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Abstract

The transition from fossil fuels poses risks to communities and industries dependent on carbon-heavy work. This article calls for geographical scholarship to engage more fully with the experiences of those ‘stranded communities’ at risk of such change. It critically reviews examples of deindustrialisation and the decline of coal communities to demonstrate how energy transitions will animate new work and extend geographical understandings of economic restructuring. This paper closes with an agenda for new scholarship to proactively envision decarbonisation in ways that are anticipatory and preventative of future processes of labour restructuring and loss.

Keywords

climate policy decarbonisation deindustrialisation just transition energy justice

I Introduction

“It’s devastating. This is all I’ve known. Steel is all I’ve known... This is the lifeblood of Port Talbot.”

(Channel 4 News, 2024)

These are the words of a steelworker in January 2024, discussing the decision of Tata Steel to close two remaining blast furnaces at its plant in Port Talbot, Wales, putting 2800 jobs at risk. The steelworks first opened in 1951 and employed 20,000 at its peak in the 1960s. Its closure had been a possibility for some time, primarily due to financial challenges linked to cheaper alternatives on global markets (Bowler, 2016). Despite this, Tata Steel’s 2024 announcement was linked by some to climate action and the move to an electric arc furnace that would reduce emissions but require less workers to operate (Halligan, 2024; Owen, 2024).

A transition away from fossil fuels represents a new stage in political, economic, and cultural terms: necessitating the wholesale transformation of patterns of energy demand and consumption and the technologies and infrastructure used across energy grids. The 2016 Paris Agreement’s objective of limiting global heating to 2°C will require more than 80% of all proven fossil fuel resources to remain unextracted (Bos and Gupta, 2019). This will lead to a series of ‘stranded assets’: sunk investments abandoned by fossil fuel companies in the wake of climate policy. Fossil fuel reserves and infrastructure have previously become ‘stranded’ for reasons ranging from high transportation costs to over-saturated markets (Bos and Gupta, 2019; Khalilpour and Karimi, 2011). Yet, climate breakdown has emerged as a key driver for new forms of ‘stranding’ in terms of its physical impacts and the policies implemented to mitigate it (Caldecott et al., 2021). Under different climate stabilisation scenarios, fossil fuel reserves may lose up to 50% of their value (Hansen, 2022) – such a devaluation could well trigger a global financial crisis (Van der Ploeg and Rezai, 2020).

The future of communities dependent upon carbon-heavy work in the face of such devaluation is significant for future geographical work. Decarbonisation represents the next substantial economic change for many: local and regional economies will be restructured, patterns of employment altered, and new geographies of inequality emerge. New technologies, such as hydrogen and carbon capture and storage, may surface whilst others enter a managed decline. A research agenda for exploring the experiences, aspirations, losses, and futures of those communities to be affected by any transition from carbon-heavy work is necessary to fully understand the implications of decarbonisation for many industries and industrial regions.

In this paper, I use the term ‘stranded communities’ to refer to communities dependent on carbon-heavy work at risk of redundancy due to changes in climate and energy policy and the economic restructuring that it will bring (While and Eadson, 2022). Whilst previous patterns of economic change have been studied and explored retrospectively, the ‘stranding’ of communities in decarbonisation remains emergent. This vocabulary is nascent, used in recent academic, advocacy, and journalistic works to describe the risks posed to communities by a phase-down of high-emitting industries without supportive policy (Achakulwisut et al., 2023; Diski et al., 2021; Nelson and Mahtani, 2019). This parallels recent work advocating for place-based approaches to understand how decarbonisation has costs and benefits for particular spaces and communities (Devine-Wright, 2022; Eadson et al., 2023).

The pivoting of new research to study the faces and drivers of these processes today would allow for an approach that not only reflects on the lessons of historic episodes but seeks to identify and understand communities at risk of future disruption and loss. Patterns of job emergence and loss will have important implications for many communities that require tracing and illumination across human geography scholarship. Much of the work on these futures has taken place in the sub-discipline of energy geographies that has provided numerous findings highlighting the devaluation of fossil fuel work and the tensions between decarbonisation and future jobs agendas. I chart these contributions through examples of deindustrialisation and coal-mine closure from the UK, USA, and Western Europe.

However, there are important global dimensions to contemporary economic restructuring. Lost jobs at Port Talbot were accompanied by accusations of hypocrisy: Tata Steel, citing emissions reductions as a reason to close blast furnaces in Wales, was building a new facility at its Kalinganagar complex in Odisha, India. One community’s loss was embedded in global flows of emissions reductions and trade networks. These multi-scalar dimensions challenge work on economic restructuring and prompt new understandings and expectations of how such change might be formed (Clark, 2022; Pike, 2022). It is necessary to move these cases of past transitions towards more anticipatory work on the geographies of ‘stranding’ to explore how new experiences across the Global North and Global South will depart from those of previous economic and labour restructuring. Whilst scholarship has charted previous economic restructuring through its impacts, it can be positioned to understand future transitions as they happen: the study of potential ‘strandings’ allows new opportunities to explore ‘left-behind places’ before, during and after they undergo change.

The subsequent sections set out a geographical understanding of ‘stranded communities’ in energy transitions across several stages. First, I highlight how contemporary discussions of carbon lock-in and stranded assets need to be broadened to include communities dependent on carbon-heavy work. To do so, I then draw on historical precedents of deindustrialisation and the decline of coal communities to highlight the repercussions of previous economic shocks. In the final section, I reflect on how future work might trace and illuminate the varied experiences of stranded communities, varying across spaces and regional contexts and within communities themselves.

