Green Skills and the Just Energy Transition: Integrating Sustainability into TVET Engineering Curricula
Abstract
The accelerating shift from carbon-intensive to low-carbon production systems has reframed the purpose of technical and vocational training, placing the formation of environmentally literate technicians at the centre of national development agendas. This review examines how vocational engineering provision can be reoriented to cultivate the ecological competencies that a fair, low- carbon economic transformation demands, with particular attention to settings in the global South where institutional capacity is uneven and labour markets are informalised. Drawing on scholarship spanning energy-justice theory, sustainability-competency frameworks, vocational pedagogy and comparative policy analysis, the discussion synthesises the conceptual foundations, curricular mechanisms, institutional enablers and governance arrangements through which training systems can equip learners for emerging occupational demands. It argues that ecological literacy is not a peripheral addition to technical instruction but a structuring principle that should permeate occupational standards, workshop practice, assessment design and trainer development. The analysis further contends that procedural fairness, recognition of marginalised workers and the equitable distribution of new opportunities must be treated as integral to curriculum reform rather than as downstream policy concerns. Persistent obstacles—including inadequate financing, weak industry linkages, gendered exclusion, obsolete equipment and fragmented qualification frameworks—are identified as the principal constraints on effective reform, and cross-sectoral partnership, scenario-based skills anticipation and sustained trainer capacity-building are advanced as the most promising remedies. The review concludes that aligning vocational engineering provision with the imperatives of a fair, low-carbon transformation requires coordinated action across education, labour and environmental policy domains, anchored in a justice-oriented understanding of who benefits, who decides and who is heard. Implications for policy, institutional practice and future inquiry are delineated.
Keywords
green skills; just transition; vocational education; sustainability competencies; energy justice; curriculum reform. IJEMT
References
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