Research

The JUST Centre is focused on the pursuit of sustainability transformations that are people-centred, ‘joined-up’ and socially just.

Across five regions in the North of England and with national reach and significance, it explores existing initiatives adopted by communities, municipalities, and businesses to pursue low-carbon living (LCL). Our interdisciplinary team works with a wide range of partners in those communities, not only to learn from existing initiatives but also to co-produce new ones.

The ambition of JUST is born from evidence that the context for research on low carbon living (LCL) has changed in recent years: there is an urgent need to complement and go beyond technical and behavioural research to develop research that understands more effectively and equitably how we can address the social and political barriers meeting the UK’s net zero agenda.

The overall aims of JUST’s programme of research are to investigate:

  • What works, when, where and for whom - and what could work - to facilitate the development and implementation of joined-up interventions for a just transition to LCL?
  • How, where and with whose participation can sustainability transformations be accelerated – in ways that combine sustainability with justice – for citizens in places that benefit least from dominant economic and political systems?
  • What lessons for just sustainability transformations can governments, businesses, and communities learn from place-based, co-produced action research?

We will produce a ‘JUST toolkit’, comprising a range of tools for communities, business, and policymakers across the UK to understand the challenges in accelerating sustainability transformations in their particular places, mobilising the insights from our research.

Research themes and places

We will organise our research around six principal themes that help us understand the dynamics of the transformations we document and seek to promote. Combined, these themes will enable us to explore the multiple dimensions (economic, ethical, political, socio-technical, and political) of LCL transformations and the interactions between them.

Each theme has two co-leads from the JUST team, and will produce a tool in the ‘JUST toolkit’. Each theme also has a working group (a ‘TWIG’, or Thematic Working and Innovation Group) to extend the Centre’s reach beyond the core team. 

  • Principles of Justice (co-leads Derek Bell and Sherilyn MacGregor). What does it mean principle and practice to say transition to a low carbon society should be ‘socially just’? What principles of justice should govern the transition? What institutional arrangements might best realise those principles? 
  • Policy, Governance and Change (co-leads Lucie Middlemiss and Matthew Paterson). How can just sustainability policies be implemented by different actors at different levels (e.g., local authorities, regional and devolved governments, national policy)? 
  • Built and Social Infrastructures (co-leads Stefan Bouzarovski and Claire Hoolohan). How do we (re)design and govern physical infrastructures and the social relations of care to enable just sustainability practices to thrive? How can decisions about infrastructure access and performance meet criteria of social, environmental, and spatial justice? 
  • Social and Solidarity Economies (co-leads Helen Holmes and Peter North). What innovations in socially just economic activity are emerging in the NofE to shape sustainability transformations? What alternative economic forms can be seeded, scaled up and proliferated elsewhere? 
  • Democratic Innovations (co-leads Jake Ainscough and Rebecca Willis). How do socio-economic inequalities shape the possibilities for democratic engagement in sustainability transformations? How can new forms of democratic participation be supported to allow different communities to shape the transition to sustainable low-carbon living? 
  • Methodological Innovation (co-leads Helen Holmes and Anne Owen). How do various forms of co-produced, place-based, people-centred knowledge production enable the circulation of knowledge to accelerate sustainability transformations? What methods measure intangible dimensions of social life such as power relations and fairness? 

Our research will be carried out principally across five regions in the North of England:  

  • Greater Manchester, led by James Evans 
  • Merseyside, led by Alexander Nurse
  • The North East, led by Danny Mackinnon
  • West Cumbria, led by Alexander Gormally-Sutton
  • West Yorkshire, led by Harriet Thew.

These places have mixed geographies (urban, rural, coastal) and substantial levels of deprivation, combined with histories of social, economic and environmental innovation. They have also been recent targets of UK-wide government attention (framed for a while under the term ‘Levelling Up’) to redress geographical inequalities, making them ideal for studying the intersections between sustainability and social justice.  

Each region has a place lead, who will direct research in that area and build a team of researchers (which we call PARTs – Place-based Action Research Teams), working closely with a wide range of stakeholders in those places (community organisations, businesses, local government).  

Alongside this place-based research, we are producing (led by Anne Owen) a large database of the key characteristics of neighbourhoods across the UK in relation to their ‘readiness’ for achieving transformations to low-carbon living. We will then use this database to develop a ‘place-matching tool’ as part of the JUST toolkit, so that insights from particular regions we study can be applied across the UK.