II Stranded assets, stranded communities

The vocabulary of ‘stranded assets’ describes ‘an economic resource that has become non-performing before the end of its useful life’ (Unruh, 2019: 399). This may include financial contracts, infrastructure or technology, or sites of extraction – all of which become liabilities for their owner when they cease to generate revenue. A terminology of ‘stranding’ is analogous with the conceptual language of ‘lock-in’ used to explore how reliance on fossil fuels can lead to forms of ‘path dependency’ across different sectors and condition possibilities for institutional change and innovation (Arthur, 1989; David, 1985; Unruh, 2000, 2002). Forms of lock-in have been studied across the transport and energy sectors, with structural conditions delimiting the potential of new, less-polluting alternatives (Markusson and Haszeldine, 2009; Urry, 2013).

If a process or technology can be ‘locked in’, it can also be left adrift in the wake of major change. Contemporary narratives of stranded assets provide an opportunity to trace such instability. In 2015, Mark Carney, then the Governor of the Bank of England warned of ‘potentially huge’ financial losses from climate change action if carbon budgets restricted the further extraction of fossil fuels (Clark, 2015). Some companies have already acted to mitigate potential financial risks: BP (2020) announced writing off US$17.5 billion of fossil fuel assets in 2020, as part of a review of its portfolio driven by the Covid-19 pandemic and a move away from fossil fuels. Risks associated with asset stranding are not confined to the private sector: an estimated three-quarters of the fossil fuel assets deemed at risk of becoming stranded by climate stabilisation are owned by national governments (Hansen, 2022).

Whilst ‘stranded assets’ have become part of the vocabulary of climate action, less is said about how asset stranding will impact certain regions and communities more than others. There is a need for research to trace and understand the communities that risk being left ‘stranded’ alongside the assets and infrastructure cut adrift in global climate action. In many communities, stranded assets will lead to the closure of workplaces, the loss of jobs, and broader social, economic, and cultural changes.

It is necessary to expand the economic notion of a ‘stranded asset’ by foregrounding it in the place where it is found and the workforce whose toil made it profitable in the first place. Goldstein et al. (2023) have highlighted how a language of ‘lock-in’ can be deployed beyond a focus on fossil fuel dependence to illuminate the complex experiences of other policy changes which drive behaviour change, shifting patterns of work, or socio-economic or cultural exclusion. The same is true of ‘stranded assets’, as carbon lock-in risks industrial and manufacturing sectors becoming vulnerable to economic change. This includes carbon-heavy sectors (such as steel, cement, and plastics manufacturing), as well as sectors that are linked to forms of carbon lock-in in behavioural terms (such as car manufacturers). The experiences of communities living in regions and working in industries and sectors vulnerable to ‘stranding’ requires cross-disciplinary approaches to trace, analyse, illuminate, and amplify how transitions are experienced and what futures may be available (or foreclosed) to those left ‘stranded’. As governments in industrialised countries develop new policies to support industrial transition and emergent sectors (such as hydrogen or carbon capture), it is important for scholarship to be well-placed to interrogate the geographies of these interventions to both highlight the important local specificities of such changes and how they might create new ‘stranded communities’.

III Conceptualising a ‘stranded community’ across geographical scholarship

Once described as an ‘academic borderland’ (Calvert, 2016), the field of energy geographies has become a rich, vibrant sub-discipline that uncovers the constitutive role of space and spatial imaginaries in shaping how energy transitions are experienced and highlighting the consequences of decarbonisation across scales, territories, landscapes, and everyday life. Overlapping with a broader ‘spatial turn’ in energy research itself (Bridge, 2018), scholars have highlighted the intersection of energy systems with racialised injustice and precarity (Lennon, 2021; Newell, 2021), marketisation and financialisation (Knuth, 2018; Sadowski and Levenda, 2020), dispossession and elite power (Batel and Devine-Wright, 2017; Dunlap and Arce, 2021; Sovacool et al., 2019), gendered exclusion (Kumar, 2018; Mang-Benza, 2021), and socio-technical imaginaries and political legacies (Delina, 2018; Plumridge Bedi, 2018).

An organising concept of ‘stranded communities’ represents a new terminology in energy geographies work attending the energy ‘spaces’ and ‘landscapes’ constituted by policy decisions, political tensions, technological innovations, shifting cultures and practices of consumption, and investment flows (Bridge et al., 2013; Bridge and Gailing, 2020; Castán Broto, 2019; Frantál et al., 2014). Altered energy geographies are often expressed in terms of cross-regional relationships, through the shifting and sharing of costs and benefits of decarbonisation – be it through spatial convergence (i.e. through normalising new regulations or standards), spatial differentiation (in which core-peripheral relationships will be reformed, consolidated, or altered), and the changing spatialities of energy access and justice (Balta-Ozkan et al., 2015; Bridge et al., 2013; Golubchikov and O’Sullivan, 2020; O’Sullivan et al., 2020; Robinson and Mattioli, 2020; Yenneti et al., 2016).

Energy geographies scholarship has detailed ‘lock-in’ in social, political, economic, technological, and affective terms (Bridge et al., 2013; Huber, 2013; Urry, 2004; Valdivia, 2008). A language of ‘lock-in’ has been used to signal the ubiquity of fossil fuel infrastructure in energy grids (Bouzarovski et al., 2016; Buschmann and Oels, 2019; Trencher et al., 2020) and how the emergence of renewable energies can trouble such dominance (Blondeel et al., 2021; Van der Loos et al., 2020). Built environments remain designed and managed to serve fossil fuel economies with the presence of fossil fuels in energy mixes difficult to reverse due to a discursive and cultural prominence, evident in discussions in scholarship of ‘petro-cultures’, ‘petro-masculinities’, and ‘petro-nostalgia’ (Daggett, 2018; Orpana, 2021; Tewkesbury, 2021) and broader conceptualisations of ‘carbon democracy’ (Mitchell, 2013), or ‘fossil capital’ (Angus, 2016; Malm, 2016).

