As growing evidence shows that technological innovation (efficiency) alone will not enable economies to stay within planetary boundaries (Jackson, 2017; Hickel & Kallis, 2020), sufficiency (Princen, 2005) has emerged as a key dimension of just transitions^[1]. It involves governing the reduction of material and energy use to remain within the biosphere’s limits while ensuring a fair distribution of essential goods and services for a decent and meaningful life for all (Büchs et al., 2024). The concept has been operationalized through the ‘sufficiency corridors’ framework (Bärnthaler 2024; Fuchs et al., 2021), which sets minimum thresholds of consumption and production to meet basic needs, and maximum limits to prevent ecological overshoot.

While much of the research on sufficiency has focused on securing adequate standards of living for disadvantaged groups, less attention has been paid to reducing the excess of privileged populations whose lifestyles are ecologically ungeneralizable or ‘polluter elites’ (Koch et al., 2024; Kenner, 2019; IPCC, 2022). Yet, considering such disproportionate contributions to ecological degradation (see for eg.: Chancel, 2022), there is an urgent need to understand how to align these social groups’ practices with the principles of sufficiency (Koch et al., 2024). 

The Just Transitions Chair aims to contribute to this emerging research agenda by exploring who urban polluter elites are, how these elites interact both among themselves and with other (social-)ecological classes (eg.: Fritz & Eversberg, 2024), and what institutional, political, spatial, infrastructural and cultural characteristics define and configure their engagement with sufficiency. The project also investigates action, governance arrangements and institutions to enable a sufficiency politics, polity and policy towards a just transition. This research adopts a plural and open-ended conception of ‘urban polluter elites’, which is not limited to the super-rich.

Each PhD candidate will develop his.her own thesis project relating to this broader research agenda. Specific research questions and methods will depend on the candidate’s academic background and research interests. We welcome a broad range of research perspectives (e.g. sociology, ecological economics, political science, urban studies, economic geography or political economy).

Questions and domains which the collective research endeavor (1 postdoc and 2 PhDs) could address are, among many others, for instance: perspectives on social-ecological justice of urban polluter elites; acceptance and sabotage of sufficiency policies; power and agency in the institutionalisation of sufficiency; debating and deliberating sufficiency corridors and pathways; understanding the idea of excess, overconsumption, non-alignment; obstruction to sufficiency policies and introducing doubt on excess.

As the PhD positions are embedded within the larger SWIFFT consortium that has a core focus on the decarbonization of Belgium, PhD candidates are asked to reflect on the relevance of their proposed project to the Belgian context, be it through a Belgian case study and/or comparative or broader synthetic insights.

^[1] A just transition is here understood as a transformative social-ecological project addressing in an integrated way intertwined ecological degradations and social inequalities (see Fransolet & Vanhille, 2023).