Sustainability talks and visa walls: reflections from the NEST conference 2025 on whose voices are heard

Kanika Balani and Carla Douglas

We organised the 10th Annual Network of Early Career Researchers in Sustainability Transitions (NEST) Conference on 29–30 May 2025, with support from the EDRC Flex Fund, Sustainability Transitions Research Network (STRN), and other funders. Our core organising team, made up of PhD researchers from institutions around the world, was committed to making equity and justice central to the design and delivery of the conference.

Equity and justice were the key themes in the panel discussions, workshops, and in many of the presentations by ECRs. These themes weren’t just theoretical, but also became deeply practical in the way the conference was organised. Among the many logistical tasks, including scheduling sessions, inviting speakers, responding to participants’ queries, arranging budgetary support for travel and accommodation, one of the most significant efforts was supporting participation from scholars in the Global South, particularly from Africa and Asia. This support took many forms: offering guidance to participants to apply for visas, preparing timely visa invitation letters, offering guidance on documentation, and raising funds to support their travel and accommodation. For some attendees, this was their first time travelling internationally. A few even obtained passports for the first time just to attend the conference.

Yet despite all our efforts, including the visa invitation letters sent at least 2 months in advance, many scholars who were eager to participate couldn’t make it. Some never received their visas in time. Others couldn’t secure the necessary funding or institutional support. In one particularly disheartening case, a member of our own conference organising team had their visa rejected on the grounds that they had not demonstrated sufficient financial assets in their home country to prove they would return. Hearing about the toll this process took with endless paperwork, exorbitant visa fee payments, sitting through stressful visa interviews, long periods of uncertainty while waiting for updates, and sometimes even facing an outright visa rejection, was difficult and deeply frustrating. For many, the journey to the UK began long before boarding a flight. It started with navigating opaque systems that questioned their legitimacy before they could even be heard. The act of participating in an international conference becomes an emotional, bureaucratic, and financial ordeal for many Global South scholars. These invisible burdens often remain unspoken in academic spaces that otherwise champion equity and justice.

This experience made us reflect more deeply on the concept of justice in sustainability transitions. Visa and passport privilege is rarely discussed in these spaces, yet it silently shapes who gets to be in the room, whose voices are heard, and whose knowledge is validated. Scholars from the Global North move through international borders with relative ease, while those from the Global South face administrative hurdles that are often invisible to those with travel privileges.

These challenges are not unique to our conference. They are part of a much wider pattern of exclusion that many Global South scholars face when trying to participate in international academic spaces. As The Lancet Global Health editorial, “Passports and privilege: access denied,” powerfully argues, the passport and visa inequalities are structural forms of exclusion that reinforce colonial legacies in global knowledge exchange. A poignant reflection by a colleague Oishika Basak captures the emotional complexity of navigating visa regimes. In her blog, “Visa: A word that ignites innumerable complex emotions within me”, she writes about the deeply personal, psychological, and structural implications of what should be a routine process but rarely is. Her reflections echo the stories that many of our colleagues shared, filled with uncertainty, exhaustion, and a lack of dignity. Cangönül and Yildiz (2024) refer to this as passport inequality, a system where the ability to participate in global knowledge production is mediated by the strength of the passport one holds. They argue that visa barriers are not incidental; they are embedded in global academic infrastructures that reward mobility while making it inaccessible to many.

One of the most powerful discussions at the conference took place during the EDRC panel on ‘energy justice’, where the conversation on reparations moved beyond historical redress for colonialism. It was reframed as a present-day responsibility to confront and correct the ongoing inequalities in access to opportunities, platforms, and participation in global dialogue. If we take the justice dimension of sustainability seriously, then addressing mobility barriers must become part of our collective responsibility. It’s not enough to acknowledge that Global South scholars have valuable insights. We must actively make space for those perspectives, not just metaphorically, but physically, by ensuring they can be in the room. Sustainability transitions must be seen as relational processes, shaped by uneven global histories, cultural privileges, ongoing extraction, and structural inequalities (Arora and Sterling, 2023). Technologies developed in the North often rely on resources and labour extracted from the South. The voices of those affected by these dynamics are essential, and not optional for credible discussions on sustainability.

And yet, amidst these barriers, there were also signs at the NEST conference of what a more just and inclusive academic space could look like. Scholars and organisers stepped in to help each other navigate processes, pool resources, and advocate for access. Many Global South scholars who attended the conference shared how meaningful it was to be seen, heard, and supported. These acts of solidarity matter. They show that even within an unequal system, we can create pockets of justice. But more importantly, they remind us that we must keep pushing for structural change. As organisers, institutions, and funders, we have the responsibility and the power to make mobility more equitable. This means budgeting for visa and travel support, challenging restrictive practices, and recognising access as fundamental to justice. If we want sustainability transitions to be truly inclusive, we must design our spaces to reflect the diversity of the world we hope to sustain. That means not just inviting voices from the Global South, but doing the work to ensure they can be in the room: fully, safely, and with dignity.

This conference reminded us that justice is not just a topic of discussion: it’s something we have to practice, every step of the way.