Episodes of carbon lock-in occur across supply chains, production lines, and energy grids. It is at these sites where the vulnerability of fossil fuel infrastructure to asset stranding is found. In exploring this process of lock-in and stranding, this paper follows the work of energy geographers who have stressed the importance of the devaluation of assets in transitions (Bridge, 2018; Furnaro, 2021; Knuth, 2017; Nelson and Ramana, 2023). Much of this works responded to a previous tendency of energy geographies scholarship to focus on new technologies, with less said about how incumbent entities and infrastructures come to be devalued and abandoned or respond to such processes (see Bridge, 2018: 17). Drawing on case studies of cleantech innovation, calls for divestment, and the financial industry’s responses to stranded assets, Knuth (2017: 112) asserts that processes of ‘destabilisation’ and ‘devaluation’ are as important to conceptualising and exploring energy transitions as forms of value enclosure and exclusion:

“These struggles within capitalist centers and between green and fossil fuel-backed blocs of capital are only likely to heat up, with major ripples through their competing production geographies and resource peripheries.”

The future of stranded communities is found within these ‘ripples’: stories of jobs lost, new roles gained, and the consequences of such change. Kleinheisterkamp-Gonzalez (2023) has called for an ‘environmental labor geography’ that centres geographical scholarship discussing climate breakdown and ecological loss on worker-led movements and organised labour. However, discussions of the futures of work in a fossil-free economy have, until recently, been absent from much of energy geographies scholarship. In reviews of the field, Calvert (2016) discusses the geographies of ‘lock-in’ but does not mention the links between such processes and shifting patterns of work and Baka and Vaishnava (2020) highlight blindspots but do not discuss workers as constituency in transition. This relative absence has been troubled by recent work highlighting the lived realities of fossil fuel workers (Ablo, 2022; Jordhus-Lier et al., 2022), the organisation of labour in renewable energy work (Knuth, 2019; Pearse and Bryant, 2021), and the relationship between labour exploitation and the extraction and production of energy (Bouzarovski, 2022; Collard and Dempsey, 2017). Understanding these changing dynamics between regional economies and employment draws in discussions of the climate-induced precarity of work (Parsons and Natarajan, 2021), the precarity of climate work (Neimark et al., 2020), experiences of unemployment (Griffin, 2021), the agency of organised labour and trade unions (Atkins, 2023; Keil and Kreinin, 2022; Stevis and Felli, 2015), assertions of the false dichotomy of ‘environmental vs jobs’ (Feng, 2020; Pichler et al., 2021), and the shortcomings of new ‘green’ jobs (Sovacool et al., 2021).

An approach of ‘strandedness’ builds on this work to explore how the new workplaces and industries required by climate action will affect certain sectors and regions more than others: for example, through investment in coastal areas hosting offshore renewables and new cycles of devaluation in other regions (Devine-Wright, 2022; Rattle et al., 2024; Rattle and Taylor, 2023). These regional geographies and their influence in future energy transition necessitate approaches that link the insights of energy geographies of scholarship with discussions in the adjacent disciplines of regional studies and economy geography around geographical inequalities. Work in this vein has developed around a focus on ‘path creation’ or ‘path development’ in which new regional economic activities emerge (Isaksen and Trippl, 2017; MacKinnon et al., 2019). The emergence of these new pathways is conditioned by the interaction of patterns of investment and regulation, national policy priorities, industrial actors, and broader regional dynamics (Dawley et al., 2015; MacKinnon et al., 2019).

Work of evolutionary economic geography (EEG) has provided conceptual frameworks to understand how the importance of regional context in defining what sectors emerge and where. As Neffke et al., (2011: 261) argue, regional economic futures ‘do not start from scratch but are strongly rooted with the historical economic structure of the region’. Work on this includes a growing focus on institutions (Boschma and Capone, 2015), non-firm actors, such as universities (Hassink et al., 2019), and the presence of existing sectors and pathways, due to the need for existing skills in related industries (Boschma and Wenting, 2007). MacKinnon et al. (2022) highlight the importance of regional assets, in resource, infrastructure, material, human, and situation terms: ranging from the existing competencies and skills to extant norms and institutional actors. These, in turn, interact with key institutions and cross-scalar initiatives. Rather than being a purely market-driven process, new forms of path creation are dependent on accommodating national policy: evident in work exploring the creation of offshore wind sectors in different coastal regions that highlights the importance of national and regional policy approaches in supporting and giving legitimacy to nascent renewable energy sectors (Dawley, 2014; MacKinnon et al., 2019, 2022).

A vocabulary of ‘stranded communities’ builds on recent efforts in EEG to broaden conceptualisations of ‘left-behind places’ – a terminology that has provided a central route to making sense of geographical inequalities since 2008 (Pike et al., 2024). Recent decades have seen geographical imbalances in growth in economic prosperity and productivity between regions: with many regions experiencing long periods of economic decline. Many places that have suffered from economic restructuring remain described in disparaging terms – they are, in shorthand, the ‘rust belts’ and the ‘flyover country’ of many countries.

Work on path creation or dependency has often focused on the ‘drivers’ or ‘barriers’ for regional economic change – with infrastructure, employment, institutions, and innovation all explored in (Brauers and Oei, 2020; Matthews et al., 2015; Trippl et al., 2020). The notion of being ‘left-behind’ emphasises a process of decline and stagnation as final, with the movement of investment leading to geographic divergence. Yet, it is also relational: being grounded in notions of place attachment as much as in how people perceive their location in (or detachment from) production networks (Pike et al., 2024; Tomaney et al., 2024). Those living in areas that have undergone industrial change are ‘moral communities’, holding a sense of place-based belonging that helps residents make sense of change (Wuthnow, 2018). People’s perceptions of their quality of life and prosperity is, at times, linked to the perceived economic productivity of their region, or by its decline (McCann, 2020). Inter-regional inequalities in productivity can, in turn, have broader significance: giving rise to new ‘geographies of discontent’ (Los et al., 2017; McCann, 2020; Rodriguez-Pose, 2018).

