A Critical Review of the Work of the High Committee for a Just Transition in Belgium

Since its emergence in the 1990s in the American trade union world, the concept of just transition has occupied an increasingly important place in political agendas, as evidenced by its integration as a guiding principle in the EU Green Deal in 2019 and by the adoption of the COP 26 Just Transition Declaration in 2021. Belgium has also embarked on the path to a just transition with the organization, between May 2022 and November 2023, of the ‘Estates General for a just transition’. This participatory process launched by the Belgian Federal Minister for the Climate, the Environment, the Sustainable Development and the Green Deal has involved different types of actors distributed into four panels: academics in the ‘High Committee’, citizens in the ‘Citizens’ Agora’, civil society organizations in the ‘Forum’ and public administrations in the ‘CIDD’.
This presentation focuses on the work of the High Committee for a Just Transition. After introducing the process through which this work developed, it will delve into the resulting scientific report. This report, which reflects a year of transdisciplinary dialogue and analyses within the High Committee, explores three main questions:  What is just transition?, Why a just transition is needed in Belgium?, and How to organize and institutionalize the just transition in Belgium?. The presentation will conclude by highlighting the principal contributions, but also the limits of this work, thus opening the way to a collective discussion on how to do science for social-ecological transitions.

https://www.justtransition.be/fr/haut-comite-pour-une-transition-juste