Speaker
Description
After decades of deregulation and market-oriented reforms, government interventions and justice-oriented policies are gaining traction. The European Commission’s Just Transition Mechanism (JTM) is an example of a justice-oriented planning approach. In this talk, I show how the grammar on justice as developed by the European Commission in the European Green Deal is not aligned with the needs of marginalized communities. This misalignment has the potential of reproducing social inequalities and amplifying political polarization. I analyze the misalignment by scrutinizing how the European Commission’s grammar of justice materializes in different laws, regulations and spaces. The data presented in this talk is based on the collective work done for the Horizon Europe project that I am coordinating, called BOLSTER.
Through the JTM, the European Commission promises to soften the social and economic shocks of the climate transition and to ‘leave no one behind.’ Public and private funds are channeled into regions that are heavily dependent on carbon-intensive industries. These industries are projected to lose many jobs due to the climate transition. Member states have selected regions that are eligible for funding from the JTM, and those regions have developed so-called territorial just transition plans (TJTPs). Through the TJTPs, projects are funded that need to boost the local economy, create jobs, and improve the living conditions in the targeted regions. However, the benefits of these projects often are directed towards actors who are well versed in receiving cohesion funding and state support, not to the needs of marginalized communities.
Thus, the JTM’s spatial reordering of territories (in the form of just transition regions), places (through funded projects), and networks (the beneficiaries of JTM) reconfigure the spatial governance of European regions. However, this reconfiguration fails to address justice from the perspective of the most affected by the climate transition. Instead of ‘leaving no one behind’, it reproduces established patterns of capital accumulation and inequalities.
| Keywords | just transition; law; planning; governance; social inequality |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | Yes |