The impacts of industrial change extend beyond the moment a plant or factor is closed. This is evident in the growing overlap between economic marginality and health problems in post-industrial areas (Draus et al., 2010; Thomas, 2016). In parts of the United States, this overlap has led to what Case and Deaton (2021) provocatively labelled as ‘deaths of despair’: or the increase in death rates amongst the middle-aged White population in rural communities from alcohol, drug overdoses, or suicide. These deaths of despair are deeply connected to broader geographies of access to health care (or denial of) and embodied experiences of place and inequality (DeVerteuil, 2022). Elsewhere, work exploring lifestyle and health behaviours has uncovered the continued importance of post-industrial economies and memories of lost work in how residents speak about health issues. For example, interviewees in post-industrial Fife, Scotland, told McGarrol (2020: 4) that lifestyles and behaviour were passed down generationally, being transmitted within certain occupations:

“in Methil and Buckie and those sorts o’ places they were all miners or ex-miners. I would say they tended to have different lifestyles to what I had coming from the country. They needed their social clubs and their beers.”

A focus on carbon-heavy work is also intricately linked to discussions of working conditions and environmental health: main employers are also often the main polluters in a region and the health impacts of local industrial activities are often central concerns for working-class communities (Navas et al., 2022). This pollution extends across a long period, often beyond the end of the ‘boomtown’ years of the industry (Bush et al., 2001; Feltrin et al., 2022). These sites of work may also provide fertile grounds for the emergence of working-class environmentalisms that push against capitalist processes of labour devaluation and ecological destruction (Barca and Leonardi, 2021; Bell, 2020). Their departure can also create new health outcomes and inequalities.

The changing regional and local economies to be brought by energy transitions lend weight to recent calls for more future-oriented work in economic geography (Gong, 2024). The geographies and vocabularies of previous rounds of economic restructuring will be inscribed with new places and communities left ‘stranded’ in decarbonisation. Notions of ‘strandedness’ and ‘stranded communities’ present a terminology to understand new industrial paths and escaped forms of carbon lock-in beyond the location of growing or declining industries and places of work and towards how such changes might be perceived before, experienced during, and remembered after the moment of change. We must all pay attention to the impacts of decarbonisation for communities living at its sharp end: facing the spectre of changing patterns of work conditions, practices, and opportunities. Emergent forms of ‘green’ path creation or path development might create new regional economies – yet it is not assured whether they will address existing uneven development and economic exclusion (Eadson and Van Veelen, 2023).

To further highlight the utility of an approach of a ‘geography of stranded communities’, I turn to two historical precedents: first, processes of deindustrialisation and, second, the closure of coal-mining facilities to highlight the relational impacts of the economic and industrial change as existing beyond energy and environmental relations. I then reflect on why and how energy transitions may shape new ‘stranded’ communities in ways that are different from these historic forms of restructuring.

IV Precedents for stranded communities

Industrial restructuring and its consequences for employment can take different forms. Massey and Meegan (1982) differentiate between ‘intensification’, referring to changes to increase labour productivity without new investment; ‘investment and technical change’, or where job losses are driven by investment in new technologies; and ‘rationalisation’, in which job losses are the direct result of disinvestment. Stranded communities can be conceptualised using the label of ‘rationalisation’, which Massey and Meegan (1982: 86) present as: ‘one of the theme-tunes of recession; its connotations of more sensible organization and order are frequently appealed to in explanation of cutbacks in production and closures of plant’. Similar examples of such departure of investment can be found in the historic processes of deindustrialisation and coal mine closure. It is these that I turn to in this section.

Deindustrialisation refers to the systematic disinvestment in a country or region’s industrial capacity, often due to the movement of investment or capital elsewhere to other jurisdictions (for cost savings) or activities (for revenue generation) (Bluestone and Harrison, 1982: 6). Scholarship on these processes is heavily rooted in historical experiences, often from the 1970s and 1980s: providing numerous explorations of different sectors experiencing industrial change through incumbency, management behaviour, or cost-shifting. These include the aviation sector (Gray et al., 1996), breweries (Pike, 2006; Strangelman, 2019), the movie industry (Christopherson and Storper, 1989), and sectors manufacturing kitchen appliances (Clarke, 2015), cars (Bailey and De Propris, 2014), and soup (Sidorick, 2009). The reasons for such relocation are often due to efforts by an employer to reduce costs and increase profitability. In Capital Moves, Cowie (1999) details how, over 70 years, the electronics manufacturer, RCA moved its production from industrial centres to poorer, rural areas to reduce costs, increase profits, and protect against militant trade unions. In this sense, deindustrialisation has often signalled a changing social contract between industry and labour, with expectations and experiences of work shifting alongside the changing locations of workplaces and industrial sites (Doussard et al., 2009). This is evident in how workers have deployed ‘moral economy’ arguments to contest closure and highlight the injustice of economic restructuring (Gibbs and Philipps, 2018; Philips, 2013).

Scholarship on deindustrialisation demonstrates how the impacts of transition and closure are about more than a loss of income, with the repercussions also deeply social and cultural (Nettleingham, 2019; Strangleman et al., 2013). Central within many works on deindustrialisation is what Linkon (2018: 1) has labelled as the ‘half-life of deindustrialisation’ or how industrial loss shapes patterns of memory, values, and social practices long after a facility has closed. Those living in the wake of declining industry are often described as holding nostalgia for what was lost (Clarke, 2015; Feltrin et al., 2022; Mah, 2012). In France, women previously employed by, the kitchen appliance manufacturer, Molineux, spoke of the bonne ambience on the production line, with the plant characterised by a warm atmosphere and sense of community (Clarke, 2015). This illuminates the various social, cultural, and historical factors that determine how deindustrialisation is experienced.

