes and defining outcomes and defining success. And that success came from the people involved, including from the Maui worldview, which is a really great to see that they were included and prioritized their own outcomes indicators on that. And then on governance, I I think we can say that coordination mechanisms are largely absent in a lot of these actions and they tend to be really reactive and a hoc interventions. So they're coming after the fact, they're like, oh, an industry's in decline or, you know, this industry's leaving or we need to do something and they're less proactive and proactive ones would be great because they'd be less risky.

(24:00):
And so what's, yeah, what's the, the role of accountability in this just transition.

(24:05):
It's really important. And how do we define it? And what does accountability look like? So I'll mention Scotland cause they are working on this. So a bunch of Scottish NGOs and other groups and academics came together and they said, we need to work on a, just transition. We called the government finally to do something. And in response to this civil society, just transition partnership, a just transition commission was created for two years to gather all kinds of information and really understand what a just transition means in Scotland. And it was a huge dialogue and they visited communities all over the place. And the chair was Jim Skye, who is a fantastic academic and is leading a leading author on one of the IPCC reports. And as one outcome of that, they created accountability. So they created a minister for just transitions. It's the junior portfolio.

(24:56):
They're going to have a really clear plan that they need to deliver on. And they created a permanent external, independent body, a just transition commission to hold the government to account and to provide expertise on how you determine you are making successful progress on meeting those commitments. So that's pretty robust. And I think a lot of the details are being worked out right now about how the commission works, for instance, with the minister and with other departments and ministries on delivering on this. But it's a very clear signal that there is going to be a strategy. There're going to be action plans, sectoral action plans. At first, the first is gonna be on energy and that this external commission is going to make sure that the goals of these strategies are being met.

(25:43):
And do we have those accountability measures in place here in Canada for our just transition,

(25:48):
Not quite in the same way we do in BC have the climate accountability act and federally, we have a climate accountability act. This is super important that we have this it's new federally. It's 2021. And this is great. We don't have an independent commission like this quite, but we're all looking at the new legislation that will come out the new just transition act. And there will certainly have to be some accountability around that. Canada has been very, very bad at meeting. Forget the justice part of transition at meeting emissions reductions requirements, right? We've not yet met one of our goals. We simply, haven't not one, not ever and that's unacceptable. And so we absolutely need more robust accountability and we need to meet those goals. We just have to, in NBC, there is a provincial unit focused on climate action and climate change, and they produce the modeling.

(26:43):
And it was really interesting that they, in the most recent clean BC update, which is the emissions plan here, the modeling was off by around 30% and they adjusted. And so my point in raising that is that we get more information. We understand where our modeling is off and we have to adjust. So we always have to set a new bar and be even more strategic about our actions. So accountability is part of that and the honesty of understanding our failures, including our failures and setting up how we establish our emissions reductions targets are super important. The issue I think that we really need to tackle is to not be crippled by the scope of the change that's needed. And that's why I do comparative work because I wanna look around the world and see where we're really seeing progress and get inspired and show these counterfactuals that it can be done and we are doing it and we can change. And there is hope. There's always hope and we can be hopeful.

(27:46):
Yeah, I think that's perfect. And I think hearing those examples from these other countries definitely inspires me that if they can do it, then we can do it too. Why not? And so lastly, this show is about empowering individual citizens to take action on the climate crisis. What can people do today to ensure that the just transition is a successful? One,

(28:08):
One is to think about what a just transition means to you and to your community and to engage with other like-minded people and groups on this topic. What I so often see in the countries I study is that these civil society actions, these groups coming together to have these conversations. And we're really starting to do that in Canada. There've been a lot of different conferences lately that this is so important and it really leads to political action. So don't think that it's not meaningful work. And at every scale all the way from how we advocate nationally to our community levels, we know that we have to live in a different way and actions big and small are very impactful. And that looks like riding your bike more, if you can, so that you're not using your car to advocating for some of these big national policy priorities.

(29:04):
Great. Well, that's all my questions, Tamara. So this has been very educational. Thanks so much for coming on the show.

(29:10):
Thanks so much for having me

(29:13):
Well, that was my talk with Tamara. I really appreciated her examples of various communities who were making change with a just transition from their community level. And they were so actively involved in the success of that. I think that's such a good lesson and so important for other communities around the world to say that, yes, we should get involved in this transition and that will make it more successful and more just so to me, that was really powerful. And speaking of community, if you're getting something out of this show, I'd encourage you to tell your friends about it because the more people that we can get involved to take action, the better off will be. Well, that's all for me. I'm Michael Bartz. Here's the feeling a little less in over our head when it comes to saving the planet. We'll see you again. Soon. In over my head was produced and hosted by Michael Bartz original theme song by Gabriel Thaine. If you would like to get in touch with us email info@inovermyheadpodcast.com. Special thanks to Telus STORYHIVE for making this show possible.

(30:11):
I'm trying to save the planet or who will someone please save me.