Decarbonisation Lead & Writer - JUST Stories

ABOUT IHRB’S WORK ON CLIMATE

IHRB’s Just Transitions Programme focuses on a central challenge: current climate action models are structurally misaligned – and this is undermining delivery. Decision-making remains top-down across sectors, financial systems misprice social risk, and practitioners lack awareness of usable, investable models. The result is an implementation gap, where ambition is rising but delivery is contested, delayed, or fragile – raising material risks for workers and communities, company operations, and the transition itself.

Our core contention is that climate action succeeds when governed as a social process, not just a technical or financial one. Embedding the rights and agency of workers, communities, and affected stakeholders into how decisions are designed, sequenced, and financed is not a moral add-on – it is a precondition for effective, investable climate action. This approach is grounded in international standards, including the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, which establish participation, accountability, and due diligence as baseline conditions.

IHRB works to shift practice through three interconnected approaches:

• making risk visible – by demonstrating how social exclusion translates into financial and operational costs

• making the possible tangible – by identifying real-world models and mechanisms, and translating them into operational insights for diverse practitioners

• making change actionable – by convening and engaging business, finance, policy, and civil society in dialogue on shared challenges and emerging issues

ABOUT JUST STORIES

The case for people-centred decarbonisation is no longer theoretical. Across sectors – from coal and steel to agriculture, construction, and energy – transitions that exclude workers and communities from meaningful decision-making face mounting resistance, reputational damage, and outright failure. Transitions designed with them are demonstrating greater durability, investability, and overall effectiveness.

Yet these models remain poorly documented and systematically underutilised in the lessons they offer. Practitioners navigating real-time decarbonisation decisions – in boardrooms, investment committees, and government ministries – lack access to credible, peer-relevant evidence of what stakeholder-informed transitions actually look like in practice: how they were designed, what trade-offs were made, and why they worked.

JUST Stories was built to close this gap.

Launched in 2024, JUST Stories is a global search for stories of people working together to advance people-centred climate action. Phase I (2024-2026) produced four in-depth stories spanning coal transition in Australia, salt-pan workers and solar energy in India, affordable housing in Catalonia, and agricultural transition in Brazil – each documented through participatory fieldwork and translated into practitioner-grade insights for business and policy audiences.

Phase II builds on this foundation.

From 2026-2028, JUST Stories will produce 2–3 new immersive stories focused on people-centred decarbonisation in practice, while a parallel strand – separately resourced – extends the work into climate adaptation and resilience. This role sits within the decarbonisation strand.

Story selection prioritises real-time transition processes far enough in implementation to demonstrate clear evidence of success, even if early-stage; where companies, financial actors, workers, communities, and public institutions are actively navigating complex trade-offs between climate objectives, commercial realities, and social outcomes.

The stories produced are not communications outputs alone. They are structured evidence, designed to:

• Surface how companies, workers, communities, and governments have navigated the real governance, commercial, and social trade-offs that shape transition outcomes

• Identify the enabling conditions that allowed stakeholder-led approaches to succeed – and the constraints that tested them

• Inform the decisions of practitioners who are actively shaping how transitions unfold: operators, investors, policymakers, sector intermediaries, and worker and community representatives.

The ultimate goal is to shift the dominant decarbonisation narrative from top-down implementation to co-designed transition governance – and to place that evidence where it can inform wider practice.

ROLE OVERVIEW

IHRB is seeking an experienced researcher and narrative writer with a specialism in decarbonisation – spanning energy and industrial transition, land use and agricultural emissions, and other sectors undergoing significant emissions reduction – to lead the research and storytelling at the core of JUST Stories Phase II.

This role will focus on identifying, researching, and producing immersive, evidence-based, solutions-oriented narratives of people-centred decarbonisation in practice. The stories produced must:

• Withstand scrutiny from technical and policy experts across sectors - including energy and utilities, heavy industry, agriculture and land use, infrastructure, and finance

• Authentically reflect the lived realities of workers, communities, and local actors at the heart of transitions

• Be directly usable in business and investment decision-making contexts – not as inspiration, but as peer-relevant evidence of what works and why

Target audiences for JUST Stories outputs include senior practitioners from:

• Industrial operators, utilities, energy companies, and manufacturers managing transition programmes

• Agricultural and food system companies navigating land-use change

• Infrastructure investors, private equity, and asset managers with transition exposure and commercial banks and DFIs financing decarbonisation at scale

• National and subnational governments designing transition frameworks

• Sector associations, employer bodies, and standard-setting institutions

While also being credible to, and co-created with, the workers, unions, community organisations, and frontline actors whose experience the stories document.

This requires the ability to move fluently between ground-level realities (what it takes to negotiate a transition plan with a mining community) and system-level decision environments (what an infrastructure investor needs to understand about stakeholder governance before committing capital).