For some, the deindustrialisation of local areas may be celebrated – ending industrial sites’ pollution of local ecologies and bodies. Local communities hold memories of past accidents and the loss of life, as well as maintaining an awareness of local pollution and its impacts (Irwin et al., 1999; Thomas et al., 2022). However, closure also leaves deep scars that are experienced and internalised across generations. This can be found in the disruption of urban space and social spaces (Emery, 2022; High, 2019; Hincks and Powell, 2022) and patterns of place attachment (Mah, 2009), the replacement of permanent jobs with precarity (Beynon et al., 1994), and the persistence of pollution and contamination and ‘forever chemicals’ (Bush et al., 2001; Renfrew and Pearson, 2021).

Lost industry leaves behind concrete and steel: smokestacks and chimneys, blast furnaces and pipework, and the villages that housed workers. These structures highlight the importance of ruins in evoking ‘the process of remembering itself, its impossibilities and its multiplicities’ (Edensor, 2005a: 834, 2005b). Mah (2012) has detailed how these physical ruins exist alongside a sense of ‘industrial ruination’, in which structures like this cease to be merely static and physical but become inscribed with a wider significance, linked to community identity and memory. In all cases, ruination is a lived and embodied experience, formed of everyday interactions between residents, community, and changing spaces of industry and employment (Mah, 2012; Meier, 2013). Yet, ruins can also come to represent key sites of endurance – of a community experiencing change and rising beyond it. As Dawney (2020) has shown in the case of former nuclear sites in Visaginas, Lithuania, Soviet ruins became conduits for a community’s sense of enduring their regions becoming ‘stranded’ by monumental changes elsewhere.

Deindustrialisation often extends across decades. Beatty and Fothergill (2020) have highlighted how longer-term view of industrial change in the UK, linking current labour relations and uncertainties to the histories of industrial towns. Within this longer period, impacts were cumulative, collecting and hardening with each new round of change, redundancy, and restructuring. The cultural embeddedness of certain industries also alters perceptions of what comes next, including community perceptions of and responses to renewable energy infrastructure (Marshall, 2016) and visions of renewal (Nettleingham, 2019; Smith, 2016). This extends into the future: scholarship has traced the potential links between historical processes of deindustrialisation and contemporary moments of populist and right-wing politics (Rhodes, 2012; Scheiring, 2020) or feelings of shame and class stigmatisation (Nayak, 2019).

Whilst scholarship on deindustrialisation has focused on how communities in cities and towns experience it (Beatty and Fothergill, 2020; Christopherson and Storper, 1989; Doussard et al., 2009; Gray et al., 1996; High, 2019), industrial transition is not an explicitly urban process. Fossil fuel infrastructure and carbon-heavy work, such as work in coal mines creates similar patterns of reliance, vulnerability, and loss. The closure of a mine, as a primary employer, can have a significant knock-on effect on the local economy: marking a ‘fiscal rupture’ in which local financial flows and security are dramatically changed (Roemer and Haggerty, 2022). This, in turn, stimulates broader regional economic decline: it has been estimated that for every mining job lost in the USA, four roles in other regional sectors also disappear (UMWA, nd.).

Scholarship exploring the impacts of coal mine closure focuses on particular carbon-reliant regions: such as communities in the Welsh Valleys, the north-east and east midlands of England, or the Central Belt of Scotland (Beatty and Fothergill, 1996; Beynon and Hudson, 2021; Emery, 2018a; Gibbs, 2021), in Appalachia (Abraham, 2017; Feng, 2020; Hess et al., 2021; Smith, 2015) or Wyoming (Cha, 2020) in the United States, the German Ruhr (Abraham, 2017; Berger, 2019; Galgóczi, 2014), or the coalfields of Australia (Evans and Phelan, 2016; Snell, 2018; Weller, 2019). Many of the spaces and communities left ‘stranded’ by departing investment were built and developed to maximise economically productive spaces. In Central Queensland, Australia, increasing coal exports in the 1960s and 1970s led to the creation of new towns and workplaces and the total redesign of others, creating new dynamics between workers, employers, residents, and the state (Gibson, 1991). This results in a ‘lock-in’ for these communities, later leaving them ‘stranded’ as the local or regional coal sector was devalued.

Historically, many of these coal regions have been subject to processes of uneven development: being a bedrock for national industrial change yet not enjoying the full benefits (Liévanos et al., 2018; Mayer, 2022; Perdue and Gregory, 2012). In Appalachia, such imbalances in the coal economy led to the region being labelled as an ‘internal colony’ (Nyden, 1979). Similarly, in Hincks and Powell’s (2022) study of the former coalfields of Wales, the deindustrialisation of the Valleys and the closure of its coal mines was part of a broader schema in which the regions were stigmatised and pushed further to the political periphery. As a result, work on coal mine closure holds important overlaps with broader geographical work on stigmatisation (Butler et al., 2018; Hincks and Powell, 2022; Sisson, 2021). Emery (2022) has adopted the language of Nixon’s (2011) ‘slow violence’ to describe the attritional character of deindustrialisation in the former coalfields of Nottinghamshire in the Midlands of the UK. It is through the impacts and challenges that follow closure that communities can face a ‘chronic trauma’ through a lack of investment, opportunity, or neglect (Pain, 2019).

