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HCIAS Blogcast: The Public Negotiation of Justice in Transitions to Sustainability

In our latest podcast episode, we speak with HCIAS research associate Dr. Mariana Ramírez Bustamante, about her work as a postdoctoral researcher on the project The Public Negotiation of Justice in Transitions to Sustainability (JuTSy). She shares insights on the role of communication, democratic institutions, and interdisciplinary research in shaping fair energy transitions in Latin America.

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David: Hello and welcome to another episode of the HCIAS Podcast. Today, we’re very pleased to have Dr. Mariana Ramírez Bustamente as our guest. Mariana is a political scientist who holds a PhD from Vanderbilt University in the United States, where she specializes in comparative politics and political methodology.

Her doctoral dissertation explored the relationship between organized crime and popular political behavior in Latin America. She also holds a bachelor’s degree in political science and administration from the Pontificial Catholic University of Peru and a master’s in Latin American Studies from Salamanca University in Spain. And in May 2024, she joined the HCIAS as a postdoctoral researcher.

So first of all, Mariana, thank you very much for being here.

Mariana: Thank you for having me.

David: One of the things that you do in your research at the HCIAS is collaborate on a project called The Public Negotiation of Justice in Transitions to Sustainability. Now, it’s a complex research project with several strands and a lot of big ideas, but I’d like to start by asking what do concepts like a just transition mean to you personally, and how do they figure into your work?

Mariana: Yeah, thank you so much for this question. I think it’s great to start with a very broad question like this. When I’m thinking about just transition, first, I think about the raising the earth temperature that has pushed the transition to energy sources, low in carbon emissions.

So instead of a complete shift from a set of dominant energy resources to another energy transition involves phasing out of fossil fuels, while increasing these renewable energies resources, such as solar and wind. So the term just transition is a little bit more complex. It’s an academic term, and it’s originated from the labor movement, which kind of highlights the need to look for what’s going to happen to the workforces, especially those that work in mining and the energy industry in general.

So this term is associated with a general approach to transition to a more sustainable energy system, which means that we need to take into consideration the economic, social and environmental impacts of the transition. But for our project, at least in the areas or the specific sub studies that I’m working on, which are related to communications and to political science, we’re mostly thinking about this concept in a more practical way. So we use a more colloquial term.

So instead of just transition, we’re mainly focusing on the energy change, mainly in Latin America, but we’re also considering, for example, to take into or analyze as well, the German case. So we’re basically focusing on how this transition from coal or different mining or extraction in general to more renewable sources like wind or lithium, also solar farms. So this is the kind of approach that we’re considering right now.

David: You mentioned that you mainly focus on communication and political science aspects of the project, and your background is in political science. So you’ve done a lot of interesting research on electoral politics. I would like to know what role democratic institutions play in these energy transitions.

Mariana: Sure. I think this is a great question to kind of combine the different topics that I’ve worked on. So thank you for giving me the opportunity to bridge these two topics.

So I think in general, the underlying topic behind these two research agendas is basically that democracy in general will affect how what people will affect representation. So people, for example, we could expect that people are interested in having this just transition or energy transition in general. And therefore, the electoral system or the way that parties are representing these needs will allow these positions to be represented in government.

So I think, for example, in the two cases that we’re right now focusing on the media analysis study that I was trying to mention before. So we are focusing on Chile and Colombia, for example, and these two countries, they have right now left-leaning parties in government. So these two, because of the ideological position that they have, they prioritize the environment and this energy transition.

So, for example, with Petro in Colombia or Boris in Chile, they both have or are pushing this energy transition agenda. So we do see that this electoral system, democracy in general, can have a huge impact in focusing or pushing this type of environmental agenda.

David: You’ve already mentioned a couple of countries in Latin America whose governments are making efforts to engage with these issues. How effective do you think those efforts have been so far? And what factors do you think might be impeding progress on that front?

Mariana: Yeah, I think this is a very complicated, I mean, I’m gonna try to answer as clearly as possible, but I think it’s a complicated topic. I think to start off, I believe that there are some structural challenges. So, for example, in Chile, that I just mentioned is one of our cases of study, the elites are very like, the politicians or government elites are very close to businesses.

And for example, mining sector, they have a lot of power. So because of this imbalance in the structure already, social structure, sometimes it’s hard to make this transition. And I think this is not only, I mean, in the case of Chile is very evident, because it’s one of the most neoliberal countries in the region.

But this is also happening in Colombia, that is the other case that we’re focusing on, because they mainly or they have these historical dependence on coal. So this change is hard to manage. But I also believe that there is another issue, I think here in Europe, now that I kind of returned to Europe after a long time, I think here, there’s a lot of education about the need to protect the environment, do something to decrease your environmental print, like a huge emphasis on recycling, stuff like that, that you can do from home.

But I think this is not necessarily the case in Latin America. So even though we see that among the general public, younger people are starting to realize the need to change for this change, environmental change, including this just transition. This is I wouldn’t say that this is widespread throughout the population.

So I think this is a key challenge, because, as I mentioned before, a democracy is key to push or have a government that represents its interests. And if we don’t have a general population asking for these changes, it’s going to be very hard to actually push or try to make the government do something more to foster this change, especially long term and in a way that is sustainable over time.

David: And how do communication dynamics and communication strategies play a role in these processes?

