Reimagining Just Energy Transitions: Beyond Technical Change to Legislative Transformation in Latin America

By Maggie Rochi and Nanda Jasuma 

The urgency of climate action has never been clearer, yet the path forward remains fraught with challenges that extend far beyond technical considerations. As Latin American countries accelerate their energy transitions, a critical question emerges: Can legislative frameworks evolve quickly enough to ensure these transitions are not only clean, but truly just?

The shift to renewables can be a driver of justice, via job creation, the expansion of energy access, and the strengthening of communities. At the same time, it can reproduce the inequalities entrenched in the current fossil fuel-dominant system, displacing vulnerable groups and prioritising profits over rights. The difference depends not only on technology and finance, but on law: whether justice is included in binding frameworks or left as a policy afterthought.

Drawing from a comprehensive analysis of energy transition policies across Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico, this think piece argues that the current legislative landscape is inadequate for delivering justice in energy transitions. While these countries have made remarkable progress in renewable energy deployment, their legal frameworks remain limited by technocratic approaches that systematically exclude the most vulnerable populations from decision-making processes and fail to address the structural inequalities that fossil fuel economies perpetuate.

The Current Reality: A Legislative Patchwork

Across Latin America, energy transition laws present a fragmented and incomplete picture. In order to assess this legal landscape, we measured each country’s energy transition regulations against the following frameworks:

·       International Labour Organisation Policy Guidelines for a Just Transition

·       UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights

·       The Escazú Agreement on access to environmental information and participation

The analysis reveals that, while all four countries have embraced renewable energy targets and climate commitments, their legislative frameworks fundamentally misunderstand what a "just" transition requires.

In Colombia, just transition legislation focuses primarily on workforce retraining, a necessary but insufficient approach that treats justice as an afterthought rather than a foundational principle. Chile's Framework Law on Climate Change mentions "Climate Equity and Justice" but lacks concrete mechanisms to operationalise these concepts in energy policy. Brazil's Just Energy Transition Programme remains narrowly focused on coal regions, ignoring the broader systemic changes needed across the energy sector. Mexico's energy transition framework, while technically ambitious, operates through a purely technical lens that bypasses considerations of social equity entirely.

This legislative patchwork reflects a deeper problem: energy transition laws are being designed as if technical efficiency alone can deliver social justice. Current frameworks systematically fail to address gender inequalities, Indigenous rights, community participation, and equitable access to energy resources, precisely the issues that determine whether transitions create or reduce social injustice.

The Structural Barriers to Legislative Reform

Why do legislative changes prove so challenging in the energy transition context? There are several interconnected obstacles that go beyond typical political economy constraints.

·       Entrenched Extractive Legacies: Decades of fossil fuel dependence have created institutional architectures designed to extract resources and export profits, not to democratize energy systems. These extractive legacies have been built via regulatory frameworks that prioritise large-scale projects over community ownership, centralised over distributed generation, and corporate over community benefits.

·       Fragmented Governance Structures: Energy transition cuts across multiple ministries, levels of government, and policy domains, yet most countries lack coordination mechanisms capable of mainstreaming justice considerations. The analysis found that even where inter-institutional committees exist, such as Brazil's Gender Committee in the Ministry of Mining and Energy or Chile's Interministerial Committee for a Just Socio-Ecological Transition, they operate with limited mandates and insufficient authority to reshape core energy policies.

·       Technical Framing Dominance: Perhaps most fundamentally, energy transition debates remain dominated by technical and economic framings that crowd out discussions of rights, participation, and equity. When policies are presented as purely technical matters, such as optimising grid efficiency, reducing emissions, and maximising renewable capacity, these appear politically neutral while actually perpetuating particular assumptions about who benefits and who bears costs.

·       Gender and Social Exclusions: The legislative frameworks consistently fail to address the structural barriers that prevent women, Indigenous communities, and rural populations from participating meaningfully in energy governance. These exclusions are not accidental oversights but reflect deeper patterns of marginalisation that energy laws have yet to confront systematically.

Toward Legislative Transformation: A Rights-Based Vision

The path forward requires fundamentally reconceptualising what energy transition legislation aims to accomplish. Rather than treating justice as an add-on to technical objectives, legislative frameworks should embed rights-based approaches as foundational principles that shape all aspects of energy policy.

Anchoring Justice in Law, Not Just Policy

The most critical reform involves elevating just transition principles from policy guidelines to binding legal mandates. Currently, most justice considerations exist in strategic documents and policy frameworks that lack legal force. Legislative transformation requires constitutional and statutory provisions that establish enforceable rights to participate in energy decisions, access clean energy, and be protected from transition-related harms.

Chile's draft law on socio-ecological just transition represents a promising model, establishing equity, democratisation, and gender mainstreaming as binding legal principles rather than aspirational goals. Similar constitutional reforms could establish energy democracy as a fundamental right, requiring all energy policies to demonstrate compliance with participation, equity, and sustainability criteria.

Mainstreaming Rights Across Government

Legislative transformation should address the coordination challenges that currently fragment just transition efforts across government. This requires creating new institutional architectures with clear mandates, adequate resources, and authority to mainstream environmental, gender, and human rights perspectives across all energy-related policies.

Effective coordination goes beyond creating new committees or agencies. It must include legal mandates that require all energy policies to undergo rights-based impact assessments, ensure meaningful participation of affected communities, and demonstrate how they will reduce rather than reproduce existing inequalities.