Any study of the closure of coal facilities becomes entangled with the emotive and embodied experiences of previous processes of change and closure (Beynon and Hudson, 2021; Johnston and Hielscher, 2017). The decline of coal has a difficult legacy in many former coal communities, overlapping with senses of lost masculinity (Hess et al., 2021) and camaraderie (Strangleman, 2001), disrupted social infrastructure (Tomaney et al., 2024); and a nostalgia and embodied memory of what was lost (Emery, 2018a: 2018bl Mayer, 2022). This cultural prominence, labelled a ‘cognitive lock-in’ by Hudson (2005), is frequently linked to the framing of coal as a common bond that forged communities and households and held them together (Carley et al., 2018). The closure of a mine alters these bonds, with occupation no longer being a primary driver of social cohesion (Parry, 2003). Research with young men in former coal communities documents how historically entrenched expectations of masculinity linked to labour and industry were punctured by changes in employment (Emery, 2020; Nayak, 2003). This also has gendered dimensions: linked to patriarchal household dynamics, community values and action, and industrial legacy (Bennett, 2015; Stephenson and Spence, 2013; Sutcliffe-Braithwaite and Thomlinson, 2018).

In light of these dimensions, Rohse et al. (2020) call for a fusing of energy geographies with works of emotional geography to understand how the decline of coal communities interacts with patterns of everyday life and embodied experiences of change to engender a sense of loss (Della Bosca and Gillespie, 2018; Emery, 2018b, 2022). A sense of place and connection between community, landscape, and coal is also important: often defining how transition policies might be received (Crowe and Li, 2020; Olson-Hazoun, 2018). Fossil fuel interests have mobilised such a sense of place to romanticise ‘rust belt identities’ to push for shale gas extraction (Rich, 2016) and discredit environmentalist protestors (Brock et al., 2022). Such identities can be difficult to reconcile, with former coal regions centring economic visions and planning around the resource long after its devaluation and departure (Cha, 2020; Della Bosca and Gillespie, 2018).

Scholarship exploring these previous rounds of economic restructuring highlights the need to foreground in the places, communities, and lives of those affected. Both demonstrate how the impacts of plant closure and industrial change extend far beyond the experience of job loss: they include experiences of significant socio-cultural change and decline. These traumatic episodes, memories of which weigh heavy for many, represent prototypes for future stranded communities: holding particular geographies concentrated in certain regions vulnerable to change.

Despite these lessons from previous episodes, processes of ‘stranding’ will challenge expectations of economic restructuring in the 21^st century. First, processes of devaluation and asset stranding diverge from the focus on ‘rationalisation’ evident in episodes of deindustrialisation and coal mine closure. Writing in the early 1980s, Massey and Meegan (1982: 87) understood rationalisation as a ‘by-product of changing relative levels of profitability, as investment flows to those areas of the economy where the return is the highest’. This can be seen in how deindustrialisation is linked to corporations moving operations in a quest for lower expenditure and increased profits (Cowie, 1999) or the closure of coal mines as linked to increasing costs of production being undercut by facilities elsewhere (Jordan et al., 2018). Stranded communities trouble such a definition of industrial change: their devaluation is mandated by national carbon budgets and policy change rather than altered profitability or investment patterns.

Second, a terminology of ‘strandedness’ can illuminate experiences that are different from what has come before. Scholarship on deindustrialisation has been dominated by widely cited case studies of workplaces in the Global North (Clark, 2022; Pike, 2022). The same is true for coal mine closure, with studies focused on the loss of productive seams across many regions of the Global North. As a result, understandings of contemporary processes risk being rooted in particular places, industries, and explanations linked to a relatively narrow set of examples. This legacy of cases from the Global North neglects other communities and places that have become ‘stranded’. In his discussion of places that have suffered from previous socio-economic decline, Rodriguez-Pose (2018) asserts a global picture: including the regions of Bihar, India; the central Lowlands of Thailand; and Guyuan, Lanzhou, and Yichun in China. Lessons of deindustrialisation in the Global North do not necessarily fit with potential experiences in the Global South: informal labour markets, global production networks, different energy regimes, and post- and/or neo-colonial power dynamics will all create new complexities and experiences.

Third, an approach of ‘strandedness’ can be rooted in what is closed or lost but in the process of such a transition. The study of deindustrialisation and coal mine closure focuses on what comes in the wake of a decision already made: exploring the end of the process, rather than the beginning. This can miss key moments of changing worker-community-industry relations and patterns of pollution: such as processes of deindustrialisation and pollution that occur whilst industrial sites remain in operation (Feltrin et al., 2022). Whilst episodes of deindustrialisation and coal mine closure are often studied as past events driving present experiences of loss or detachment, any work exploring the stranding of communities in climate action will do so as the motivations, policies, visions, and immediate impacts of such restructuring become visible. Through this lens, decarbonisation and its consequences can be studied as both a changing present and an anticipated future, of which there will be a plurality.

V An agenda for studying ‘stranded communities’

With decarbonisation representing the next form of industrial restructuring that brings change to regional economies and local patterns of work (While and Eadson, 2022), a notion of ‘strandedness’ and study of ‘stranded communities’ can provide new lessons for understanding both the energy transition and processes of economic change. An agenda for work that seeks to understand and give voice to these experiences is necessary. Recent work has called for place-based approaches to the industrial change brought by decarbonisation to understand how climate action will remake the socio-cultural and politico-economic characteristics of particular regions (Devine-Wright, 2022; Eadson et al., 2023). Such approaches would be able to account for the illumination of localised impacts that exist beyond the economic sphere. The scholarship on deindustrialisation and coal mine closure reviewed in the previous section illuminates the deep scars held by many communities in the wake of change. The need for place-based approaches raises important questions regarding which cases, places, and sectors are selected for study and the methods used to detail and understand them, as well as the broader political connotations of decarbonisation.

