Understanding what conditions promote or hinder energy affordability in energy transitions is crucial for coal and carbon-intensive regions (CCIRs) dealing with the trade-off between phasing out fossil fuels and deepening social inequalities. While previous studies have included household and national-level conditions, this paper addresses the research gap covering regional-level conditions by drawing from regional energy governance, energy justice, and sociotechnical transition frameworks. A mixed-method approach consisting of a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis and case-study analysis is applied to 14 CCIRs in Europe, Asia, and North America. Results show that energy affordability in CCIRs is influenced by combinations of regional and (inter)national conditions. Whereas the existing literature and transition policies do not differentiate between the CCI sector's transition type, this paper highlights that conditions underlying energy (un)affordability differ when the CCI sector is phased out or has the option to transition. Based on the findings, this study calls for a multi-level governance approach to alleviating and preventing energy unaffordability and recommends that policy mixes like the EU Just Transition Fund consider the different types of CCIR transitions.

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This chapter introduces an interdisciplinary perspective to investigate the transition process and to identify empirical evidence of social-ecological tipping points (SETPs) in the case studies on coal and carbon intensive regions (CCIRs) analyzed in the project TIPPING+. The interdisciplinary lens considers different modes of thought, frameworks, and multiple perspectives and interests from diverse stakeholders, a systems’ understanding, and different culture considerations across the CCIRs. Within this interdisciplinary process, we applied various lenses to study the potential for SETPs by combining insights from human geography, social psychology, regional socio-technical systems, and political economy perspectives on the phases of low carbon transitions and on the justice component of the transitions. Subsequently, this chapter gives an overview of how the eight CCIRs case studies in this book have applied various interdisciplinary lenses to investigate the regional transition and the emergence of SETPs.

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A crucial task to accelerate global decarbonisation is to understand how to enable fast, equitable, low-carbon transformations in Coal and Carbon Intensive Regions (CCIRs). In this early literature review we underlined the relevance of the boundary concept of social-ecological tipping points (SETPs) and showed that the research and policy usage of SETPs applied to accelerate structural regional sustainability transformations faces three key challenges: (I) integrating theoretical and empirical contributions from diverse social and ecological sciences, together with complexity theory (II) designing open transdisciplinary assessment processes able to represent multiple qualities of systemic change and enable regionally situated transformative capacities, and (III) moving away from one-directional metaphors of social change, or static or homogeneous conceptions of individual agency and single equilibrium in energy transitions; and instead, focus on understanding the conditions and capacities for the emergence of systemic transformations and regenerative processes across multiple levels and forms of agency. We refer to these complex and place-situated processes as learning to enable regional transformative emergence.

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We develop and apply the concept of equitable knowledge co-production (EKC) by proposing a reflexive framework to support inclusive stakeholder engagement with diverse knowledge-holders. This framework is built on the authors’ experiences of leading three ongoing Horizon 2020 projects, and its goal is to contribute to the realisation of epistemic and recognition justice in the context of large-scale research and innovation projects by raising awareness of how knowledge co-production is carried out during the project proposal and implementation phases.@en