Doing justice in the European transition to climate neutrality: why, how, and for whom?

In December 2019 the European Commission launched the European Green Deal (EGD) and hereby ramped up the climate ambitions of the European Union. Responding to a mounting sense of climate urgency, the European Commission proposed a comprehensive reform program to make the EU’s economy climate neutral by 2050. The net-zero emissions goal has since then been enshrined in the first European Climate Law and given rise to a dense mix of regulatory frameworks and green investments schemes. One such scheme is the Just Transition Fund that is designed to offer financial support European regions, industries and workers that are struggling to decarbonize. Recognizing that the shift away from fossil fuels only will gain public acceptance if it ‘leaves no one behind’, the JTF is dedicated to the reinvention of Europe’s carbon-intensive regions and upskilling of the European workforce. In this talk I trace how these European just transition efforts are discursively justified and done through the work of the Just Transition Platform, an online portal coordinated by the European Union. The platform was launched in 2020 to assist EU regions to unlock support available through the JTF and has since then convened stakeholders from affected regions in a strategic exchange of joint challenges, collective visions, and best practices. Although the many guides, toolkits and concept notes produced by the platform may seem mundane and technical, I approach them as governmental practices that are productive of the problems, objects, and subjects to which the EU’s just transition efforts are directed. Hence, rather than being passive or neutral, these documents, I argue, carry problem formulations that codify why, how and for whom justice is done in the European quest for climate neutrality.

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