When Vulnerability Is Mistaken for Justice: Just Readiness and the Political Grammars of Colorado's Coal Transition

ABSTRACT This paper examines how “community readiness” operates within just transition governance, arguing that readiness frameworks—though intended to support locally grounded, participatory change—can also unevenly shape recognition, participation, and repair. In rural transition contexts, readiness is often treated as evidence of legitimacy and fairness through cohesion, consensus, and institutional alignment—even as these qualities may obscure internal inequalities and foreclose contested futures. Drawing on postcolonial feminist theory, recognition justice, and scholarship on anticipatory governance, the paper reconceptualizes readiness not as a neutral measure of capacity but as a governing grammar that organizes who counts as the community, how disagreement is interpreted, and which futures are rendered actionable. Empirically, the paper analyzes Colorado's effort to decarbonize its electricity system by 2040, focusing on the institutional architecture created to manage coal plant closures and support coal‐dependent regions. Based on an iterative analysis of a wide set of documents, the study identifies four recurring political grammars—legibility, harmony, anticipation, and state redress without redistribution—that structure just transition governance across institutional sites. Together, these grammars help explain how transition efforts can be substantively active and procedurally inclusive while remaining constrained in their capacity to address deeper questions of power, belonging, and rural political–economic change. The paper concludes by advancing “just readiness” as an analytic orientation attentive to contestation, evolving community boundaries, and the politics of anticipation in rural sustainability transitions.