In light of Pike’s (2022) call for geographical scholarship to shift away from presenting deindustrialisation as standalone economic case studies and, instead theorise it as a continuous, varied process, a notion of ‘strandedness’ allows work to adopt a more anticipatory lens. In many communities facing uncertain futures, the forms of ‘smokestack nostalgia’ defined above (Cowie and Heathcott, 2003: 14) may evolve and be elevated alongside contemporary vocabularies of ‘solastalgia’ as emergent, changing, and anticipatory emotional responses to climate issues (Albrecht et al., 2007; Askland and Bunn, 2018). The development of analytical approaches and tools that anticipate which communities, workplaces, and regions are at risk of the impacts of stranded assets would enable a justice-led scholarship that is preventative rather than reparative; allowing the use of previous examples to gauge potential vulnerabilities and advocate for new policies to proactively remedy potential impacts.

When anticipating such impacts, there remains a need to map the physical geographies of stranded communities beyond coal economies that are at risk of change. To date, there has been a great deal of focus on declining coal sectors (Abraham, 2017; Cha, 2020; Hess et al., 2021; Johnston and Hielscher, 2017; Mayer et al., 2020; Snyder, 2018). An overarching focus on coal communities in decarbonisation overlooks the vulnerabilities of other places and regions to devaluation and ‘stranding’. Recent work has explored economic restructuring in the defence industry (Bell et al., 2024), transportation (Irving et al., 2022; Strangleman, 2012), and manufacturing (Gibbs and Kerr, 2020; Pichler et al., 2021) sectors. The ubiquity of the carbon economy means that numerous industries, workers, and communities are dependent on fossil fuels within their everyday working practices. These include sectors entwined with fossil fuels economies, such as petrochemicals and synthetic plastic manufacturing. Additional sectors requiring investigation include heavy manufacturing sectors such as steel and cement production, where productivity is linked to the use of high heat and where profit margins can be slim. These ‘hard-to-abate’ sectors have limited pathways to emissions reductions. In the aviation sector, large airports employ tens of thousands of employees, stimulating economic links between many ‘airport towns’, employers, and emissions from the use of jet fuel: relationships at risk in future emissions reductions. The automotive industry will also undergo extensive change in a transition from the internal combustion engine to electric vehicles. These facilities are simultaneously the main emitter and primary employer in many regions: leading to such tensions defining the future of work for many.

A preventative focus of work on ‘strandedness’ should also interrogate the anticipated and imagined futures of work in the oil and gas sector. Whilst the dynamics of these energy sources’ decline is not as codified in policy or understood as the phase-down of coal, they represent key emitters and targets of movements calling for their decline. Oil and gas companies remain large global employers – with an estimated 8 million employees working in oil and 3.9 million in gas supply (IEA, 2022). Across this sector, workers are facing uncertain futures – with phasing down the oil and gas sector being subject to political debate, legal struggles, and contested decision-making (Adomaitis, 2023; Groom and Renshaw, 2023; Young, 2023). As Haarstad and Wanvik (2017) have argued, these ‘carbonscapes’ are instable and open to transformation across their commodity chains and flows. This instability plays out across infrastructure of oil rigs, tankers, extraction sites, and pipelines. It also takes form in the lives and possibilities of those working at these sites (Sica, 2021) and within the communities living at their edges. In many oil-rich economies, these fuels stimulate petro-state authoritarianism, petro-capitalist rent seeking, and economies of violence (Kennedy, 2014). From the Niger Delta to the Gulf of Mexico, communities have suffered the state violence, toxic chemical exposures, and legacies of contamination that the fossil fuel regime brings (Adunbi, 2013; Breglia, 2013; Watts, 2003). Whilst the ‘strandedness’ of closed coal mines might be experienced by those who used to toil at the seam, the ‘stranding’ of oil and gas will present new lessons and experiences of economic and industrial change.

An anticipatory approach also necessitates understanding future forms of lock-in before they take form. Fossil fuel interests continue to pursue new projects to further embed petrocultures and prolong revenues and profits (Kühne et al., 2022). This has important implications for many. In some places, the promise of new fossil fuel infrastructure may even come to promise a better future, complicating experiences of energy transition and a community’s place within it (Rich, 2016; Telford and Atkins, 2024). Yet, these projects will be as vulnerable to stranding. The expansion of fracking for shale gas in the USA promised better economic futures for places previously ‘left behind’ only to leave with the impacts of extraction once the sector declined (Jerolmack, 2021). These activities have a significant global dimension: two-thirds of these ‘carbon bombs’ are in China, Russia, the Middle East, or North Africa (Kühne et al., 2022). Fossil fuel phase-out in the Global North is pushing activities elsewhere: further shifting the costs of global petrocultures to communities in the Global South. It is necessary to dedicate attention to the forms this shift takes, the vulnerabilities it creates, and the lock-in it further embeds. This is a cross-scalar process: climate action is a global goal driven by national commitments, regional transitions, and local impacts. Yet, there are different trajectories of emissions reductions, themselves sitting alongside important discourses of historical responsibility and the right to develop. It is necessary to trace the specificities and differences from region to region to respond to recent calls by Tornel (2023) for further critical attention to ontological and epistemological injustices within energy transitions – through broadening definitions of ‘energy’, the labour used to produce it, and the impacts of lost employment and livelihoods. Processes of decarbonisation may overlap with other industrial shifts, such as mechanisation (Janardhan and Tamura, 2020) or calls for climate justice, decent work, and secure livelihoods (Cock, 2019; Mohlakoana et al., 2023; Parsons et al., 2022). These patterns, perhaps already in process in parts of India, China, and other countries, will coalesce with climate ambitions to alter regional economies. For example, recent years have witnessed the decline of the car manufacturing sector in Brazil (Reuters, 2023), impacting patterns of employment in key areas where manufacturing is clustered, such as São Bernardo do Campo, São Paulo. These cases can trouble and broaden contemporary understandings of strandedness, highlighting new economic and labour restructuring – as well as differences across places and communities.

