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The comparative politics of just transition policies: building green-red winning coalitions in Spain and Ireland
Journal of European Public Policy
Abstract
Just transition policies can be useful measures to address the new social risks of industrial decarbonization. However, while these policies are growing empirically, they remain arguably undertheorized. Navigating a largely unexplored field, this article aims to strengthen our understanding of just transition policymaking with a theory-generating ambition. It does so by asking: what explains the adoption of just transition policies? Following a Most Different Systems Design, Spain and Ireland have been selected as comparative case studies to reconstruct the political trajectories behind national just transition policies. Drawing from coalition theories, empirical analysis maps the preferences of and interactions between political parties and organised interest groups. The article relies on outcome-explaining process tracing and qualitative methods, including the analysis of policy and press documents, and thirty-nine semi-structured interviews with policymakers and other informants. The core argument is that just transition policies emerge as the result of green-red winning coalitions steered by powerful entrepreneurs, who engage in political exchanges with other socio-political actors in order to trade political support for decarbonisation, in exchange for economic support to affected societal groups.
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In the light of the climate crisis, ‘green transitions’ are inevitable to address the environmental harm caused by fossil capitalism. The article argues that the pathway of such green transitions is closely interrelated with welfare setups, as the answer to the questions ‘who wins, who loses; who supports, who opposes the green transition—and why?’ is strongly dependent on the welfare setup of a given economy. The welfare state not only stabilises the economy, prevents deprivation and balances class interests, it also structures interest constellations, material living conditions, and cultural lifestyles. Hence, which ‘green social risks’ need to be addressed, which social groups will seek to have a voice in a green transition, which transition routes are seen as legitimate, and which societal cleavages emerge around the transition—all these factors are shaped by the welfare setup of a country. Drawing on comparative welfare state theory, the article provides an analytical starting point for considering country-specific factors of green transitions and thus, outlines the potential of this political science research strand for debates on eco-social policy, politics, and polity.
The social impacts of the climate crisis and the need for societal transformation to achieve climate goals require integrated research and design of environmental policy and social security. The article analyses the current state of research on eco-social policy and sustainable welfare. Based on a systematic literature review covering more than 1000 publications, the article identifies 20 research topics. Strong research progress has been made on social compensation for climate policies; economic inequality in the climate crisis; energy use patterns in housing, mobility, and nutrition; political conditions for eco-social policy; and varieties in eco-social country regimes. Future research activities should focus on the five bottlenecks detected in the emerging research topics: the reduction in the environmental burden through a change in demand structures by the welfare state; growth-independence of social security; support for socio-ecological transformations by altered financing of welfare states; eco-social insurance and institutions; and ecological mainstreaming in the domains of social security. Discussing the explanatory factors for past research activity and sketching the elements of sustainable welfare states, the article concludes with the historical importance of including ecological concerns in social security.
Enacting stringent climate policy has proven politically challenging, not least because of concentrated losses in fossil fuel-producing communities. “Just transition” strategies have been proposed to mitigate this distributional challenge. Yet, little is known about how such strategies affect voting behavior. Using a mixed-methods approach, we exploit a local climate policy in Spain—a “Just Transition Agreement” (JTA) to phase out coalmining, support affected workers, and invest in affected municipalities—which was negotiated by the incumbent Socialist Party (PSOE) government with affected unions and businesses shortly before a national election. A difference-in-differences study shows that PSOE’s vote share in coalmining municipalities increased at the 2019 election relative to similar municipalities, implying that the JTA was electorally successful. Further statistical tests and elite interviews suggest that this electoral boost was driven by unions’ support of the JTA. Our findings have implications for how parties can craft popular climate policy.
Social policy developed as a research field and academic discipline to ensure protection from social risks in the era of emerging capitalism and industrialization. While welfare states have successfully increased their citizens’ wellbeing, they have also contributed to the ecological crisis, while the shared scientific understanding of exceeded planetary boundaries and worsening climate change scenarios has not (yet) reshaped mainstream social policy research. In this article, we suggest that the established traditions in social policy research can nevertheless provide a solid ground for responding to the climate emergency and facilitating the sustainable transformation of society and the economy. With a focus on four of the research fields that are central in social policy scholarship – risks, citizenship, welfare regimes, and wellbeing – we develop an ecosocial research agenda. By discussing the classic and climate-adjusted understandings of these fields, we open future pathways for social policy research and invite scholars to engage with our proposed research agenda.
