Green, sustainable, just: our paradigms are maturing. Are we?

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12 Oct 2026 · Nina Volles

I have worked on green skills and the transformation of education systems for more than ten years, and with Paeradigms since 2019. In that time our vocabulary has changed more often than our practice. Environment. Sustainable development. Green. Now just. Almost every programme document I review today promises a just transition. It is tempting to dismiss this as donor fashion. I don't. I read it as a sign that our paradigms are maturing. Each new word answers a question that the previous one left open. But a word only matures when the people who use it choose it on purpose and accept what it commits them to. Too often we don't. Think of the questions behind the words. Environment asks what we must protect. Sustainable asks how long it can last. Green asks where the opportunity lies. Just asks who decides, who benefits and who pays. The last question is the uncomfortable one. It is also the one that decides whether a transition holds. Words decide what we measure, who sits at the table and which costs stay invisible.

Four layers, not four replacements

The vocabulary did not move in a straight line. Each layer kept the earlier ones alive and added a new promise, and a new blind spot.

Period	Dominant word	Core promise	Blind spot
1970s to 1980s	Environment	Protect nature from damage	Treated nature as separate from the economy and from people's livelihoods
From 1987	Sustainable development	Meet today's needs without compromising tomorrow's (Brundtland)	So broad that almost any activity could claim it
2008 to 2012	Green economy, green growth, green jobs	Growth and environment can go together	Assumed growth can be decoupled from resource use at the speed required. The evidence for that remains thin
From 2015	Greening, just transition	Change institutions and systems, and share the costs and benefits fairly	Risk of becoming a label without criteria

I include our own work in this. In 2024, Paeradigms and partners published a report that presented green economy, green growth, green transition and green transformation as overlapping steps, and concluded: "All terms lead to a just transition." I would not write that sentence today. Terms do not lead anywhere by themselves. They sit side by side, they serve different interests, and each one requires a decision.

What our own work taught us

Since 2019, Paeradigms has researched and advised on greening education and training systems for the British Council, GIZ, the Union for the Mediterranean and the ETF, among others. Three findings shape how I read the new vocabulary.

Naming is easier than measuring. In 2023 we developed a tool for the British Council to assess how green a TVET system is at policy, industry and practice levels. We piloted it in Botswana, Morocco and Tanzania. All three had quality assurance mechanisms. All three scored lower on how well those mechanisms monitor TVET against green economy objectives. A training provider in Botswana put it simply: "in so far as green economy is concerned there is nothing in place."

Skills are not enough. In 2025 we prepared country studies for GIZ on Brazil, Kenya and Pakistan, which fed into a flagship report launched at COP30 in Belém. The Pakistan study, on renewable energy and climate-smart agriculture, concluded that "addressing these skills gaps alone is insufficient for a just transition". Women farmers and tenant farmers face barriers that no curriculum removes: access to land, credit and inputs.

Words need to be agreed, not assumed. Our 2024 report with the Union for the Mediterranean and the ETF on green skills in higher education and research started by sorting out the terminology. It is also where we wrote the sentence I quoted above. Writing a definition is the easy part. Agreeing on what it commits you to is the work.

Same two words, four meanings

Almost every major institution now uses just transition. Read their documents side by side and you find very different ideas of what justice means.

The World Bank moved from green growth in 2012 to "a just transition for all" in its 2018 report on coal mine closure, a phrase it took from the trade unions. Its Green, Resilient and Inclusive Development (GRID) approach of 2021 aims to "deliver a just transition to a green economy" through social and labour market policies. Justice here means managing and compensating the costs of change inside the existing growth model.

The African Union frames it differently. Its Climate Change and Resilient Development Strategy (2022 to 2032) calls for "a just, inclusive and equitable transition to an African green economy" and makes "leave no one behind" a guiding principle. The Nairobi Declaration of 2023 adds the historical point: "Africa is not historically responsible for global warming." It insists on common but differentiated responsibilities, on finance promised and not delivered, and on green industrialisation. Justice here means the right to develop, and a fair share of who pays.

The European Training Foundation speaks of a "fair" transition and puts skills at its centre. Its 2025 report on the EU neighbourhood and Central Asia found that workforce measures in national climate plans are often fragmented and lack operational detail. Justice here means employability and investability.

