Transformative innovation policies, like related concepts such as mission-oriented or challenge-oriented innovation policies, have emphasised sectors or socio-technical systems while being often ignorant about place. Following the call for transformative innovation policies in cities and regions, there is a risk of transposing national practices to the local and regional level without a thorough consideration of the theoretical and empirical implications, and without being attentive to the lessons learned in studies on local and regional development. One critical point is the idea of just transitions, which often takes a top-down and abstract approach to justice with little attention to “real” people and place. In this paper, we argue for a bottom-up and more inclusive approach to just system transformation by focussing on people and place. To this end, we combine both theoretical and empirical insights about local and regional change processes and the possibilities of local actors to shape local and regional change processes to realise the functionings they desire. Theoretically, this is based on the literature on local agency in regional development combined with the capability approach in development studies.  Both in the global south and north countries like India, Sweden and Norway green growth is being imagined as a confluence of industrialisation backed by energy innovations. But in this top-down pursuit of green growth, policies and practices intended to enable justice principles in social and economic system transformation are often critiqued for not meaningfully engaging and augmenting the wellbeing of vulnerable local and indigenous communities. Hence, through a human centric integrative framework of justice we explore how regional development policies engage with justice principles in  Sweden and India.  From this, we deduct how local and regional policy approach could shape more procedurally, distributionally, and recognitionally just opportunity spaces for individuals and groups- which is the core of just transformations.