Welfare States are considered key tools to provide just transitions. The hypothesis of synergy states that Social-democratic regimes are in a better position to accomplish them. While synergy has been widely theorised, its empirical verification has remained less studied and provided contradictory results. The weaknesses detected in the state-of-the-art, such as the misalignment of empirical testing and the theoretical drivers of synergy, as well as inconsistencies in the selection of variables and biases imposed by classifications in discrete timings, lead us to define an improved methodological framework. We apply the continuous observation of Ward's hierarchical clustering in squared Euclidean distances under Thorndike's criterium to twenty-three European countries between 2008 and 2016 and reject synergy after detecting that Social-democratic regimes display the best social conditions but the worst environmental performances and that society and the environment are not linked. This outcome motivates us to propose a discussion with a focus on the sustainability of economic growth and the opportunities for sustainable welfare scholarship to settle it.
Green transitions create major challenges to union power in carbon-intensive economies as well as opportunities for the renewal of union power. This research asks why sometimes unions oppose or delay green transitions while other times unions are more open to green transitions and may even become strong transition supporters. In drawing on the Power Resource Approach, I argue that unions are neither natural opponents nor supporters of green transitions but instead engage strategically with green transitions. Unions’ strategic choices to pursue oppositional, reactive, affirmative or transformative transition strategies is guided by an imperative to maintain or expand their power resources. The strategic choices unions make are influenced by several contextual conditions. In a comparative case study on coal transitions in South Africa and Germany, I identify the following contextual conditions: sectoral interests, organisational identity, internal structure, coalitions, political- and socio-economic environment, governance context and public discourse. Regarding each of these, I show how unions make strategic choices to protect or expand different power resources and become agents of transition or defenders of the status quo. This paper contributes to empirical research on drivers behind union transition strategies and offers an analytical framework to explain unions’ strategic choices in green transitions.
Global warming and some climate change policies pose additional social risks that necessitate novel responses from the welfare state. Eco-social policies have significant potential to address these challenges, but their wide-scale adoption will depend, among other factors, on public support. In the current article, we theorise how public opinion about eco-social policies is likely to be influenced by a set of contextual and individual-level factors, as well as the perceived welfare deservingness of the target groups. Alongside contributing to the emerging body of literature on eco-social policies, this theoretical framework could help policymakers to anticipate the social groups that will support or oppose eco-social policy agendas and how some of the contradictions could be reduced through policy design.
The newly emerging concept of sustainable welfare refers to welfare systems which aim to satisfy everyone's needs within planetary boundaries and to decouple the welfare-growth nexus. Both Universal Basic Income (UBI) and Universal Basic Services (UBS) have been discussed as suitable, but potentially competing, approaches that could support sustainable welfare. This paper contributes to this debate by asking how UBI and UBS compare in relation to four sustainable welfare criteria: a) planetary boundaries, b) needs satisfaction, c) fair distribution, and d) democratic governance. The paper argues that UBI and UBS are not so much conflicting but complementary approaches for supporting sustainable welfare. UBI focuses on the consumption side of the economy while UBS addresses the production side more directly, both of which would be relevant in any sustainable welfare system. Sustainable welfare outcomes of UBI and UBS would be shaped by the institutional contexts within which they operate, especially by the governance of markets, collective provisioning systems and decision-making at all levels. More attention needs to be paid to these institutional contexts when discussing potential sustainable welfare outcomes of UBI and UBS.
