Faster, higher, fairer? How multi-level instrumental justice reconfigures net-zero energy transitions in China

As global net-zero targets accelerate, China's state-led decarbonization process, with its unprecedented scale and speed, has become a key reference point in the global energy transition. However, while China's rapid decarbonization has resulted in significant emission reductions and technological breakthroughs, it has also raised potentially profound equity challenges. This paper harnesses a novel Governance-Justice Nexus analytical framework to examine how state-led campaign-style governance reshapes the landscape of fairness across different dimensions of energy justice. Drawing on 52 semi-structured expert interviews and fieldwork conducted across China's three major industrial clusters, this study reveals how campaign-style governance instrumentalizes justice objectives during policy implementation. This study shows that while state mobilization ensures the speed and goal orientation of the decarbonization process, it also reproduces structural inequalities across regions, industries, and social groups. The differences between coastal and inland areas, state-owned and private enterprises, and core industries and marginalized groups are reinforced by the logic of governance, but within these constraints, new forms of dynamic inclusion have also emerged. Theoretically, this study inductively derives the concept of instrumental justice from empirical findings, capturing a distinctive mode in which justice is embedded as a manageable and adjustable element within state-led governance, serving broader political objectives. The findings not only extend the applicability of energy justice theory beyond Western political systems, but also offer new analytical insights into the evolving justice dynamics of rapid decarbonization in the Global South.