Main Findings: Regional Labour Dependencies and Skills Mismatch
The primary finding reveals that regional labour dependencies in fossil fuel economies cannot be resolved through conventional technical reskilling alone without addressing systemic recognition and procedural deficits. As established in regional transition research, distributional concerns regarding the invisibility of informal workers and regional economic dependency dominate transition dynamics, yet these inequities are exacerbated by weak procedural inclusion and institutional barriers ("Energy Justice in Transition", 2025). Informal workers frequently remain unacknowledged within standard state governance mechanisms, which severely limits their access to emerging green finance, capacity development, and technological innovation programmes ("Energy Justice in Transition", 2025). Consequently, workforce reallocation policies that neglect the ethical dimensions of procedural and distributional impacts fail to shield vulnerable regional populations from significant socio-economic dislocation. Addressing these structural imbalances requires state policy to expand beyond traditional industrial confines; as theoretical assessments emphasize, a just transition functions as an overarching ethical framework that must navigate the practical, policy, and social complexities of structural inequality in a low-carbon transition ("What Is a Just Transition?", 2021). Furthermore, regional transition programmes must broaden the parameters of existing labour and trade union conventions by incorporating comprehensive socio-economic planning, public space considerations, and alternative economic options beyond coal ("What Is a Just Transition?", 2021). Without embedding targeted participatory mechanisms, equitable benefit allocation, and formal recognition of informal labour into state-level policy frameworks, institutional inertia will continue to perpetuate historical vulnerabilities, hindering sustainable economic restructuring across coal-dependent jurisdictions.