In recent decades, we have witnessed the diffusion of policy diffusion studies across many sub-disciplines of political science. Four mechanisms of policy diffusion—learning, competition, emulation and coercion—have become widely accepted as explanations for how policymaking processes and policy outcomes in one polity influence those in other polities. After pointing to major shortcomings of this inductively gained set of mechanisms, we present a theoretically more coherent typology that draws on key concepts from International Relations and Policy Studies. The four mechanisms we lay down consider rationalist and social constructivist approaches equally and they incorporate symmetric and asymmetric constellations. By further distinguishing between processes confined to one policy field and those arising from links across policy fields, we present a typology of eight theoretically consistent pathways of policy diffusion. Our framework enables the aggregation of knowledge and contributes to conceptual coherence in multi-methods research.
Institutionalism gives priority to structure over agency. Yet institutions have never developed and operated without the intervention of interested groups. This paper develops a conceptual framework for the role of agency in historical institutionalism. Based on recent contributions following the coalitional turn and drawing on insights from sociological institutionalism, it argues that agency plays a key role in the creation and maintenance of social coalitions that stabilize but also challenge institutions. Without such agency, no coalition can be created, maintained, or changed. Similarly, without a supporting coalition, no contested institution can survive. Yet, due to collective action problems, such coalitional work is challenging. This coalitional perspective offers a robust role for agency in historical institutionalism, but it also explains why institutions remain stable despite agency. In addition, this paper forwards several portable propositions that allow for the identification of who is likely to develop agency and what these actors do.
This study shows how interest group-party relations, parties’ cross-cutting policy preferences, and competition with challenger parties shape the structure of issue competition on climate policy. It uses the ‘most similar’ cases of the UK and Ireland to show how differences in party systems influence the structure of issue competition. Theoretically, the study takes up the challenge of integrating salience and position in the conceptualisation of climate policy preferences. Empirically, it provides new evidence on factors influencing climate policy preferences and the party politics of climate change, focusing on interest groups, party ideology, and challenger parties. Further, it identifies similarities between the general literature on interest group influence on party preferences and the literature on interest groups in climate politics, and seeks to make connections between them.
Planetary justice (PJ) requires a profound planetary just transition (PJT). Recognizing the essentially contested nature of just transition (JT) we propose an analytical scheme to better interpret and differentiate amongst the growing number of JT proposals and, by extension, PJTs. After outlining the increasing association of JT proposals with global policy, as well as their proliferation, we employ scale to address their spatial and temporal inclusiveness and scope to address their social and ecological inclusiveness. Assuming that inclusion does not automatically translate into procedural or substantive justice we then propose that JT proposals should also be evaluated in terms of their socioecological purpose, specifically social equality and standing for nature. We then argue that a full understanding of JT must combine inclusiveness and justice and suggest ways in which we can advance the practice and study of Planetary Just Transition .
Attention towards topics such as environmental pollution, climate change, or biodiversity has strongly increased in the last years. The struggles to balance market powers and ecological sustainability somehow evoke memories of the early days of European welfare states, when social protection emerged as a means to prevent industrial capitalism from disruptive social tensions due to excessive social inequalities. In fact, social and environmental crises are inseparably intertwined, as ecological destruction is likely to be followed by social deprivation, and a lack of social security can be a crucial barrier for ecologically sustainable action. Our paper seeks to provide a step towards such an integrated perspective by studying problem pressure and public interventions in the area of green welfare, that is, in social and environmental protection. By using available data from Eurostat and Environmental Performance Index (EPI) databases, we contrast environmental and social performances to detect links between the social and the ecological dimension in these areas and unearth different configurations of green welfare among European countries. Our findings suggest that there are different “worlds of eco-welfare states” which only partially overlap with the more conventional “world of welfare states” but show how the Nordic countries are in the relatively-better performing cluster.
The history of welfare states is tightly linked to industrial capitalism and a mode of regulation where production and consumption patterns increased in parallel [...]
