For the latest installment of the Critical Conversations series — devoted to deep, thoughtful conversations around dimensions of a gender-just transition — we spoke with Katie Swan-Nelson, a Scottish just transition advocate working on climate and development strategies at the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD).
Prior to joining the UN, Katie held various positions in academia, government, and civil society, including the Scottish Just Transition National Commission. Katie’s work supports countries in national policy planning for just transition, and in this discussion with WEDO’s Sinead Magner and Mara Dolan, she offers grounded insights on macroeconomic challenges, international cooperation, and the imperative of linking national strategies with global frameworks.
The transcribed interview below has been edited for length and clarity. Watch the video of the full conversation.
WEDO: UNCTAD does a lot to support countries in their national policy planning around a just transition. At the global level, we often don’t get a glimpse into that kind of context-specific thinking around how a specific country or place might be experiencing just transition challenges. What have you learned from doing this kind of national policy work?
Katie: When it comes to trying to bridge the gap between the national level challenges of delivering a just transition and the global discussions, I think one of the key messages that have come loud and clear to me is that while every national just transition strategy – and I say national though just transitions happen at every level because the primary mode of delivery will be the state — as much as they will be unique because of the distinct circumstances of every country, developing countries in general face a lot of the same constraints. That is what we try to bring to some of the discussions in the global arena. What we find is that across the three means of implementation, finance, technology, and capacity-building, most developing countries are struggling with the same challenges.
With finance, accessing adequate finance for their climate plans, but also being able to build the virtuous cycles of macroeconomic development that are so fundamental to being able to both develop and achieve climate goals at the same time. From the technology perspective, there is a real challenge in accessing affordable, low-emissions technologies that could help them leapfrog industrially so they don’t have to go through a high-emissions pathway to achieve those virtuous macroeconomic cycles. From the capacity-building perspective, things like land use, informality, and institutional capacity.
These are challenges that are replicated across many developing countries and act as a barrier to achieving just transitions. One thing that comes out loud and clear is that, while there are differences, there are many similarities.
WEDO: Trade undergirds so much of what we are talking about in relation to energy, debt, social service provision, natural resource governance, etc. What are some things you wish climate advocates or folks committed to a just transition knew about the trade in relation to the conversation about just transition policy?
Katie: If you speak to people who have been working in trade justice for a long time, they are coming with that institutional knowledge of what’s happened in recent decades in terms of trade liberalisation and the successes and failures of that. When you speak to climate people, the perspective is very much on emissions reductions, adaptation investments, and the response to climate impacts. That link between climate and trade is tough because, on the one hand, you don’t want to instinctively say trade is good in and of itself, because I think that the evidence is clear that how you trade and how you structure that trade regime is critical to whether or not that leads to positive development impacts. We’ve seen major shortcomings in that, whether that’s premature deindustrialisation, which often has very intersectional dimensions, impacting the poorest, women, and migrants more than other categories within a society.
When it comes to climate, emissions reductions without thinking about the structure of that economy and how it trades won’t lead to the sort of holistic, whole-of-economy, virtuous development approach we aim for. Emissions reductions without thinking about the economic trajectory that any given country is on is not looking at the whole picture.
At the moment, we already have a trading system that hasn’t delivered all the benefits expected. We have seen a few trends, like market concentration in some big multinational companies. We have seen countries trading more but earning less, staying in the bottom rungs of global value chains. We have seen limited technology transfer and support for countries to diversify and upgrade through trade. This should mean that we need to do things a little bit differently. That requires thinking about trade in terms of the developmental elements that could support countries here — I’m thinking about special and differential treatment. If you’re not in the trade world, but if you’re in the climate world, you know Common But Differentiated Responsibilities (CBDR) — that’s the equity element of the climate world. But special and differential treatment (SDT) in the trade world is kind of a similar, analogous mechanism. It’s this concept that developing countries need support in hand. They need a little bit more policy space in order to trade equally and fairly with other trading partners. What we’ve seen is a restriction or a sort of restraint on special and differential treatment as a concept.
We need facilitative measures instead of punitive ones. I say punitive because that is the material experience that developing countries are having when they’re looking down the road at measures like carbon border adjustment mechanisms and other things that appear to punish them for being locked into high-emissions industries that are part of a global value chain system. They feel like they have little maneuver to get out of these mechanisms, which feel like punishment for a trading system that hasn’t enabled them to upgrade, diversify, and trade well in order to have a positive economic development. We need measures that are going to extend adequate finance, share technology, and really support them through trade to be able to do that positive, low-emissions development.
My message would be: think facilitation, not punishment.
WEDO: You talk a lot in your work about the systemic challenge of debt, including incidents of debt restructuring incentivising more fossil fuel extraction or working against climate goals. Can you explain the scale of debt as a barrier to a global just transition, and what debt means for a country pursuing one?
Katie: The headline statistic from a recent UNCTAD conference was that 3.4 billion people are living in countries that have to spend more on interest on debt than on health and education. If you have an economy funneling so many resources just to keep the creditors at bay, you’re not able to invest in adaptation and mitigation measures, as well as the social measures that can together form a just transition. We know that just transitions require a level of institutional planning, consideration, preparation, mitigation of unintended consequences, and forward thinking that is expensive. Without the fiscal space to do that, just transitions won’t happen. We might see some climate transitions. We might see some emissions reduction. But along the way, we will also see a lot of backtracking on development gains, on poverty eradication, and on inequalities. This is where the debt question becomes really important because the framework that we currently have for thinking that a country has a sustainable amount of debt implies that the first priority is paying off creditors, and that austerity is a viable economic strategy to get out of that debt. These frameworks need to be revised to make space for the time investments we need, as well as the social investments we need, because we need all of those things together. Otherwise, that virtuous macroeconomic development cycle will never emerge, and countries will have to remain in this perpetual stagnation and vulnerability, waiting for the next crisis to hit.
