The hardest part of the green transition may not be the building of new infrastructure, but mediating the conflicts that come with it.
The green transition is often presented as a technical challenge: build renewable energy, electrify transport and phase out fossil fuels. But the transition is also reshaping jobs, landscapes and communities. Across the world, resistance is growing around wind farms, mining projects and industrial restructuring linked to climate policy. These conflicts surrounding sustainability policies and measures reveal something fundamental: the transition produces unequal impacts and law and governance are often poorly equipped to engage with the conflicts that follow.
Unequal transitions create conflict
Green policies redistribute costs and opportunities unevenly across society: they create new investment, infrastructure and jobs, while exposing others to industrial decline, rising living costs or environmental disruption. A region that attracts the development of a battery plant or offshore wind hub may see the transition as a source of employment and renewal, while a coal, steel or refinery community may experience it as a threat to jobs, local identity and economic security. These uneven effects generate resistance to transition policies.
Workers in carbon-intensive industries may fear unemployment and loss of identity tied to their profession. Rural communities often feel excluded from decisions about renewable energy infrastructure that transforms local landscapes. Communities in the Global South bear many of the environmental and social burdens linked to the extraction of critical minerals needed for green technologies.
These tensions go beyond economic considerations. They are also about recognition, participation and trust. People want to know whether they are being heard, whether decisions are fair and whether the burdens of the transition are being shared justly.
Participation without listening
Governments and corporations increasingly rely on public participation and stakeholder engagement to improve the legitimacy of sustainability projects. Yet these processes often remain conflict-blind: they invite people to comment on projects, but rarely create space to examine deeper tensions, mistrust or past grievances that explain why opposition emerges in the first place. Mediation is different because it treats disagreement as a conflict that needs to be understood before designing solutions rather than as a problem to be managed.
Public consultations are frequently organised after major decisions have already been taken. The conflict around wind farms on Sámi reindeer herding land in Norway illustrates this problem. For Sámi communities, the issue was not only where turbines would be placed, but also how the project affected migration routes, grazing practices and their ability to sustain their way of life. When participation fails to engage with these deeper concerns, it risks becoming a procedural exercise focused on managing opposition rather than understanding its causes.
In many cases, unresolved tensions can also delay or disrupt green transition projects. Legal challenges, public protests and political pushbacks increasingly shape the implementation of renewable energy infrastructure and industrial transition policies. Conflict therefore affects communities and stakeholders as well as the capacity of governments and corporations to carry out the green transition.
Furthermore, conflicts in the green transition are rarely just technical disagreements. They often involve competing values, historical grievances and unequal power relationships. Opposition to a renewable energy infrastructure may reflect concerns about identity, exclusion or distrust in institutions, while conflicts around critical mineral extraction may concern control over land and resources. Such opposition need not therefore amount to hostility to climate action itself.
When planning authorities, permitting procedures and corporate engagement processes treat conflict mainly as a problem to minimise or to manage, they risk deepening frustration and polarisation instead of building legitimacy.
Sitting with conflict
This is where mediation can play an important role. Mediation is usually understood as a way to settle disputes, but it can also offer a different approach to sustainability governance. Rather than trying to eliminate disagreement, mediation creates space to engage with conflict directly.
This means bringing affected actors into dialogue before key decisions are taken and giving them room to shape plans rather than comment on them. Communities could be involved in discussing where wind turbines are located, workers in planning industrial restructuring or residents in adapting housing renovation schemes before costs are imposed. Such conversations will not eliminate disagreement, but it can prevent it from being treated as a failure of the process. They also make it easier to acknowledge power imbalances instead of assuming that all stakeholders enter discussions on equal terms.
Importantly, mediation avoids forcing consensus. Some conflicts simply cannot be fully resolved. But mediation can help parties better understand competing positions, clarify what interests are at stake and identify pathways that can meet the concerns of all parties at the table. In doing so, mediation can foster greater mutual understanding between actors affected by and involved in green transition measures, creating conditions for mutual recognition, trust and more constructive forms of problem-solving.
The green transition will inevitably generate tensions because it asks societies to rethink how economies, communities and everyday life are organised: where people work, how land is used, how homes are heated and how people travel. Since conflict is inherently present in the green transition, we must learn how to engage it – with courage and openness.
*******************
This blog post is based on the paper to be presented at the conference Sustainability Law: Law’s Response to the Convergence of Crises, 16-18 September 2026, at the University of Oslo