The emerging concept of sustainable welfare attempts to integrate environmental sustainability and social welfare research. Oriented at a mid-term re-embedding of Western production and consumption norms into planetary limits, it suggests the development of “eco-social” policies in the rich countries. In this theoretical context, this article empirically investigates the relationships between attitudes towards welfare and climate policy in 23 countries. Using 2016 data from the European Social Survey, we explored patterns of synergy between both kinds of policies as well as effects of crowding-out, where support for one kind of policy involves refusing the other. Since previous research addressed the role of welfare states and their institutional foundations in establishing environmentally sustainable societies, we studied how attitudes towards welfare and climate policies differ according to welfare regime affiliation. Additionally, we examined how a range of socio-demographic and political factors such as class, education, income, and political position shape people’s views on welfare and climate policy goals. The results of a multiple correspondence analysis indicate that the simultaneous support of welfare and climate policies follows welfare regime lines in that this support is the highest among social-democratic countries. However, also some conservative and Mediterranean countries score high in this regard. At the individual level, people with a higher education, employees in socio-cultural professions, and voters of moderate left and green parties display the highest mutual support for welfare and climate policies.
The process of Europeanisation implies convergence across EU member states. This is to be achieved mainly through structural economic harmonisation and institutional system-building. This chapter deals with contemporary welfare developments in the European social model. We identify the major changes affecting European countries both functionally (in terms of policy integration), and territorially (as regard multi-level governance), and go on to consider EU initiatives in social policy-making. New policies aimed at co-ordinating employment and social policies at the European level seek to bridge the dichotomies between the economic and the social and between the national and the European. Hence, while a paradigm shift in macro-economic policies has enabled monetary centralisation and a growing convergence of EU internal ‘open’ markets, the decentralisation of welfare programmes has also aimed at meeting demands for territorial subsidiarity. Reforms related to the emergence of what may be termed new social risks may provide EU institutions with opportunities to make social policy reforms consistent with the new economic policy orientations, while respecting national diversity. In the concluding section we discuss the extent of convergence in social policy paradigms across European countries.
Process-tracing in social science is a method for studying causal mechanisms linking causes with outcomes. This enables the researcher to make strong inferences about how a cause (or set of causes) contributes to producing an outcome. Derek Beach an.
This article examines the impact of the current economic and financial crisis on the consistency of the corporatist dynamic that has oriented governments, trade unions and employers’ associations towards consensus in Spain, Italy and Portugal over the past two decades. Following the analytical framework developed by Öbert et al. (2011), which interprets corporatism as a process of political dialogue, we analyse whether the conditions that make exchange possible have been altered during the crisis and, ask, if this is the case, whether such a transformation is cyclical or structural in nature. New limitations on the autonomy of national governments with regard to the design of socioeconomic policies have arisen. These are related to the supervision of national politics by supranational institutions, the introduction of which has profoundly altered some of the basic requirements for corporatist political dialogue: the mandate or sovereignty in decision-making and the value of the assets available for exchange between stakeholders.
ISSN: 1388-2627
Riding on the 2019-2020 wave of climate mobilisations, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen made climate commitments one of its core priorities with the launch of its ‘Green Deal’. To deliver on the flagship targets of reducing net Green House Gas Emissions by 55% by 2030 and achieving net zero emissions by 2050, the EU has been finalising the adoption of its ‘Fit for 55’ legislative package before a change of leadership and a new Parliament starts its work. Yet, since the launch at the ‘Green Deal’, the political momentum for climate and environmental ambitions has faltered. Russia’s war on Ukraine and concerns about the security of European energy supplies have favoured the search for alternative fossil fuel suppliers and development of new fossil fuel infrastructures. In parallel, cost of living and economic concerns have also been instrumentalised to challenge green policies, both at national and EU levels. This article asks whether these new challenges represent a risk to the implementation of the ‘Green Deal’ and to the EU’s future ambitions on climate and the energy transition. It concludes that while the energy and climate transition agenda is likely to prove resilient, its framing and focus may be changing in a context of domestic politicisation of the climate and energy transition and global geopolitical competition.
This article introduces the symposium titled “Political science perspectives on the emerging eco-social policies, politics and polity in the European Union” that brings together the eco-social debate with mainstream theories and concepts from the political science discipline with the aim of encouraging a mutually and reinforcing theoretical and empirical exchange between the two fields. Before presenting the other contributions to the symposium, this article unpacks what “eco-social” is by presenting the existing definitions followed by a bottom-up identification of the “eco-social” essence retrieved through a systematic review of this literature. Furthermore, it takes stock and identifies areas of deficiency of the eco-social literature along the three dimensions of policy, politics, and polity while also outlining potential contributions of political science’s approaches to this field.