WEDO: International cooperation is a major sticky issue in negotiations. What are successful cooperation mechanisms, what would they demand and provide, and why are they so key?
Katie: We know that no just transition is isolated. We live on a global planet, and that means we live in a globalised economy, and all economies are interdependent on one another. We see this in the sort of trade shocks that have happened this year and financial shocks that have happened in the past five years since the pandemic, that leave no country untouched. One country’s transition is so interdependent with other countries, whether those are its neighbours or the big systemic economies like the U.S. or China, which have an outsized role in determining the direction of the global economy.
Thinking about the different axes of cooperation, the financial axis of being able to have adequate finance for the sort of investment that is needed in just transitions, whether from public development banks, the international financial institutions, the market where private sector finance may have a role, or from your own domestic resources, that cooperation on ensuring adequate access to suitable finance for the investments is critical. At the same time, there’s also the cooperation element of trying to build a more stable global economy. Just transitions demand stability: the ability to plan, to assume you can take on debt, and to know your currency won’t be attacked the next year as bondholders flee to safety in the US due to another financial shock. These sorts of stability tools that are not available to many developing countries need to be strengthened, too.
There’s also the axis of being able to think about the upgrading that I’ve mentioned before — not just upgrading to a higher value-added economy, but also to a low-emissions economy that will require partnerships, both between countries, whether that’s in like energy systems or transport systems, but also North-South support or South-South support, and sharing technologies which can foster that sort of productive low-emissions development. It’s worth mentioning here the barrier posed by intellectual property rules and how the system of intellectual property we saw during the pandemic, for example, with the vaccines, prevents the homegrown development of certain fundamental technologies and materials. It’s not just about wanting them for your own security in your country, but about being able to create Indigenous technologies that are suitable for your population, for your context. And also to support competition to open licensing could be a really important tool for sharing technologies and allowing more abundant competition and innovation. I would love to see more plurilateral initiatives between countries that are coalitions of the willing, exploring technology and industry-sectoral partnerships that can link from the chain of workers to research and development to the initiation of designs to industrial and infrastructure build-out, whether that’s between one localised region, or North-South, South-South, across different regions. I also think about management and anticipation of potential shocks and spillover effects — some countries will implement policies that will have potential negative effects on other countries. Instead of navigating that through escalating tensions or restrictions, which challenge the multilateral regime and cooperation, I think we need some sort of space for mediation and mitigation, more spaces for that kind of cooperation and overcoming of challenges, because it is a dream to imagine that such tensions won’t emerge. They will.
WEDO: The mandate to establish a global just transition mechanism was created at COP30 last year. What are the essential components that we need to see to advance a people-centred just transition, specifically around gender justice?
Katie: The macro distributional impacts of just transitions have huge implications for inequalities, whether they are gender, racial, informal, or formal workers. This is sort of the crux of just transitions, particularly at the national or local level. If we’re thinking about the added value of a mechanism in a multilateral space, it’s going to be trying to address issues between countries, but also issues that emerge where one country may have some questions and challenges, and it needs support or capacity building, or more understanding or knowledge of what other people are doing elsewhere. The Just Transition Commission in Scotland heard that their policy documents were being used by officials in Botswana because the ILO didn’t have anything else to offer that might be more suitable for their context. I hope it was useful, but to be frank, if I were a Botswanan official, I’d be looking for someone from the African continent to be sharing that knowledge. It’s not just about overcoming or finding and learning from those countries that are pioneering some just transition strategies. It’s also allowing that peer-to-peer space of “we both have this challenge, how can we overcome that?”
Number one, a peer-to-peer function; number two, a learning function, and a capacity-building function from those who have gone before, those who have been first movers. Number three, an overcoming of differences function, a navigation of where something might be contested, where there might be spillover impacts, before you’re taking things to the World Trade Organization or to other mediation services. There could be a space for non-binding discussions and non-binding negotiations, and exploration there.
In thinking about the gender dimensions in particular, because we live in a very gendered economy, all three of them will interact in some way. Looking at countries that are successfully addressing issues like social protection, care work, who are thinking about just transitions, not just in terms of energy, systems, but also in terms of social infrastructure, that critical fundamental foundation that all economies require to thrive — I think that that would be a huge addition to any global just transition discussion. Otherwise, we remain in a very siloed space, only thinking about industrial energy transitions and not thinking about these other fundamental components of a just transition.
WEDO: How has your perspective or approach to this work changed over time through your experience working with movement partners, governments, and, now, the UN?
Katie: On the whole, I have only strengthened my belief that a just transition is the only way we are going to deliver a climate-just world that also addresses and tackles all the other pressing social issues we have. The just transition is the way that you address some of the biggest threats to multilateralism, the biggest threats to national stability. I also have not changed my opinion on the fact that internationalism and solidarity are the main modalities through which that can be successful. I truly believe that there is a future world where everyone can live a prosperous life without that coming at the expense of someone else’s prosperous life — that there is a world where we can meet those original UN foundational goals and visions of what the world should be in terms of peace, in terms of poverty eradication, in terms of equality.
