Varieties of Ecosocial Policies in the EU: The Case of the National Recovery and Resilience Plans

Abstract

The European Union (EU) has started implementing its ambitious decarbonisation strategy devised by the European Green Deal (EGD) short after the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak. In addition to deploying ordinary legal and budgetary instruments, an extraordinary amount of funding has been mobilized through NextGenerationEU to support green, digital and just transitions, having the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) as its cornerstone. Drawing on the growing eco-welfare debate and EU governance scholarship, our contribution first analyses how the 27 national plans implementing the RRF address the ecosocial challenges by scrutinising the intersection between social and environmental objectives at the level of individual thematic axes and then focuses on the explanatory political dynamics in three countries: Germany, Italy, and Poland. Our findings show that different ecosocial policy integration mixes can be found and the variation can be explained by a country-based combination of political-institutional and interest-based factors, in addition to domestic social and environmental policy legacies.