How to prioritize between contradictory justice claims in energy transition conflicts?

In recent years, transformation pathways are characterized by increasing attention to making them just and inclusive. Both political and academic debates reflect this priority. While there is wide agreement on the necessity of justice in transitions, different actors and individuals hold different ideas of what justice is, and which justice concerns should be prioritized. In politicized transition settings, diverging normative standpoints of what a just transition should like are at the heart of many conflicts. The phase-out of fossil industries, for instance, involves complex claims to justice which are often reduced to the dichotomy between local communities fearing to lose their jobs and climate justice groups fighting for emission reductions to prevent global harm. Decisions of what ought to be done are often not properly discussed and justified. And even if they are, conflictual settings are shaped by unequal power dynamics and uneven access to debates and decision-making arenas. The question of whose claims to justice should be weighed higher in these transitions arises, and it requires decision-makers to position themselves. Energy policy and transition research has seen multifaceted contributions on energy justice or just transitions. However, the normative underpinnings of the justice conceptions that are used often remain insufficiently spelled out. Many studies notice a lack of justice in the cases that they study, yet it remains unclear against which principles of justice these statements are made. As energy policy researchers (not as political theorists), we ask ourselves how decision-makers then should make sense of all the, partially contradictory, justice claims that they have to deal with. To this end, we review what selected political theory contributions suggest as principles of prioritizing between justice claims if they stand in conflict with each other. We then study to what extent such prioritization proposals are reflected in the social science energy justice literature. While conclusive answers on how to prioritize between contradictory claims cannot be provided in this contribution, the aim is to identify those questions and considerations that have to be addressed to move forward towards pragmatic approaches of meaningfully engaging with diverse justice claims.