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Jeremy Brecher’s review of Dimitris Stevis’ new book Just Transitions: Promise and Contestation 

The late president of the AFL-CIO once quipped that the reason he didn’t believe in a just transition is because he had never seen one. It’s too bad that he didn’t live long enough to read Dimitris Stevis’ new book Just Transitions: Promise and Contestation. He would have been able to learn something about the just transitions that are occurring in countries around the world.

Stevis traces the idea of a “just transition” back to Tony Mazzocchi of the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers, now part of the Steelworkers. He shows that just transition is “now on the agenda” of “intergovernmental organizations and negotiations, governments, environmentalists, business, churches and labor unions around the world.” And he teases out the often contested ways the term has been used – and the varied strategies that are being advocated and used to implement it. 

Dimitris Stevis is the co-director of the Center for Environmental Justice at Colorado State University and a co-author of the LNS report Workers and Communities in Transition: Report of the Just Transition Listening Project.