Conceptualising restorative justice in the energy Transition: Changing the perspectives of fossil fuels

Abstract

Restorative justice within the energy sector focuses on the needs of the victims, such as nations, citizens and nature. It restores them to their original position prior to a damaging activity. The importance of restorative justice is that it can be a proactive policy approach to preventing harm and conflict within the energy sector if applied and accounted for at the outset of an energy project or activity. For many years energy justice scholarship has had three tenets central to its core, however, this research focuses on restorative justice that has been advanced since 2017. This review aims to capture the addition of restorative justice and provides a comparative law and case study perspective and explores the application of restorative justice across three countries Iran, Malaysia, and Canada with a focus on the oil and gas sector. In what is a first in-depth exploration of restorative justice our results confirm that restorative justice if applied can act to ensure the enforcement of energy justice, i.e., moving from theory to practice. This research also highlights how there exists a number of legal tools that have restorative justice as a guiding principle such as the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) process, the Energy Financial Reserve Obligation (EFRO), and the Social License to Operate (SLO). These are gaining in application and can ensure restorative justice moves further from a conceptual theory to practice.