UN agencies stretch the concept furthest. The ILO resolution of 2023 ties a just transition to decent work, social dialogue, social protection, gender and the informal economy. UNESCO's TVET strategy for 2022 to 2029 aims at "successful and just transitions". In 2025 the UN climate convention agreed at Belém to create a just transition mechanism, with its content still to be defined. Same two words. At least four meanings: compensation, development rights, employability and rights at work.

Six claims worth debunking

A more mature word does not guarantee a more mature practice. These are the claims I hear most often in workshops, terms of reference and evaluation interviews. Each one holds a grain of truth. None holds up as stated.

1) "The just transition is a new idea." It is not. North American trade unions used the term in the mid-1990s. The 2008 Green Jobs report of UNEP and the ILO already defined green jobs as decent jobs. The ILO guidelines of 2015 linked environmental policy with decent work, social dialogue and social protection. What is new is not the idea. It is that development banks and ministries now sign up to it. That should make you more curious about what they mean, not less.

2) "Green growth is a win-win." The World Bank argued in 2012 that green growth is necessary, efficient and affordable. Growth and environment can indeed move together for a while. But a two-part systematic review of 835 empirical studies by Wiedenhofer, Haberl and colleagues (2020) found that absolute decoupling of GDP from resource use and emissions is rare, and nowhere near the speed required. Win-win is a hypothesis, not a fact. Programmes built on it should say so.

3) "Green jobs are good jobs." Only by definition. The ILO calls a job green only if it is also decent. Most national classifications of green and greening occupations do not check that condition. Informal waste collection and recycling are counted as green activities in many countries, often with high health risks and no social protection. Before you celebrate a green job count, ask what the jobs pay and who does them.

4) "The green transition is a skills transition." The European Training Foundation said exactly this in November 2025 and called skills "a precondition for a fair and bankable transition". Skills are necessary. They are not sufficient. Training does not create jobs that the economy does not offer, nor protect people whom social policy leaves out. Avis (2025) shows how training models designed for formal wage employment fail where most people work informally. I say this as someone who works in skills development: we oversell what training can do. And when a transition must be "bankable", you know whose criteria come first.

5) "A just transition is about coal." That is where the concept became mainstream, in the coal regions of Europe and North America and in the World Bank's 2018 report on mine closure. Transposed elsewhere, it misses the point. The Nairobi Declaration of 2023 states plainly that "Africa is not historically responsible for global warming". For a country that emits little and suffers much, a just transition is first about adaptation, access to energy, finance that was promised and not delivered, and a fair share of the gains from its own resources. The UN climate negotiations recognised this broader scope at Belém in 2025.

6) "If it says just, it is just." This is the most widespread claim, and the weakest. I regularly review logframes with "just transition" in the title and not a single indicator on who benefits or who pays. The World Bank's GRID approach of 2021 speaks of policies that "compensate losers". The word is revealing. People who lose remain objects of policy, not participants. The AFD distinguishes an affirmative just transition, which redistributes burdens within the current model, from a transformative one, which changes how production and ownership are organised. Most programmes promise the second and fund the first. Kortetmäki, Timmermann and Tribaldos (2025) warn that a concept stretched too far dilutes either justice or ecological ambition. Both happen.

Maturity is a decision, not a word

So yes, our paradigms are maturing. Thirty years of debate have produced a vocabulary that can hold environment, economy and justice in one sentence. That is progress. But maturity is not something a vocabulary does. It is something people do when they choose their words deliberately and accept what those words commit them to.

At Paeradigms we now ask four questions before "just transition" goes on any page. I recommend them to you.

Which justice do you mean? Compensation, participation, recognition or correction. Each leads to different activities and different budgets.
Who pays? In time, money, risk and extra work. If your answer is "nobody", you have not looked yet.
What changes for the environment? Every action must change something measurable, including adaptation to climate impacts. Inclusion alone is not a green transition.
What can you not deliver? A training institution does not set wages. A ministry of education does not run social protection. Saying so is not weakness. It makes the rest of your promise credible.

The old words are not wrong. Green still names an opportunity. Sustainable still names the horizon. Just names the question we avoided for too long. We do not need a fifth word. We need to mean the four we have. If you work with these terms, I would like to hear how you decide which one to use, and what you measure behind it.