Focusing on two key instruments, the Just Transition Fund and the Social Climate Fund, this article assesses to what extent the EU's pledge for a 'just transition' has the potential to foster greater social justice while implementing the European Green Deal. We analyse the related objectives, policy tools and patterns of political conflict and find that both Funds have narrow objectives anchored in a reactive logic complementing existing social investment initiatives with a focus on reskilling the workforce hit by decarbonisation. Both instruments rely on multi-level investment aiming to generate green growth, combined with targeted compensation for the more vulnerable. This, we argue, is not conducive to a just transition that addresses the intersection of environmental and social problems in a holistic way. Finally, various political fault lines pose the threat that EU action will be insufficient to tackle exacerbated inequalities in the future.
The just transition from coal, oil, and gas to renewable energy sources involves commitment from all EU states. But who is leading, or lagging? We apply an innovative DeePeR framework to identify these states, using open-access quantitative global data from multiple sources, by evaluating the energy and equity dimensions of Distributive, Procedural and Restorative justice. Using rank percentile scores, we assessed EU nations' level of fossil fuel dependency (including both energy and financial dependency) and distributional inequality, their fossil fuel CO2 emissions, climate finance pledges and a calculated procedural justice score, and their commitment to modern renewable electricity output and rankings on fair and renewable jobs. We find that EU states' performances on just transition are distinct across four broad regions; Scandinavia, eastern Europe, western Europe, and the Mediterranean. We discuss the nuances of fossil fuel embeddedness in the EU. This is followed by reflection on the importance of embedding fairness in the deployment of new renewable jobs. Finally, we consider the implications for a better-targeted financial mechanism for just transition alongside a fossil fuel divestment strategy.
This article will demonstrate that, given the complexity of inequalities in the climate-environment-social nexus, fragmented policies for a just transition that focus on only one dimension of inequality will not deliver the results needed to justify proclaiming a ‘just transition for all’. By reframing the sustainability trilemma for the case of the climate emergency and deconstructing the concept of a ‘just transition’ based on the relevant literature and selected case studies, we shall highlight some of the concept’s inherent contradictions. The article will argue that a holistic approach requires a reframing of the role of the welfare state.
As complex challenges like climate change and inequality become increasingly salient, eco-social policies are emerging as suitable public policy instruments to pursue integrated environmental and social objectives. However, despite their rising relevance, a descriptive-and hence empirically applicable-definition is still lacking in the reference literature, currently dominated by normative studies. Therefore, building on a critical assessment of the state of the art, this article proposes a framework for conceptualising eco-social policies, calling for an output-based definition with policy integration as its core element. The article also proposes a typology to differentiate various eco-social policies along two dimensions: the direction of policy integration and the link to economic growth. This typology allows us to elaborate on the possible roles that the welfare state can play vis-à-vis environmental challenges and policies, for instance in the context of decarbonisation: reactive or preventive; protection-or investment-oriented.
Just transition is becoming an increasingly popular concept to address the
social consequences of industrial decarbonization, which EU countries have
committed to pursue through the European Green Deal. These consequences
include increasing redundancies – especially in carbon-intensive firms – and
losses of income and well-being in marginalised communities. However,
a review of the reference literature shows that the role of just transition in
policy design has so far been largely overlooked by existing empirical studies.
Against this backdrop, the core aim of this working paper is to assess whether
and how EU and national policy documents speak about a just transition
and/or about tackling the social consequences of industrial decarbonisation,
by referring to the concept of eco-social policy mixes for a just transition.
This study hence maps and analyses these policy mixes, first at the EU level
and then at the Member States level. This is done through a manual textual
analysis of relevant EU documents and of 27 country-specific National
Energy and Climate Plans. Results show that eco-social policy mixes for a just
transition are still rare across Europe and, when in place, they are markedly
characterised by a narrow scope and an investment-oriented approach, while
also being sometimes alarmingly attached to low climate ambitions.
