Just Transitions Law: Putting Labour Law to Work on Climate Change

摘要

If governments are to confront climate change, and to use law as a means to facilitate a transition away from a high carbon economy, they will need public support. That support is unlikely to be forthcoming unless policies are in place to protect those families and communities who will be adversely affected during the transition. This basic observation is at the root of just transition movement and policy platform. To implement a just transition strategy, governments need to design policies that cross existing government ministerial portfolios and legal regimes. A key challenge is how to coordinate this cross-cutting, multi-disciplinary project to create a coherent legal and policy model. Legal scholars can assist with this difficult project by helping to undercover useful legal and factual patterns and providing a normative framework for re-organizing legal materials. One way scholars have responded to similar challenges in the past is to develop new legal fields that re-organize existing categories. If the exercise is successful, the new legal field can expose useful new ways of looking at the legal world, and expose patterns theretofore unseen.