The renewable energy transition is the defining infrastructure project of this generation. It is also one of the most significant human rights challenges of our time. Wind farms are increasingly being built on Indigenous territories without meaningful consent. Critical mineral supply chains pass through regions with documented labour abuses. Solar projects can displace communities while delivering their benefits elsewhere. Clean energy does not automatically distribute its benefits to the people who bear its costs.
Melis Tarakçıoğlu, a sustainability and human rights consultant with experience at KPMG and UN Global Compact Türkiye, works at the intersection of these two realities. Her position is clear: “A transition that is unjust is not a just transition at all,” Tarakçıoğlu says.
Consultation Without Decision-Making Power Is Not Meaningful Engagement
The most consequential gap in how renewable energy projects engage affected communities is not the absence of consultation; it is the absence of power within that consultation. Communities are often consulted after site selection, after project design has been finalized, and after the financial structure has already been set. At that point, consultation becomes a compliance exercise rather than a genuine exchange. The decisions shaping the project have already been made, and engagement primarily serves to document that it occurred.
A human rights due diligence framework aligned with just transition principles reverses that sequence. Free, prior and informed consent is not a box to check in the permitting process. It is a substantive right with real implications for whether a project proceeds, how it is structured, and who controls the terms under which a community’s land and resources are used.
Tarakçıoğlu is precise about what this requires: redistributing decision-making power before project design is finalized, rather than presenting communities with decisions already made and inviting reaction. That distinction determines whether HRDD produces genuine accountability or merely generates paper trails that obscure its absence.
Grievance Mechanisms That Cannot Deliver Remedy Are Symbolic Formalities, Not Accountability Tools
A grievance mechanism should be measured by one standard: whether harm is remedied when it occurs. Not whether concerns can be documented, or whether a submission process exists, but whether the outcome for the person raising the grievance changes in a meaningful and verifiable way.
Many company-controlled feedback tools fail this test. They demonstrate that a mechanism exists and may satisfy due diligence requirements in form, but they often lack the independence, accessibility, and accountability needed to function in practice.
“If a grievance can be raised but not resolved, the mechanism is not working,” Tarakçıoğlu notes. For communities affected by large-scale energy infrastructure, the difference between a functional grievance mechanism and a symbolic one is not merely procedural. It is the difference between access to remedy and continued exposure to harm.
Due Diligence That Does Not Change Practice Cannot Prevent Harm
The hardest question a climate justice approach forces onto the table is the one the renewable energy sector has often been structured to avoid: who bears the costs of the transition, and who captures its benefits? Carbon emissions may be reduced globally, but communities hosting renewable energy infrastructure often absorb the land use impacts, displacement, environmental disruption, and social change. Meanwhile, the financial benefits generated by these projects rarely reflect the distribution of harm.
Effective HRDD does not manage the appearance of responsibility. It produces measurable changes in practice: in how projects are sited, financed, governed, and in how the economic value of the transition is distributed. Policies and reporting frameworks matter only insofar as they drive those changes.
An ESG strategy that generates comprehensive documentation of human rights commitments while leaving underlying power dynamics intact has not protected anyone. It has simply produced better documentation of inaction.
Follow Melis Tarakçıoğlu on LinkedIn for more insights on human rights due diligence, just transition frameworks, and closing the gap between sustainability reporting and real accountability.
