Counterplans in the jobs vs environment tension: Understanding participatory politics in the Hauts-de-France (France) and IJmond (Netherlands) regions

There is an ongoing tension between protecting jobs while safeguarding the environment. In order to address this tension, governments employ ‘just transition’ policies aiming to balance workers’ material needs with the environmental transition. However, these policies do not always cater to the needs of communities, and non-state actors often develop alternative plans. The existing literature has primarily looked at state-led participatory processes that aim to deliver a ‘just transition’. In this paper, we propose a broader understanding of participation that includes spaces where counterplans emerge. Counterplans have the potential to present new political and economic imaginaries to overcome the ‘jobs vs environment’ tension. We ask what the capacity of non-state actors is to organise such alternative forms of participation and how they develop counterplans. To answer these questions, we examine state-led participatory processes and actors’ counterplans in two European Just Transition regions, the Hauts-de-France region of France and the IJmond region of the Netherlands. Over the course of a year, we interviewed 60 actors from a range of governmental and non-governmental organisations including trade unions, environmental groups and residents groups involved in the making of regional ‘just transition’ policies. Our comparative analysis shows that state-led participatory processes failed to engage key actors while other groups were advancing their own counterplans. While we can question whether these counterplans overcome the ‘jobs versus environment’ tension, they offer alternative spaces where these dynamics can be temporarily disrupted.