These various episodes and their consequences highlight the importance of research using approaches and methodologies that are sensitive to local context, personal experiences, and the presence of competing narratives of change. The examples of deindustrialisation and coal mine closure illuminate how devaluation and decline are about more than lost jobs but also about regional economies, communities, and senses of connection. As Zhang (2024) has detailed in the different experiences of workers and families in coal communities in China and Australia, processes of closure reshape experiences of loss as well as understandings of how past, present, and future are linked together. The consequences of decarbonisation in stranded communities will be everyday, embodied, experiential, and diverse: being conditioned by community and personal circumstances and perceptions of change.

A ‘stranded community’ will be fragile, and dynamic: with people, livelihoods, concerns, and cultures entering dialogue in the face of economic change. Geographical research into stranded communities must attend to the divergent lived experiences present within communities and how such experiences are conditioned by race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and class. No experience of a ‘stranding’ will be the same: impacts will overlap and intersect with broader social exclusions. Those affected may also have different capacities to respond or be resilient to change. Patterns of inclusion and exclusion can result in certain forms of place attachment, grief, or envisioned futures being cast as shared or prominent; when they are one of many. The presence of labour in energy geographies scholarship is often cast in the image of the coal miner (Bouzarovski, 2022) – whose characterisation, labour, and appearance is nearly always masculine. This neglects the plurality of voices and experiences that exist within the sector: including migrant labourers, gendered work, informality and precarity, and those working in subsidiary sectors – all will be facing different experiences of transition. Expanding the scope of research will include these voices of those women in the UK who formed community support networks during the 1984/5 Miners’ Strike (Sutcliffe-Braithwaite and Thomlinson, 2018) or those whose hidden and informal toil to collect coal in contemporary Tajikistan creates feelings of shame (Behzadi, 2019), or the abused migrant labourers working on the infrastructure projects of oil-rich Qatar.

Finally, a focus on how ‘strandedness’ is experienced provides opportunities to explore the agency and influence of these communities. Being ‘stranded’ is not an end-point. Residents, institutions, and communities can, instead, present new visions of change of the future: for example, weaving together their individual and shared histories with visions of what might come next (Zhang, 2024). Some may celebrate the end of carbon-heavy work. Others may be fearful of disrupted futures. It is necessary for research to adopt methodological toolkits to detail and elevate these experiences. Cha et al. (2022) developed community-engaged oral histories in the United States to document the lived experiences of change and formulate what a ‘just transition’ might be formed of, working with respondents to understand the justice implications of energy transitions and document current experiences of change and visions of the future. Qualitative methods adopted by scholarship on industrial change include workers enquiry (Bell et al., 2024; work/life-history interviews (Emery, 2018a; Gibbs, 2021; Strangleman, 2012;), biographical interviews (Lovell et al., 2018; Thomas et al., 2022); life-history narratives (Bennett, 2020), visual methodologies (Byrne et al., 2016), and oral histories (Strangleman, 2019; Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, 2021). The adoption of these methods allows for the tracing of how economic restructuring will be perceived before, experienced during, and remembered after the moment of change.

Previous blindspots led to academic research across the social sciences being unprepared for the populist ‘revolt of the Rustbelt’ driven by geographical inequalities, job losses, and political resentment (Rodriguez-Pose, 2018). Rodriguez-Pose (2018) has detailed how recent political shocks demonstrate the growing political importance of the places that have suffered previous rounds of economic restructuring. Across the Global North, the geographies of right-wing populist movements overlap with (and make political currency of) experiences of regional decline and inequality (Baccini and Weymouth, 2021; Dijkstra et al., 2020; Los et al., 2017). If the future ‘stranding’ of communities represents the next round of economic restructuring, it may also illuminate new regions, places, and communities to be ‘left behind’. Economic shocks, job loss, and regional inequalities can reduce levels of public support for climate policy and, with it, energy transitions – leading to a loss of support for emergent ‘green’ sectors that enter as new employers (Vona, 2019; Weckroth and Ala-Mantila, 2022). Context matters here: recent work has highlighted how climate action is an important terrain for right-wing populist antagonisms (Atkins, 2022; Fiorino, 2022; Żuk and Szuleck, 2020). Stranded communities are important audiences for such messages: with the decline of carbon-heavy manufacturing providing fertile ground for those seeking to delay climate action.

Whilst academic research may have failed to prepare for previous political shocks driven by economic change, it is able to prepare for the next round of stranded communities. Understanding and anticipating these new geographies is an ambitious challenge yet it is a necessary one. Fulfilling global and national climate pledges will alter local workplaces and regional economies, with many across the globe facing lost jobs or altered working practices. Human geography as a discipline must remain attuned to the locations, vulnerabilities, and experiences of ‘stranded communities’. A geography of stranded communities can be an impetus for a justice-led approach to studying decarbonisation as a process of economic change: detailing how it may reveal new ruins, instil new senses of loss, overlap with historic industrial change, and give rise to new grievances. A proactive and sensitive agenda for exploring such processes provides a route for finding and remedying new forms of injustice and economic loss.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Ed Atkins

Author biography

Ed Atkins is a Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Bristol. His work focuses on energy transitions and socio-economic justice.

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The geographies of ‘stranded communities’ in energy transitions

Abstract

Keywords

I Introduction

II Stranded assets, stranded communities

III Conceptualising a ‘stranded community’ across geographical scholarship

IV Precedents for stranded communities

V An agenda for studying ‘stranded communities’

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

Funding

ORCID iD

Author biography

References