The growing attention paid to the idea of a just transition away from the incumbent fossil fuel energy paradigm has led scholars to devise diverse definitions, understandings, and viewpoints of the term. This review seeks to clarify the different perspectives surrounding the concept, to consolidate knowledge, and to provide a concise account of current debates in the literature as well as a research agenda. It identifies five themes around which the concept has been discussed: (1) just transition as a labor-oriented concept, (2) just transition as an integrated framework for justice, (3) just transition as a theory of socio-technical transition, (4) just transition as a governance strategy, and (5) just transition as public perception. Overall, this review suggests that the literature on just transition employs rich theoretical and empirical insights from various disciplines yet contains several gaps. Specifically, it argues that the literature would benefit from more empirical studies rooted in practice, more discussion on the relationship between different concepts of just transition, an expansion of geographical scope to include developing countries and non-democratic regimes, and more attention to power dynamics in just transition.
This chapter provides an overview of Ireland’s policy response to climate change. It traces the evolution of climate policy during four distinct historical phases. The first of these was the era of the so-called Celtic Tiger, which saw a rapid rise in emissions. The second was characterised by profound crisis of economy and polity, during which attention was diverted from climate policy but with a significant fall in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The third phase was the economic recovery, which in many ways was as unexpected in its speed and extent as the crash. During this period, Ireland’s emissions rebounded strongly, illustrating that Ireland’s emissions remain stubbornly coupled to economic growth. Fourth and finally, the chapter examines Irish climate policy since 2017, asking whether Ireland has left its laggard status behind. The chapter concludes with a reflection on the broader context that has shaped Ireland’s policy response to climate change.
Like climate action itself, it is fair to say the ‘just transition’ debate is in its infancy in Ireland within public and policy discourse around addressing climate breakdown, the ecological/biodiversity crisis and the transition to a low-carbon, green economy. This chapter critically analyses policy proposals that safe, secure and well-paid green jobs can only be maintained by strong unions and that bargaining power through unionisation is a vital component to achieving a just transition from ‘actually existing unsustainability’ and the creation of a climate-resilient economy and society. It explores examples of ‘unjust transition’ in the Republic and Northern Ireland and the importance in both jurisdictions of an explicit focus on a ‘just transition for agriculture’. While the idea of a just transition most often applies to workers in the energy sector, in Ireland, the greatest source of greenhouse gas emissions is the agricultural sector. The chapter also discusses the evolution of trades’ union engagement with both climate and energy decarbonisation and broader environmental politics across the island, noting that a ‘post-carbon’ just transition also raises challenges for unions embracing a ‘post-growth’ objective.
Coal phasing-out policies and the consequent closure of large coal infrastructures (mines and thermal power plants) have put coal dependent areas at a crossroads. This empirical study applies the policy mix analytic framework to discuss how transition contracts, as new instruments in Spain, could accelerate socio-technological regime change and promote a just transition; all of which from the analysis of the barriers for the economic, political, social, technological and environmental spheres. From a mixed research design, information from 43 stakeholders was collected, first to qualify just transition barriers and then to quantify their relevance and intergroup variance. The resulting policy implications highlight three essential factors, a strategic vision, an innovation approach and a transversal notion of justice. These factors must be considered in order to increase consistency, coherence, comprehensiveness and credibility of transitional contracts.
Public policy research has become increasingly comparative over the past several decades, but the methodological issues involved in this research have not been discussed adequately. This Handbook provides a discussion of the fundamental methodological issues in comparative policy research, as well as descriptions and analyses of major techniques used for that research. The techniques discussed are both quantitative and qualitative, and all are embedded in the broader discussion of comparative research design.
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While the decarbonization of the global economy will bring immense benefits in the aggregate and to many individuals, it will also be disruptive and costly for some, at least in the short term. As these disruptions and costs have become increasingly salient in recent years, there has been an explosion of interest in the climate policy community about how low-carbon transitions can be implemented justly, equitably, and politically smoothly. A key part of what is needed in responding to this growing interest is a better understanding of the suite of ‘transitional assistance policies’ and strategies that can be deployed, alongside or as part of climate change mitigation policies and processes. Responding to this need, we survey a wide, multi-disciplinary literature to answer the ‘who’, ‘what’ and ‘how’ of transitional assistance policy: who is likely to be adversely affected by the low-carbon transition, and in what ways? What substantive strategies and policy instruments are available to governments to mitigate the burdens of low-carbon transitions? And how can governments implement such strategies and policies successfully? In the course of answering the first two of these questions, we develop a novel typology of transitional assistance policies, in which multiple policies are parsimoniously classified according to one of four coherent policy strategies, and one of five kinds of beneficiaries. In answering the third question, we emphasize the importance of certain ‘state capacities’ for shaping transition processes and managing vested interests.
