EUJUST

The European Commission has described the European Green Deal as ‘Europe’s man on the moon moment’ (cited in Eckert 2021, 81). Yet, several governments (e.g., Poland) have raised obstacles to ambitious climate goals and questioned the ‘fairness’ of the distribution of economic costs. As the EU mobilises unprecedented funds and political attention to the climate crisis, an integral part of the strategy consists in ‘ensuring that no one is left behind’ (European Commission 2019, 3), by giving greater emphasis on ‘just transition’ in EU official discourse and policies (Kyriazi and Miró 2022). In that sense, the possibility of a just transition epitomizes today’s new ‘European social question’ (Crespy, 2022). As the emerging literature on the eco-social state points out, however, the relationship between climate action and social policy is a complex one (Gough et al. 2008). The concept of just transition can (and does) refer to a variety of notions regarding what is specifically unjust in green transitions, and to different political projects and (social) policy solutions. Contention around distributional consequences of the European Green Deal and the role of compensatory instruments, such as the Just Transition Fund, is a good illustration of this (Mathiesen and Barigazzi 2021). The adoption of these instruments in the EU constitutes fertile terrain for in-depth empirical research into the tensions, dilemmas and conflicts about how different approaches to social policy are incorporated in both green transition discourses and policies. This project thus seeks to answer the following question: How do different social policy logics shape the EU ‘just transition’? To address this question, the project analyses the adoption of key instruments aiming to achieve the just transition, in particular the Just Transition Fund to find out how climate action and social policy are articulated. The constructivist approach adopted will serve to trace problem construction, instrumentation and implementation though a combination of quantitative tools (content analysis) as well as qualitative tools (interviews and discourse analysis).

The project shall meet two objectives. The first is to produce cutting-edge empirical findings about the adoption of recent key policy instruments of the European Green deal, in particular the Just Transition Fund, the Social Climate Fund in connection with the European Semester. More specifically, the findings will concern a) the multi-level construction of a problem of ‘social justice’ in the European green transition; b) the conception, negotiation, and adoption of relevant policy instruments; and c) the implementation of conditionality attached to funding during the period (2021-2025). The second objective is to make a substantial analytical contribution to the burgeoning literature on the EU green transition and social policy. We expect to demonstrate that, as the just transition epitomizes the new avatar of a changing and contested European social model, its instrumentation reflects a rather narrow conception of the just transition which in continuation with the entrenched logics of compensation, social investment and conditionality. Therefore, this project has the potential to tap into heated political debates about on-going transformations of the EU into a particular kind of (multi-level) eco-social state.