Democratizing Energy Governance

Perhaps the most transformative potential lies in legislative frameworks that democratize energy governance itself. Colombia's initiative to regulate “Energy Communities” that cooperate in generating, commercialising, and using renewable energy points toward alternative ownership models that could reshape power relations in the energy sector.

Legislative frameworks could go further by establishing legal preferences for community ownership, cooperative models, and decentralised generation. Such provisions would not merely allow community participation but actively structure markets to favour democratic ownership over corporate concentration.

Enforcing Corporate Accountability

Current legislative frameworks place few binding obligations on private energy companies to respect human rights or conduct meaningful consultation with affected communities. Transformation requires mandatory human rights due diligence processes, binding environmental and social impact assessments, and legal liability for companies that violate community rights.

Brazil, Chile, and Colombia all have draft legislation under consideration that would make human rights due diligence mandatory for businesses. Accelerating these initiatives and ensuring they apply specifically to energy companies represents a crucial step toward accountable energy transitions.

Big Picture Recommendations: A New Legislative Paradigm

The evidence from Latin America suggests that incremental reforms to existing energy legislation will be insufficient to deliver just transitions. Instead, the region needs a new legislative paradigm that treats energy transition as an opportunity for transforming social relations, not just technical systems.

Constitutional Energy Rights: Countries should consider constitutional provisions establishing energy democracy as a fundamental right. Such provisions would require all energy policies to demonstrate how they enhance rather than undermine community control over energy systems. Mexico's proposed constitutional amendment to guarantee universal access to clean energy represents one model, though it should be expanded to include participation rights and community ownership preferences.

Binding Justice Standards: Legislative frameworks should establish binding minimum standards for what constitutes a “just” transition, including specific requirements for community participation, gender equality, Indigenous consultation, and equitable benefit-sharing. These standards should apply to all energy projects, public and private, and be enforceable through accessible legal mechanisms.

Integrated Governance Mandates: Rather than creating separate “just transition” policies, legislative frameworks should require all energy laws and policies to demonstrate compliance with justice criteria. This mainstreaming approach would prevent the marginalisation of social considerations and ensure they shape core energy decisions rather than remaining peripheral add-ons.

Participatory Planning Requirements: Legislative frameworks should mandate participatory planning processes for all major energy decisions, with specific provisions to overcome barriers to participation by women, Indigenous communities, and rural populations. These requirements should include accessible information, culturally appropriate consultation processes, and binding mechanisms for incorporating community input into final decisions.

Funding Justice: Legislative frameworks should address the financing mechanisms needed to support just transitions. This includes redirecting fossil fuel subsidies toward community energy projects, establishing carbon taxes with strong social protection measures, and creating dedicated funds for communities affected by energy transitions.

Catalyzing Change: The Political Path Forward

Legislative transformation will not emerge automatically from technical analysis or policy recommendations. It requires building political coalitions capable of challenging entrenched interests and advancing alternative visions of energy futures.

There are several promising entry points for catalysing legislative change. First, the upcoming cycle of Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) under the Paris Agreement provides opportunities for civil society organisations to demand more ambitious justice commitments and the legislative frameworks needed to implement them.

Second, rising social movements around energy democracy, environmental justice, and Indigenous rights are creating political pressure for more participatory energy governance. Legislative reforms should build on this momentum by creating institutional channels for sustained community engagement rather than one-off consultation processes.

Third, the evidence of policy failures in current energy transitions, from community resistance to renewable projects to the exclusion of women from green job programmes, creates opportunities to demonstrate why justice-blind approaches are ultimately ineffective even on their own technical terms.

Conclusion: The Transformative Moment

Latin America stands at a critical juncture in its energy transition journey. The technical foundations for renewable energy deployment are largely in place, but the social and political foundations for just transitions remain underdeveloped. The choice facing the region is whether to continue pursuing technical transitions that reproduce existing inequalities or to push for the more challenging but ultimately more sustainable path of legislative transformation.

The evidence suggests that incremental reforms to existing energy laws will be insufficient. Instead, the region needs new legislative paradigms that treat energy transition as fundamentally about democratizing energy systems, not just decarbonising them. This transformation will require political courage, sustained civil society mobilisation, and international support for alternative models of energy governance.

The stakes could not be higher. Climate change demands rapid energy transitions, but social justice requires that these transitions enhance rather than undermine democracy, equity, and community control. Legislative transformation offers a path toward energy futures that are not just cleaner, but truly just. The question is whether Latin American countries will seize this transformative moment or settle for technical changes that leave fundamental power relations intact. The pathway is clear: legislate just transition mandates, strengthen institutions, guarantee rights, mandate accountability, secure financing, and ensure transparency. These are not optional extras; they are what will make the transition durable, equitable, and sustainable.

Author:

Maggie Rochi

Maggie works as Programme Officer on Climate and Environmental Justice for the Global Initiative for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. She is an international lawyer working on the intersections between gender, human rights, environmental and economic law. Prior to joining GI-ESCR, she worked dealing with the protection of economic and social rights in Argentina, at an NGO focused on strategic litigation and as a clerk in the judiciary. She holds an LL.B. and a J.D. from the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina, where she specialised in International Law and an LL.M from the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights, Switzerland. 

Author:

Nanda Jasuma

Nanda Jasuma is a graduate student specialising in global economy and environmental policy at New York University. As an intern, she supports research and advocacy on the intersection of environmental and social justice. Her professional journey includes experience in supply chain, project management, and renewable energy, where she has contributed to projects aimed at advancing sustainable solutions and equitable development.