Citizen participation in energy transitions is needed to address energy injustices. Yet, the effect of energy justice on citizens' willingness to participate remains untested. This study examines whether citizens are more inclined to participate in local energy projects that consider justice factors or not. A representative survey collected data ( N = 768) from a Mexico-US cross-border region. We applied a Discrete Choice Experiment, using a Multinomial Logit Model for aggregate preferences and a Latent Class Choice Model to identify preference variation across citizen types. Interestingly, findings show that especially vulnerable groups and youth expressed greater willingness to participate as local leaders in projects prioritizing distributional justice (i.e., targeting energy-poor households) and procedural justice (i.e., involving civil organizations and multiple governance levels in decision making). This contrasts with common assumptions that vulnerable groups are disinterested in, or insufficiently informed about, participation in the energy transition. Our findings suggest that justice-informed project design may foster broader citizen engagement. The participation, and leadership, of vulnerable groups can be enabled when formal institutions recognize and engage with existing organizations representing these groups, such as traditional Indigenous authorities.

A just energy transition requires not only the achievement of low-carbon goals but also the creation of fairer energy systems where special attention is given to identifying vulnerable groups and addressing the inequalities they experience. Governing energy transitions at the regional level may help formulate and implement tailored policies addressing vulnerabilities at the local level. However, there is limited understanding of the vulnerabilities that citizen groups experience in energy regions. We formulated three objectives to address this gap: I) identifying energy vulnerabilities in a regional transition context; II) understanding what citizen groups experience them and why; and III) identifying barriers that prevent policies from engaging with these groups. We applied a case-study research design to the Rotterdam-The Hague energy region in the Netherlands. Data collection involved semi-structured expert and stakeholder interviews and a review of newspaper articles and policy reports. We processed data with a thematic analysis drawing from energy justice literature and intersectionality theory. Three main energy vulnerabilities were identified: unaffordability of energy consumption, the lack of opportunity to own self-generation technology, and little to no inclusion in decision-making processes. The findings reveal five groups prone to vulnerability and the conditions that put them in a vulnerable situation, such as living in an energy-inefficient house. We conclude that regional energy transition policies should consider intersections of society while offering more support to municipalities to enable them to engage citizen groups at higher risk of energy vulnerability.

Energy transitions are often studied using socio-technical transitions, just transitions and more recently, social-ecological tipping points (SETPs). While they can be important starting points for conceptualising large-scale systemic change, when applied within a regional context, they often fail to appropriately explain change. SETP concept is receiving increasing attention, but its heuristic value still requires further empirical validation. While many energy transitions are still in a pre-tipping point phase, the lack of empirically validated tipping points raises a question of applicability if these frameworks are unable to capture change at the regional scale. In this paper, we introduce a new inductive framework, Just Social-Ecological Tipping Scales (JSETS), based on cross-case analysis in coal and carbon-intensive regions (CCIRs). The framework helps understanding systemic change in regional contexts by identifying transition states. We then analyse traits in these transition states by assessing enablers and barriers of triggering factors and actors over temporal and spatial scales as well as justice dimensions. This analysis helps us to identify cumulate changes leading to four tipping scales, which can move a region from one transition state to another. By identifying both transition states and tipping scales, we can anticipate the potential traits needed for a CCIR to move towards a just transformation.

Low-carbon transitions are particularly acute in coal and carbon-intensive regions (CCIRs), which face not only technological and economic barriers but also deep socio-political and cultural obstacles in moving away from carbon lock-in. Transforming these regions requires destabilizing and reconfiguring high-carbon regimes, often demanding structural changes across technological, socio-economic, political, and cultural domains. Despite increased attention to the decline of unsustainable energy systems, much research and policy remain short-sighted, often overlooking paradoxes, trade-offs, and spill-over effects during transitions. This Special Issue addresses the complexity of sustainability transitions in CCIRs from an interdisciplinary social science perspective, drawing on nine original contributions from the TIPPING+ project. The collection introduces advanced concepts, methods, and empirical evidence to better understand and navigate transitions in CCIRs, focusing on Social-Ecological Tipping Points. Through diverse case studies across Europe, Asia, and North America, the articles examine the interplay of forces shaping transition trajectories and highlight their non-linear, multi-scalar, and justice-sensitive nature. The Special Issue introduces frameworks for diagnosing transition states and identifying tipping dynamics, with attention to timing, territoriality, and equity. It further analyzes how political, economic, and governance conditions, as well as place-based narratives and cultural framings, influence the destabilization of carbon lock-ins and the legitimacy and direction of change. Collectively, the articles reframe transitions in CCIRs as embedded, justice-centred, and culturally contested processes, providing actionable insights for research, policy, and planning in sustainability transformations.

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.

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.

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.

We introduce a method based on directed molecular self-assembly to manufacture and electrically characterise C-shape gold nanowires which clearly deviate from typical linear shape due to the design of the template guiding the assembly. To this end, gold nanoparticles are arranged in the desired shape on a DNA-origami template and enhanced to form a continuous wire through electroless deposition. C-shape nanowires with a size below 150nm on a SiO ₂/ Si substrate are contacted with gold electrodes by means of electron beam lithography. Charge transport measurements of the nanowires show hopping, thermionic and tunneling transports at different temperatures in the 4.2K to 293K range. The different transport mechanisms indicate that the C-shape nanowires consist of metallic segments which are weakly coupled along the wires.