The role will be supported by and work in collaboration with the wider IHRB team to ensure technical robustness and to translate story insights into business influence. A dedicated Business Engagement Lead (being recruited in parallel to this position) will take primary responsibility for story dissemination and practitioner outreach, sector forum engagement, masterclass production, and dilemma forum convening – allowing this role to focus on research and storytelling depth.

ROLE OBJECTIVES

To lead the process of:

• Identifying a long-list of real-time examples of people-centred decarbonisation in practice across a diversity of sectors and geographies

• Producing 2-3 deeply researched, field-based stories for publication

• Producing immersive multi-format outputs for each story: a visually compelling, long-form narrative feature, fact sheet, and structured business lesson distillation as well as video supplement and social media collateral.

And to work with the wider IHRB team to:

• Ensure each story contributes to a coherent body of evidence that advances the case for stakeholder-informed transition governance

• Support the development of cross-story synthesis and learning products - in particular the business briefs, masterclasses, and annual dilemma fora

WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE

• Stories that are credible to the workers and communities at their centre, and genuinely useful to the business and policy practitioners they are designed to influence

• Clear, evidence-based articulation of what made each transition work – the governance choices, sequencing decisions, and enabling conditions that practitioners can learn from and apply

• Outputs that are cited, requested, and used by practitioners

• A structured lesson distillation for each story that gives the Business Engagement Lead strong material to work with for bespoke business and sectoral briefings

• Contribution to a recognisable, growing body of evidence on people-centred decarbonisation

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

Research & Framing

• Conduct rigorous literature and landscape reviews on decarbonisation across relevant sectors, with particular attention to how stakeholder participation, workforce planning, and community governance shape transition outcomes

• Identify high-potential, real-time case studies through IHRB’s networks, sector contacts, and targeted outreach – building a long-list from which the 2-3 stories are selected

• Develop analytical frameworks to assess what constitutes a “just” and “effective” decarbonisation process – one that is commercially viable, stakeholder-informed, and durable

Fieldwork & Primary Research

• Design and implement ethical, high-quality interview and engagement processes across all levels of each story – from community and worker actors to company executives, investors, and government counterparts

• Undertake field visits to selected sites (1-2 per year) to gather primary data, context, and narrative material – having built the necessary trust and relationships with local actors to co-create the story together

• Ensure all research is conducted to the highest standards of safeguarding, consent, and representation, in line with IHRB’s ethical guidelines for field research

• Surface the governance choices, sequencing decisions, and commercial trade-offs that shaped transition outcomes – the material that makes a story useful and actionable to practitioners, not just compelling to read

Narrative Development

• Produce publication-quality stories that integrate human narrative, analytical insight, and clear articulation of enabling conditions and constraints

• Translate complex, context-specific findings into clear, structured insights for both frontline communities and institutional decision-makers

• Work with IHRB communications colleagues to produce accompanying outputs including fact sheets, social assets, and audio-visual supplements

• Own the fact-checking, validation with story subjects, and translation into the primary local language of each story

• Collaborate in the editorial review process, sharing draft outlines and sections at key stages, responding to feedback from various IHRB colleagues, and working with IHRB’s Head of Just Transitions and Head of Communications on key editorial tradeoffs and decisions

Business Lesson Distillation

For each story, the Decarbonisation Lead & Writer will produce a structured distillation of the business-relevant lessons - identifying the decision moments, governance adaptations, commercial trade-offs, and enabling conditions that shaped outcomes. Specifically, the writer will:

• Provide this distillation as a substantive input to the Business Engagement Lead for development into the practitioner brief and sector-specific materials

• Participate in mid-development reviews with the Business Engagement Lead to ensure the right questions are being surfaced in the field before fieldwork concludes

• Contribute story insights and lesson material to inform the design and content of the annual practitioner dilemma forum, led by the Business Engagement Lead.

Masterclasses

Each JUST Story will be accompanied by a chapter-based digital masterclass series featuring the transition leaders and practitioners at the heart of the story. The writer's role in this is foundational: the relationships built during fieldwork and participatory research are the basis on which masterclass contributors are identified and approached. Specifically, the writer will:

• Identify and cultivate relationships with potential masterclass contributors during the research and fieldwork process

• Closely liaise with the Business Engagement Lead on contributor profiles, story insights, and the key lessons each contributor is best placed to teach

• Support the Business Engagement Lead in framing and structuring masterclass content where editorial input from the researcher perspective adds value

The Business Engagement Lead holds primary responsibility for masterclass production and delivery - but that is highly dependent on the foundational work in producing each story.

Strategic Integration

Working with the wider IHRB team to:

• Ensure each story contributes to a coherent body of evidence across Phase II and builds on the foundation of the first four JUST Stories

• Support the identification/formation of and regular engagement with the Project Advisory Council to refine story selection, framing, and quality assurance

• Support the development of cross-story synthesis products, drawing out patterns and lessons across the JUST Stories portfolio

• Contribute story insights and lesson material to inform the design and content of the annual practitioner dilemma forum, led by the Business Engagement Lead.

