Decarbonisation Lead & Narratives Writer – JUST Stories
- Organization
- Institute for Human Rights and Business
- Location
- Home-based role and open to candidates globally
- Job Type
- Full-time
- Deadline for Applications
- 07/05/2026
- Where to Apply
- https://ihrb.teamtailor.com/jobs/7882664-decarbonisation-lead-narratives-writer-just-stories?utm_source=jobs.humanrightscareers.com
IHRB is seeking a narrative specialist who can build trust across diverse ecosystems of actors forging real-time just transitions, and produce rigorous features that change how business leaders act.
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
