[Hiring] Decarbonisation Lead & Writer @Institute for Human Rights & Business

Role Description

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.

Qualifications

• 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.
• 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.

Requirements

• 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.

Benefits

• Consultancy fee of GBP£4,250 per month from the agreed start date through 29 June 2028.
• Home-based role open to candidates globally.
• Willingness to travel internationally up to three times per year.

Timeframe & Contracting

• Deadline for applications: Sunday 5 July 2026 (11pm UK-time).
• First interviews will take place the w/c 27 July between the hours of 2-6pm GMT.
• Expected start date: As soon as possible, contracted through 29 June 2028, with a one-month notice period.
• Candidates must already have the legal right to work in their country of residence.
• This is a full-time role of 5 days per week.