Key policy insights
• Without transitional assistance policies, consumers, workers, businesses, specially-affected communities, and states that are highly dependent on emissions-intensive assets stand to lose from decarbonization.
• Transitional assistance policies can be narrow (addressing financial losses only) or broad (addressing a wider range of losses), and conservative (backward-looking) or adaptive (forward-looking).
• Combining these elements yields four coherent transitional assistance strategies: compensation; exemption; structural adjustment assistance; and comprehensive adaptive support.
• Comprehensive adaptive support strategies have greatest potential for just, equitable and smooth transition outcomes, but are costlier and more complex to implement.
• State capacities to steer complex, long-term transitions are therefore a crucial variable in transition success.
In the field of 'climate change', no terrain goes uncontested. The terminological tug of war between activists and corporations, scientists and governments, has seen radical notions of 'sustainability' emptied of urgency and subordinated to the interests of capital. 'Just Transition' is the latest such battleground, and the conceptual keystone of the post-COP21 climate policy world. But what does it really mean?
Just Transition emerged as a framework developed within the trade union movement to encompass a range of social interventions needed to secure workers' and frontline communities' jobs and livelihoods as economies shift to sustainable production. Just Transitions draws on a range of perspectives from the global North and South to interrogate the overlaps, synergies and tensions between various understandings of the Just Transition approach. As the concept is entering the mainstream, has it lost its radical edge, and if so, can it be recovered?
Written by academics and activists from around the globe, this unique edited collection is the first book entirely devoted to Just Transition.
Introduzione
In questo articolo cercherò di proporre un inquadramento teorico che sia in grado di collocare in una prospettiva piú generale gli eventi che seguirono all'improvviso e rapidissimo aumento dei salari a partire dagli anni 1968–70 in tutti i maggiori paesi industriali. è possibile dire che le altissime rivendicazioni salariali, l'intensità particolare dei conflitti, le nuove forme di questi, i nuovi contenuti, anche, delle rivendicazioni, cosí come il sempre maggiore coinvolgimento dei sindacati nei rapporti politici, e insieme la diffusione delle iscrizioni sindacali in sempre nuove categorie di popolazione, e il pullulare dei movimenti sociali di ogni tipo siano tutti fenomeni comprensibili all'interno di un comune modello? E li si deve spiegare come conseguenze di una tendenza strutturale di lungo periodo o invece come un'alterazione temporanea dei sistemi di rappresentanza politica e sindacale?
Policy scholars have effectively leveraged policy process models, theories, and frameworks to respond to a variety of important environmental questions. For example, how do environmental issues arrive on the agendas of policymakers? What factors contribute to environmental policy change? What are the designs and effects of institutions (e.g., policies or cultural norms) on environmental governance? In this review, we survey the field of policy process scholarship, focusing on environmental governance, with three objectives. The first objective is to catalog the policy process models, theories, and frameworks most often featured in studies of environmental governance. The second is to capture the methodological choices commonly employed in the application of these models, theories, and frameworks in environmental domains. The third is to identify how these approaches deal with issues central to environmental governance research, including time, space, and policy scale. We aim to identify trends and strategies for integrating key considerations of scale into empirical policy process scholarship.
Process-tracing in social science is a method for studying causal mechanisms linking causes with outcomes. This enables the researcher to make strong inferences about how a cause (or set of causes) contributes to producing an outcome. Derek Beach and Rasmus Brun Pedersen introduce a refined definition of process-tracing, differentiating it into three distinct variants and explaining the applications and limitations of each. The authors develop the underlying logic of process-tracing, including how one should understand causal mechanisms and how Bayesian logic enables strong within-case inferences. They provide instructions for identifying the variant of process-tracing most appropriate for the research question at hand and a set of guidelines for each stage of the research process. © 2019 by Derek Beach and Rasmus Brun Pedersen. All rights reserved.