Mariana: I think I think this is a good way to kind of try to ground our previous discussion, right? Like, I do think that there needs to be a better communication, like if this is something that that in context, like Latin America, is not really discussed, or is something that it’s only being discussed in like smaller groups, there needs to be a wider strategy to communicate the need for these kind of social, environmental and political changes, right? And I think this is what what some of these governments that I mentioned, Chile and Colombia are trying to do, like by doing our our study on the coverage of of this energy transition, we’ve seen that Petro is the one who actually discusses more openly about these kind of topics and the and the need for this energy transition.

But it’s actually kind of contradictory, because unlike Chile, that has a lot of potential for, they have a lot of lithium, like the second reserve in the world for lithium, and they have a lot of potential for green hydrogen. In Colombia, they have these wind parts or farms, I think they call it, and La Guajira is one one of those cases. But even though, even though like Petro is saying, this is going to change our supply for energy, and it’s going to provide for the whole country, many say that that’s actually not the case.

So the discourse doesn’t match reality. That would be like an example of what should be avoided, or like a strategy that I would say, like, it’s not really something that should be, like widespread, or like, done by other countries, because it’s generating this expectation that it’s gonna solve or at least like improve the whole situation in the country when actually that’s not going to happen. And that can also put or generate a conflict in the areas where they are, where these renewable energies are being produced.

So I would say that’s a strategy that we should avoid. On the contrary, what should be done is to actually focus on the local population in the area where they extract lithium, for example, or where they are extracting green hydrogen or doing these farms to assess the needs that these localities have and better develop this project in a way that is actually just and sustainable over time.

David: To change the topic slightly, the project as a whole is very interdisciplinary. So you don’t only work with other political scientists, you also collaborate with communication researchers and geographers. What benefits do you see in this kind of interdisciplinary research?

Mariana: Yeah, so I think this is a very complex phenomenon that we are talking or that we are discussing or analyzing. So it’s very hard to actually understand these kind of topics with just one single theoretical framework or one methodological approach. So I believe that this interdisciplinary perspective allows us to consider different actors that are involved and also multiple angles that we can use to focus or analyze this issue, which would allow us in turn to have a better understanding of it.

So I think that while combining these different methodological approaches and theories, we can grasp better what is the main problematic, what are the main issues, and this could hopefully inform policymaking or improve future research about this topic.

David: And are there any ways in which you found this mixture to be challenging?

Mariana: So I believe we use different kind of language. So for me, some terms that are very… So I’m a political scientist and I did my PhD in the US.

It’s a very quantitative approach. I also do qualitative research, but the way that we talk is very quantitative. We want to measure, we want causality.

And when talking to people from communications, from geography, sociology, that’s not the way they see things. The kind of studies that they do tend to be a little bit more descriptive. They map actors, they want to know the interactions between those actors.

So I think for me, it was kind of like at the beginning, especially I had the need to change the way I thought, the way I had been trained so that there’s no miscommunication. And also this language also manifests in the methods that we use. So I do a lot of…

I do experiments, I use surveys. And now for the communication studies, we’re using content analysis, quantitative content analysis. So there’s the need to kind of also become familiar with other methods and try to understand or get the most out of the other discipline and try to understand what they are trying to say and how it benefits you, even though if you have a different kind of perspective and approach to analyze the same topic.

David: And how is it all going? What aspect of the project are you focused on right now? What does a typical day look like for you?

Mariana: Currently, I’m mostly involved in the communication project. So we’re doing a content analysis of the main printed media in Chile and Colombia. We’re doing this analysis from 2016 until November 2024.

So we have downloaded all the articles from all the main newspapers in these two countries. We finally selected one newspaper for each country, which is the one that provides more news about the topic that we’re interested about, which is this energy transition. And we have created a codebook to be able to generate this data, right, to code all these articles.

We have a team of coders, so we have trained them. And now, right now, we are in the process of verifying whether the training that we’ve given them so far is enough for them to start the coding. So right now we are in the second phase of the pilot.

And I, since we’re working with this team, we also have a research assistant. I, like, constantly coordinate with Pablo, who is the main, the principal investigator of this project. So I try to coordinate with different people who are doing different tasks.

And I’m overlooking this data generating process. I would say that’s my main or daily kind of activities for that project. And I’m also involved in this other project with Alejandro.

It’s a political science perspective. We are trying to analyze what do people think or how, when do people, ordinary citizens, when do they support these just transition policies or measures. So the way that we’re trying to assess this topic is by conducting an experiment embedded in a survey.

So we’re thinking about comparing probably Chile with Germany. And we, it would be like, we’re trying to design a main questionnaire where we would have the experiment, probably a conjoined experiment. And then we, so we’re reading about similar studies who use this approach and other studies that analyze this topic.

And we’re trying to come up with these tools or the, yeah, the tools that we want to use to collect this data.

David: I hope that you’ll be able to come back later on and share some of the findings with our audience.

Mariana: Yeah, that would be great. Thank you.

David: Thank you very much, Mariana, for coming in to talk to us about your work. And thank you as well to the audience. Don’t forget to follow the HCIAS on social media and see you in the next episode.

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This HCIAS Blogcast has been just a short recap of a wide-ranging and thought-provoking discussion. If you would like to learn more about our guest and her work, you can listen to the whole episode here.


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
HCIAS Blog (May 7, 2025). HCIAS Blogcast: The Public Negotiation of Justice in Transitions to Sustainability. HCIAS Blog. Retrieved April 21, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/13vkz


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