What is an urban just transition? Grappling with an unsettled concept in an industrial region

As global decarbonisation pressures grow, so do calls for ‘just transition’. Urban and regional governments are exploring what this means for their jurisdictions. This article investigates how urban policy makers make sense of just transition, and the implications for its understanding in urban policy. We adopt Q-methodology to examine sensemaking for policy stakeholders in a UK industrial region, producing a new analytical conception of sensemaking through conceptualisation, contextualisation and operationalisation. This allows interrogation of how unsettled concepts like just transition are translated into legible policy entities. We found participants wrestled to resolve just transition with path-dependent narratives, reaching for existing policy discourses to modify just transition. As sensemaking moved through different stages existing narratives layered up, reducing transformative potential. Collectively, these suggest openness to just transition as policy logic but a challenge to embed transformational approaches. Cognitive and cultural dependencies are central to this challenge and our findings point to specific ways these dependencies are manifest.