2026/01/02 by Chris Gibson, Natasha Larkin, Andrew Warren +3 · 1 voice
Business, Management and Accounting · Engineering · Social Sciences · #Global trade, sustainability, and social impact #Mining and Resource Management #Urban Planning and Governance
paper · pdf · doi:10.1080/00049182.2026.2655424
openalex publication_date 2026/01/02 · openalex created_date 2026/04/16 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/22
This article offers a geographical interpretation of Australia’s evolving industrial decarbonisation agenda. In April 2024, the Albanese Government launched Future Made in Australia, seeking to align decarbonisation, regional development and sovereign manufacturing ambitions. Yet recent government-funded bailouts of energy-intensive industrial facilities has amplified concerns about viability, the pace of decarbonisation, and who bears transition risk. We ask: what do such crisis interventions reveal about how industrial decarbonisation is being governed, and whose interests and futures are prioritised? We identify three issues. First, crisis conditions are shaped by global market volatility, regional industrial legacies, material-technical aspects of production, and corporate under-investment. Second, governance of industrial futures and accompanying energy transitions responds to crises via deal-making between state and private actors, under place-, time- and industry-specific constraints. Third, socio-spatial justice implications remain secondary to national security concerns, market viability and asset stabilisation, even though regional workers and communities are exposed to the crisis intervention outcomes. Decarbonisation scenarios with community-wide consequences are thus unfolding not through participatory ‘just transition’ frameworks but through commercial-in-confidence negotiations – risking the decarbonisation futures these policies are ostensibly designed to drive. We discuss geographical, social and environmental implications of this for regional industrial futures and the decarbonisation imperative.