• Contribute to IHRB’s broader just transitions knowledge base and organisational learning

ABOUT YOU

The ideal candidate combines:

• Strong primary research capability (including interviews and fieldwork)

• Exceptional narrative writing skills, with the ability to translate complex, context-specific realities into compelling, analytically rigorous stories

• Demonstrable curiosity in balancing industrial decarbonisation and sectoral climate policy alongside the qualitative dimensions of stakeholder agency and human rights.

Core Experience & Knowledge

• 7+ years’ experience in journalistic and writing roles, combining primary research or fieldwork with long-form features and/or narrative or analytical report writing.

• Demonstrated expertise in decarbonisation and just transitions, with a track record for cross-sectoral curiosity and applied analysis

• Strong understanding of how decarbonisation intersects with corporate governance and investment decision making in tandem with respect for human rights, workforce planning, and community relations

• Familiarity with relevant frameworks and debates, including just transition principles, ILO standards on just transition, NDCs and sectoral decarbonisation pathways, the evolving landscape of transition finance, and broader landscape of business and human rights

• Proven ability to produce high-quality, analytically rigorous, and narratively engaging written outputs for specialist and non-specialist audiences

• Experience working in politically and socially sensitive contexts, where power dynamics between companies, governments, and communities are live and contested

Core Skills and Abilities

• Exceptional writing and storytelling ability – able to balance human narrative, analytical rigour, and evidence-based insight

• Strong qualitative research skills, including interview design, fieldwork, synthesis, and analysis

• Ability to translate local, context-specific insights into broader systemic relevance for institutional audiences

• High degree of emotional intelligence and cultural sensitivity when engaging with workers, communities, and frontline actors

• Ability to identify and surface the governance decisions, commercial trade-offs, and sequencing choices that practitioners need to understand – not the human story alone, but the structural lessons within it

• Strong organisational skills and ability to manage multiple workstreams in a remote, globally distributed team

• Ability to build trust-based relationships with a genuinely diverse range of actors - from community members and frontline workers to company executives and government counterparts - and to hold those relationships with integrity across the full arc of a story.

Nice if you have, not a dealbreaker if you don’t

• Experience working directly with worker organisations, trade unions, or community groups in the context of industrial or economic transition

• Experience engaging with corporate sustainability, transition planning, or ESG practitioners from within business or finance

• Additional languages relevant to project geographies

Attitude

• Proactive and self-motivating: Entrepreneurial attitude, with a proven ability to own and be accountable for end-to-end processes and tasks, and ensure successful outcomes

• Flexible and adaptable: Ability to adjust aspects of the work, timelines, and working style as needed to cater to the realities of a small, nimble, globally distributed organisation

• Collaborative: Comfortable working as part of a small team with distinct but interdependent roles – particularly in the interface between research/storytelling and business engagement

• Diplomatic and tactful: Treating all actors – from community members to senior executives – respectfully and sensitively, acting as a bridge builder across power and perspective

TIMEFRAME & CONTRACTING

• Deadline for applications: Sunday 5 July 2026 (11pm UK-time)

• Interviews: First interviews will take place the w/c 27 July between the hours of 2-6pm GMT. Second interviews will take place one week later and be scheduled with candidates closer to the time, including a short exercise prepared ahead of second interview.

• Expected start date and timeframe: As soon as possible. The consultant will be contracted through 29 June 2028, with a one-month notice period.

• Location:

  • This is a home-based role and open to candidates globally. To support effective collaboration, we are only able to accommodate candidates whose primary working hours align with time zones up to Central European Time (CET), or west of CET, ensuring substantial overlap with colleagues working on US/Europe/Africa time (MST/CET/SAST).

  • Candidates must already have the legal right to work in their country of residence, be able to manage all related taxes, provide their own laptop, and have reliable internet connectivity.

  • The role requires willingness to travel internationally up to three times per year. Site visits may involve remote locations; candidates should therefore hold a valid driver’s license and maintain appropriate insurance and a good driving record.

• Hours: This is a full-time role of 5 days per week.

• Compensation: The consultancy fee is GBP£4,250 per month from the agreed start date through 29 June 2028.

• Contracting: The successful candidate will be engaged through a consultancy agreement subject to UK law. They will need to be registered as self-employed and will be responsible for managing their own taxes, insurance, and any other legal or financial obligations. A consultancy offer will be subject to receipt of two satisfactory references.

Click on the “Apply Now” button to answer some specific application questions.

Please note: The following yes/no questions are intended to help you identify whether you are qualified and well-positioned for this role. Please answer honestly. We list these minimum criteria and constraints for a reason. If you do not qualify this time, there will certainly be other opportunities in the future. Answering dishonestly only takes away from our capacity to consider other applicants that are well suited for this particular role. So please note that if you answer "yes" to an answer and we find that to be untrue, you will not be considered for future roles at IHRB

Applications from unsuccessful applicants will be held on file for 6 months after the end of the recruitment process.