Why the promise of green jobs has limited resonance: Industrial attachments in 'net zero' transitions

• ‘Green jobs’ (GJ) discourse circulates among climate policymakers and campaigners. • I show that the promise of green jobs has limited resonance for some communities. • It lacks resonance for people who are attached to traditional industries. • Repurposing people’s industrial attachments might sow the seeds of support for GJ. • This is important to achieve net zero transformations. ‘Green jobs’ discourse circulates with intensity among climate policy networks in the United Kingdom and internationally. Social actors assume that the promise of the mass delivery of green jobs will help to build public support for a net zero industrial transition among communities with affective ties to high-carbon industries. In this paper, I use interview and ethnographic data collected in a northern English town to critically examine this assumption. Drawing on conceptual work about the nature of ‘attachments’, I show that proposals for the delivery of new green jobs and industries are felt to lack credibility and have limited resonance with some communities. By making this argument, I put forward a novel analysis within energy and industrial geographies about the tension between imagined sustainable futures (envisaged by policymakers and environmental campaigners) and the materiality of attachments to traditional industries (experienced by communities). I conclude by exploring how low carbon infrastructures might be rendered more affecting. One response lies in recognising and repurposing people’s industrial attachments; this necessitates forms of investment attuned to place-specific sensitivities.