Between rhetoric and reality: Governance of just transition in Portugal's coal phase-out

Portugal's 2021 coal phase-out was celebrated politically as a milestone of climate leadership. This article interrogates the governance of the process using a Just Transition framework, examining the relationships between policy commitments, institutional implementation, administrative outcomes and workers' experiences. Drawing on documentary analysis, fieldwork, and sixteen semi-structured interviews with directly employed workers, public officials and company representatives, we examine how just transition guidelines were framed in national policy and applied in the closures of the Sines and Pego thermoelectric power plants. Neither municipality registered a marked rise in unemployment following the closures. Nevertheless, interviewed workers reported income loss, less meaningful work and an erosion of professional and social identity. Governance responses were largely technocratic, privileging compensation and reskilling, while workers perceived territorial investment as delayed or insufficient. Despite their different designs, the institutional arrangements in both territories converged on the same recorded outcome by different routes: redeployment, early retirement, employment-service placements and income-support measures each determined whether covered workers appeared in the unemployment register at all. The comparison therefore suggests that administrative indicators are not wholly independent measures of policy outcomes but are partly shaped by the instruments used to mitigate closure impacts. The article specifies this mechanism and highlights the need for transition governance that institutionalises social dialogue, transparency and longitudinal, disaggregated monitoring of employment outcomes.