The book critically assesses the impact of party governments in different institutional settings on welfare state generosity and labour market reforms. Its key findings contradict earlier established views on the impact of leftist governments on welfare state policies. Specifically, left-wing governments are pursuing clientelistic policies when facing high institutional constraints and austerity and turn out to cater towards the core workforce rather than designing policies for the full range of labour market participants
Just transition is a new framework of analysis that brings together climate, energy and environmental justice scholarships. It was originally coined as a term that was designed to link the promotion of clean technology with the assurance of green jobs. The Paris climate change agreement marks a global acceptance that a more rapid transition is needed to avert disastrous consequences. In response, climate, energy and environmental justice scholarships must unite in assessing where injustices will emerge and how they should be tackled. Just transition offers a new space for developing an interdisciplinary transition sensitive approach to exploring and promoting (1) distributional, (2) procedural and (3) restorative justice, termed here as a new triumvirate of tenets.
One of the most common ways by which ideas influence policy outcomes is by facilitating the construction of a political coalition. The ideas that have this capacity we call coalition magnets, and this contribution explains how coalition magnets open a path for policy reform. The key components of a coalition magnet are the ambiguous or polysemic character of the idea that makes it attractive to groups that might otherwise have different interests, and the power of policy entrepreneurs who employ the idea in their coalition-building efforts. We illustrate the utility of the concept with an examination of three ideas that were creatively employed to construct new policy coalitions: sustainability; social inclusion; and solidarity.
VoC theory seems to be caught in a trade-off between parsimony and explanatory capacity. It provides high heuristic value-added for analysing countries where performance-enhancing complementarities rely on clearly different patterns of actor interaction and forms of coordination. It appears more difficult to extend to 'deviant' cases where there is a mix of logics, a high degree of institutional incoherence and an apparent absence of complementarities. This chapter uses the tools of VoC to explain how mechanisms of market and non-market coordination work and change over time in two 'mixed market economies' (MMEs) - Italy and Spain. It focuses on the relationship between production regimes and welfare systems, and specifically the wage-labour nexus and employment protection. In contrast to arguments for a distinctive form of state capitalism alongside 'market' and 'managed' varieties, this chapter argues that the state's role is distinctive but not unique in the Mediterranean countries, and has also undergone considerable change in recent years. It also argues that two different trends can be perceived in these countries: the growth of 'autonomous coordination' in which actors seek to manage the economy via new kinds of non-market governance; and 'market colonization', a process whereby market modes of coordination emerge and prevail.
Across Europe, contemporary negotiated reforms of economic and social policy are increasingly characterized by a logic of information rather than a logic of exchange. Unlike in neo-corporatist bargaining over incomes policies, states negotiate with the social partners not primarily to secure their acquiescence, but instead to enlist their active assistance in designing and mobilizing support for substantial reforms of public policy. State policy-makers lack the combination of technical, relational, and local information necessary to design successful blueprints for reform, and so they are dependent on the social partners to acquire this information. In systems in which unions and employers' associations can exercise dialogic capacity, policy innovation is more likely to come from the propositions of the social partners than from political parties or bureaucrats. Using this logic, the article undertakes a pairwise comparison of episodes of negotiated reform: pensions in France and Italy, and vocational training in France and Germany.
This article discusses recent research on party politics and the welfare state that differs from traditional ‘partisan politics theory’. The traditional approach states that left-wing and right-wing parties hold contrasting positions on welfare issues, depending on the interests of their respective electorates. This view has recently been challenged by three strands of research, which emphasize (1) the effects of electoral change on parties’ policy positions, (2) the role of context, notably electoral institutions, party competition and the configuration of party systems, and (3) the impact of different linkages between parties and electorates (particularistic versus programmatic). The implications of these arguments for the applicability of partisan theory are presented, and theoretical and empirical issues are identified for further research.