Speakers
Description
Climate change is one of the most critical challenges of our time. It affects billions globally, manifesting in more frequent extreme weather events, rising food insecurity, increasing forced migrations, and accelerating ecological damage. These impacts, manifested at multiple scales from local to global, require coordinated and multi-level policy responses. The European Green Deal (EGD) embodies the European Union’s strategic vision to drive a systematic transformation toward a sustainable economy and society. It aims to achieve climate neutrality by 2050, in alignment with the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. To this end, the EGD promotes circular economy practices, the reduction of social and territorial inequalities, and the sustainable use of natural resources.
The academic literature emphasizes that public policies arise to address a collective problem. In this light, the EGD constitutes the set of actions undertaken by the EU and the actors involved in its implementation to specifically tackle the issue of climate change and its socioeconomic implications. These actions include the design of regulatory, financial, and operational tools, such as the European Taxonomy and the implementation instruments of Next Generation EU (NGEU), one of the most significant efforts to address climate change impacts at the national and local levels.
European policies have triggered a process of Europeanization, transferring EU norms, tools, practices, values and goals into the governance systems of Member States. However, this process does not appear to be a proper top-down policy transfer from the EU level to national and local governments. Instead, it is a “mutual adjustment” process shaped by the interaction among institutional actors at different levels and scales. A case in point is the Do No Significant Harm (DNSH) Principle, designed to ensure that EU-funded projects, particularly those financed through the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF), avoid significant environmental harm.
The analysis examines how the downscaling of the DNSH Principle affects national, regional and local governments, particularly referred to the Italian Recovery and Resilience Plan (RRF). The research highlights how, at least in the Italian context, a parallel system of environmental regulations has emerged, shaped by the interaction between European and national levels. Furthermore, the structure of Italian environmental governance, characterized by the distribution of responsibilities across multiple levels of government, has resulted in significant asymmetries. These disparities are evident in regional and local governments’ responses to the implementation of the DNSH principle. Without a coherent national framework, the risk highlighted by this research is the increase in spatial and social inequities resulting from different regional capacities to predict and address site-specific effects of climate change.
Finally, the contribution explores the DNSH principle as a driver of institutional innovation and learning, assessing its capacity to reshape the EU policies and investment programs implementation in Italy, thereby contributing to understanding how this principle has influenced the country’s capacity to address climate challenges at the national level. From this perspective, the article provides evidence on the transformative role of European policies in shaping national and regional policies to address environmental and social challenges.
| Keywords | DNSH principle; Governance; EU policy making; Europeanization; environmental policies; |
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| Best Congress Paper Award | No |
