12h45, Leclercq B290 and Teams, sandwich lunch at the ISPOLE cafétéria
Please indicate any specific dietary requirements (other than vegetarian) at marine.bardou@uclouvain.be

Amandine Crespy and Clément Fontan
Ideas and instruments of the European Union's "just transition"

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’? 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, we investigate the multi-level construction of a problem of ‘social justice’ in the European green transition, as well as the conception, negotiation, and adoption of relevant policy instruments. The 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.