Huei-Ling Lai

Industrial decarbonisation is central to the UK’s strategy for achieving net zero and ensuring long-term environmental and economic sustainability. However, technological progress alone is not sufficient. Securing public trust and delivering a just transition – one that is inclusive, equitable, and locally grounded – is essential. This report brings together insights from ten IDRIC-funded research projects across the UK’s industrial clusters, with a focus on public perceptions, social licence to operate (SLO), and the need for place-sensitive strategies that engage communities meaningfully. The report offers recommendations to industry and policymakers to ensure that the transition to a low-carbon economy is equitable and enjoys broad public support.

Decarbonizing industrial sectors is a critical global challenge, involving the creation of new industrial spaces—‘net zero industrial clusters’—co‐locating energy sectors and ‘hard‐to‐abate’ industries such as oil refining and steelmaking. This paper provides the first empirically grounded geographical investigation of these emerging spaces. It employs a place‐based research agenda to unpack how UK net zero industrial clusters (ICs) are imagined and emplaced in policy and industry discourses through place‐based naming, spatial configuring and mapping activities. By conducting document analysis, 33 in‐depth stakeholder interviews and five field trips to three UK case studies, we show how cluster imaginaries vary across cases and policy contexts in terms of constituents, focus and purpose. Ontological complexity is compounded by different rationales among stakeholders in configuring clusters and by contested cluster naming and boundary setting. This ambiguous, evolving spatiality raises important political and justice concerns over who and where is excluded in cluster building. These findings advance the geographies of low‐carbon transitions by showing: (1) ways that ICs' spatial embeddedness, which underlies cluster spatial configurations, helps increase industry actors' recognition of their economic, social and cultural ties with the places of their making, even if this risks path dependency; (2) how fluid cluster boundaries, reflected in cluster names and maps, emphasize the value of a network topology of scale to enable spatially inclusive, multi‐scalar climate mitigation. Finally, we argue that a place‐sensitive net zero policy mindset is vital for fulfilling ICs and the UK's decarbonization potential in a manner that is both fair and locally grounded.

Land grab scholarship hitherto has seldom discussed about place, while alternative food networks (AFNs) scholars often overlook socio-spatial issues beyond agri-food systems. This paper addresses these gaps with a place-based approach. It examines two land struggles and three AFNs initiatives in Wanbao Village in Taiwan, showing how they co-shaped and protected the community’s sense of place from the threat of domestic land grabbing. Moreover, it demonstrates the structural linkages between land and food struggles that undermined AFNs' ‘(re-)localization' strategy, calling for their combined efforts in research and activism to defend marginalized agricultural/rural space from land frontier-making in a capitalist-industrial society.

Studies on community energy have generated many useful insights concerning its potentials and challenges in facilitating energy transitions. However, this line of inquiry tends to overlook the crucial significance of site-specific contexts, concerns, and needs beyond the energy system and often generalizes these under a “civil society” umbrella. To study community energy on its own terms, this paper proposes a more grounded approach based on the relational place-making framework. It draws upon the case of the Taihsi Green Energy and Health Community Initiative in Taiwan to investigate how the emergence, development, and framing of this initiative are entangled with geo-historically produced concerns about the village’s socio-economic marginalization and suffering from petrochemical pollution. The findings suggest that community energy in this context was a proactive continuation of place-based activism for environmental justice; its value to this damaged community lied in its potential to create self-reliant socio-material relations alternative to those relied on the patronage of petrochemical interests. However, this justice-oriented aspiration tended to be discounted in national-level energy transitions agenda, revealing a tension between citizen-oriented and community-based energy projects. The paper argues that a relational place-based analysis is crucial in recognizing the grounded meanings and values of a community energy initiative, which can address the decontextualizing tendency in many community energy studies to better help policymakers and advocates enhance energy justice in disadvantaged communities.