In November 2023, Petroineos announced the closure of Scotland’s only oil refinery at Grangemouth by 2025. Grangemouth is widely perceived as a ‘litmus test’ for the Scottish Government’s commitment to a ‘just transition’ for workers in the oil and gas industry to steer them on an orderly movement towards suitable employment in green energy production. The announcement came as a shock and disrupted just transition planning developed in Scotland since the late 2010s. Power imbalances between Petroineos and the Scottish Government and the workforce and trade unions demonstrate the difficulties of organising transition in a sector dominated by large multinationals subject to minimal accountability or transparency. This paper demonstrates the value of historically, economically and politically grounded policy analysis for achieving net zero. It assesses the Grangemouth closure announcement, focusing on governance mechanisms, UK, Scottish and local policy coordination, transparency and long-term planning challenges, particularly for net zero, energy policy, renewables and deindustrialisation. This article is published in the thematic collection ‘The critical role of governance for decarbonisation at pace: learning the lessons from SHAPE research’, edited by Sarah Birch, Hilary Graham, Andrew Jordan, Tim O’Riordan, Henry Richards.

This article introduces the thematic collection, ‘The critical role of governance for decarbonisation at pace: learning the lessons from SHAPE research’, edited by Sarah Birch, Hilary Graham, Andrew Jordan, Tim O’Riordan, and Henry Richards. With confirmation that global average temperatures in 2024 exceeded 1.5° above pre-industrial levels, and near continuous news of extreme weather events around the world, there seems little to dispute the characterisation of UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, that ‘every country must deliver and play their rightful part’. Guterres and many others point to the urgency of action, even though it is palpably sluggish. In the collection, we argue that SHAPE (Social Science, Humanities, and the Arts for People, Economy and environment) research provides the essential lynchpin for policymakers to understand people, societies, economies, and cultures and what works in practice to bring about the transformative changes needed to respond to this challenge. The common thread of this collection is governance. Governance provides the political and civic mechanisms to deliberate and make inclusive decisions based on evidence and collective judgements about our shared future. The collection features crucial policy insights drawn from SHAPE research to advance the principles and practices of consensual governance, and to help navigate ‘an exit off the highway to climate hell’.