The green transition is increasingly perceived as unjust by various stakeholders. Academic debates revolve around decarbonisation and coal phase-out legislation, the rush for critical minerals, new forms of renewable energy, regional strategies and the lack of effective coordination mechanisms, and policy gaps between economic and workforce development strategies and socio-ecological protections. Based on six case studies carried out between 2023 and 2025, this article identifies future vulnerabilities arising from the reproduction of intersectional socio-environmental inequalities in the EU's just transition, thereby expanding the frame of socio-environmental justice (SEJ) through the lens of prospective environmental justice (PEJ). By centring analysis on the prospective production of SEJ and creation of green sacrifice zones, PEJ encourages scholarship and policy to confront the cross-sectoral and structural inequalities that green transition policies, as expressions of green capitalism, often inherit and amplify. We address a gap in comparative studies that empirically and qualitatively engage with the grassroots effects of the transition in Southern and Eastern Europe, discussing its structural conditions and evidencing place-based lived experiences. This article contributes to mapping prospective (re)vulnerabilisation in Europe's green/just transition and the making of green sacrifice zones, wherein certain groups, identities, lands, and livelihoods are precast as dispensable in the pursuit of climate goals. Our contribution builds understanding of what it means to be made vulnerable in the technocratic shadow of the green transition in Europe's periphery.
Small modular reactors (SMRs) have been proposed as a way to decarbonise urban district heating. To be technically and economically viable, SMRs should be located close to existing district heating networks and thus near residents. This would likely raise questions about fairness of, for example, the distribution of risks and benefits, and the opportunities to participate in SMR site selection. This article examines the role of energy justice in the construction of the technoscientific promise of SMRs. Such a construction process entails institutionalisation of the promise in, for example, policies, legislation, regulation, and funding decisions, and its materialisation in R&D, prototype, and commercial projects. The article analyses how energy justice considerations are used in either building or undermining the two key pillars of a technoscientific promise-its legitimacy and credibility. To be considered legitimate, a promise must address a widely recognised and urgent societal problem, whereas for credibility, it must be perceived as viable in practice. The processes whereby legitimacy and credibility are constructed and deconstructed, to foster or undermine the institutionalisation and materialisation of the promise, have significant implications for justice and equity across time, space, and groups of society. Building on earlier research on just energy transitions, the SMR promises in Finnish cities are analysed from three analytically distinct yet overlapping perspectives: distributive, recognition, and procedural justice. The material consists of documents and news items on R&D, policymaking, and municipal SMR initiatives.
Concepts such as ecology and disconnection are useful to provide a comprehensive response to the malaise of representative democracy. The article explains these concepts in relation to the interactive nature of democratic representation. It also identifies three analytical levels of the representative disconnect: governance, social intermediation, and the affective level. On the basis of this theoretical framework, the article maps an empirical phenomenology of the representative disconnect. A preliminary examination of data drawn from a survey of representative elites and the general public suggests that the pessimism permeating many interpretations of the crisis of representative democracy may be tempered by some empirical evidence. Negative attitudes persist; however, they do not necessarily preclude the possibility of renewed alignment among the actors operating within the representative ecology.
Resilience and security have become undeniable governance imperatives—sometimes attaining similar, near-synonymous, connotations in contemporary security strategies. Long-term investments in dual-use civilian and military infrastructure and functions, like drone walls or surveillance-equipped wind power parks, result in closer handshakes between resilience and security in democratic societies. However, how these two concepts interrelate in practice—i.e., which of them becomes the dog and which becomes the tail—is a matter of great importance to the ability of societies to govern their affairs in a sustainable, fair, and democratic manner. The fusion of resilience and hard security through the co-investment, co-location, and co-engagement of civilian and military investments, infrastructure, and functions carries significant political and legal risk for infrastructure operators, including the possibility of harm to the civilian population and objects. The obfuscation of civilian and military roles and capabilities entrenches a risk-averse security culture and erodes democratic measures and processes and may in that way build strategic advantage for authoritarian adversaries. Preoccupied with the blending of security and resilience in wind energy infrastructure in the Baltic Sea region, the article calls for scrutiny of relevant decisions and applicable legal frameworks. It bridges the literature on Polish and Swedish policy approaches to civil–military collaboration in the energy sector with the international legal literature on dual-use objects and civil–military accountability to reveal unresolved legal challenges acute in the Baltic Sea region.
In recent decades, cities have developed diverse urban food governance innovations, ranging from integrated food strategies to translocal alliances and targeted programmes. While these efforts have advanced systemic and multi-actor approaches, questions remain about their material grounding, inclusivity, embeddedness in urban dynamics, and impact. Emerging scholarship has begun to explore urban food infrastructures (UFIs) to better understand how the material and relational foundations of urban food systems shape sustainability and food security outcomes. At the same time, public food infrastructures are increasingly championed in policy recommendations as key to building just and resilient food systems. However, conceptual clarity and analytical frameworks for examining UFIs and their governance remain limited. Drawing on insights from governance, urban, and infrastructure studies, we develop an analytical framework to advance the definition of UFIs and unpack the diverse public roles involved in governing them. This framework is applied to three types of infrastructures in Barcelona: urban community gardens, cooperatives, and food insecurity initiatives. Findings show that UFIs are relationally constituted and politically embedded, revealing multiple public sector roles that challenge conventional understandings of public infrastructures and state-led action. By advancing the conceptualisation of UFIs, the article offers a new entry point for urban food governance that connects material, relational, and political dimensions; contributes to policy debates on accountability for public sector action and inaction; and highlights the importance of further interrogating the publicness of infrastructures in shaping just and resilient urban food futures within a post-2030 agenda.
