Unresolved tensions in green transitions: Retraining and the question of ‘how’?

Abstract

This commentary responds to Chantel Carr's article ‘Repair and care’ through a focus on the vexed question of carbon-intensive worker retraining in the context of urgent and necessary decarbonisation and industry change in Australia. There are many parallels between my research and Carr's, particularly in relation to an understanding of the potential of existing technical skillsets in industrial working populations. Like Carr, I reflect upon my empirical research – over the past decade – with current and former industrial tradespeople. This commentary reflects on what ‘retraining’ has actually meant, in practice, for industrial workers in deindustrialising Australia. I then identify a key tension that exists in relation to the question of retraining carbon workers. Climate change mitigation calls for the dramatic and wide-ranging transformation of industries, infrastructure, jobs, and skillsets. But the fact remains, humans are complex, with diverse needs, and they are now more likely to articulate these needs on an individual level, not collectively. With this in mind – and in a background in which much academic work draws attention to complexities and institutional shortcomings – how do we balance individualised requirements with the need for dramatic, macro-level transformation?

Unsettling relatonality: Attachment after the ‘relational turn’

“…I am not sure that the difference is one of the affirmable and non-affirmable, or more difficult to affirm. Neither the effects or objects of attachment are necessarily straightforwardly positive or negative, as I stress and Rose (2023) notes. I think it is the same with desire.…”

“…Rose is also concerned with the outside to attachment, but in terms different to Zhang's, albeit with resonances given their shared orientation to the non-relational. As he generously acknowledges, Rose starts from a different series of ontological commitments to mine, phrased by him as a ‘primordial negativity; a primordial existential situation that works to undermine every force which it simultaneously instigates’ (Rose, 2023). Rose then asks me a question of ‘why’ that I confess I have struggled to answer in his terms : ‘If subjectivity is perpetually unfolding and becoming, if it is only ever an expression of its relations, than why is attachment necessary?…”

Doing the work: Locating labour in infrastructural geography

“…Carr, 2022; Carr, 2023, and accompanying dialogues). How might the lens of infrastructural labour contribute to recognising labours’ skills, capacities, and knowledge, recognising spatial, subjective, and scalar differences, while also weighing up calls for deepened understandings of complexity with the urgent need for rapid transition amidst climate crisis (Stein, 2022: 4)? Moreover, critically querying promises of green infrastructures and decent work might be extended to question the premise of work as the primary or sole basis for achieving a decent life (cf.…”

Repairing social connections: Dismantling carbon infrastructures with care

“…Stein's (2023) response speaks to the challenges climate change presents for democracy, where the dramatic, macro-level societal transformation needed sits at odds with the complexity of human experience and needs. It is clear that workers in carbon-intensive energy generation and industrial production face an uncertain future in those sectors in Australia.…”

“…Importantly, this cannot be one way – a site for ‘educating’ the industrial working class. Rather, as I argued in the original article, industrial workers bring their own agency: haptic repair skills and dispositions (Corwin, 2023; Stein, 2023) but also long histories of negotiating and resisting industrial capital, as the history of working-class environmental action testifies (Barca, 2023).…”