How can we make sustainability fair for everyone? That is the question the JUST Centre seeks to answer.
In Greater Manchester this means making sure environmental concerns are joined up with the needs of people and places. Anything else will be ineffective, unpopular and, in many cases, unfair.
We have had two decades of pilot projects and environmental initiatives, many of which have been successful in their own terms, but have not added up to anything like a sustainability transition. In Greater Manchester the JUST Centre wants to go beyond discrete projects to think about how silos like energy, transport, food and housing can be joined up in places and across organisations that matter to people.
The plan for our first Greater Manchester JUST Advisory Board meeting was to agree on a set of projects that our partners felt had potential to be joined up. What actually happened was much more interesting: a live demonstration of what it actually means to ‘join things up’ across sectors, organisations and places.
The role of the JUST Centre in Greater Manchester
Our Advisory Group is keen that the JUST Centre’s core function is not to deliver projects directly, nor to compete with existing programmes. They want us to work at the level of capacity and capability, helping to identify common barriers, points of leverage and connections between initiatives that are already underway.
This includes:
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Supporting organisations are not primarily sustainability focused, but whose work is nevertheless central to a just transition
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Identifying transversal needs - such as skills, communication, evidence and confidence - that cut across policy domains
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Grounding activity in places where people already live, work and seek support.
For them (and us, the researchers) the Centre should be less concerned with what interventions are delivered, and more with how they can be helped to travel, combine and take root in different institutional and community contexts.
What the Advisory Board revealed
The Advisory Board discussion moved very quickly beyond individual project proposals. A project decarbonising community buildings, for example, immediately raised more general issues like asset ownership, community trust and the limits of existing grant and funding schemes. A recurring observation was that resources are often available to assess feasibility, but far harder to secure for implementation, highlighting a structural gap that many community organisations encounter.
Beyond enabling factors, community buildings were not framed simply as sites for retrofit. They were understood as institutional anchors: trusted places that already convene multiple agendas, from health and wellbeing to advice, education and social support. This opened up a wider discussion about their role as demonstrators where sustainability is made visible, tangible and credible, rather than abstract or technocratic. This logic extended to other places like Greater Manchester’s new Live Well hubs and similar one-stop centres.
Rather than asking how sustainability initiatives might attract new audiences, our Advisory Board asked us to focus on how sustainability action can be embedded into places that people already rely on. Warm and cool spaces, indoor air quality, accessible information, and locally appropriate training were all discussed as topics that connect climate objectives with everyday needs.
A project developing resilience to extreme weather highlighted the importance of community capacity building, supporting people to understand risk, navigate institutions and act collectively. Similar themes emerged around carbon literacy, legal support for grassroots groups and green skills. Each coalesced around questions about audience, relevance and effectiveness.
Transversal factors and systemic change
We know that many of the barriers to just transitions are not technological, but institutional and structural. The meeting highlighted a set of transversal factors that cut across different projects and domains:
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Communication, particularly translating policy and strategy into actionable lived experience
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Demonstration, using real places to show sustainable living
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Training and skills, broadly defined to include legal literacy, evaluation and organisational learning, not just technical competencies
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Trust, especially where sustainability agendas intersect with poverty, health, or insecurity.
Transversal factors matter precisely because they cut across silos like energy, housing, transport, food and health. As systemic factors they are also least likely to be resourced or coordinated effectively, because they do not sit neatly within any single policy remit.
Places: Where transitions are assembled
Perhaps the most powerful insight from the meeting was the importance of where transitions can be assembled. Community hubs, Live Well centres and similar spaces bring together institutions, services, and social relationships in ways that formal programmes rarely do. As such, they offer powerful opportunities for alignment linking decarbonisation with health, resilience, skills and inclusion without requiring people to choose to attend something specifically sustainability related. They simultaneously act as sites for communication, demonstration and community building.
Streets emerged as another critical site. Most people experience the sustainability transition not through strategy documents, but through how safe, accessible and welcoming their local streets feel. Proposed projects focusing on active travel and place-making illustrated how climate, health, gender, safety and design concerns are already part of everyday environments. Safer Streets also forms one of six national missions, presenting a ready-made hook into national debate.
Implications
The lesson we learnt from the first GM JUST Advisory Board is that we need to pay closer attention to the social, institutional and geographical infrastructures through which transitions are made. It clarified a direction of travel both of us have been pursuing in our own research, towards work that strengthens capacity, supports trusted institutions and embeds sustainability within the very specific places where other priorities already meet.
If the JUST Centre can help make these connections more visible, robust, and equitable, then it will be doing precisely what it was set up to do.
Members of the Greater Manchester Advisory Group:
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Michaela Howell, Groundwork
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Rachel Berman, Greater Manchester Combined Authority
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Keiko Ivinson, Sustainable Futures, University of Manchester
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Louise Robbins, Greater Manchester Moving
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Pete Abel, Friends of the Earth
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James Evans, JUST Centre (University of Manchester)
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Harry Barton, JUST Centre (University of Manchester)
