Critical Conversations: Delivering a Gender-Just Transition

Bringing Hidden Ideas to Light

Through dialogue with activists, researchers, and community leaders, we surface analysis that is often missing from mainstream climate and energy debates and connect lived experience to policy conversations.

The series creates space for reflection, learning, and collective sense-making at a moment when the meaning of just transition is being actively contested.

Why These Conversations Matter

The concept of a just transition emerged from labor movements calling for a shift to sustainable economies that protect workers’ rights and dignity. As the term gains traction in global climate policy, it is increasingly narrowed to technical or sectoral transitions focused on energy and industry.

This risks overlooking the deeper systems of inequality that shape whose labor is valued, whose lives are protected, and whose voices are heard. Without confronting power, care, extractivism, and colonial legacies, transition strategies will fail to deliver justice.

How Critical Conversations Works

Through Critical Conversations, we:

• Host interviews with feminist, grassroots, and frontline thinkers and practitioners
• Explore themes often sidelined in policy spaces, including care work, consent, extractivism, petro-masculinity, and green colonialism
• Share insights in accessible formats that invite reflection rather than prescription
• Connect narrative and analysis to ongoing advocacy and policy debates

Each conversation focuses on one dimension of a gender-just transition and centers voices rooted in lived experience.

Promoting Knowledge and Understanding

Critical Conversations broadens public and policy understanding of what just transition can and must mean. The series helps advocates, policymakers, and funders engage more critically with transition narratives and supports the development of approaches grounded in care, dignity, and collective liberation.

Rather than offering fixed answers, the series invites deeper questions about how transitions are defined and who gets to define them.

How Critical Conversations Connects to Our Broader Work

Critical Conversations moves minds by challenging dominant narratives and making feminist analysis accessible and relevant. It complements WEDO’s advocacy, research, and convening by grounding systems change work in reflection, dialogue, and movement knowledge.