Just transition in place: Unpacking the policy discourse of just transition through Scarborough, Canada

Just transition (JT) has emerged as a key framework for navigating the overlapping imperatives of sustainability, justice, and political viability. Yet, as the concept has travelled across movements, institutions, and scales of governance, its meanings have multiplied, while urban and suburban spaces remain comparatively peripheral to dominant JT imaginaries. This article develops a multilevel place-based policy-discourse analysis for studying JT in relation to a particular location, demonstrated through the case of Scarborough, Ontario, Canada. Drawing on a purposively assembled corpus of twenty-six documents, the method analyzes how JT is articulated across five dimensions: inclusivity, issues, spatiality, temporality, and process. The resulting analysis identifies a diverse but patterned discursive field in which moderately inclusive, policy-oriented, and state-legible formulations predominate, while more expansive and transformative visions remain present but comparatively marginal. It also shows that JT can be spatially expansive in one sense and narrow in another, and that urban localities such as Scarborough are often rendered abstract or peripheral within policy discourse. In this way, the article offers a place-based methodological framework for tracing how JT policy discourse is assembled across scales and how it shapes the ways transition may be understood and made actionable in a particular place.